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On 3 November 1863 the first issue of Leselinyana la Lesotho, datelined Morija, was published by the Revd. Adolphe Mabille of the Paris Evangelical Mission Society. Leselinyana continues to be published today. Its contents have been recently used by two biographers of Moshoeshoe and in the present paper I hope to suggest some other ways in which the materials in this publication can be of value to historians of the Sotho.Mabille had arrived among the Sotho in 1860 and had already published several small pamphlets written by himself on a small primitive printing press. The first issue of Leselinyana comprised just a single sheet containing two pieces of writing -- an editorial signed “Leselinyana la Lesutho” in which, inter alia, the newspaper introduced itself in the first person to the Basotho. The other piece was the first of what came to be a series of articles with the general title “Mogaogeli oa Moetsalibe” (“The Sinner's Pardoner”). From the beginning Leselinyana emphasized articles of a religious and catechetical nature, clearly indicating its basic purpose as a vehicle for religious instruction and propaganda.According to Gérard the publication of Leselinyana was interrupted only twice. The first hiatus was from 1865 to 1869 when the Boers of the Orange Free State invaded and temporarily occupied areas west of the Drakensberg mountains, evicting the French missionaries who had supported the Africans there. The second occurred during the so-called Gun War of 1880/81 when the Sotho successfully resisted efforts by the Cape government to disarm them and to open Sotho lands to white settlement. In the following discussion I will touch briefly on a few representative materials in Leselinyana which suggest the richness of the paper as a source for historians, not only of the Sotho themselves but of their relations with the whites of the area and with the missionaries.

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Any curtailment or total denial of an individual's freedom to utter his or her ideas either orally or in writing, for any audience, whether actua~ or potential, may be defined as censorship. Bruce Lannes Smith, a political scientist, in describing what he labels "Authoritarian Control of Propaganda," highlights another facet of censorship. "In a highly authoritarian polity," he says, "the regime tries to monopol.ize for itsel.f al.l. opportunities to engage in propaganda, and often it wil.l. stop at nothing to crush any kind of counterpropaganda."!. Since it woul.d be inconceivable that any human being would wil.lingly submit to the surveil.l.ance of his thinking and his utterances, regimes that seek to exercise this kind of control. depend on a formidabl.e armory of restrictive legislation by which they proceed to decl.are all ideas that challenge or expose their dogma illegal.. "How l.ong and how completel.y such a pol.icy can be impl.emented," says Smith, "depends, among other things, on the amount of force that the regime can muster, (and) on the thoroughness of its pollee work. "2 As part of the "other things" mentioned by Smith, we might add that the success of such a policy also depends on a judiciary that is willing to compromise its integrity by sitting in judgement over cases invol.ving l.aws whose morality is questionable, to say the very least. The independence of the courts is thus undermined, as the regime appoints judges who are sympathetic to its dogma. Censorship can thus be further defined as a monopoly of propaganda enjoyed by a regime and upheld by force.