Whose Lesotho? Trauma, memory, and revisiting a time of fear in Rethabile Masilo’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper is focused on the analysis of the gripping narratives of Lesotho’s political terror and violence between 1972 and 1986 as captured in Rethabile Masilo’s poetry. To date, Masilo has published four poetry collections—Things That Are Silent (2012), Waslap (2015), Letter to Country (2016) Qoaling (2018) and Mbera (currently in Press). Arguably, these collections evoke a fecund poetic space to string together history and an extremely accurate details of Lesotho’s political trajectory during Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan’s governance. Drawn attention to, is the terrifying narratives of sudden experience of political unrest in the country shortly after independence from the United Kingdom in October 1966. Essentially, personal responses of Masilo (in his poetry) to the horrifying circumstances suffered by him and members of his family during the regime of Leabua stand as a bulwark against tyranny. The paper engages in interpretive analysis of Masilo’s poetry and Literary Trauma theory has been appropriated for its analysis. The paper foregrounds gripping, poetic narratives of anomie to revisit “a time of fear” in Lesotho between 1972 and 1986 when the 1970 election was annulled, and the constitution suspended my Prime Minister Leabua. The paper delineates a spate of the country’s agony and violence that accompanied a period of anarchy, which complicated Koeeoko’s gruesome perpetration of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial executions of members of the opposition.

Keywords:

• ‘a time of fear’
• exile
• memory
• Rethabile Masilo’s poetry
• trauma
• whose Lesotho?

1. Introduction

Rethabile Masilo stands out as a new, unique Lesotho’s poetic voice whose writing maturity is cultivated, nurtured, and sustained while living in exile after running away from the Lesotho’s torrid political climate in 1981. In more than three decades as a poet, Masilo’s poetry has not attracted a deserving scholarship due to the paucity of awareness created by the less-visible publishers of his poetry collections. Consequently, to date, there are no critical articles nor book-length publications on his poetry. Nonetheless, the fragile bridge between the past and the present of the Lesotho’s nationhood is often concomitantly interrogated in Masilo’s poetry collections, Things That Are Silent (2012), Waslap (2015), Letter to Country (2016) Qoaling (2018) and Mbera (in Press). Readers of Masilo’s poetry will recognize that his poetry allows for the navigation through trepidation and violence which focus on the mechanics of intermingling between grief and trauma, uncertainty, and perversion of justice. All these collections have been chosen in the paper to examine how Masilo has skillfully manipulated the experiences of personal hurt, despair, and exilic years to engage with violence as a recurrent rupture undermining peace and stability in postcolonial Lesotho. Among other things in Masilo’s poetry is that anxiety would always arise from an atmosphere of great disquiet and political apprehension as they complicate the fears of intimidation and torture.

The paper is focused on the overwhelming signification of how violence intersects trauma in Masilo’s poetry, and how it eloquently draws attention to the political tyranny which ravaged the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho between 1972 and 1986. Shortly after the country won independence from the United Kingdom on 4 October 1966, there was a post-election crisis after the conduct of its second elections in 1970, which plunged the nation into violence that lingered till 1986. Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan’s government is marred by chaos emanating from morbid fear and terror where state violence complicates an increase in the militarization of Lesotho. In the aftermath of this crisis, a hangover of political dysfunction consistently haunts the country and will not be easy to reverse in the foreseeable future (Gill 1990,230). Thus, the BNP’s government ruled from 1966 until January 1986, when it was overthrown by Major General Justin Metsing Lekhanya, through a military coup.

Drawing on eye-witness accounts and personal responses, memory embodies a strategy of imaginary in Masilo’s poetry. Recollection, introspection, and flashback provide the technical means to remember the facts, dates, and period of the bizarre occurrences of violence between 1972 and 1986—a period that distinguishes Leabua’s regime as a time of fear. Hence, the paper will essentially illustrate how Masilo has appropriated the inevitable significance of memory for a construction of personal grief borne out of trauma, deriving from the calamitous political persecutions which resulted in personal losses that befall his family by mere casualty. For its theoretical framework, Literary trauma theory has been adopted for analysis of the paper.

2. A reflection on Lesotho’s literary production

If Thomas Mofolo's Chaka has significantly mapped well Lesotho onto the mainstream African literary trajectory, A.S. Mopeli-Paulus and Lanham's Blanket Boy's Moon has innocuously exposed the country’s penchant for ritual murder-liretlo and Morabo Morojole's How We Buried Puso has reconstructed how exile and alienation could negatively impact on the family’s cohesion, spirituality, and communal life. As it is, Masilo stands out a promising writer who just may craft the great poetry in the foreseeable future to return Lesotho to the competitive global literary spaces. Situated within a pathfinding sensibility, Masilo’s poetry embodies the multiplex tropes of trauma, grief, and memory to revisit power play during the Leabua’s government in Lesotho. Affirmed by the frenetic pace of incursions from Mofolo’s Chaka (1750), Mopeli-Paulus and Lanham’s Blanket Boy's Moon(1953) and scores of other literary productions in Sesotho that are currently warehoused in the Morija’s Museum and Archives, Lesotho somewhat made a bold attempt at literary production in the colonial era. However, this effort seems to have dwindled as the country lacks serious commitment to the literary production’s enterprise in the postcolonial period. This lethargy provides the backdrop for a downgrade in the country’s literary production’s rating currently. Therefore, if literature is bordered with the act of imagining which eventually leads to a writing that offers something to the world, Lesotho’s present reckoning in the African literary enterprise seemed to have succumbed to exhaustion in the past years. Save that Morabo Morojele’s How We Buried Puso (2006) staged a critical interlude bristling with a short-lived optimism to provide a memorable break in the hiatus, it is disheartening to realize that no groundbreaking harvest of literary works in English has been recorded in Lesotho in many decades until a recent emergence of Masilo.

