Arguably Bennett Makalo Khaketla was/is the second major figure in Southern Sotho literature after Thomas Mofolo. Both of them were New Africans from Republic of Lesotho, located in the middle of South Africa. He had a remarkable forte in all the three major generic forms. Khaketla has published two novels: Meokho ea thabo (1945, Tears of Joy) and Mosali a nkhola (A Woman Betrayed Me); plays: Moshoeshoe le baruti (1947, Moshoeshoe and the Missionaries), Tholoana tsa sethepu (1954, Results of Polygamy) and Bulane (1958); and poems: Lipshamanthe (1954, Astonishments). Although these creative works are a considerable literary achievement and legacy for African people, Bennett Makalo Khaketla is probably more popularly renowned today for having been an editor of a major Lesotho newspaper Mohlabani (Warrior) in the 1950s. It was owned by the Maloti Information Bureau. Browsing through his editorials of the 1950s, they evidence Khaketla's remarkable grasp of international politics as wqell as the complex interrelation between culture and politics. For instance celebrating the independence of Ghana in 1957, and commending Kwame Nkrumah for his political leadership, gives him an opportunity to comment on the complex nature of European colonial intervention in Africa and the intractable nature of the then incepient African political modernity: "We do not, in the least, belittle what the English have done to uplift the people of Ghana. What happens to be our object of hatred is their practice, for which they have become notorious among the colonial peoples, of always digging in their roots whereever they set foot. They are never satisfied with doing what they set out to do, and having accomplished it leave the people of the particular country to their own devices. So it happened  in Ghana as it has happened in many another country. The English leech stuck its hooks into the black bowels of a black country inhabited by a black folk. . . The victory of Nkrumah and Ghana is a victory for the whole of Black Africa, and for that reason we wish him double success in everything he undertakes, for his failures will be the failures of Black Africa, and his success will be the success of Black Africa" ("The Editor Speaks", Mohlabani, Motseanong/May, 1957). This reflection is really about the relationship between modernity and the political philosophy of Pan-Africanism, for Khaketla observes that Richard Wright's Black Power is an astute representation of the new things happening in Ghana. In the same issue of the newspaper he published the full text of the Freedom Charter which had been promulgated by the Congress of the People two years earlier in Kliptown. In another instance, the Crisis of the Congo, affords him an opportunity to make insightful observations about the role of African intellectuals in the African Revolution: "And why are Africans discouraged from going overseas for higher education? Because the Belgians know history. The French Revolution, to quote one example, was the result of the activities of intellectuals. Had France had no intellectuals there would have been no French Revolution. In the same way the Belgians realised that so long as they had no intellectuals among the Congolese, so long would they control the reins of government without fear. But they seem to have failed to reckon with one thing: that ideas---particularly political ideas in this age of sputniks---have wings; that Africa is today like a chain of mechanical contraptions which are set in motion from Cape to Cairo and from Morocco to Malagasy at the mere touch of one button" ("Lesson Of The Congo", Mohlabani, Mphalane/October, 1960). It is necessary to note that the lessons drawn by Khaketla from the Congo Crisis are similar and parallel to those postulated by Frantz Fanon ("Lumumba's Death: Could We Do Otherwise?" [1960] in Toward the African Revolution). Bennett Makalo Khaketla's reflections on the political evolution of Lesotho (then Basutoland) qre extraordinary. His writings on politics and culture belong to the central lineage and heritage of the New African Movement: what Walter Rubusana and Allan Kirkland Soga achieved in the 1890s in Izwi Labantu, Solomon T. Plaatje Tsala ea Batho in the 1910s, R. V. Selope Thema in Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1920s, Josiah Mapumulo in Ilanga lase Natal in the 1930s, H. I. E. Dhlomo in the 1940s in Ilanga lase Natal in the 1940s, was continued by B. M. Khaketla in Mohlabani in the 1950s. In this sense, Khaketla was preoccupied with what had profoundly concerned Jordan Ngubane in the 1940s in Inkundla ya Bantu: a major construction of African Nationalism. The realism of his literary works is a projection of this preoccupation.