Keeping their words

Restoring a language in Lesotho

- Rachel Savage

Mathabang Hlaela, centre, views a siPhuthi recording taken as part of Matthias Brenzinger and Sheena Shah's work to preserve the language

Tsotleho Mohale was addressing a group gathered on a mountainside still damp from intense rain that morning.

The peaks on the other side of the 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 filmed the exchange. Shah and Brenzinger have been travelling regularly to Daliwe, a remote valley in Lesotho about 15 miles from the nearest paved road, since 2016, working with local interpreters and activists to document siPhuthi.

Observing the encounter was a senior healer, Mathabang Hlaela. Initially, she refused to be interviewed, wary of foreigners stealing knowledge she had been amassing since 1978. But after briefly disappearing into her corrugated iron hut, she emerged adorned with beads - a thick belt, headbands and necklaces - and said she too wanted to be interviewed.

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