In the recent time, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of the Africa’s most prodigious scholars in his critical works such as Decolonising the Mind (1986), Moving the Centre (1993) and Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams (1988) has persistently been in the forefront of the decolonization of African literature by continually advocating for a return to the indigenous use of African languages as the media of African literatures. Laudable as Ngugi’s suggestion may seem but has been scoffed at by some notable African writers and critics like Wole Soyinka in The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (1989) where he expresses his dissatisfaction with the adoption of African language as the sole medium of literary production in Africa. This dissatisfaction further reverberates in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s article “‘The Language of African Literature: A Writer’s Testimony’” when he disagrees with the suggestion that the use of English language in the writing of his works could lead to the colonization of his mind (1992, 156). Also, Pius Adesanmi in his article “‘Europhonism, Universities and Other Stories … ’” remarks that a preponderance of African writers found it convenient to write in English and writing in English or other colonial languages do not make them Europhiliacs or agents of imperialism (2002, 126). Ogaga Ifowodo (1998), an accomplished poet also argues that “‘it is not language but what utterances we speak into its mouth that matters. And African writers have shown that the language may be foreign, but the experience it recounts is African to the core’” (cited in Adesanmi, 2002, p. 125). Cautioning against a sudden rush for the adoption of African language in the writing of African literature, Joseph Mbele has contended that a sudden resolve to use African indigenous languages by the African writers who are not well grounded in such languages may hinder them from accomplishing the great task of artistic commitment (Mbele, 1992, p. 148). Notwithstanding its determination to participate in the decolonizing process of African literatures and cultural productions, literary enterprise in Lesotho has been surprisingly marginal. The reason for this low production may not be far-fetched as Sesotho concomitantly serves as a predominant language of literary production in the country. Arguably, when cultural materials are processed in the language of a monolithic ethnic or regional group, they are embodied in limited linguistic nuances that reflect inherent ambivalence in the group’s anthropology, worldview and belief system which can only be accessed through literature by the smaller audience outside such a linguistic scope. Considerably, Basotho’s overwhelming fidelity to Lesotho’s nationalism usually resonates in the privileging of Sesotho over and above the use of English language as a medium of disseminating its cultural productions, has tellingly reduced a visibility of its national literature. Consequently, decades of sustaining this tempo, has unhelpfully reduced international access to the country’s literary and cultural productions.

To what extent does exponential growth in population correspondingly influences or diminishes literary productions in Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo DR, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Zimbabwe in the last twenty years? Except Egypt, if most of these countries with numerous ethnic groupings could have outstandingly developed vibrant literary cultures in English language, whatever could be responsible for an abysmally poor literary productions in Lesotho? With approximately 2,108,328 population of a stand-alone linguistic status (Sesotho), Lesotho even among its peers in the Southern Africa in terms of exceptional literary productions in English, has comparatively not fared well. Notwithstanding, Ba re e ne re’s consummate enthusiasm underlined in off and on sweltering struggles to promote literary engagements in the country, has not yielded appreciative dividends. Efforts of this cultural outlet have only spawned marginal interventions. Established in 2011 by Liepollo Rantekoa, Ba re (Once upon a time)—an annual Lesotho literary festival organization for showcasing Basotho's orature and cultural proclivities, continues to trudge along the uncertain paths dictated by the complicated Lesotho’s political terrains. Worriedly, with lesser visibility lately, Ba re seems to have now entered a phase of its declining years. Most unfortunately, its activities have been undermined and egregiously delimited by its focus on literary productions written majorly in Sesotho.

