How the Novelist Morabo Morojele Created a Distorted Vision of Lesotho

In two novels, How We Buried Puso, and the UJ prize-winning The Three Egg Dilemma, Mosotho novelist, Morabo Morojele, established himself, like all great novelists, as an artist who will be remembered for being a mouthpiece for the consciousness of his society. Although contemporary society rarely turns to novelists in order to see their own reflection (Lesotho has one of the highest suicide and murder rates in the world), it’s an important task that must be undertaken nonetheless, like a traveller checking if all their wares are in order before embarking on a long journey. Art in recent times has struggled to find its significance in a world that seems to be regressing into fascism, and economic and ecological collapse; arts institutions struggling to stay afloat, arts and humanities education having their funding pulled, a constant undoing in the ecological and metaphysical fabrics of our society. The fate of books even more so, with fewer and fewer people reading each year. But this doesn’t nullify the significance of the task of recording societal progress, which art has historically been able to do. Just that act of recording is enough, it’s not art’s place to provide answers, but rather, put questions in our hands that may inspire us to find answers, whether they be philosophical, existential, or economic. When in 2024, Ntate Morabo won the UJ Prize for Fiction for his sophomore offering, The Three Egg Dilemma, it bode well for the state of Lesotho literature. But awards, and ironically, an indifferent reading culture in Lesotho, can potentially obscure interesting questions that lie at the heart of an oeuvre like Ntate Morabo’s, questions that soar above literary concerns to touch at the heart of what makes a ‘great novel about Lesotho’, or even bigger questions, like the role of art in how Lesotho imagines itself into the world’s consciousness.

And this is a consciousness Ntate Morabo urgently wrote the country into inhabiting; making a veritable case for himself as one of Lesotho’s foremost scribes, despite literary culture in Lesotho overlooking his important contribution in relation to the towering legacies of figures such as Zakes Mda and his work, and Thomas Mofolo. Perhaps it’s the genuinely odd nature of Ntate Morabo’s ouvre that, Lesotho lacking a sizeable leisure-reading populace notwithstanding, has pushed him away from the upper echelons of culture that he should rightly occupy; this mirror that he held up to Lesotho was a genuinely weird one, misshapen to reflect Lesotho’s own deformity, reflecting not light but darkness itself, revealing instead the long shadow of the country that stands before it, and not the beautiful, green-hilled mountain kingdom she perceives herself to be.

How We Buried Puso, published in 2006, finds its literary mode in a protracted funeral proceeding. The whole novel takes place in a single day, the day of the funeral of the narrator, Molefe’s, brother, Puso. Although the circumstances of Puso’s death remain largely mysterious, until an unforgettable denouement later, much of the narrative propulsion of the novel lies in Molefe’s re-encounter with a country he hasn’t been to in years. With the ethnographic gaze of a tourist, he roams about the labyrinth of his childhood memories that being back home after seven years inevitably brings to the surface, and the colourful cast of characters that exist therein. This is coupled with prescient observations about the country itself.

It’s impossible to completely discard an auto-fiction reading from an experience with the book; Ntate Morabo himself had lived an equally nomadic life with degrees from The London School of Economics and the Institute of Social Sciences in the Hague, as well as working for NGOs, international organisations, and a career as a jazz musician,  recording and performing with many of South Africa’s biggest musicians. As such, the state of borders, or being ‘border-ed’ is a primary concern in Molefe’s observations. ‘The country neighbouring ours’ is a frequent, and if not, oppressive, influential force in the world Ntate Morabo creates. Characters like Twice and Thembi, who respectively, have come from war and political violence in the country neighbouring ours, or have come to Lesotho to live with Molefe and his family, expose them to the idiosyncrasies in language and behaviour of another culture, and also reflect the porousness of identity that Basotho from Lesotho and South Africans often find themselves in.

The physical borders that separate the two make the existence of hard borders ironic. A long history of migrant labour, Lesotho exporting water to South Africa, shared languages, and even, notably, Lesotho offering refuge for South African exiles during apartheid serve this irony. Similarly, Molefe’s ‘African’ identity becomes a persistent subject to ponder in Europe, where navigating the loneliness of being in the diaspora, both in work and in interpersonal relationships, gains a profundity from the state of being state-less. The feeling gets no better when Molefe comes home for Puso’s funeral, and indeed, the novel’s digressions, and observations, are spurred from feeling like an outsider in the first place. The power of the novel lies in Ntate Morabo using his narrator’s positionality to push his prose to explore bigger ideas, both linguistic and philosophical, that soar above the relatively basic plot device of having a character return home for his brother’s funeral. Frequently, chapters end in lyrical prose.

