HISTORY OF THE BASUTO: ANCIENT AND MODERN BY D FRED ELLENBERGER AND J C MACGREGOR

"HISTORY OF THE BASUTO: ANCIENT AND MODERN" BY D FRED ELLENBERGER AND J C MACGREGOR. HARDCOVER, INSCRIPTION FROM PREVIOUS OWNER, 393 PAGES, IN EXCELLENT CONDITION.

David Frédéric Ellenberger (1835-1919) was a Swiss French Protestant missionary who left for Basutoland (present-day Lesotho) in 1860 as a member of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. Ellenberger spent more than 45 years collecting the oral traditions of the Basotho (also known as Sotho) people. His method was to gather "all the information which it was still possible to obtain from intelligent old men concerning the tribes, their origin, their manners, their form of government, their beliefs, the genealogy of the chiefs, etc." His objective was to preserve, for the Basotho, their historical memory, which he saw as being lost through contact with Westerners and other Africans.