Sotho

The Sotho, often called the Basotho, are a Sotho-Tswana people whose homeland lies on the high plateau of present-day Lesotho and adjoining parts of southern Africa. They grew from Bantu-speaking farming clans who had settled the highveld by about 1500 and mixed with the older San hunter-gatherers; their separation from the Tswana is thought to date to the fourteenth century.

Sotho society was built around clans under their own chiefs, joined in loose confederations, and by the seventeenth century Sotho kingdoms covered the Free State and neighboring highlands.

The Mfecane in the 1820s scattered refugees: some groups, among them the Kololo, migrated as far north as the Zambezi, while Moshoeshoe I united clans around Butha-Buthe and Thaba Bosiu into a Basotho kingdom, using French missionaries to develop a written form of Sesotho.