Colour Bar

by Susan Williams

  Hanging over Seretse was the need to tell his uncle, the Regent Tshekedi, about his plan to marry Ruth. Seretse was aware that according to Bangwato law and custom, the wife of the Kgosi should be selected by his people; usually, the wife would be from a royal family. He was afraid, too, that his uncle would not like the idea of him marrying a white woman. Forty-three years of age, Tshekedi had been Regent of the Bangwato for twenty-three years and was a formidable man. Seretse wrote Tshekedi a long letter. Addressing him as ‘Father’, he announced his plan to marry Ruth on 2 October and asked him to accept her as his wife:

  I assure you, father, that there has been nothing improper between the girl and myself. I have known her now for a year and two months. She knows very well what she is doing and we are aware of the difficulties that await us. These difficulties have already begun.

  ‘I am not marrying her out of pity,’ he added. ‘I love her, moreover she is a suitable person father. You will agree that this is so when you meet her.’ He asked Tshekedi to send some money:

  I cannot do this without financial assistance from you father. Therefore Sir no matter how you feel please send me the necessary funds as soon as possible to enable us to start at least without financial worries.

  He concluded:

  Please do not try to stop me father, I want to go through with it. I hope you will appreciate the urgency of my request. I do need help.

  Ke le ngwana wa-gago [‘I am your son’]

  Seretse.20

  But when the blue airmail letter arrived in Africa, it provoked a crisis. It was ‘so unexpected’, observed a friend of Tshekedi, ‘that it had the effect of going off like a bomb… The news of the marriage almost made Tshekedi mad.’21 The Resident Commissioner described the Regent’s reaction in his memoirs. ‘Tshekedi came to me with a face like a fiddle,’ he recorded. ‘That Seretse should marry at all without going through the usual forms of consultation was bad enough. That he should marry a European was the end.’ The Resident Commissioner argued that such a development was hardly surprising. After all, it was Tshekedi who had insisted that Seretse go to England – ‘and then raised the roof at the not unpredictable consequences’.22

  Tshekedi was used to having his own way and now he resolved to stop Seretse’s marriage. He sent a cable to his lawyer, Douglas Buchanan, in Cape Town:

  Have just received most disturbing letter from Seretse. He is engaged to English girl banns published intends marry second October. Please take immediate possible steps possibly assisted by your brother Jack, Professor Coupland and others to stop this marriage by arranging immediate air transport for Seretse return South Africa.

  ‘Please contact Sir Evelyn Baring immediately,’ he added, ‘and ask for his immediate support to get London office [to] arrange departure of Seretse.’23

  Sir Evelyn Baring, who was the High Commissioner of Bechuanaland, was horrified by the news. Tall and patrician – some said cold and aloof – Baring was in his mid-40s, two years older than Tshekedi. He was a graduate of Winchester School and New College, Oxford, where he had gained a First in History; now he was following in the footsteps of his father, Lord Cromer, who had been consul-general in Egypt, as an imperial mandarin. He immediately cabled the permanent secretary at the Commonwealth Relations Office in London. ‘Most grateful,’ he urged, ‘for any help you can give since marriage would be disastrous for Bamangwato Tribe and Seretse personally.’24

  Buchanan sent a cable to his brother John, a London solicitor. ‘Chief authorises me,’ he wired, ‘to urge you to take every possible step to prevent Seretse… marrying English girl.’ He asked him to caution the parson who had called the banns – ‘If Congregational contact LMS. If Church [of] England contact Archbishop.’ Once he had done this, he should inform Ruth’s parents of the ‘ostracism and misery awaiting her. Such marriage possibly cause Seretse’s deposition.’25 Next day, Buchanan cabled Ronald Orchard, the Africa Secretary of the LMS, and asked him to act immediately to prevent the marriage.26

  Meanwhile, Tshekedi sought to deal with Seretse directly. First he stopped his allowance. Then, on Friday 24 September, he cabled a blunt warning:

  Your proposal [is] more serious and difficult than you realise. It is [the] surest way of disrupting [the] Bamangwato Tribe. You seem to have forgotten your home is [in] south[ern] Africa not England. Have made immediate arrangements for your immediate return.27

