Remarkable rise of a language in danger

Concentrated among the people living in the remote Daliwe valley, siPhuthi has gained new life thanks to intrepid linguists and activists

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Tsotleho Mohale was addressing a group of people gathered on a mountainside still damp from an intense rainstorm that morning. The peaks on the other side of the steep valley were draped in cloud. Mohale was speaking in siPhuthi, a language spoken by just a few thousand people in parts of southern Lesotho and the north of South Africa's Eastern Cape province, about the plants he used and the ailments he cured as a traditional healer.

The questions came from Sheena Shah, a British linguist, and were translated into siPhuthi by Mohale's grandson Atlehang. Shah's German colleague Matthias Brenzinger was filming the exchange. The two academics have been travelling regularly to Daliwe, a remote valley in Lesotho 25km from the nearest paved road, since 2016, working with interpreters and activists to document siPhuthi.

Observing the encounter was a senior healer, Mathabang Hlaela.

Initially she had refused to be interviewed, wary of foreigners stealing knowledge that she had been amassing since 1978. But after briefly disappearing into her corrugated iron hut, she re-emerged adorned with beads and declared that she too wanted to be interviewed in her native language.

While siphuthi remains under threat from the dominant Sesotho in Lesotho and Xhosa across the border in South Africa, it has undergone a remarkable revival.

Shop owner Malillo Mpapa started working with Shah, now a researcher at the University of Hamburg, and Brenzinger as a paid language consultant in 2019. She recalled how receptive ebaPhuthi people were to the project.