"A Bushman Cannot Rule": Power, Movement, and Freedom in the Family of Moletsane. Central Southern Africa, 1849 and 1967

The contribution of African intellectuals, and specifically of African historians, to the production of knowledge about southern African past has only recently started to be recognised. The article proposes the analysis of a little-known autobiography authored in 1967 by Abraham Aaron Moletsane, a subject of colonial British Basutoland/independent Lesotho and a descendant of a nineteenth-century ruler of central southern Africa, Abraham Makgothi Moletsane of the Bataung. In particular, the present work focuses on how the author used the Sesotho concept of “Bushman”, Moroa, and argues that, separate from the influential colonial stereotype, different meanings of the term can be traced to the political debates on power and movement taking place in the nineteenth-century highveld. Reading the autobiography in combination with a series of more conventional archival documents, the article also illustrates the benefits that contemporary scholarship can obtain from a serious engagement with these historical materials, and calls for new researches on Abraham Aaron Moletsane and his intellectual milieu.