Maseru - An Illustrated History
Drawing upon newspaper accounts, photographs, oral history and official sources, David Ambrose has reconstructed the history of Lesotho’s capital city. Ambrose documents early accounts of indigenous Bushman habitation in the vicinity of Maseru, and then proceeds to tell of later Sotho settlements at Ha Tšosane, the Basotho-Boer Wars, and the official founding of Maseru by the British in 1869.
Through numerous old photographs, the reader is able to enter into the life of the small colonial capital at various points during the past 150 years until finally, after Independence in 1966, Maseru bursts its seams. Aerial photographs from 1961 and 1988 attest to this startling transformation as Maseru grew from 15 000 in-habitants to its present population of well over 300 000.
This finely conceived book will be of interest, not only to historians, but also to town and regional planners, sociologists, students of urbanisation and to all who have visited Maseru, the “city of yellow sandstone”.