In March 1887 Robert Germond, a missionary in charge of a small mission station at Thabana Morena on the western border of present-day Lesotho, reported sad news. Basutoland, he wrote, ‘produces less and finds no outlet for its products. Its normal markets, Kimberley and the Free State, purchase Australian and colonial wheat … Basutoland, we must admit, is a poor country … Last year’s abundant harvest has found no outlet for, since the building of the railway, colonial and foreign wheat have competed disastrously with the local produce.’1

Thabana Morena is about 330 kilometres from Kimberley. Then part of the British protectorate of Basutoland, the region was the breadbasket of the South African interior. Basotho farmers produced grain for the rapidly growing local markets of Griqualand West, a division of the Cape Colony whose major town was Kimberley, and the Orange Free State, one of the two Boer republics set up in the 1850s after the Great Trek.