AFP, Maseru :
In a cottage in rural Lesotho, Tisetso Litheko lays out six full passports packed with immigration stamps showing his constant movement across the border to neighbouring South Africa.
The 31-year-old former shepherd is one of more than 400,000 Lesotho nationals who live for much of the year in South Africa, forced by decades of a lack of work in the small mountain kingdom to seek a livelihood elsewhere.
“Moving to South Africa was something I could not avoid. I had very few options here in Lesotho,” Litheko told AFP. The flood of migrants from Lesotho-a country the size of Belgium that is encircled by South Africa-goes back to the discovery of gold in Johannesburg in the 1880s, when thousands of men from Lesotho were recruited to work in mines.
Litheko says his father and grandfather spent most of their lives as mineworkers in Johannesburg, the first in a long line of male members of the family who were forced to migrate for work.
In a cottage in rural Lesotho, Tisetso Litheko lays out six full passports packed with immigration stamps showing his constant movement across the border to neighbouring South Africa.
The 31-year-old former shepherd is one of more than 400,000 Lesotho nationals who live for much of the year in South Africa, forced by decades of a lack of work in the small mountain kingdom to seek a livelihood elsewhere.
“Moving to South Africa was something I could not avoid. I had very few options here in Lesotho,” Litheko told AFP. The flood of migrants from Lesotho-a country the size of Belgium that is encircled by South Africa-goes back to the discovery of gold in Johannesburg in the 1880s, when thousands of men from Lesotho were recruited to work in mines.
Litheko says his father and grandfather spent most of their lives as mineworkers in Johannesburg, the first in a long line of male members of the family who were forced to migrate for work.
