On October 4, 1966, the British protectorate of Basutoland became the Kingdom of Lesotho, with Moshoeshoe II as king and Chief Leabua Jonathan as prime minister. The country had about a million people in 30,000 square kilometres, all of it above 1,000 metres. It is one of the few states entirely enclosed by a single other country, and the enclosing country was apartheid South Africa.
The Basotho nation had been assembled by Moshoeshoe I in the 1820s, during the Difaqane, the upheaval that followed the rise of the Zulu kingdom. He took his people to the mountain fortress of Thaba Bosiu and held it against the Zulu, the Boers and the British in turn. Basutoland was annexed by the Cape Colony in 1871, and after the Basotho won the Gun War of 1880 it was made a British territory directly in 1884.
Britain kept it. Nobody else wanted it, and handing it to the Boer republics or to the Cape would have caused trouble. That left it as a labour reservoir: by the 1960s perhaps 150,000 Basotho men were working in the South African mines, and their remittances were the largest single item in the economy. Independence did not change that.
The first election, in 1965, was won by the Basotho National Party, which was conservative, Catholic and close to South Africa, over the Basutoland Congress Party, which was closer to the ANC. Jonathan suspended the constitution after the 1970 election, which his party appeared to have lost. He ruled by decree. South Africa tolerated it until 1986, when it helped organise a coup against him.
The economy still runs on three things: water sold to South Africa under the Lesotho Highlands scheme, textiles made for the American market under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, and mine wages and remittances. Roughly 20 per cent of adults are living with HIV, one of the highest rates in the world, and about a quarter of the country's men work across the border.