Sotho People - The Sotho People Today

The Sotho People Today

The Sotho heartland is the Free State province in South Africa and neighboring Lesotho. Both of these largely rural areas are characterized by widespread poverty and underdevelopment. It can thus be reasonably argued that many Sotho speakers live in conditions of economic hardship though people with access to land and steady employment may enjoy a higher standard of living . Landowners will often participate in subsistence or small scale commercial farming ventures. Overgrazing and land mismanagement are growing problems.

Internal migration explains why Sotho is widely spoken throughout the sub-continent. In order to enter the cash economy, Sotho men often migrated to large cities in South Africa to find employment in the mining industry. Migrant workers from the Free State and Lesotho thus helped to spread Sotho to the urban areas of South Africa. Migrant work is generally agreed to have had a negative impact on family life for most Sotho speakers since adults (primarily men) were required to leave their families behind in impoverished communities while they were employed in cities located hundreds of kilometers away.

Attempts by the apartheid government to force Sotho speakers to relocate to designated homelands had little effect on human settlement patterns, and large numbers of workers continued to leave the traditional areas of Black settlement throughout the last century. While men tended to find employment within the mining sector, women gravitated towards employment as agricultural or domestic workers.

The allure of urban areas has not diminished and internal migration remains a reality for many black people born in Lesotho and other sotho heartlands today.

Generally, employment patterns amongst Sotho speakers follow patterns pertaining to broader South Africans society. Due to historical factors, unemployment amongst Sotho and other Black South Africans remains high. Professional people are employed in the education, health, medicine, legal and political sectors. Others find employment in the civil service and business.

In terms of religion, the central role that Christian missionaries played in helping Moshoeshoe secure his kingdom helped to ensure widespread conversion amongst Sotho people to Christianity. Today, the bulk of Sotho speakers practice a form of Christianity which blends elements of traditional Christian dogma with local, pre-Western believes. Modimo (“God”) is viewed as a supreme being who cannot be approached by mortals; the favour of ancestors, who act as intercessors between Modimo and the living, must be cultivated through worship and reverence. Officially, the majority of Lesotho’s population is Catholic.