  But this telegram had the opposite effect from the one that was intended. Seretse’s and Ruth’s determination to marry stiffened into defiance and they decided to bring the wedding-day forward. They went to see Dr Patterson, who agreed to change the date of their wedding to the next day, a Saturday, at 1.30 p.m.28

  But at 10 o’clock on the Friday evening, the vicar was astonished to receive a telephone call from Dr Roger Pilkington – a man he had never heard of before – asking if he might come and talk to him about the wedding plans of Mr Seretse Khama. Pilkington had been surprised to find in his morning post a note from Seretse, inviting him to his wedding. But surprise turned into horror, when he realized that Seretse’s future wife was a white woman. He immediately telephoned Seretse, urging him to reconsider. Seretse was bitterly hurt: he could hardly believe that the man he had called his friend disapproved of his plan to marry Ruth, clearly on racial grounds. Pilkington quickly sought out Ruth, advising her against the marriage, but she politely and firmly refused to discuss the matter with him. Then he went to see Ruth’s parents, but her father said they had washed their hands of the whole affair.

  ‘I realised that something must be done,’ explained Pilkington to Tshekedi, ‘in view of the very serious situation which would be created in Africa if the marriage was to go through against the wishes of Seretse’s people.’29 In fact, Pilkington knew nothing about the ‘wishes of Seretse’s people’ and he had never been to Africa, let alone Bechuanaland. But his antipathy was so strong that he felt he must act. He was very shortly to become a member of the British Eugenics Society, which in the 1930s had articulated a clear opposition to marriage across racial lines. By the mid-1940s the eugenics movement had been discredited in many people’s eyes by Hitler and Nazism, but it continued to exist, presenting its theories in weaker and more neutral terms. In 1944, the British Eugenics Society set out its aims in the name of ‘racial hygiene’ – to ‘improve the inborn qualities of mankind’ through the marriage of ‘best-endowed couples’.30 Pilkington worked as a marriage guidance counsellor, to help couples make eugenically healthy decisions about whether or not to marry.

  He went to see Dr Patterson in the late evening and energetically tried to dissuade him from marrying Seretse and Ruth. But the vicar was uncomfortable: so far as he could see, the two young people were perfectly within their legal rights to marry and he was pleased they wanted a Christian marriage. By now, Pilkington had spent the whole day rushing about, trying to stop the marriage, but he still had one last person to speak to – Seretse himself. At half past midnight, he and his wife appeared on Seretse’s doorstep. They insisted on coming in and proceeded to argue with him for three and a half hours; they told him he was ‘behaving disgracefully’.31

  In the meantime, John Buchanan had contacted John Keith, who was the head of the overseas student department at the Colonial Office. Tall and scholarly, Keith was a bachelor who had twenty years of colonial service in Northern Rhodesia behind him when he joined the Colonial Office. He believed that ‘race relations in this country should be on a sensible and what one might call a Christian basis’, and had robustly resisted moves within the British forces during the war to follow the colour bar of the Americans.32 Keith was well liked by the students at Nutford House and often invited them to his own home, which he shared with his mother; when they ran out of money, he did what he could to help.33 But this warmth did not extend to approval of Seretse’s plan to marry Ruth. He went to see Charles Njonjo and Harry Nkumbula, asking them to reason with their friend. They said they would, hoping that this would buy time for their fr
iends.34

  The alleged reason for stopping the marriage was that Seretse had not consulted his uncle or his people. But both Seretse and Ruth were British citizens and under British law there was no requirement for such a consultation. They were adults – Seretse was now 27 and Ruth was 24 – and they were fully entitled to marry. ‘You will appreciate,’ explained Sir Cecil Syers, Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, in a telegram to Baring, ‘that it would be difficult for us to intervene officially unless of course the marriage would not be valid in the Bech[uanaland] Prot[ectorate] but I assume that this point does not arise.’ The real reason for the opposition was a conviction that it simply would not do for Seretse to marry an Englishwoman. ‘I fully appreciate the undesirability of the marriage,’ wrote Sir Reginald Coupland in Oxford to Sir Cecil. ‘If I could do anything to help to prevent it,’ he added, ‘I should feel obliged to do so, unpleasant though it would be.’35

