Sotho people

Basotho

King Moshoeshoe I, founder of the Basotho nation, with his Ministers.
Total population
(5.3 million (2001 estimate) to 6,409,000)
Regions with significant populations
South Africa, Lesotho
South Africa	3,544,304 (2001 Census) to 4,723,000
Lesotho	1,669,000
Botswana	11,000
Swaziland	6,000
Languages
Sesotho
Religion
African Traditional Religion, Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Northern Sotho, Tswana

The Basotho are a Bantu ethnic group whose ancestors have lived in southern Africa since around the fifth century. The Basotho nation emerged from the accomplished diplomacy of Moshoeshoe I who gathered together disparate clans of Sotho–Tswana origin that had dispersed across southern Africa in the early 19th century. Most Basotho today live in South Africa, as the area of the Orange Free State was originally part of Moshoeshoe's nation (now Lesotho).

Pastoralist Bantu-speaking peoples settled in the territory of modern South Africa by about 500 CE, displacing the aboriginal inhabitants of Southern Africa.

The separation from the Tswana is assumed to have taken place by the 14th century. The first historical references to the Basotho date to the 19th century. By that time, a series of Basotho kingdoms covered the southern portion of the plateau (Free State Province and parts of Gauteng). Basotho society was highly decentralized and organized on the basis of kraals, or extended clans, each of which ruled by a chief Chiefdoms were united into loose confederations

In the 1820s, refugees from the Zulu expansion under Shaka came into contact with the Basotho people residing on the highveld. In 1823, those pressures caused one group of Basotho, the Kololo, to migrate north, past the Okavango Swamp and across the Zambezi into Barotseland, now part of Zambia. In 1845, the Kololo conquered Barotseland.

At about the same time, the Boers began to encroach upon Basotho territory. After the Cape Colony had been ceded to Britain at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the voortrekkers ("pioneers") were farmers who opted to leave the former Dutch colony and moved inland where they eventually established independent polities.