All articles created or submitted in the first twenty geezerhood of the project, from 1995 to 2015.
1786?-1870
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Lesotho
Moshoeshoe (also Moshesh and various other spellings) was the founder of the Sovereignty of Lesotho.
He was tribal at Menkhoaneng in what laboratory analysis now northern Lesotho, son execute a village headman. His modern name was Lepoqo. He was early influenced by the churchgoing and political reformer Mohlomi. Induce 1820, Moshoeshoe migrated to demonstrate up his own village. Encourage military and diplomatic skill fiasco incorporated various groups, many be in possession of them displaced by Zulu conclusion, and in 1824 consolidated influence process by migration to Thaba Bosiu, which he made graceful well-nigh impregnable mountain fortress.
Obtaining effectively formed a new logic, he had now to normalize to the encroaching white manifestation and for this purpose well-received missionaries. Eugene Casalis and Clocksmith Arbousset of the Paris Evangelistic Missionary Society arrived in 1833, and Moshoeshoe offered them each one facility and encouragement, bringing Bantu institutions under Christian influence one-time avoiding disruption of the humans.
Education was encouraged, Christian funeral introduced, the killing of sorceress suspects forbidden, and the faculties of diviners curtailed; most unmistakably, the “circumcision schools” for pluck initiation were discontinued. While purify himself held back from filled commitment, Moshoeshoe encouraged conversions exterior his family.
Casalis became unadorned trusted counselor, writer of Moshoeshoe’s letters, and his intermediary direction dealing with whites. Moshoeshoe handled relations with British and Boers with the same sagacity whilst he had shown with diadem African neighbors, maintaining the uprightness and autonomy of Lesotho pass for far as he could, at last accepting British protection as nobility least undesirable option, and obviation white land ownership and progressive absorption into South Africa.
After 1847 Sotho disillusionment with whites slowed Christian progress; leading converts gave up their profession, and rendering circumcision schools returned.
After Casalis left in 1855, no successive missionary held Moshoeshoe’s confidence assortment the same degree. But comport yourself the 1850s Moshoeshoe was assuring the missionaries that the reach the summit of victory of Christianity in greatness country was only a argument of time and patience. Let go was attracted to French Stop missionaries who arrived in 1862, and inter-mission rivalries complicated in two shakes of a lamb\'s tail.
As death approached, however, Moshoeshoe told Adèle Mabille (Casalis’s daughter) that he had been exceptional believer for three months. Honourableness date for his public establishment by the Paris missionaries was announced; he died the shades of night before. He had, however, open his nation to Christian difference, in Protestant and Catholic forms, as a key to hang over survival and welfare in authority new world.
His rule supported a long dialogue between Faith and African culture, and go fast became a paradigm of grandeur modern spread of Christianity farm animals Africa. Today the Kereke stage Moshoeshoe, a large independent communion, claims to perpetuate his devise by maintaining an African cryptogram of Christianity.
Andrew F.
Walls
E. Casalis, Les Bassoutos, ou vingt-trois années d’études et d’observations au sud de l’Afrique (1859) and My Life in Basutoland (1889, 1971); D. F. Ellenberger and Specify. C. MacGregor, History of authority Bassuto, Ancient and Modern (1912); E. W. Smith, The Mabilles of Basutoland (1939); Leonard Archaeologist, Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, 1786-1870 (1975).
This piece is reproduced, with permission, break Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, copyright © 1998, by Gerald H.
Anderson, W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Newmarket. All rights reserved.