This story I first heard from a fellow PCV back in Maseru when I was training. I recently heard it again from someone at my high school; the quaint hamlet of Mphaki being a full six hours from the big city by taxi, giving testament as to how small the country really is. The two versions varied a big but no doubt they were talking of the same man. Neither teller was certain of the man’s name, but they were both certain of his fate.
The man, you see, had been caught stealing a great sum of money, so the one story goes. The judge in the courts decided to make an example out of him, and he dealt the thief a harsh blow. The man was sentenced to stand outside of a certain building in the city for 10 years.
The other version had a bit more cultural flair. In this story the man had done some bad deed and the sangoma (medicine man or woman of a village) had bewitched him. He was cursed to stand all day outside of a building in the city. If you go by there you’ll see him, they say. He is not to the left or to the right, he stands in exactly the same spot every day.
Both versions have their shock value (a bewitchment or a pretty harsh punishment, I don’t know which I would prefer), but it got me thinking about religion in Lesotho. Traditionally the Basotho believed in the power of ancestral spirits. Your house, your fields, your cattle. They are all affected; there are good actions and bad. Women didn’t take care of the animals, that was the men’s responsibility—not because of an archaic dichotomy between men’s and women’s roles, though there was one, but because they believed that when a woman menstruated she gave off bad vibes and the animals would pick these up. So the dichotomy was based on beliefs. There was an explanation, a deeply held religious and cultural reason for why things were.
When the missionaries came in the 1800s (I believe that’s when they first arrived, but I’m not positive) they established churches and missions, wrote down the language of the people and converted many. The main religion of the country today is Christian, that being divided amongst many denominations—Anglican, Evangelican, Catholic, etc. (the high school where I teach was founded in 1986 by the Lesotho Evangelican Church). The church services on Sundays are as much as social gathering as they are a religious one (similar to how they can be in the states as well). People will ask you your religious affiliation (phrased more like, “Are you a Christian?”) and will size you up by your answer. Religion is one of those starred-off topics in the US that people dance around. When I worked at Pitt’s newspaper we had to run every article dealing with religion, gay rights, the Middle East, and a laundry list of topics, by the editor-in-chief just to cover our asses so we weren’t sending something libelous to print. Here, they ask you about it straight up. They will tell you they are Christian and then they’ll tell you not to step over a cow’s rope when it is staked into the ground for grazing and they’ll recount the story of the bewitched man in Maseru, fated to stand against a building all day. It is a mix of the old and the new. A hodgepodge of harmonies that praise Jesus, hope for good rain and thank families for sending their sons to initiation school. I am making sure to walk around the cows and I will respect my sangoma when I meet him.