The village chief, old Father of Crows, neglected his second wife, Mother of Pumpkins, because she could not have children - until, one day, two doves came to help her.

In 1843, Queen Victoria agreed to take Basutoland under her protection, thus achieving Moshoeshoe’s first goal. The seeds of his second goal had been sown more than a decade before. At the same time that Basutoland was forming as a nation, French Protestants began an evangelical drive in Africa. After arriving in Cape Town, three missionaries set out on a treacherous ride—one thousand kilometers long—across mountainous, bandit-infested lands to arrive in the new Basotho kingdom. Their first order of business was to learn Sesotho and devise an alphabet so that it could be written because they wanted to translate the Bible.

It is largely due to those early missionaries that so much of the oral tradition of the Basotho has been preserved; they and their successors collected folktales, songs, proverbs, and riddles in order to have original texts for study and the compilation of a Sesotho dictionary. First published in 1875, that dictionary is still in use today, following many revisions and new editions.

As a result of Christian missionary influences, the folktales of the Basotho are different from those of most other African peoples—they are more relaxed and benevolent, containing less cruelty and wickedness. Of course, these folktales are still populated by cannibals, demons, and other vicious characters, but they are no more gruesome than, say, Grimms’ fairy tales. Basotho tales generally have happy endings. This is particularly uncommon for Bantu tales. That is why I call them fairy tales rather than folktales.

Behind the three tales of our collection (one recounted here and two in the next issue), there is a strong moral message. The first tale was originally used as a lesson to teach young chieflings that they should treat everyone–even their wives—with fairness and equality.