3. Delineating Grief in Masilo’s Poetry through Literary Trauma theory

Curiously, early scholarship falsely admitted that trauma is an unrepresentable phenomenon. In contrast, Literary Trauma theory stridently emphasizes that literature through language has the capability to express trauma by deploying a chorus of imaginative interjections. Literary Trauma theory acquired increasing significance with the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and Kali Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Caruth writes in Unclaimed Experience that trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that “‘its very unassimilated nature -the way it is precisely not known in the first instance -returns to haunt the survivor later on’” (Caruth, 1996, p. 4).As such, literary trauma theory emphasizes the possibilities of using language to contextualize the experiences, responses and narratives of grief as experienced by an individual. Tal explains that there is always a consistent battle over the proprietorship of a traumatic experience. This battle is constantly fought in the spheres of political discourse, popular culture, and scholarly debate. Tal continues that “‘if survivors retain control over the interpretation of their trauma, they can sometimes force a shift in the social and political structure’”(1996, 7). Michelle Balaev argues that “‘trauma as a recurring sense of absence that sunders knowledge of the extreme experience, thus preventing linguistic value other than a referential expression’” (Balaev & Balaev, 2014, p. 1). Literary Trauma theory further interrogates, the relationship between lived experience of a traumatic event by individuals and the attendant personal losses (Balaev, 2012, p. 13). Arguably, trauma experienced by Masilo when he witnessed how his family members and some members of the opposition BCP party were harassed, jailed, and killed by Leabua’s government between 1972 and 1986 in Lesotho, ostensibly instigates a compelling need for him to devise emotive language in crafting poetic narratives that come to terms with his emotional stability. Hence, Masilo’s narrative imagination as deployed in his poetry is imbedded in “‘sense of the possible—our capacity to imagine beyond what appears to be self-evident in the present’” (Meretoja, 2014, p. 20). Within the context of Literary Trauma theory, dark imageries, melancholic symbolism, and poetics of forlornness are constantly invoked to essentialize the signification of trauma in Masilo’s poetry. For instance, a symbolism of desolation is strikingly captured in “‘Where the Grass is warm’”: “‘/the time we played morabaraba on the flat/boulder above our home in Qoaling -that/house now trembles when it’s approached,/like a child beaten into submission for years/’” (Waslap, 48). If tender imagination is summoned to memorialize the nexus of state violence, family’s privacy violation, and loneliness orchestrated by the exilic years, Masilo’s poetry bears the imprint of loss, devastation and hopelessness appropriated for the reconstruction of the vision of birth and death. But his ability against all odds, to withstand unremitting pains, deriving from a totality of this trauma is encapsulated in the last two lines of “‘A poem starting with a line by Tim Pfau’”, where he relentlessly affirms that: “‘/Our relief lies in this:/though pain is here, we fight to send it back./’” (Letter to Country, 27) (Qualls, 2014).

Literature acknowledges that trauma is a lived experience of an individual and groups as retold in literary works. Within the context of intense and painful affect- an aftermath of death of the loved ones, survivors often suffer from attendant painful trauma symptoms of disturbing, intrusive thoughts and other related griefs that make survivors yearn for their loved ones (Pearlman et al 2014, pp. 4–5). Trauma is defined as a fallout of a devastating incident an individual suffers which the mind is unable to process, assimilate, and consign to the past (Powell 2016, p. 441). “‘A traumatizing experience, therefore, is defined not by its intrinsic properties but by the mind’s response to it’” (Herman cited in Powell 2016, p. 441). Trauma is basically triggered from the intersection of social relations and cultural meanings deriving from two perspectives: First the interrelationship of denigration and oppression could occasion traumatic experiences for individuals and groups. Second, the notion of trauma is, itself, socially constructed and performative (Powell 2016, p. 441).

Robert A. Neimeyer in his Techniques of Grief Therapy has eloquently assessed three fundamental stages in the manifestation of grief in individuals. Neimeyer later contended that grief arises as an interpretation of psychological communication activity occasioned from the death of a loved one. Grief is often manifested and is viewed as a transcendental deprivation of one’s psychosocial needs (Neimeyer and Cacciatore 2016, p. 187). Just as the narratives of trauma raise a hedge around individual’s experience, scholars of trauma have often been fascinated by the nagging urge to negotiate “‘the collective complexity of remembering and living with trauma’” (Grayson, 2017, p. 122). Masilo has essentially illustrated in his poetry that trauma assumed a national dilemma in Lesotho during the regime of Leabua when the traumatic wounding he suffered personally and by other members of the opposition is situated in relation to the brutal wielding of political power and feedback from the experiences of its recipients(victims).

Marc Owen Jones has classified repression within the circumstantial range of the process by which the dominant hegemonic order attempt to maintain power by destroying, rendering harmless or appeasing those organizations, people, groups, or ideologies “‘that potentially threaten their position of power or privilege’” (Jones, 2020, p. 23). Again, Christian Davenport has delineated what constitutes repression when he acknowledges that repression includes “‘… verbal and physical harassment, arrests, political banning (e.g., Outlawing a party, type of action or belief), establishing curfews, acts of censorship (e.g. closing a newspaper), torture, disappearances, and mass killing’” (Davenport, 2007, p. 487). Notedly, atrocious conditions of the arbitrariness of the repressions often, do not escape a historical documentation with zest and pace (Skopin 2022, p. 3). While domination may at first look innocuous, institutional deployment of coercion is a reflection of power imbalance rather than the “‘monopoly of power by one group over another’” (Eldredge, 2007, p. 5). If Political repression ostensibly aids authoritarian rule, autocrats will always aim to “‘survive in office while maximizing rents’” (Magaloni, 2008, p. 717). Hence, brazen display of violence has a possibility of turning political repression into a formidable but unsuspecting instrument of political survival under authoritarian rule (Tannerberg, 2022, p. 12). Though not unique to Lesotho, opposition figures expressing dissenting views and opinions are traceable to inherent inequity and a perpetration of injustice as they underscore bewildering intolerance of authoritarian rulers in the postcolonial Africa.

