Retelling the history of Lesotho : an interplay between orality, painting and film in Kalosi Ramakhula’s works

Abstract

Kalosi Ramakhula is the producer of Moshoeshoe: The Mountain King Volumes 1, 2 and 3, a series of videofilms which narrate the history of Lesotho in the 19th century. His production emerges as a rewriting of history in a context where historical documentation is predominantly authored by historians and ethnographers who complement their research through oral resources. Ramakhula uses a unique approach which incorporates visual art by way of historical paintings created to accomplish a coherent mixture with the established print, sound and vision media of documentary cinema. He collaborates with contemporary Basotho artists commissioned to produce elaborate naturalistic paintings of historical significant characters, sites, events and social practices of the period being depicted. Through an exploration of the concepts of multimodality and intermediality, the article uses a semiotic analysis of selected paintings to examine the multiple layers of potential meanings communicated by the film-maker. We argue that Ramakhula’s retelling strategy explicitly creates a link with the experience of nation building in the past and the present. The paintings are a significantly expressive form of media in this regard, creating a consciousness of Bosotho-ness as the one concept that in principle remains constant despite transformation over the centuries. Ramakhula’s work is seen therefore, as having the potential to create space for negotiations around contemporary debates on nation building in Lesotho.