Makers and Shapers Profile

Thomas Mofolo

Person

1876 - 1948

[Source - Benathi Marufu for FHYA, 2022, using encyclopedia.com: Thomas Mokopu Mofolo as one of the first writers of note in modern African literature. His 1925 novel, Chaka, written in the Bantu tongue of Sesotho, blends Zulu saga, historical fact, and fiction in its tale of an actual warrior-leader from the previous century. C. F. Swanepoel, in a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay, called Mofolo "the most important African writer of the first quarter of the twentieth century. He still ranks with African Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, and Najib Mafuz. Mofolo was born in 1876 in Khojane, Basutoland, which later became the kingdom of Lesotho, located in South Africa. During his childhood, Basutoland and its indigenous Sotho inhabitants were under British colonial rule, and his family became part of a wave of African Christian converts in the area. Mofolo attended schools run by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, and as a young man went to the town of Morija, where he worked for the Rev. Alfred Casalis, the director of a local Bible school. Casalis also ran a printing press and book depot in Morija that encouraged literacy among the Sotho. Mofolo decided on a teaching career and in 1896 entered the teachers' training college in Morija. His studies were interrupted for a time due to lack of funds, and when he finally finished the program in 1899, the Boer war had erupted in the area. Mofolo then went to Leloaleng to study carpentry. He taught school until 1904, when he became a proofreader at the Morija Press and also served as Casalis's secretary. Until 1910 he wrote for Leselinyana la Lesotho (The Little Light of Lesotho), a missionary-run newspaper. An avid reader, Mofolo was encouraged by Casalis and the other missionaries to try his hand at writing fiction. The result was a 1907 novel, Moeti oa bochabela (The Traveller of the East), published by the Morija Book Depot. It was the first work of fiction ever written in Sesotho. It was later translated into English and published abroad in 1934.]