4. Writing Lesotho in Poetry

With the prototypes of small houses sign-posted by pit latrines often dug in their frontages that spread across its landscape, Lesotho’s resistance against modernity is abetted by corruption in the political space, weak judicial system, aging infrastructure and its deficient maintenance, and the mindless obstinacy of its citizenry who would rather cling to the traditional ways of doing things. Even though, American, British, Japanese, and Chinese governments have continually given millions of dollars in economic aid to Lesotho, but its leaders have clearly engaged in predatory, financial recklessness that have undermined Basothos’ confidence in the successive governments. If the way a nation thinks reflect the quality of its governance, Lesotho is bedeviled by a relatively low economic level of industrial production, and the country is far from behind Botswana, Namibia, and Eswatini in the Southern Africa’s hemisphere in terms of development. Being one of the poorest countries in the world where majority of the population are trapped in sickening misery, Lesotho’s poverty is predicated on high domestic unemployment, declining agricultural production, falling life expectancy and rising child mortality (Crush et al., 2010, p. 1). Consequently, for all its fascinating landscape of awesome valleys, beautiful highlands and relative freezingly cold temperatures, Lesotho remains a violent country whose number of homicides increase annually. Due to its common destiny with South Africa, unaddressed crimes have often reverberated across Lesotho in the frightening dimensions of violence. A country of a most contentious inclination, ironically, violence deconstructs Lesotho’s emblematic subscription to the symbolic concept of “Khotso” (peace). “Khotso” is deceptively inscribed in the country’s flag and often hedged around Lesotho as a cultural pride. More of reality than imagination, the honorifics of “Mme” and “Ntate” are facades the Basotho usually erect to mask intentions, and individuals will always use them to advance tyrannical and violent tendencies. The irreconciliation of violence and peace (Khotso) closely infringe onto each other as it reflects in how old and new animosities are settled extrajudicially across the country. This contradiction is illustrated and reinvented in the nightmarish dissection of horrors embedded in Masilo’s poetry. Referencing this contradiction further in Masilo’s poetry, it would invariably, appear in the final analysis, that violent political trajectory and turbulent social situational contexts in Lesotho are pretty much of connate activities. Hence, Masilo focused on violence in the four poetry collections as a central leitmotif, to reconstruct an inherently ruptured social relationship among the individuals and political circles in Lesotho.

At independence, there were three political parties: Leabua’s Basotho National party (BNP), Ntsu Mokhehle’s main opposition party, Basotho Congress party (BCP) and Marematlou Freedom party (MFP) (allied to the monarch). The BNP won the first ever election in 1965 (in preparation for indigenous rule in 1966). The leaders of BCP accepted outcome of elections. The winner BNP (aided by apartheid South Africa) subsequently formed the first government of Lesotho. In 1970, the constitution decreed a second election (expected to be conducted every five years. As the BNP was losing, the Basotho Congress party (a party Masilo’s family supported) was clearly in the lead. It was so clear that the BNP (in government then) in panic decided to annul the result, even before the voting was over. Hence, Leabua’s government suspended the constitution and threw Mokhehle and other leaders of the BCP into jail. Reviewing the outcome of 1970’s elections in Lesotho, Stephen Gill aptly comments that:

Although the Prime Minister was shaken by this election defeat,

he took the initial steps to hand over power. After receiving some

strong words from his Ministers, ‘Maseribane and Peete, however, he

suspended the constitution and declared a State of Emergency on 30 January 1970.

Hundreds of BCP supporters were arrested, and in the months which followed

the Police Mobile Unit (PMU) and BNP party fanatics made life extremely painful

for anyone who protested. The whole experience was a terrible shock which took

almost everyone by surprise. (A Short History of Lesotho, 221)

Radical elements within the BCP unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the Leabua government in January 1974. This would attract a major backlash from the ruling BNP who went all out killing and hauling into jail, prominent members of the BCP. Mokhehle would later form a guerilla outfit -Lesotho Liberation Army (LLA) to protest this dispossession. Denied a possibility of governance when its mandate was stolen by the Leabua’s BNP and having effectively secured financial assistance from Libya, the BCP assembled a cadre of trained fighters to start a guerilla warfare in Lesotho. But these fighters only recorded marginal success as they were unable to conduct significant military campaigns against the Leabua’s government due to the problem of crossing into the South Africa. However, the LLA was forced during the early 1980s to cooperate with the Apartheid South Africa’s government. Afterwards, even with the support of the Apartheid South African government, the LLA could only put up limited spectacular attacks within Lesotho (Gill 1990, 239). Arguably, Lesotho’s journey through nation formation has been undeniably sluggish, unpredictably troubling and in the end, “‘a jolting experience’” (Machobane, 1990, p. 1). If the 1970’s annulment of the Prime Minister’s election in Lesotho continues to be referenced in history books as blatantly outrageous, the attendant tensions it created afterwards makes death and misery both expected and accepted. While Masilo (2012) recognizes the period between 1972 and 1986 as a literary space which constitutes a time of fear, the apprehension is heightened when majority members of the opposition are kept in jail and power increasingly revolves around the Prime Minister Leabua and three of his important ministers: Matete Majara, Sekhonyana ‘Maseribane, and Peete Peete. The tension reaches its climax when the BCP dominated civil service and parastatals were purged and high-ranking officials were relieved of their jobs. Leabua would later suspend the constitution and declared a five-year moratorium on politics, giving excuses that the Westminster system does not align with the Basotho’s traditions and values (Gill Stephen, 1993, p. 221).

