Night has settled over the central highlands of Lesotho, and for Kabelo Mohai and Lepeli Maapesa, sunset means the beginning of a school day. The two young men set off into the dark as the sun drops behind the towering peaks, beginning a long descent toward a classroom that, for many of the men who make the same walk, is the only formal education they will ever have.
They pull wool blankets over their shoulders against the biting cold and pick their way down rocky paths that sit at elevations approaching 8,000 feet above sea level. Far below, scattered rural villages appear as tiny dots. The journey takes roughly an hour and a half. By the time the moon is high in the sky, the lights of the small town of Semonkong are visible ahead.
They are not alone on the mountain. Dozens of similar blanket-clad silhouettes are descending the slopes, singing and chatting excitedly as they approach a low building lit by fluorescent tubes: the Good Shepherd School, where more than 40 herders assemble on a typical evening for night classes.
The school serves the community around Mokhotlong, in a small, mountainous southern African country that is entirely surrounded by South Africa and where even the lowest valleys sit thousands of feet above the sea. Distance here is not measured in kilometers but in hours on foot. Reaching a classroom, a clinic or a trading post can mean a full day of walking, a fact that shapes decisively who gets an education and who does not.
Mohai and Maapesa are part of a much larger workforce: tens of thousands of boys and young men who work as shepherds. Livestock is not a marginal industry in Lesotho but a backbone of the national economy and a fixture of cultural life, and the herds that feed that economy are tended largely by people who are still children.
The figures explain the stakes. Wool and mohair account for nearly 60% of the country's agricultural exports and support about a quarter of the rural population. When a family's income depends on a flock, a school day and a herding day pull in opposite directions, and the family can usually afford only one of them.
What tips the balance is a combination of poverty and tradition rather than preference. Boys of school age are routinely called upon to take charge of animals, and they may spend months at a stretch alone on the high slopes, far from any village, classroom or road. The work is itself a demanding education — hard-won knowledge of weather, terrain and animal behavior — but it yields no reading, no arithmetic and no credential.
The bill for that arrangement comes due in adulthood, when years of lost schooling cannot be recovered. That is the gap a small network of low-cost schools, operated on a shoestring budget, is trying to close: classes conducted after dark, in the hours left over after a full day's work.
The schedule is deliberately unusual. Lessons take place roughly twice a month, and for many of the men who attend, they are the only form of education available to them at any point in their lives. The logic of that rhythm is easy to infer from how the herders live: their movements are governed by the animals, the season and the weather, not by a school calendar.
Sparse as the timetable is, the gathering has a social function of its own. The walk down the mountain is, in the photographs, an upbeat communal affair — men singing and talking on the slopes — and the fluorescent-lit room with more than 40 of them inside is a rare fixed point in lives otherwise spent moving with the flock.
The trade-off is continuity. A pupil who changes camps, loses animals to weather or illness, or simply cannot make the long walk after dark will miss sessions and drift behind, and a young man who concludes that reading and arithmetic are not for people like him may leave for good. Keeping even partial literacy among such a dispersed, mobile population requires teachers to work at the pace of herding rather than at the pace of a fixed classroom.
The implications reach well beyond individual pupils. A literate population of herders has bargaining power: a shepherd who can read a receipt, a contract or a price list is harder to overcharge. Cooperatives, aid agencies and banks all need literate members to manage records and hold elections. Because wool and mohair already make up the bulk of agricultural exports, even modest gains in education among producers could feed through into export earnings and rural incomes.
The same geography that keeps herders out of classrooms also constrains other services. Elsewhere in Lesotho, flying doctors treat patients in villages such as Mphooko, which has no road access. Education and health in the country are limited by the same fact: people are scattered across steep, high, difficult terrain.
That is what makes the night school in these photographs a modest intervention carrying a large ambition. Forty-odd men gather under fluorescent lights twice a month; the national picture involves tens of thousands of young herders. The arithmetic looks improbable. It is also the kind of improvisation that rural education systems are seldom funded to attempt — and it is precisely the education these men were waiting for, says NPR's photo essay, which frames the classes as possibly the most inspirational night school anywhere.
The story was reported by Julie Bourdin, with photographs by Tommy Trenchard, and published Sept. 27, 2026.
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