Latest news with #Lesotho-born
The Herald Scotland
24-07-2025
- Sport
- The Herald Scotland
Lets'osa wasting no time in making big impression at Partick Thistle
Tuesday night's 2-0 win over Queen of the South would be the acid test. The fans had already taken to Lets'osa's personable nature, but it is his performances on the park that will ultimately define his time in Maryhill. The Lesotho-born player was pitched into the starting XI for his debut as fans got to see the club's latest recruit in a competitive game for the first time. He had the entire stadium rooting for him within minutes. Somehow, his efforts on the pitch were even more enthusiastic than his responses in that interview. He was seemingly everywhere; marauding around the park, taking his man on, charging forward to join the attack at every opportunity. He would get his reward around half an hour into his debut. Moments after Aidan Fitzpatrick had slammed Thistle ahead with a free-kick, the same player found himself bearing down on goal with no one to stop him making it 2-0. The winger drove at goal, spotting a lung-busting run from Lets'osa before squaring it to his team-mate for the simplest of finishes. It capped off a fine debut for Lets'osa – known as 'T' among his team-mates – and the man himself could not have been more pleased. Although, one suspects that he would still have been remarkably chipper had Thistle lost the game. He doesn't just play with a smile on his face; he appears to live with a huge grin permanently etched across it. 'Of course I'm happy,' Lets'osa said after the 2-0 win, which could have easily been six or seven. 'All glory to the Lord Jesus. He gave me the strength and peace on the pitch. I was able to play my happiest game. 'I think everybody was able to see that in the stands, from the staff, from the team-mates who encouraged me on the pitch. So I'm really happy. 'To be honest, I think after the interview I already won the fans' hearts! I think I had more pressure to be able to deliver on the pitch, but I did my best. I hope they enjoyed it. Not just myself, but the team performance. We're here to play for the team. 'Hopefully I can play more than 60 [minutes going forward]! I need to keep my legs strong, keep my self ticking over. I'm really happy to even just play, to be honest. I'm so happy, so blessed. I'm really happy everything's going so well so far.' Lets'osa certainly put in the hard yards for his debut goal. He sprinted more than half the pitch's length in order to provide an option for his team-mate – although he admits he wasn't sure if Fitzpatrick would simply go it alone, rather than slipping him in. Ts'oanelo Lets'osa scores on his Partick Thistle debut (Image: Partick Thistle) 'To be honest, when I started sprinting all the way through the pitch, I was like, 'You have to now!' after me running,' Lets'osa laughs. 'No, I'm joking. I didn't know he was going to pass it, but it just shows the team bond, how we are close and we're becoming close on the pitch as well. I was really happy just for him to pass the ball to me like that. 'It does look far on the pitch, but the coach has been training us very well. Us as a team, we're all fit. I believe the fans saw that [against Queens]. Our pressing – Craw [Robbie Crawford], Logan [Chalmers], Fitzy, Tony [Watt] - we all did our work and it gave our defence such an easy job at the back, to be honest. 'It gave us confidence being able to show how good we are in the press and how organised we were. I think we're just disciplined. If we keep that going for the next couple of games, I think they'll be more prosperous games.' Both head coach Mark Wilson and assistant Alex Rae were highly vocal throughout Tuesday's Premier Sports Cup fixture as they issued tactical instructions from the sidelines. Lets'osa is particularly grateful for Rae's expertise, given the fine playing career the former Falkirk, Sunderland and Wolves midfielder enjoyed. 'Definitely,' said Lets'osa. 'I always like to ask questions, just to be able to learn. It's always good to have someone you can learn from. Someone who's been at that level, who's more experienced than you. Just to take tips and just to guide you. 'His wisdom can help me on the pitch. He also helped me on the pitch [against Queens], scanning, keeping the game simple. It's an easy game, but sometimes it can be difficult to play the easy game. He's teaching me a lot, so I'm really happy to have him, and Mark as well. It's been amazing.' You'll be hard pressed to find a happier man in Glasgow – heck, in Scotland – than Thistle's latest recruit. His infectious positivity is plainly apparent, and he says the warm welcome he has received has helped him to settle in quickly. 'I would just say the peace that I feel being at the club, being with the team-mates, the coaching staff - I don't think I can ever go away from that,' Lets'osa replied when asked if anything stood out from his first week in Maryhill. 'Every time, from the first moment I came in, the training, the coach speaking with me, the boys just encouraging me, just being good lads at the end of the day. Also, then seeing the fans on the open day [last Sunday] and now seeing them together on the pitch. So I think that's the one thing I can say that's really remarkable, if that's the right word to say.' It's difficult to think of a more suitable word to sum up Lets'osa's first week with Thistle.
eNCA
05-06-2025
- eNCA
Two-year-old Kutlwano allegedly killed for being 'undesired' gender
JOHANNESBURG - A Lesotho-born sangoma appeared briefly in court on Thursday accused of helping a mother murder her two-year-old son. Sebokoana Khounyana, a 50-year-old Lesotho national, previously told the court he intends to plead guilty. But his defence team attributes the sangoma's courtroom outburst to his lack of legal support at the time. The sangoma reportedly led police to Kutlwano Shalaba's shallow grave. The child's mother is accused of selling him to the sangoma for R75 000. Prosecutors allege that Keneilwe Shalaba turned to the sangoma to kill her child because she was unhappy with the baby's gender. The case has rocked her Vanderbijlpark community. Khounyana is due back in court on the 25th of June, when his bail bid will be heard. He and Shalaba remain in custody until then.