  But it was not as if Seretse was the first African student to marry a white woman in Britain. In 1942, Jomo Kenyatta had married a white woman called Edna Grace Clarke, who became the second of his four wives. According to the West African Review in September 1949, ‘In the Gold Coast today more Africans are married to English girls than ever in its chequered matrimonial history, and every other student brings out… a white bride.36 There was also a rumour at the Colonial Office that Kwame Nkrumah was considering marriage to an Englishwoman with whom he may have been ‘on terms of intimacy’, according to a British mandarin, when he was in the UK in 1947.37

  In the late 1940s, the issue of colour was moving up the British agenda. In June 1948, the Empire Windrush arrived in Southampton from Jamaica, bringing about 450 people – a number of them with war service records – who were hoping to find work in Britain. This was the start of a wave of migration to the UK from the British colonies of the West Indies. Under the British Nationality Act of 1948, all crown colonial subjects were British citizens and were entitled to unrestricted entry into Great Britain, as the ‘mother’ of the empire. But many people in Britain were horrified. Within two days of the docking of the Empire Windrush, a group of eleven Labour MPs wrote to the Prime Minister, calling for controls on black immigration. In his reply, Attlee defended the admission of British subjects to Britain. But he took a different line in the Cabinet, where he censored Arthur Creech-Jones, the Colonial Secretary, for not ‘having kept the lid on things’ in the colonies. As a way of getting rid of the new problem, he asked whether there was a way of sending the Windrush migrants to East Africa to work on a project known as the Tangan-yikan Groundnuts Scheme (which turned out to be a complete failure).38

  The British population had been grateful to colonial men for their contribution to the war effort. But now their attitude had changed. A Jamaican man who had served in the RAF commented:

  I suppose you could say racism crept up on me – although some other people may have seen it straight away. But it is something that crept up on me very slowly… Just after the war was over, I was on a bus and there were two service people in front of me, one a woman. And she was saying, ‘Isn’t it about time they went back to their homes?’ and it was the first time that it hit me that, you know, that people were putting up with us, that they didn’t really want us, but we were a necessary evil.

  ‘People were more aggressive to you,’ said another Jamaican who had served in the RAF. ‘In short, they are trying to say that you shouldn’t be here.’ Not everyone he met felt like this:

  I would say a third of the people in Britain still had imperialist ideas. People from the colonies should be planting bananas and chocolate and whatever it is. Another third, I would say, [thought it] did not really matter [so long] as Arsenal win on Saturday. The other third, they were just nice, ordinary people.

  But the third who were hostile made his life very difficult.39

  Sometimes, when Seretse and Ruth were out together, people shouted abuse at Ruth, calling her a tart. This was not an uncommon experience for a white woman who went out with a black man. ‘If I am with a European girl,’ said a Nigerian student at London University, ‘other English people look the girl up and down with the implication that she cannot be a respectable girl.’40 On one occasion, a friend of the Williams family deliberately crossed the street to avoid greeting Ruth.41 ‘No colour bar in London!’ exclaimed Ruth bitterly. ‘Might as well say no sand in the Sahara. Of course there’s a deep-rooted colour bar in London, and all Britain.’42

  Seretse and Ruth got ready for their wedding on the morning of Saturday, 25 September. Ruth had chosen a wedding dress of turquoise wool, with a pillbox hat; Seretse was dressed in his one dark suit.43 Muriel was going to be their bridesmaid and John Zimmerman best man. Both Seretse and Ruth had wanted Njonjo to share in their special day, but he had warned them against this: two black men in the company of two white women might draw unwelcome attention to the occasion.44

  That same morning, the leading men of the London Missionary Society met together in London at Mission House – Orchard, John Buchanan, Pilkington and also the Reverend A. J. Haile, who was the LMS representative in southern Africa. Their first tactic was to send a message to Ruth by taxi – but there was no reply. Then, at 1.00 p.m., with just half an hour to go before the wedding, Pilkington called the vicar, instructing him to telephone Seretse and tell him that he was not willing to perform the ceremony. Patterson hesitated, then made the call.

