Lesotho

The next day we were up for an early start again to head to Lesotho ("lahsootoo") this time, packing passports to enter into the country within South Africa. The border control was a small post with a couple guards. We were told that this would be the last place that we could use a bathroom until leaving Lesotho, since we would be driving through a very rural part of the country. We happened to have the same guide as the day before, who apparently hadn't yet shown us all the skills he possessed for negotiating unruly dirt roads that sometimes led through shallow rivers. We only did see one other automobile in the next 5 hours within Lesotho as well as a tractor, though many people were seen walking along the dirt roads. People in Lesotho sustain themselves through agriculture and in the rural areas that we drove through, live with minimal amenities.

We first went to pick up another man who would share the history of Lesotho and take us on an easy-going hike to see San cave paintings. He introduced himself as Power, very friendly with a great sense of humor woven throughout his historical presentation. He first reviewed the proper terminology for the people of Lesotho, Basotho ("bahsootoo"), and their language, South Sotho (probably have gotten the pattern by now, "Sootoo"). Power teaches math at the local school, which we got to see, currently two buildings with grades 1-4 in one building and 5-8 in another. A third building was pretty well on it's way to being finished at which point they'll move grades 7 and 8 in there. With the remaining bricks, he said they plan to build a wall in middle of the building that has grades 1-4 since currently all four grades meet in four different groups in one large room, a teacher at each of the four chalkboards.

We started our walk to the San cave paintings, stopping to eat our lunch of sandwiches again after we had reached the highest point of the hike. There, Power described the San to us, the original inhabitants of Lesotho, a nomadic hunting and gathering people who would travel in small groups of 20 or 30. The cave paintings served several purposes, the main one being a means of communication between groups to let them know where they had found water and animals to hunt. The direction in which the animals were painted was very important, showing other groups in which direction such animals could be found. Painting buffalos depicted a water source since unlike most animals that survived in the region considered "drought animals" able to store water in their bodies for long periods of time, buffalo needed to drink on a daily basis, so would be found near water.

San always thought to the future and of the larger group, never taking abundantly from the land, so that food would remain plentiful for all. If an animal was killed by one person, it was shared amongst all in the group, which was reason to keep the groups small. Power described that when the San people came upon an eland, the biggest (deer-like) animal they would hunt, it was considered "The Perfect Day" and they would celebrate together. They never killed buffalo because in thinking to the future, they knew buffalo would always be able to point them toward a source of water. One of our fellow hikers, a guy we had met the day before already, was working on his doctorate in Philosophy and couldn't quite work out this idea of the Perfect Day asking later during the walk back whether the Perfect Day was a real day or an idea of a day. Very nice guy, but goes to show, sometimes things are just as they seem: it was a perfect day when they had the biggest animal in the region to eat together.

The actual paintings were really faded as they were done something like a 1000 years ago. Also in the paintings were some people depicted as taller than the animals, which meant they were evil; San always painted themselves below the height of the animals in accordance to their totem belief. These evil, taller people, are thought to be the Zulu who the San came into conflict with when they settled into the lands that the San had inhabited for years. Zulus were of a different mindset than the San in that they had the concept of property, which was completely foreign to the San who shared all they had and never thought of the land as theirs. As Power described, laughing, "Suddenly there were big fat, slow moving animals in the land where they previously had to hunt very fast animals. They were very happy, thought they had been blessed and started killing the cows." Zulus didn't take kindly to their cows being killed by the San, the conflict ensued.

That's as much history as I remember and/or have time to go into - I'm sure there's a lot more if you're interested to look into it further online.

From the San cave paintings, we went to see a natural healer, a sangoma. A sangoma is given the gift of healing, identified in a vision by both the upcoming sangoma as well as the sangoma who will train a new one. This sangoma, probably in her 70's, had already trained 6 sangomas and was training a seventh, which entails learning about natural herbs and healing. The Basotho people know the types of illnesses which a sangoma will heal and those that you must see a doctor for. For instance, a broken leg will not be healed by a sangoma; and a spiritual ailment will not be healed by a doctor. After the sangoma told us her story of how she came to be a sangoma (in Sotho and translated by Power), we were encouraged to ask any other questions. It had taken her 9 years to train to become a sangoma because when she was identified in a dream with the gift, she was a "church-goer", which didn't align well with her belief system, so it took her that long to train because she only slowly accepted her position as a sangoma.

We went on from the sangoma's house, to get to try some home-brewed beer. Like Peru where families will place a flag outside their door to show that they brew chicha there, families do the same here with three different flag colors depicting the type of beer. I didn't catch all three types but a green flag apparently means that there is beer brewed with marijuana there; that's not the beer we tasted. The beer looked milky and tasted sour, similar to chicha actually. After some more impressive driving on Sim's part to get our van through the small passageways to get to and from those destinations, we were back on the more open road, driving through a couple more shallow rivers, on our way back to the border post.