The placing

The house of Moerane belongs to an ancient and complex history of African chiefdoms and clans in and around the area of southern Africa known by the mid-nineteenth century as Basutoland. Moerane was born in the former British Cape Colony, which adjoined Basutoland, but as historians of this region have shown, borders were far from fixed in 1904. Conflict existed between African peoples and the British colonial systems which administered both Basutoland and the Cape, as did conflict with Dutch-Afrikaner settlers trekking northwards, as well as conflict between African peoples themselves. Moerane was born long before Lesotho became a sovereign state, but shortly before South Africa became a Union (1910), in a region that had experienced, and went on to experience throughout his lifetime, waves of migration and resistance to one form of oppression after another.

Moerane's family lineage is indirectly linked with that of the founding father of the Basotho nation, Moshoeshoe I (c. 1786–1870) through Moshoeshoe's son, Lebenya. Lebenya was a major chief in the Mount Fletcher district, a ‘frontier zone’, as Martin Legassick has termed this kind of border area between countries that did not yet have fixed and immutable boundaries, and where Basotho lived side by side with other peoples, including ‘their sister tribe the Batlokwa and the Hlubis with the Xhosas scattered in their midst’. Lebenya's son, Thakaso, met Daniel, Eleazar and Joshua, three baptised sons of Chief Ramokopu (christened Lenare) while they were studying together at Morija Training Institution (in Basutoland). Thakaso persuaded his father to invite Lenare and his family to live in Mount Fletcher (in the Cape) in the 1880s, on what Manasseh T Moerane later described as ‘an educational mission’. The other attraction of the region, for Lenare, may have been the abundant land for farming. After Lenare and his wife Arianyane settled there, their son, Eleazar Jakane, ‘crossed the mountains in 1899 to join his parents’ once he had finished his education at Morija. Jakane moved to Mangoloaneng within a few years to establish his own farm and homestead, remaining ‘a lifetime pillar and counsellor’ to Chief Lebenya.