"The Last of the Queen’s Men. A Lesotho Experience " by Peter Sanders was reviewed
by David Goldsworthy in the December 2001 issue of the Australasian Review of African
Studies. This paper considers what contribution the book has made to the social history of
the white community in what was then Basutoland.
The book covers the author’s time as a District Officer in the Basutoland Administration
from 1961 until 1966 the year when Lesotho gained its Independence. Sanders (2000:3)
has three objectives: to recapture what it was like, "to work as an administrator in the last
days of British rule in Basutoland, and then as a scholar in the early days of Lesotho’s
independence." He was also trying to place his experience, "as a small and atypical part
of the extraordinary history of contacts and relations between black and white in southern
Africa, and in Lesotho in particular."
Sanders (1989:194) read Greats, alias Latin and Greek, at Oxford and after Basutoland
went on to get a PhD in African History, to write The Life of Moshoeshoe, and become
Chief Executive of the Race Relations Board in Britain from 1988 to 1993 (Glaze
2001:53). He therefore seems highly qualified to write his book. My qualifications for
writing this piece are less impressive. I am a demographer, I have read a lot of
autobiographies, and I was there. I have known Peter for over forty years and in signing
my copy of his book he kindly credited me with the title of Chapter 9," Leribe: the King
and the Cardinal." In spite of all this I found sections of the first half of his book to be
rather annoying; hence this article.