Lesotho

The Sotho people, called Basotho in the plural, have lived along the Drakensberg highlands and the surrounding lowlands for centuries. Their language, Sesotho, organizes nouns into classes by prefix, and the class you choose signals what kind of thing you are naming. A single person is a Mosotho. Many people are Basotho. Their country, formed with the 'le-' place prefix, is Lesotho.

The Basotho nation as a political entity began around 1822 under a leader named Moshoeshoe I. He gathered refugees from the Mfecane — the wave of wars that spread from Zululand across the southern African interior — and built a coalition on a natural fortress called Thaba Bosiu, meaning 'mountain at night' in Sesotho. By 1830 he had assembled enough allied chiefdoms to call the confederation a kingdom. The name he used was Lesotho.

Britain formally recognized Basutoland as a protectorate in 1868, when Moshoeshoe I, facing Boer encroachment from the Orange Free State, requested Queen Victoria's protection. The British accepted and renamed the territory Basutoland, anglicizing the Sotho name as they had done elsewhere in the region. Basutoland was never absorbed into South Africa proper, which proved significant when apartheid hardened in the 1940s. The territory's separate status under Britain prevented the Union of South Africa from claiming it.

Independence arrived on October 4, 1966, and the country restored its own name: Lesotho. The Sesotho speakers had always called their land Lesotho; what the colonial period added was not a new name but an erasure. The prefix 'le-' that colonial administrators overlooked was simply the word for 'country' in Sesotho grammar. Lesotho is one of three countries in the world encircled entirely by a single other nation, and its name predates the border that surrounds it.