Masilo’s aversion to a spate of horrendous violence in Lesotho is further expressed in “‘Before they came’”:

They slayed a person here

despite the smell of milk on his breath,

took what they could

of what was left in his heart

and went. (Qoaling, 21)

The killing of an infant in “‘Before they came’” affirms the vast dimensions of violence in Lesotho. Life in the country has always been undermined not only by violence but by the persistent poverty which has driven majority to embark on liretlo -a ritual murder. Liretlo requires a harvest of human organs like the heart and genitalia as underlined in the poem either for money ritual or for a muti. Mopeli-Paulus and Lanham’s Blanket Boy's Moon (1953) argues that in interpreting violence in Lesotho, liretlo provides a vital information to the study of the way of living by the Basotho. Liretlo is often executed when babies and young ladies are kidnapped and murdered afterwards. Also, when a group of men desires a victim from any part of the country; they then plan to abduct victims (mostly infants and girls) from isolated communities and could also trap someone who is too drunk to resist (Dunton, 1990, p. 109). Confident of its growing strength, these days, most killings are done in Lesotho by the Famo gangs who immediately crisscross the porous borders into South Africa as soon as their missions are accomplished. Liretlo, abduction, enforced disappearances, sporadic shootings and other concomitants of violence have become almost inseparable from the Famo gangs’ network of operations. If gangsterism and extrajudicial killings most prominently heighten the gangs’ notoriety, the indigenous Basotho musical performance upon which Famo derives its social relevance has now engendered a bitter rivalry among its numerous followers. While Mafeteng and Matelile are the hotbeds of Famo’s violent activities, Lesotho’s political elites do ostensibly, collaborate with different Famo gangs, to systematize violence in the country through enforced disappearances, kidnapping and sporadic killings. It is not a hidden fact that, government functionaries in Lesotho regularly patronize the Famo gangs, especially during elections. Sadly, the rhythms of Famo’s violence resonates with Lesotho’s tottering and unsteady nationhood in its reluctance to inaugurate reforms that could strengthen its comatose judicial institutions.

Lesotho’s judiciary has been weakened from the time of Leabua’s authoritarian rule when he egregiously undermined his political rivals and constantly disregarded critical court injunctions. Sustar and Karim argue that when protestation against deliberate injustice is muffled by authoritarian rulers, the creative production which could transform the society is needlessly undermined (2006, 47). Therefore, Masilo’s poetry unremittingly offers a ghastly reading of depredation, agony, and political persecutions in the early years of the postcolonial dispensation in Lesotho as he witnessed them firsthand as a youth. Even though Masilo appears to be somewhat ambivalent in his fidelity to the Basotho nationalism as occasioned by his family’s forceful flight from the country, yet, the politico-historical reevaluation of the governance in Lesotho has placed his poetry in a new perspective on the deconstruction of Leabua’s handling of opposition figures from 1972 to 1986. To this end, Niyi Akingbe argues that as the euphoria of independence continues to wear off and the peculiar problems of many countries in Africa begin to surface, African writers must incorporate these crises into their literary productions (2013, 125). Shocked by the brutality of political persecutions as they altered family unities of the affected opposition figures, Masilo placed personal worries and public concerns conterminously in his poetry. This is strikingly demonstrated when his Qoaling home’s invasion is referenced in “My Father’s Killers”’:

They take to the road at midnight, and turn

Toward land that by right we plough and turn.

Their dark convoy passes white-washed houses.

A brakelight: the bakkies slow down, then turn.

They Park at right angles to the street

To light the yard -it’s daddy’s day and turn.

They have come on a crisp September night

To blight us, make our season change and turn … (Things that are Silent, 25)

“‘My Father’s Killers’” evokes memories of a time of fear in Lesotho, when Leabua’s militias, Koeeoko, rampaged through every nook and cranny of Lesotho, and hunted around in the neighborhoods, to locate the targeted members of the opposition earmarked for assassination. Like the notorious Tonton Makouts, a special operations unit within the Haitian paramilitary force created as a “hit squad” in 1959 by the Haitian dictator, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the Koeeoko in a similar fashion was established by the Prime Minister Leabua in the early years of his inglorious regime, to harass, intimidate,torture and kill his political opponents considered too outspoken. In a relative mode that reenacts the operations of Tonton Makouts, the Koeeoko acted as political cadres, secret police and instruments of terror (Karczewska, 2015:5). Much of what people think they know about the magnitude of violence perpetrated by Leabua’s regime seems inaccurate or downright false as the poem strikingly illustrates a vivid sketch of the night Koeeoko militia, came to Qoaling and initiated an abortive attempt to kill Ben Masilo (Masilo’s father). This gloomy night of terror underscores chaos to exacerbate the cumulative impact of violence unleashed on the country by the militia as it becomes alarmingly apparent in the poem. Masilo expressed dismay at the rapidity at which Koeeoko engages in nocturnal, predatory unleashing of a torrent of violence on the members of Ntsu Mokhehle’s Basotho Congress Party (BCP). Trauma experienced in the poem is frustrating, aggravating and exasperating as Koeeoko “‘/take to the road … ’”/to mark where they would hit next. On a crisp 4 September night of 1981, Koeeoko conducted deft maneuvers as they did a reconnaissance of Masilo’s house: ‘‘/their dark convoy passes white-washed houses./A brakelight; the bakkies slow down, then turn … /. Wherever the “‘dark convoy’” of the Koeeoko appears, is the metonymic of presumptive dastardly attacks on the members of the opposition. A personal account of the 4 September 1981’s invasion has been further provided in Masilo’s own words:

Koeeoko-cum-PMU asked dad to come out (at about four am);

he refused, they started shooting machine guns into our parents’ bedroom.

