At a Glance
Fort Hare, Pan-Africanism, and the Formation of a Nationalist
Ntsu Mokhehle's political formation at Fort Hare University College in the Eastern Cape was the same experience that shaped so many of the southern African liberation era's most important leaders. Fort Hare was, in the 1930s and 1940s, the primary institution of higher education available to Black students across southern and central Africa — a mission school college that had trained generations of African professionals and political leaders and that served as the meeting point for the region's emerging nationalist intelligentsia. Mandela was there. Tambo was there. Robert Mugabe was there. Seretse Khama was there. The connections formed at Fort Hare between students from across the region were the personal networks through which Pan-African solidarity was built, and the political ideas debated in its common rooms and student organisations were the ideas that would animate the independence era.
Mokhehle was exposed at Fort Hare to the ANC's politics and to the Pan-Africanist tradition — the conviction that African liberation was a continental project that transcended the particular borders that colonialism had drawn, and that the liberation movements of different territories had obligations of solidarity toward each other as well as toward their own peoples. This Pan-African framework shaped his vision for Lesotho's liberation in ways that distinguished the BCP from the more narrowly Basotho-focused nationalism of Jonathan's BNP from the beginning.
He returned to Basutoland after Fort Hare and entered the emerging nationalist politics of the late 1940s and early 1950s with the combination of intellectual formation and practical organisational capacity that Fort Hare had provided. The founding of the Basutoland Congress Party in 1952 — the name deliberately echoing the African National Congress — was an assertion of the connection between Basotho nationalism and the broader African nationalist project, and a declaration that Basutoland's liberation movement would be shaped by the democratic, non-racial, mass-based politics that the ANC represented rather than by the conservative, chieftaincy-aligned politics that the colonial administration preferred to deal with.
Building the BCP: Mass Nationalism in a Mountain Kingdom
The political challenge of building a mass nationalist movement in Basutoland was formidable. The territory was small, extremely poor, overwhelmingly rural, and governed through the traditional chieftaincy structures that the British had incorporated into their indirect rule administration. The chiefs — whose authority was both traditional and colonial, derived from both Swazi custom and the British recognition that gave them administrative functions — were generally aligned with the conservative nationalism of the BNP rather than with the more radical BCP. The Catholic Church, which was the dominant religious institution in the territory, also tended to support the BNP's pro-chieftaincy conservatism over the BCP's more secular, Pan-Africanist politics.
Mokhehle built the BCP against this grain, drawing support from the urban workers, the educated youth, the teachers and clerks who formed Basutoland's emerging middle class, and from the migrant labourers who went to South Africa and returned with direct experience of the racial capitalism that the liberation movement was fighting. The BCP's connection to the ANC's politics — which gave it the most sophisticated political analysis of the South African racial system available — was a genuine asset in building a movement whose members understood their own condition in relation to the broader regional structures of racial and colonial oppression.
By the time Basutoland moved toward independence in the mid-1960s, the BCP was the most significant mass political organisation in the territory, and Mokhehle was its undisputed leader. The pre-independence elections of 1965 produced a BNP victory — Jonathan's party won through a combination of chieftaincy support, Catholic Church backing, and South African sympathy for a more conservative nationalist movement — but the BCP remained the largest opposition force and Mokhehle remained the most prominent alternative leader. The 1970 election was his opportunity to translate that support into governing power.
January 1970: The Election That Was Stolen
The January 1970 election is one of the clearest cases of democratic theft in the post-independence African political record. The BCP was winning. The results showed it. The international observers confirmed it. And Leabua Jonathan, the sitting Prime Minister whose party was losing, cancelled the election and kept power by force.
The immediate consequences for Mokhehle were severe. He was detained. His colleagues were detained. The constitutional framework that would have translated the election victory into governing power was suspended. The state of emergency that Jonathan declared gave the security forces broad powers to suppress the opposition, and those powers were used systematically against the BCP's leadership and membership.
When Mokhehle was eventually released, he faced a choice: accept the new political reality and work within the constraints of Jonathan's authoritarian system, or continue to assert the democratic legitimacy that the 1970 election had established and pursue whatever means were available to restore it. He chose the latter. He went into exile in Zambia and then in South Africa, and from exile he built the Lesotho Liberation Army — the BCP's armed wing — as an instrument for pursuing through force what the democratic process had delivered and then had taken away.
The Lesotho Liberation Army and the Complication of South African Support
The LLA's operations from South African territory created one of the more uncomfortable dilemmas in the history of southern African liberation politics. The apartheid government's support for Mokhehle's armed resistance against Jonathan — who had by the mid-1970s become an increasingly open opponent of apartheid and a host for ANC exiles — placed Mokhehle in the position of benefiting from the support of the very system that the ANC, the BCP's political model and natural ally, was fighting. South Africa was supporting the LLA not because it cared about Lesotho's democracy but because Jonathan's government had become a problem for Pretoria, and destabilising it through support for the LLA was a convenient tool of pressure.
Mokhehle's acceptance of this support — whatever his private reservations about its source — created significant tensions with the ANC and with the broader anti-apartheid movement. The ANC regarded Jonathan's government, for all its authoritarianism, as a frontline state ally that was taking real risks to oppose apartheid, and it could not easily support a movement that was conducting military operations against Jonathan with South African backing. The complications of this period remain one of the more difficult chapters in the BCP's history — a period in which the legitimate democratic grievance of 1970 became entangled with the geopolitical interests of the apartheid state in ways that compromised the purity of Mokhehle's democratic cause.
The 1993 Vindication: Seventy-Four Years Old and Finally Prime Minister
The military coup that overthrew Jonathan in January 1986 ended the immediate context within which the LLA's operations had been conducted, and the new military government eventually committed to restoring democratic governance. Mokhehle returned to legal political activity and rebuilt the BCP as an above-ground party preparing for elections. When those elections finally came in March 1993 — twenty-three years after the stolen victory of 1970 — the result was extraordinary. The BCP won all sixty-five seats in the National Assembly. Every single constituency in Lesotho returned a BCP candidate. It was the most comprehensive electoral mandate that any party had received in any southern African election, a result that reflected two decades of pent-up democratic preference and the enduring loyalty of the Basotho electorate to the party whose victory had been taken from them in 1970.
Mokhehle took the oath of office as Prime Minister at the age of seventy-four. The ceremony was a moment of extraordinary personal vindication — the recognition, finally and definitively, of the democratic legitimacy that he had maintained through thirty-eight years of opposition, exile, and armed resistance. It was also, for Lesotho, a moment of democratic renewal after two decades of authoritarian rule: the beginning of a democratic dispensation that the country had been denied since January 1970.
Legacy
Ntsu Mokhehle died in Maseru on 6 January 1999, eighteen months after ill health had forced him to step down from the prime ministership. He was eighty years old. He had founded the BCP forty-seven years earlier. He had won an election twenty-nine years earlier and had to wait twenty-three years to exercise the power it conferred. He had spent years in exile, had led an armed resistance movement, had negotiated his way back to legal political activity, and had finally governed the country he had always believed should be governed democratically.
His legacy is the legacy of democratic commitment sustained through extraordinary adversity — the refusal, across decades of repression and exile, to abandon the claim that the 1970 election result had established and that the Basotho people's democratic preferences deserved to be honoured. Very few political leaders in the history of African independence have maintained that kind of commitment across that kind of time span, in the face of that kind of opposition, and have lived to see it vindicated. Ntsu Mokhehle did. That is a legacy worth recording.