Setsokotsane

The journey by train from Johannesburg where the narrator stands and ‘home’ in Lesotho was a day and a half’s tedious journey by train in Mohapeloa’s time (the 1930s-70s), a journey that he himself made several times, but that poor working class Basotho travelling third class would have found even more unbearable. In his years on ‘the Reef’ in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mohapeloa would often have felt that longing to be picked up by a whirlwind and carried back to his family in Lesotho. This is the feeling expressed in ‘Setsokotsane’.