Motlatsi, my nephew, three years old, was killed instantly. He liked to sleep

between his grandparents. Mom ducked under the bed. They broke into the

house and did not find dad. Mom says someone lifted the draping bed eiderdown

and looked under the bed. Their eyes locked. And he put the eiderdown in place.

They left. (Interview 2022, 6)

Drawing from the poem “‘My Father’s Killers’”, is an incontrovertible fact, that while personal loss tends to be a dominant theme running across all Masilo’s poetry collections, the all-pervading, depressing anxieties associated with the recurrent violence in Lesotho is ostensibly, often, drawn attention to. If most alarming manifestations of this violence is rooted in political persecutions, unresolved cases of homicide and outrageous rapidity at which family feuds and personal scores are settled extrajudicially—dimensions of violence in the country are unlocked in Masilo’s poetry through the interaction of national history and personal trauma. Masilo’s retelling of the ghastly invasion of his Qoaling home on 4 September 1981, conforms to Colin A. Ross’s admonition in The Trauma Model that intense retelling of the narrative of trauma to another person, remarkably serves as “‘an essential component to recovery’” (2006, 258).

As appeal for Tchicaya U Tam’si is that of the alluring, recurrent imagery of River Congo in Selected Poems (1970) and the appeal for Wole Soyinka (1998) is the mysteries of childhood in Ake: The Years of Childhood, Qoaling is not merely Masilo’s ancestral village but a muse, a sanctuary and a symbolic space that stands as a bulwark against the tyranny of Leabua during a time of fear. Qoaling is a rural community on the outskirts of Maseru located in the Maseru District of Lesotho. Qoaling is a string of complex network of villages whose topography is bifurcated along undulating valleys overlooking Maseru. Qoaling evolves, entrenches, and reshapes the poetics aesthetics of trauma grounded in Masilo’s poetry. The ruralness of Qoaling functions as a resort of tranquility, a bastion of family cohesion and a forte of resilience. Qoaling’s topography gives it a romantic ambience that disconcertingly parallels the reverberations of insecurity, chaos and uncertainty identified with Leabua’s Lesotho. A quick appraisal of “‘Qoaling’” further lends credence to this assertion:

I knew you, Qoaling, still as night –

accepted the ways of your truth,

each breath air lungs gulp for life,

each year flames leaving your mouth,

until the enemy flanked us, which was

the start of the beginning of our end. (Qoaling, 31)

Qoaling serves as a stronghold for the processing of memory and reminiscences that reassesses the enduring griefs scattered in the landscapes of Masilo’s poetry. Most unfortunately, Qoaling’s bucolic insularity was ruptured, and its quiet calm shattered when the Koeeoko operatives came calling in the night of 4 September 1981. To this end, the poet asks rhetorically where else he could find a new sanctuary: “‘/So where to now, Qoaling?’”/(Qoaling, 31). A temporary disruption of the Qoaling’s quietude by the Koeeoko militias in “‘Qoaling’” underscores a widespread of violence in Lesotho during a time of fear. The invasion proves that the village is not invincible, to point out a popular Basotho’s proverb: Motse o motle kantle feela which translates to “‘a village is only beautiful on the outside’” (McCrea et al., 1999, p. 624).

5. Locating authoritarianism and dispossession in Leabua Jonathan’s government

As Masilo provides a historical insight into a debilitating privation of opposition figures, authoritarianism and dispossession are intricately meshed in his poetry. No less spontaneous, authoritarianism has occurred in differing shades throughout the world from the ancient to the modern times, and its shattering impact has had a devastating effect of gloom wherever experienced. Niyi Akingbe argues that “in retelling and recovering the past, history and memory are coexisting modes of (re)writing and (de)constructing personal narrative within a given literary space”(Akingbe, 2019, p.11). Hence, Masilo has essentially deployed leitmotifs of both history and memory in his poetry to traverse the turbulent history of the postcolonial Lesotho. What grows increasingly clear is that injustice in early and later years of postcolonial Lesotho is fixated on the systematic dispossession of individual’s rights by the government through home invasion, enforced disappearances, incarceration, killing and forced exile. Dispossession is a troubling concept, whose complications are often difficult to explain, and its effects are too bewildering to accept as a reality (Butler & Athena, 2013, p. 1). Consequently, torture hedged about by authoritarian rulers is a morbid fascination with death which would often trigger fear that encases victims of persecution as surely as stone walls. Dispossession here would imply a subjection of the individuals to continuous harassment through unexplainable arrests by the police and killings by the Koeeoko militia as it frequently happened during Leabua's government, when opposition members were jailed, killed, and needlessly stampeded into exile. A recollection of this dispossession is captured in “‘Avenue’”:

The coiling of distressed faces …

Years of laughter trapped in corridors.

