Mount Moorosi sits above the Quthing valley in what is now southern Lesotho. By the 1860s it had become home to a mixed community: Phuthi people under Chief Moorosi, Thembu groups who had come north during the Mfecane (the upheaval of forced migrations), and San families who had been in the Maluti mountains for generations. The word for that arrangement, in the language the Cape Colony used, was "a problem."
The AmaQithi were among those Thembu groups. Their oral tradition places them in Quthing before the war. One community member's inkaba (ancestral cord-burial site) is in Lesotho. The Sotho name Quthing is the locative form of emaQithini in isiXhosa: the place of the AmaQithi. The name of the valley is the name of the clan.
Eight months
The Cape Colony had been pushing to disarm the Sotho chiefs. Moorosi refused. In April 1879, colonial forces began a siege of the mountain. It lasted eight months. On 20 November 1879, the mountain fell. Moorosi was killed on the slopes. His followers — Phuthi, Thembu, San — fled.
Three lines carried the AmaQithi south: Ngcongolo's line went to eNgcobo, other families to Cofimvaba, and the Qhwabi line to Mkapusi in Lady Frere, where they founded the village now called emaQithini — Mqithi Village. Three routes, three districts, one clan name across all of them.
What survived the mountain
Our research suggests the split was not panic. Spreading across several districts made it harder for colonial authorities to find and tax the group as a single unit. The families that scattered were still in contact with each other — the name, izibongo, and ingqithi custom held across all three lines.
Qwabi Joka, who settled at Mkapusi, named one son Molosi — after Chief Moorosi, adjusted slightly to avoid the British blacklists that followed the war. He named another son Bushman outright. Both names are still in the family. He was making sure his children would know where they came from, whatever the clerks wrote down.