‘To call the dead is to call the sun. And the sun is a powerful thing. It cures and regenerates. It is a balm, a tonic, a first rate detergent. It demystifies hypochondria and is antagonist to all affliction. It is an antibiotic, an antidepressant, an antihistamine, an aunt who descends on a fractured home, cleans up living spaces, kindly rebukes the father, consoles the mother, puts the kettle on for tea and buys the children sweets, so that everything and everyone can be remade. The sun wipes away most anything. I am drunk and stagger past the tent to the house. It is very late. I see the first intimation of light against the mountains on the horizon. Tomorrow’s sun frightens me’.

Yet, though the book succeeds in creating that feeling of alienation and sustaining it, one can’t help, most of the time, not to ignore the dissonance between passages like the one quoted above, which work to give the book universal relevance, and the limiting scope that Ntate Morabo builds Molefe and Lesotho itself with. This, I suppose, is the weakness with not only a first person narrative voice, but also, one in which the narrator is largely passive; observing his own memories and the people around him, but rarely inciting any narrative action to push the story forward. Finishing the book, we come away with the feeling that we intimately know Puso, his widow Miriam, Thembi, Twice, Abuti Jefti, but very little about Molefe. His connection with his dead brother is equally tenuous, and although this serves the feeling of alienation that being away from home for so long has undoubtedly cultivated in him, the lyrical, and often, breath-taking prose attempts, with varied successes and failures, to reconcile the expansiveness of alienation, spiritual, economic, post-colonial, with the fairly limited materials he chooses to build Lesotho with. We don’t get the feeling like we know where we are. Places, ‘like the country neighbouring ours’ are not named, and even the place where Molefi grew up is referred to as just ‘our township’. Although, a township’s exact definition, and eventual depiction in a Lesotho context favours vagueness over amalgamating visual cues of a township as it exists in the collective Southern African mind, with specific, idiosyncratic ‘township’  visual cues provided by Lesotho and its unique topography. Relative to the pervasive public conception of a ‘township’ from ‘the country neighbouring ours’ being defined as residential developments erected to confine ‘non-whites’, both in terms of space and economic activity, a ‘township’ in Lesotho, a country made up of hilly villages and very small towns, even though not immune to colonial town planning in their formations,  jumps out as  a frequent word choice that,  though interesting, leaves one confused as to its intended effect.

‘Like so many other towns in poor countries such as ours, the villages clustered together to form our nation’s capital is the outcome of colonial planning. Our former masters never imagined that the single thoroughfare named in usual fashion after a royal of that time might one day need to serve a far larger population of vehicles and people, or that state administration might require a smarter design and location of police stations, passport offices, departments of agriculture and such. Things did not improve much with independence and our town is now a place of half-completed infrastructure projects, their funds siphoned off by keen politicians, of congested and pot-holed streets ruled by uncouth taxis, of too many people in insufficient space and a few well-hidden quarters where our satisfied managers and their foreign advisors lived behind tall hedges and ‘Beware of the Dog’ signs.’

Although passages such as this are brilliant in their balancing between alienation and familiarity, one is frequently left with the feeling of being in a nowhere-land. The towns themselves are not named and even the ‘former masters’ who so violently shaped them, though we know who they are, are not named. It’s an interesting literary choice that even though it expands upon Molefe’s alienation, is sometimes done at the expense of rooting the reader in tactile, visual specifics, a canvas that could have potentially allowed the book to gain wings where Lesotho’s depiction is concerned, and not only where poetic, literary innovation is concerned. But this, the book seems to argue, is at the heart of writing a character like Molefe, of being a writer with experiences like Ntate Morabo has had, or even, of being ‘Mosotho’. It might be an expected route to follow a depiction of Lesotho as a land of ‘rolling-green hills’, and the romance of ‘benevolent kings and queens in cow-skin garb’, but aesthetically, and even, politically, this choice of placing us in the middle of an ontological ‘nowhere’ reflects on the struggles of identity that Molefe finds himself in, and perhaps, that the state of being Mosotho comes with, as a result of colonial violence, being bordered on all sides by ‘the country neighbouring ours’, and even, in light of a globalised world, considering what it means to be African and black.