This is the meaning of people

Whose names are inscribed across

A cenotaph attack. A path you will

Have to find a name for beckons.

You plant a road sign, along the side.

5.1. Which says ‘Leabua Jonathan’s Street.’ (Mbera -forthcoming collection)

Masilo’s increased emphasis on the deprivations of the opposition figures through incarceration, killing and displacement is encapsulated in “‘Avenue’”. The poem evaluates how individual freedom, family cohesion and freedom of association are stifled during a time of fear as contextualized by the Leabua’s tyrannical regime in Lesotho. This stifling is represented in: “‘/The coiling of distressed faces … /Years of laughter trapped in corridors/’” (Mbera). Consequently, historical underpinnings of Leabua government’s unleashing of violence on the opposition figures through Koeeoko militia is signposted in: “‘/This is the meaning of people/Whose names are inscribed across/A cenotaph attack/’”(Mbera). Names of the major casualties of Leabua’s attack in the opposition’s camp have been further mentioned by Masilo in an interview ‘‘three months earlier, on 21 June 1981, Odilon Seheri, who was working to create a political party that would challenge the BNP, was killed. He was shot in the head and his body was incinerated. The order was Odilon Seheri (21/6/81), Ben Masilo (4/9/81), Edgar Motuba, editor of a newspaper -Leselinyana la Lesotho (7/9/81), and others … (Akingbe, 2022, p. 214). “‘Avenue’” therefore, essentially recalls nostalgia that profoundly complicates a trauma deriving from the killing of Seheri, Motuba and the killing of Ben Masilo’s grandson (Motlatsi) when his Qoaling’s home was invaded in the middle of the night on 4 September 1981. Although Ben Masilo escaped by whiskers, but the invasion left an enduring scar as his family is fractured. Apprehensively, Rethabile Masilo and his sister escaped to America, but his brother Khotsofalang (Mbera) who left Lesotho to join the Botswana hosted Lesotho Liberation Army (LLA) got killed. In a moment of traumatic grip, Masilo (2022) provides a grieving, personal account of the death of his older brother, Khotsofalang in an interview: “‘My older brother Khotsofalang (Mbera), voluntarily left the country for Botswana to join the struggle from outside. We never saw him again, and just heard stories left and right about his demise. We still do not know how he died, or where, or when’” (Interview 2022, 5).

6. Reconstructing Trauma in Masilo’s Poetry

Unpacking tropes of disillusionment with words can be daunting for a first-time reader of Masilo’s poetry. Again, few things are more daunting than having to delineate trauma from paranoia in the poetics of Masilo’s poetry. How does an individual come to grips with a devastating trauma which has taken toll on his immediate family? Trauma, and grief are embedded into more contextualized discourse of political persecution and annihilation in his poetry. Trauma has a variety of shades, and while it tends to codify explanations for individual’s experience of grief, it is also used to contextualize the irreparable loss suffered from losing a member of one’s family. Stef Craps has suggested that “‘by narrowly focusing on the level of the individual psyche, one tends to leave unquestioned the conditions that enabled the traumatic abuse, such as political oppression, racism, or economic domination’” (Craps, 2015, p. 28). For Masilo, the struggle to give a voice to the devastating, shattering, and bewildering violence which has disrupted his family cohesion finally gave a vent to poetic engagement expressed in grief. Trauma deriving from a political persecution of Ben Masilo (Masilo’s father) by the Leabua’s government fixates upon a critical disruption of the entire family’s life as it altered young Masilo’s emotional stability even while on exile in France. Undeniably, this disruption instantiates a circumstance, where the borderlines between grief and paranoia intersects.

At the heart of this disruption is an unimaginable depression suffered by Masilo. Ania Zubala and Vicky Karkou have dissected the effects of intense trauma on an individual when they argued that “depression is one of the most likely, though destructive, responses to both global and individual challenges of the fast-changing and unpredictable modern world” (Zubala et al., 2018, p. 1). Nonetheless, at this critical moment of been on the verge of nervous breakdown, poetry provided the much-needed succors, as it offered Masilo expressive lines to apprehend confounding events that led to the years of political violence in Lesotho when his Qoaling home was invaded in the midnight. Recognizing this as a moment of catharsis, Masilo sublimated his grief by constantly revisiting this disruption in his poetry collections. Subscribing to what Lyndsey Stonebridge has described as “‘productive tension’”, poetry is indispensably harnessed and appropriated as a conduit of expressivity by Masilo to account for the personal losses. Stonebridge has contended that within a context of forced migration (literary)creativity is often forged in the furnace of “‘productive tension’” (Stonebridge 2018, p. 32). Hence, he unquestionably chooses poetry as a strategy of subversive reconstruction and revisitation of these griefs. By appealing to the sensibility of memory, Masilo has demonstrated that poetry has a radical capability to foreground the link between creativity, activism and fighting for justice (Akingbe, 2021, p. 147). The most agonizing locus of the trauma he has never recovered from is essentially embedded in a death of his 3-year-old nephew -Motlatsi, death of a brother Khotsofalang and a subsequent flight into exile by his entire family. Arguably, these unforeseen occurrences vibrantly constitute multiple traumas for Masilo. When trauma is contextualized within its complex multiplicities, ‘‘an individual may experience simultaneously multiple traumas, and these are not necessarily equally weighted (Ward 2015, p. 1). Masilo deployed bitter memories of the trauma, to recall an invasion of the household of Benjamin Masilo in Qoaling on 4 September 1981by the Koeeoko militia, a strike force of Prime Minister Leabua. Unfortunately, Motlatsi, Masilo’s nephew was a major casualty of this invasion in “‘A dream about Motlatsi’”:

That day bullets came together

to talk the boy into coming back from the dead.

