Ntšeliseng ʻMasechele Khaketla

Ntšeliseng ’Masechele Khaketla was a pioneering poet, dramatist, translator, and teacher from Lesotho.

Born Ntšeliseng Caroline Ramolahloane on 1 January 1918 and now best known as N.M. Khaketla, she achieved several notable firsts for Mosotho women. She was the first woman from Lesotho to earn a degree and was among the earliest women to be published in the country. Additionally, she co-founded the first private school in Lesotho and became the first woman to be appointed as a high court assessor.

N.M. Khaketla died on 16 August 2012, and despite receiving little academic attention during her life, she is now regarded as one of the founding figures in Sesotho literature.

Life
Ntšeliseng Caroline Ramolahloane was born on 1 January 1918 at Ha Majara, in Berea District of what was then Basutoland. Her father, Luka Ramolahloane, was a teacher, and her mother, ’Maphilip Ramolahloane, was a housewife. She was one of eight children, and brought up in privileged surroundings due to her father's job. As a child, she read the English and Sesotho books that were in the family home, and aspired to be a nurse. Her early education was at schools in Liphiring and Siloe in Mohale's Hoek District.

N.M. Khaketla went on to Morija College in 1933 and became the first Mosotho woman to complete a junior certificate. She then continued her studies at the University of Fort Hare where she became the first Mosotho woman to graduate, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in History and English, in 1941. A year later she began a teaching career at missionary schools run by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society and then at Basutoland High School in Maseru where she became deputy principal. It was while she was in Maseru that she met her husband, Bennett Makalo Khaketla. They had six children, including ‘Mamphono Khaketla. The couple lived in exile in South Africa between 1950 and 1953 due to his political activities.

By the 1960s, N.M. Khaketla had co-founded Iketsetseng Primary School, the first private school in the country that would grow to over 1,000 pupils and educate the future Queen 'Mamohato and her son, later Letsie III. In 1979, she was the first woman appointed as a High Court assessor and also served on the council of the National University of Lesotho, the government's National Planning Board, and on the Special Committee on the Status of Women on the Law Reform Commission. Elsewhere, she was active within the Anglican Church and its Mothers' Union, and in 1990 co-founded the Lesotho Academy of Arts. Khaketla received an honorary doctorate of literature from the National University in 1983, and in 1997 received the Gold Record of Achievement award from the American Biographical Institute.

N.M. Khaketla died of renal failure on 16 August 2012 at Maseru Hospital. After her death, she was honoured with a mass at the Anglican Cathedral of St Mary and St James in Maseru, before burial in Kokobela Cemetery.

Writing
N.M. Khaketla published 12 books during her lifetime, including two collections of poetry, nine dramas and a translation of one of Walter Trobisch's books produced during his time as a missionary.

While Khaketla is often regarded as the first woman to be published in Lesotho, her debut, Mosali eo u ’neileng eena, appeared three years after Emely Amy Selemeng Mokorosi's 1951 poetry collection, Bolebali. This was to be Mokorosi's only book, and has been overshadowed by Khaketla's publications.

Mosali eo u ’neileng eena, or 'The woman you gave me', is a biblical reference to the fall of man, and reflects Khaketla's frustration with men blaming their mistakes on their wives. It tells the story of a shell-shocked seminarian who returns to Lesotho from the First World War, and has been described as a 'pioneering psychological romance.

Khaketla then turned to poetry, with a collection entitled ’Mantsopa, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1963. The collection is dedicated to her child, Matsoso Lesuhlana, who died in infancy. Some of the poems included in ’Mantsopa were later included in a collection of Basotho writers, published as Lemuloana in 1971. In 1976 a poem was also included in Joanna Bankier's The Other Voice: Twentieth-century Women's Poetry in Translation.

Khaketla continued to self-publish her works throughout the 1970s and, less prolifically, the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1990s, Maskew Miller Longman republished Selibelo sa Nkhono for the South African market under the title Sedibelo sa Nkgono.

Despite N.M. Khaketla's work spanning the missionary, apartheid and post-apartheid eras, she received scant attention from western academics or later African-language writers. One of the few interviews on record from her most productive period was with the VOA's 'Conversations with African Writers' series, but this was omitted from the published collection that appeared in 1981.

Complete works
Poetry

Drama

Translation

Collections