The Three Egg Dilemma, published in 2023 similarly finds its literary materials by placing us in the middle of a nowhere-land that is inferred to be Lesotho. Here, Ntate Morabo uses the fact of the country’s political instability and accompanying, frequent violence to weave a tableau where Mohlala, an aged landlord in the ‘somnambulism of [his] days’, spends his days with friends, visiting the local bar, scraping by in harsh economic conditions, (a three-egg dilemma that the novel finds its title in) and trying to survive, frequently, raids from soldiers and the imminent war brewing in the heart of this country. Though no explanations are given as to the source of this civil unrest, and for the reckless interruptions of violence that the soldiers bring to Mohlala and the other cast of characters’ lives, it is nonetheless effective, in a way that How We Buried Puso isn’t, in situating the reader in this nowhere- land redolent with the aroma of imminent violence.  In the manner of soldiers licking their wounds after a cease-fire,  Mohlala in his old age is portrayed as still reeling and numb from the whirlwind of a life clumsily realised; failed dreams, failed trysts, the question that all human beings eventually reach at the tail-end of their lives; did I do enough? Here, unlike with Ntate Morabo’s previous book, the alienation created in the narrator and the circumstances of the ‘valley’ he lives in reach a chaotic harmony.  The strength of the book lies in how it carries the reader through this frequent unease, with frequent outbursts of violence. This is at the heart of Ntate Morabo’s project of writing Lesotho by stripping away any details that could firmly situate the reader in a specific locality, leaving only implications whose power lie in their relationship with the world outside the book; a Lesotho which has been rife with frequent political assassinations, raids from soldiers, coups, and a lawlessness that exists in both politicians and law enforcement entities, people entrusted to protect Basotho society and not terrorize it. As with How We Buried Puso, Ntate Morabo realises this with lyrical, and dazzling prose;

‘There are certain silences that distil the earth and ways of being in it. Incomplete silences, because there is no absolute silence.  Sound is tougher than silence and will always insinuate itself, at least, and it will have purpose and time to, if nothing else, tell us that we are not dead; whether the sound of distant industry or the sound the wind makes breathing through the trees, or closer still, the sound of a beating heart’

But like in How We Buried Puso, the narrator largely remains passive, and seems to have things happen to him, waiting for his next catastrophe, or waiting, rather, for the re-appearance of a harmless ghost that visits him with a bumbling weariness of movement not unlike the somnolent weariness Mohlala himself has accumulated from the sheer act of a long life. The lack of taking meaningful narrative action could potentially wear out some readers, and test their patience. Although, unlike in How We Buried Puso, the passivity here works only to accentuate the feeling of being at the edge of the world with no more dreams to build or chase after, forced only to look back at one’s life ruefully in the middle of a ‘nowhere-land’. The fact that this ‘somnolence’ is met , throughout the book, with bursts of violence gains wider, poetic implications in understanding the country that Ntate Morabo is writing about. Lesotho’s bucolic landscape, and its outward projection as a ‘peaceful country’, as stated before, is accompanied by of one of the highest murder rates in the world, highest suicide rates in the world, highest incidences of gender-based-violence in the world, and one of the highest transmissions of HIV/AIDS in the world. Ultimately, even the act of not naming it in the novel is a choice that forces the reader to look closer, not at the beauty that Lesotho clothes herself in, but at the often ugly innards she chooses to hide. ‘Mota’s Ghost, the apparition that frequently visits Mohlala is depicted naked,

‘As if it had heard my thoughts, it smirked and shook its head. I looked at it, unafraid. It brushed its hair and licked its lips, like a suave man. It lifted one leg off the other and swivelled on its naked buttocks for comfort on the hard floor. Seated, its head reached above my writing desk; it had been a tall fellow I remembered from ‘Mota’s car. It tapped its indented chest with one hand and twisted its protruding belly button with the fingers of the other, a game it might have learnt for dexterity. Its umbilicus cut at its birth, it had not always been there. It was not of eternity backwards. It had never evolved and would die sometime too’.

Through his work, Ntate Morabo has similarly succeeded in guiding the reader to see Lesotho naked herself, where ghosts roam about and she is stripped of the pretensions, even in her naming,  that hide the song of violence always humming at the edges of her society. It’s an artistic decision that while may alienate many readers, especially Basotho readers, nonetheless positioned Ntate Morabo as an important voice in contemporary literature, daring and original enough to lift the veil that covers Lesotho and forcing everyone to look underneath it. Here, even its ghosts wear no clothes.