Scroll.in
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Morabo Morojele: The social and political drum beats of the Lesotho jazz musician
We use the term ' Renaissance man ' very loosely these days, for anybody even slightly multi-talented. But Lesotho-born jazz drummer, novelist and development scholar Morabo Morojele was the genuine article. He not only worked across multiple fields, but achieved impressively in all. Morojele died on May 20, aged 64. As a researcher into South African jazz, I encountered him initially through his impressive live performances. I was surprised to hear about his first novel and then – as a teacher of writing – bowled over by its literary power. Celebrating a life such as Morojele's matters, because a pan-African polymath like him cut against the grain of a world of narrow professional boxes, where borders are increasingly closing to 'foreigners'. This was a man who not only played the jazz changes, but wrote – and lived – the social and political ones. Economist who loved jazz Born on September 16, 1960 in Maseru, Lesotho, Morojele schooled at the Waterford Kamhlaba United World College in Swaziland (now Eswatini) before being accepted to study at the London School of Economics. In London in the early 1980s the young economics student converted his longstanding jazz drumming hobby into a professional side gig. There was a vibrant African diasporic music community, respected by and often sharing stages with their British peers. Morojele worked, among others, in the bands of South African drummer Julian Bahula and Ghanaian saxophonist George Lee. With Lee's outfit, Dadadi, he recorded Boogie Highlife Volume 1 in 1985. Studies completed and back in Lesotho, Morojele founded the small Afro-jazz group Black Market and later the trio Afro-Blue. He worked intermittently with other Basotho music groups including Sankomota, Drizzle and Thabure while building links with visiting South African artists. For them neighbouring Lesotho provided less repressive stages than apartheid South Africa. Morojele relocated to Johannesburg in 1995 and picked up his old playing relationship with Lee, by then also settled there. His drum prowess caught the eye of rising star saxophonist Zim Ngqawana. With bassist Herbie Tsoaeli and pianist Andile Yenana, he became part of the reedman's regular rhythm section. The three rhythm players developed a close bond and a distinctive shared vision, which led to their creating a trio and an independent repertoire. Later they were joined by saxophonist Sydney Mnisi and trumpeter Marcus Wyatt to form the quintet Voice. Voice was often the resident band at one of Johannesburg's most important post-liberation jazz clubs: the Bassline. Although the 1994-founded venue was just a cramped little storefront in a bohemian suburb, it provided a stage for an entire new generation of indigenous jazz and pan-African music in its nine years. Voice was an important part of that identity, which is particularly audible on their second recording. Play Morojele also recorded with South African jazz stars like Bheki Mseleku and McCoy Mrubata. He appeared on stage with everyone from Abdullah Ibrahim to Feya Faku. His drum sound had a tight, disciplined, almost classical swing, punctuated visually by kinetic energy, and sonically by hoarse, breathy vocalisations. Voice playing partner Marcus Wyatt recalls: 'The first time I played with you, I remember being really freaked out by those vocal sound effects coming from the drum kit behind me, but the heaviness of your swing far outweighed the heaviness of the grunting. That heavy swing was in everything you did – the way you spoke, the way you loved, the way you drank, the way you wrote, the way you lived your life.' Wyatt also recalls a gentle, humble approach to making music together, but spiced with sharp, unmuted honesty – 'You always spoke your mind' – and intense, intellectual after-show conversations about much more than music. Because Morojele had never abandoned his other life as a development scholar and consultant. He was travelling extensively and engaging with (and acutely feeling the hurt of) the injustices and inequalities of the world. Between those two vocations, a third was insinuating itself into the light: that of writer. The accidental writer He said in an interview: 'I came to writing almost by accident … I've always enjoyed writing (but) I never grew up thinking I was going to be a writer.' In 2006, after what he described in interviews as a series of false starts, he produced a manuscript that simply 'wrote itself'. How We Buried Puso starts with the preparations for a brother's funeral. The novel – set in Lesotho – reflects on the diverse personal and societal meanings of liberation in the 'country neighbouring' (South Africa) and at home. How new meanings for old practices are forged, and how the personal and the political intertwine and diverge. All set to Lesotho's lifela music. The book was shortlisted for the 2007 M-Net Literary Award. There was an 18-year hiatus before Morojele's second novel, 2023's The Three Egg Dilemma. Now that he was settled again in Lesotho, music was less and less a viable source of income, and development work filled his time. 'I suppose,' he said, 'I forgot I was a writer.' But, in the end, that book 'also wrote itself, because I didn't have an outline … it just became what it is almost by accident.' In 2022, a serious health emergency hit; he was transported to South Africa for urgent surgery. The Three Egg Dilemma, unfolding against an unnamed near-future landscape that could also be Lesotho, broadens his canvas considerably. The setting could as easily be any nation overtaken by the enforced isolation of a pandemic or the dislocation of civil war and military dictatorship, forcing individuals to rethink and re-make themselves. And complicated by the intervention of a malign ghost: a motif that Morojele said had been in his mind for a decade. For this powerful second novel, Morojele was joint winner of the University of Johannesburg Prize for South African writing in English. At the time of his death, he was working on his third fiction outing, a collection of short stories. Play Beauty of his work lives on Morojele's creative career was remarkable. What wove his three identities together – musician, development worker and writer – was his conscious, committed pan-Africanism and his master craftsman's skill with sound: the sound of his drums and the sound of his words as they rose off the page. Through his books, and his (far too few) recordings, that beauty lives with us still. Robala ka khotso (Sleep in peace). Gwen Ansell.
