Sotho

The Sotho lived in a number of chiefdoms on the southern African plateau. By the seventeenth century their clans formed loosely connected kingdoms in what is now South Africa's Free State and neighbouring regions.

Amid wars and migrations in the 1820s, Moshoeshoe I gathered Sotho clans and refugees under his protection. He established a stronghold at Butha-Buthe in 1822 and later moved to Thaba Bosiu, laying the foundations of the kingdom that became Lesotho.