After Zambia my second posting in the Foreign Service was to
Lesotho where I was Public Affairs Officer and Director of the American
Cultural Center. Shortly after I arrived
the ambassador hosted his annual Fourth of July reception where the King was an
invited guest. At the end, when I went
to shake hands with His Majesty, the king whispered in my ear: “Bill let’s not
let protocol interfere with our friendship.”
What was he talking about?
When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer at the high school in the royal
village, the king, who was patron to the school, attended faculty meetings and
we became friends. So my wife, Qenehelo
and I found ourselves invited to the palace in the capital for lunches and
dinners as often as twice a week. The
king was so informal that he once greeted my wife with “Hello, gorgeous!”
US policy toward
South Africa was not popular at the time, but the local ANC leader and future
Minister of Constitutional Law said “Bill’s a brother.” After dinner discussions with prominent
people were the norm but the topics were as informal as to whether it was OK
for husbands to beat their wives. The
king once asked for my views on policy toward South Africa. When I started rattling off official policy
the king replied “I want to know what you think. If I want policy I’ll ask the ambassador.” So we were friends.
Then, without warning, the military staged a coup in 1986,
and installed the king, formerly a ceremonial figure, as absolute leader. The dinner guests I had known suddenly became
ministers and I was on a first name basis with over half the cabinet.
One of the American speakers I invited to Lesotho was Ed
O’Brien, leader of a “Street Law” program in DC. The idea was to teach students that when they
walked the streets, the law was in effect and applied to everybody. Who better to host a seminar with Ed than the
king? He had majored in law at Oxford
and was patron of the high school in his village. So Ed came and presented his program in the
palace with ministers in attendance.
After Ed left the king called me and said he wanted to set up a street
law program in Lesotho.
I was subsequently called to the palace for a one-on-one
with His Majesty to discuss how we could work together. Foreign Service Officers dream of situations
like this, sitting down with a head of state to talk about democratizing their
country. So our Street Law program for
Lesotho was born. I sent a law professor
from the national university to the US to study street law and when he returned
to Lesotho he worked with an American specialist, Margaret Fisher whom I had invited
on a six month working visit to Lesotho.
The American lawyer and the Mosotho professor worked
together: a textbook on the law of Lesotho was created and introduced into the
classroom, and a mock trial, featuring student “lawyers” and presided over by
an actual high court judge took place.
The whole program was a first (and only) experience for me.
Since those heady days the king was killed several years
later in an auto accident. But there
hangs on our wall in northern Virginia a lovely Basotho weaving, the king’s
parting gift to us when we left the country in 1987.
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