'Masechele Caroline Ntseliseng Khaketla

Khaketla also co-founded the first private school in Lesotho, Iketsetseng Primary School, and became the first woman to be appointed as a high court assessor. Despite receiving little academic attention during her life, she is now regarded as one of the founding figures in Sesotho literature.

• Name — Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla • Birth Name — Ntšeliseng Caroline Ramolahloane • Born — 1918 • Died — 16 August 2012 • Birthplace — Ha Majara, Berea, Basutoland • Occupation — * Playwright • poet • short story writer • literary translator • teacher • Place of death — Maseru, Lesotho • Notable Works — * Mosali eo u 'neileng eena (1954) • Children — 6, including 'Mamphono Khaketla • Spouse — Bennett Makalo Khaketla (m. 1946; died 2000) • Education — University of Fort Hare (BA)

• Illustration — Map of Berea District, Lesotho Ntšeliseng Caroline Ramolahloane was born on 1 January 1918 at Ha Majara, in Berea District of what was then Basutoland. Her father, Luka Ramolahloane, was a teacher, and her mother, 'Maphillip Ramolahloane, was a housewife. She was one of eight children, and brought up in privileged surroundings due to her father's job. As a child, she read the English and Sesotho books that were in the family home, and aspired to be a nurse. Her early education was at schools in Liphiring and Siloe in Mohale's Hoek District. Khaketla went on to Morija College in 1933 and became upon her completion of her studies in 1936, the first Mosotho woman to complete a junior certificate. She then continued her studies at the University of Fort Hare (then South African Native College at Fort Hare), where she became the first Mosotho woman to graduate, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Sesotho, in 1941, having completed her studies the previous year. A year later she began a teaching career at missionary schools run by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society and then at Basutoland High School in Maseru where she became deputy principal. It was while she was in Maseru that she met her husband, Bennett Makalo Khaketla. They had six children, including 'Mamphono Khaketla. The couple lived in exile in South Africa between 1950 and 1953 due to his political activities. By the 1960s, Khaketla had co-founded Iketsetseng Primary School, the first private school in the country that would grow to over 1,000 pupils and educate the future Queen 'Mamohato and her son, later Letsie III. In 1979, she was the first woman appointed as a High Court assessor and also served on the council of the National University of Lesotho, the government's National Planning Board, and on the Special Committee on the Status of Women on the Law Reform Commission. Elsewhere, she was active within the Anglican Church and its Mothers' Union, and in 1990 co-founded the Lesotho Academy of Arts. Khaketla received an honorary doctorate of literature from the National University in 1983, and in 1997 received the Gold Record of Achievement award from the American Biographical Institute. Khaketla died of renal failure on 16 August 2012 at Maseru Hospital. After her death, she was honoured with a mass at the Anglican Cathedral of St Mary and St James in Maseru, before being burial in Kokobela Cemetery.

Khaketla published thirteen full-length works during her lifetime, all of them in Sesotho, including eight plays, three poetry collections, one short fiction collection and a Sesotho-language translation of Walter Trobisch's 1971 English-language book, I Married You. While Khaketla is often regarded as the first woman to be published in Lesotho, her debut, Mosali eo u ’neileng eena, appeared three years after Emely Amy Selemeng Mokorosi's 1951 poetry collection, Bolebali. This was to be Mokorosi's only book, and has been overshadowed by Khaketla's publications. Mosali eo u ’neileng eena, or "The woman you gave me", is a biblical reference to the fall of man, and reflects Khaketla's frustration with men blaming their mistakes on their wives. It tells the story of a shell-shocked seminarian who returns to Lesotho from the First World War, and the work has been described as a "pioneering psychological romance". Khaketla then turned to poetry, with a collection titled 'Mantsopa, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1963. The collection is dedicated to her child, Matsoso Lesuhlana, who died in infancy. Some of the poems from Mantsopa were later included in a collection of Basotho writers, published as Lemuloana in 1971. In 1976, an English-language translation by Daniel Kunene and Jack Cope of the eleventh stanza of a poem from Mantsopa, "Molelekeng", was included in Joanna Bankier's The Other Voice: Twentieth-century Women's Poetry in Translation, under the title "The White and the Black". It later appeared in Daughters of Africa (1992; reprint 1993), edited by Margaret Busby. Khaketla continued to self-publish her works throughout the 1970s and, less prolifically, the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1990s, Maskew Miller Longman republished Selibelo sa Nkhono for the South African market. Despite Khaketla's work spanning Lesotho's colonial and post-colonial eras, she received scant attention from Western academics or later African-language writers during her lifetime. One of the few interviews on record from her most productive period was with the Voice of America's Lee Nichols for VOA's "Conversations with African Writers" series, but this was omitted from the published collection that appeared in 1981. Nevertheless, portions of that interview were quoted in Nichols's 1984 book, African Writers at the Microphone.

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• [Sesotho-language translation of Walter Trobisch's I Married You (1971)]

• Joanna Bankier (1976). The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-04421-8 • A. B. Thoahlane, A. B. (1971). Lemuloana: Pokello ea thothokiso tsa Sesotho (in Southern Sotho). Johannesburg: Longman Southern Africa