The Basutos; Their Country and Their People

Record summary

Eugène Casalis’s The Basutos; or, Twenty-Three Years in South Africa describes Basotho society, religious ideas, origin traditions, diviners, ancestral beliefs, and historical memories encountered during his missionary career. It is a useful nineteenth-century lead for studying how oral tradition was converted into missionary ethnography and how colonial observers distinguished, or failed to distinguish, myth, genealogy, history, and ritual explanation. The work should not be read as a neutral transcript: Casalis translated concepts through Christian categories, selected material for a European readership, and wrote retrospectively about changing political conditions.