During all my years in Lesotho, I spoke to a Chinese only once. I encountered many Chinese at the shops they own in villages and towns throughout the country, yet I really only conversed with one man who drove his pick-up truck to our school in the countryside one afternoon to deliver heads of cabbage. Our principal knew the man from the capital, Maseru, where she lived, and had purchased the cabbage from him for our school lunches.
“This lechaena knows Sesotho,” Principal Tsita told me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d yet to meet a Chinese who knew the local language.
“This lekhooa knows Sesotho,” Principal Tsita told the Chinese man.
So the Chinese man said to me, “Ho joang, abuti?” — How’s it going, brother? His pronunciation was spot on. We chatted for a minute about my living alone out here on the outskirts of a small village. When he left, I stood impressed with his language skills. I had to admit that his Sesotho was farther along than mine.
I’d love to have talked with him more and picked his brain about his living in an African capital behind barred windows and armed guards. Chinese are not exactly loved in Lesotho, as in much of the rest of Africa, or so I hear. But I never have heard much of the Chinese side of the story, until stumbling upon Mothusi Turner’s work.
Turner is a student at Oxford University who knows Mandarin, has roots in Lesotho, and is studying and writing about the Chinese in Africa. An enlightening piece you might want to read is “Setting up Shop in Lesotho: How the Chinese Succeeded.” I had always wondered how many Chinese were in Lesotho, where their money came from and where it went, not to mention how in the world they first ended up in this little mountainous enclave that few people in the greater world even know exists. Turner goes toward answering these questions. And there on his blog are a number of other important and unique articles. As far as I know, he is the only one doing this research.
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