Lesotho exists because of the determined efforts of one man, Moshoeshoe I (1786-1870), to secure land for his people in the face of intense social upheaval and the insatiable land-hunger of others. Before the arrival of Moshoeshoe's ancestors around 900 AD, the San inhabited Lesotho's hills and mountains unchallenged. Today the San are gone, exterminated by the British led by one Colonel Bowker, who led the last of many missions against them in the highland region of Sehonkong in 1873. However, they have left their mark through rock paintings, elements of their tongue in the Sotho language, and traces of their features in some Sotho people.

 

The Sotho first settled the fertile plains that today form the Lesotho lowlands and the Free State, before going on to colonize the mountains. They farmed these plains relatively peacefully for centuries, but by Moshoeshoe's time, bandit clans from elsewhere had already forced thousands of Sotho off their land. Moshoeshoe proved his own marauding skills in 1809, when he rustled so many cattle from another chief that he was judged to have "shaved his beard"; Moshoeshoe is the "praise name" he earned for that feat - pronounced "Moshwehshweh", the name is supposed to represent the sound of shaving. He became a chief in 1820, based on top of a mountain near Butha-Buthe, where he became patron to many refugees in search of safety. However, after a particularly vicious attack on Butha-Buthe in 1824, Moshoeshoe decided it was no longer safe and trekked south with his followers in search of a better mountain. He found one at Thaba Bosiu, which was subsequently attacked repeatedly, but never taken. Moshoeshoe meanwhile expanded his kingdom by securing other clan chiefs as clients, at the same time earning a reputation for wisdom and generosity amongst ordinary Sotho that is almost mythical today.

Moshoeshoe had heard from travellers that missionaries brought peace, and so welcomed the arrival in 1833 of three from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS), establishing them in Morija, and taking an active interest in their work, though he never officially converted. The missionaries established what is now the Lesotho Evangelical Church, second in size only to the Catholics in Lesotho, whose missionaries founded Roma in the 1860s.

The kingdom was encroached upon by land-hungry whites from the 1840s, and the Orange Free State (OFS) government invaded in 1858, their soldiers destroying Morija and then launching a failed attack on Thaba Bosiu. They nonetheless captured plenty of farm land, whose acquisition was sanctioned by a British treaty in 1860. In 1865, the OFS government cited Sotho cattle theft as the pretext for a new war, though few could deny Moshoeshoe's bitter assertion that "my great sin is that I possess a good and fertile country". The ensuing Seqiti War resulted in the destruction of Sotho crops by Free State troops, forcing Moshoeshoe into a humiliating treaty in 1866 which signed over most of his remaining good land. The war resumed in 1867, and was halted only by the British taking over what was left of the kingdom as the protectorate of Basotholand in 1868. The Treaty of Aliwal North in 1869 restored Moshoeshoe's land east of the Caledon but left the rest with the Free State, where it has remained to this day.

Moshoeshoe died in 1870 and the British handed Basotholand to the Cape administration a year later, which began taxing its new subjects, establishing a series of hut tax-collection points which have since grown into Lesotho's modest collection of small towns. In 1879, in a bid to tempt the OFS and Transvaal into federation, the Cape government decided to confiscate all Sotho firearms. The result was two years of raids and skirmishes, known as the Gun War , an expensive and futile effort that brought down the Cape government and so outraged London that Britain resumed direct rule in 1884.

Along with Bechuanaland and Swaziland, Basotholand rejected incorporation into the union of South Africa in 1910, with King Letsie II instead helping found the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC) in 1912. During the following years, the monarchy and chiefs' position declined, partly because British reforms forced their uneasy conversion into a junior arm of the colonial civil service, but also because social changes at work in the region, like migration, urbanization and rising education levels, proved too much for chiefs and successive kings to adapt to. In 1960, when Moshoeshoe II was crowned king, independence politics were in full swing, spearheaded by Pan-Africanist Ntsa Mokhele's Basotho Congress Party (BCP), and rivalled by the more conservative Basotho National Party (BNP). The BCP easily won the 1960 elections, but the 1965 ones were narrowly won by the BNP, who duly led newly named Lesotho into independence on October 4, 1966. However, after losing the 1970 election, prime minister Leabua Jonathan annulled the result, declared a state of emergency, and carried on ruling until he was toppled in 1986 by Major General Metsing Lekhanya . Lekhanya ordered the expulsion of the ANC from Lesotho and signed an agreement that year with South Africa for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project.

In 1990, Lekhanya sent Moshoeshoe into exile and installed his son Letsie III as king, but a year later Lekhanya was himself ousted by Major General Phisona , who then gave way to a democratically elected government led by Mokhele's BCP in 1993. There was no end to the turmoil, however, with Letsie dissolving the BCP government in August 1994 for alleged incompetence, although regional pressure soon forced the restoration of the government and constitution. Letsie stood down in favour of his father in 1995, but Moshoeshoe II died in a car crash the next year, and Letsie regained the throne rather sooner than he really desired.

The elections of 1998 were won in a landslide by Mokhele, this time at the head of the breakaway Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD), but opposition parties cried foul amid widespread allegations of vote-rigging. In July and August of that year, large crowds gathered outside the Royal Palace in Maseru demanding the results be overturned; these protests developed into a mutiny by Lesotho Defence Force soldiers, and in September, under the flag of a Southern African Development Community (SADC) peacekeeping force , South African troops crossed the border. Fierce fighting took place around military bases and at the strategically vital Katse Dam, but the delayed arrival of further peacekeeping troops from Botswana meant that Maseru was left unsecured, and demonstrators from the Royal Palace were joined by thousands of others from surrounding districts angry at what they regarded as South Africa's heavy-handed intervention. A large number of shops and offices in Maseru, as well as towns such as Mafeteng, were looted and burned. Though largely regarded as an aberration, the 1998 disturbances still loom large in local politics, and there is every evidence that political squabbling will continue.