  But Seretse and Ruth refused to accept that their wedding was off. They rushed down to the vicarage and entreated with Patterson to marry them. Sympathetic, he tried hard to think of a solution – and decided to consult his Bishop. He knew that Dr Wand, the Bishop of London, was coming that day to officiate at an ordination service at St Mary Abbots Church, not far away. He suggested that they all make their way there, straightaway, and ask the Bishop to sort out the difficulty. The vicar and his wife took Seretse and Ruth to St Mary Abbots, where they sat anxiously together in a pew, waiting for the Bishop to complete his service. They assumed that he would be bound to approve of their wish for a Christian marriage, in the house of God.

  In the meantime, Pilkington had set off with Orchard and Haile for St George’s Church. They were absolutely determined to prevent the marriage and had developed a new strategy. If the vicar were to start proceedings, they would simply raise an objection to the marriage and it could not possibly go ahead. But although they waited and waited, no one came to the church. Again they rang the vicarage – and were told about the plan to consult the Bishop. In angry frustration, they hurried out to the street and hailed a taxi to St Mary Abbots, where they rushed in and wrote a note for the Bishop, with instructions that it should be given to him as soon as the service was over. The note advised him not to consent to the marriage.

  The verdict of the Bishop went against Seretse and Ruth. He did not even bother to speak to them himself, but sent the Archdeacon of Middlesex with a message. ‘Get in touch with the Colonial Office,’ he advised. ‘When they agree to the wedding, I will.’45 Stunned, the little party returned to St George’s Church and Ruth broke down in tears.46 ‘Does the Church want to force me to live in sin?’ she asked in despair. She had left her parents’ home that morning expecting to be a married woman by the evening. She could hardly return home, but nor – since she was not married – could she now spend the night in the flat with Seretse. In despair, she took a room in a hotel in Bayswater, nearby.47

  Pilkington realized that Seretse and Ruth were very angry – ‘in an emotional condition which rendered it useless to try to approach them in any way’.48 But he was not worried about this, he explained to Tshekedi, because he believed that Seretse’s ‘whole future and to a certain extent even that of his country depended upon our intervention, though I cannot expect that he will easily realise the good turn that was done to him when the affair was held up on Saturday’.49 He suspected that Ruth had ‘started this business out of a kind of emotional reaction to the colour bar in Africa’, and be
lieved that she was ‘not altogether a bad kind of girl’.50 John Buchanan took the same view. But if this was true, he worried, she ‘will possibly be more difficult to deal with than if it had been a case of a chorus girl or suchlike, when money would have talked possibly’. Should the marriage go ahead, he predicted, it would be a tragedy. ‘How long,’ he wondered, ‘could such a marriage last in this country (where just as I know so well in Northern Rhodesia) there is in theory no Colour Bar but in practice!! Looking further ahead what possible hope have any children of such a marriage?’51

  Just four days after the fiasco at St George’s Church – on Wednesday 29 September 1948 – Seretse and Ruth were married in a civil ceremony at Kensington Registry Office. Early that morning, Seretse collected Ruth from her little hotel in Bayswater. She was wearing a black suit with a white blouse; the jacket was fitted, flaring slightly at the back, and she wore a black hat. It was a severe outfit and not very bridal, but it reflected their determination.52 They walked swiftly to the Registry Office, looking over their shoulders to check whether anybody was following them.53 They were waiting outside the Office when it opened, with their three witnesses – ‘my sister Muriel, loyal to the last’,54 John Zimmerman and one of Ruth’s cousins.

  Shortly after nine o’clock, Seretse and Ruth were husband and wife.55 Despite the combined efforts of the Regent Tshekedi, the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the Colonial Office, the Church of England and the London Missionary Society, as well as lawyers in South Africa and Britain, they had started their lives together. They walked from the Registry Office to the hotel where Ruth had stayed the previous few nights, to collect her things and move them into her new home with her husband – the little flat in Campden Hill Gardens. Seretse sent John Keith a telegram. ‘Have married Ruth,’ he told him, adding playfully, ‘Do you still want to see me?’56 I am sorry,’ wrote Coupland to the Commonwealth Relations Office, when he heard the news. ‘It will be a miracle,’ he added, ‘if the marriage turns out happily in the end for either of them or for their children. It’s a real tragedy or so it seems.’57