We ’ll give you the name of the shooter, they said

from the centre of his tummy, like voices muffled

by the distance from the bottom to the top

of a well. But Motlatsi shook his head. (Qoaling, 23)

“‘A dream about Motlatsi’” recreates a grief encased in the nocturnal visit of the Koeeoko assassination squad to the Masilo’s Qoaling house on the 4 September 1981. In the poem, memory constantly activates trauma through recollection as well as through historical interrogation of the atrocities perpetrated by the Leabua’s authoritarianism in Lesotho between 1972 and 1986. Masilo’s juggling of memory in the poem to recall the killing of Motlatsi, betrays a bitter lamentation for his death. Again, Motlatsi’s death intersects a loss of home and a capturing of the trails of grief he had to contend with many years while on exile in the United States and France subsequently. Further, the death of Motlatsi, provides a long-term connection of Masilo to a childhood that reverberates a traumatic memory associated with invasion of a once peaceful home in Qoaling. This experience can be troubling as families often face unexpected challenges within disconnected systems as they impinge on the traumatizing transitioning (Bailey & Harrist, 2018, p. 29). Masilo’s (2015, 2016 and 2018) reminiscence of the Koeeoko’s nocturnal visit to Qoaling in “‘A dream about Motlatsi’” indexes as it embodies a trauma deriving from the Masilo’s family disintegration that parallels a time of fear in Lesotho. The trauma embedded in the poem is symptomatic of the Leabua’s authoritarian rule. This disruption is further reminisced upon in “‘Life is Family’”:

My father says “Tsamaea hantle” and “Hamba kahle”

are like cloth tearing, like teacher’s chalk on the blackboard.

he always grits his teeth when he says them … (Letter to country, 54)

Most unfortunately, the invasion is haunting enough to continually trigger a sense of loss that bears witness to the staggering horrors of violence as it indelibly scarred his childhood in “‘What Father Said’”:

He said: “I shall build a house on the heights

of Qoaling, and enter its sanctuary to start a home,

to gather under one roof the meaning of time,

of place, and of family”. (Waslap, 17)

Masilo vividly recalls his father’s words in “‘What Father Said’”, to lessen the post-traumatic pains he suffered in exile. Such recollection recontextualizes Deborah Horvitz’s words, when she offers a useful suggestion on how to live with the aftermath effect of a trauma. Horvitz argues that traumatic experience cannot be wished away but can only be lived “‘in the present without cancelling a painful past’” (2000, 166). Undeniably, this invasion is a harbinger of violence in the postcolonial Lesotho and its sobering implications reflect the enduring dangers of political skirmishes happening recurrently in the country. In the aftermath of the invasion, violence further got escalated into a terror that spread fear which engulfed the whole country. Political crisis further instantiated instability as the LLA engaged government in a cross-border guerilla warfare which brings about displacement and mayhem until the army struck in 1986, to restore a denouement. Stricken with a morbid fear deriving from the Qoaling’s invasion by Koeeoko militia, Masilo and his family members are forced into embracing a forceful exile into Kenya and America.

7. Conclusion

The paper has examined and analysed how Rethabile Masilo sublimated griefs of deaths of his nephew—Motlatsi, brother, Khotsofalang (Mbera)and a loss of home in Qoaling by throwing himself into a tide of poetry while on exile in America. Trauma as a derivation of grief, undeniably remains an abiding leitmotif in Masilo’s poetry to foreground a recollection of multiple losses during his exilic years in America and France subsequently. Arguably, Masilo deployed memory toward recalling violent political crisis in Lesotho between 1972 and 1986 during the regime of Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan. During this crisis, Ntsu Mokhehle and some senior members of the BCP party were jailed, killed and some fled into exile for safety. The paper has also acknowledged that Ben Masilo’s house in Qoaling was invaded in the midnight of 4 September 1981 by the Koeeoko militia. While Masilo’s father escaped unhurt, his nephew, Motlatsi was killed during the invasion and his brother Khotsofalang was killed when he joined the LLA.

Correction

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Niyi Akingbe

Niyi Akingbe is Professor of Comparative Literature and Poetics. He is at present a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Department of English Studies, University of South Africa, Pretoria. He received a PhD from the University of Lagos, Akoka, Nigeria, where he studied Protest Literature. His scholarly interests include Comparative, Postcolonial, Commonwealth, Protest and African literatures, Cultural studies, Music in literature, and the intersection of literature and Film studies. His work has been published internationally, in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States.