Lesotho

Every part of Lesotho lies more than a thousand metres above the sea, which no other country can say, and the whole mountain kingdom sits inside South Africa. The Maloti and Drakensberg ranges fill the east, rising to Thabana Ntlenyana, the highest peak in southern Africa, and winter brings snow to passes such as Sani. The Senqu, which becomes the Orange River, rises in these highlands, and the Maletsunyane Falls plunge into a gorge near Semonkong. Most farms crowd the western lowlands.

San hunters painted the sandstone shelters of the lowlands long before Moshoeshoe I gathered survivors of the wars of the 1820s on Thaba Bosiu, a flat-topped mountain no enemy managed to take, and built the Basotho nation there. Wars with Boer settlers cost much of the best farmland, and in 1868 Moshoeshoe won British protection as Basutoland. After the Gun War of 1880–81 the territory was ruled directly from London, and Lesotho became independent in October 1966.

A heavy wool blanket worn as a cloak and the conical mokorotlo straw hat, pictured on the flag, mark the Basotho at once. Riders on sure-footed Basotho ponies go where roads do not, and famo music, built on the accordion and sung poetry, grew among migrant miners. The Katse and Mohale dams send water to South Africa and turn the turbines at Muela, garment factories make jeans for export, the Letšeng mine yields unusually large diamonds, and mountain flocks give wool and mohair.