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5
Ruth
Waiting in London for the outcome of the kgotla, Ruth was missing Seretse badly. One consolation, at least, was a reconciliation with her mother. ‘She had never been as strongly opposed to my marriage as my father,’ wrote Ruth, ‘and she quickly realized my loneliness after Seretse’s departure and he being six thousand miles away. So she came to see me, sometimes in the mornings, which enabled us to have lunch or tea together.’1 Ruth had also made a new friend – Betty Thornton, another newly married woman, who lived in a bed-sitter at the top of the house. They had bumped into each other early one morning, while rushing to the front step to collect their precious bottles of rationed milk.2
Ruth was continually hounded by the press. Scarcely two weeks after their marriage the newspapers took it up. Early one Saturday morning, a young ex-serviceman in London was woken up by his mother frantically waving a newspaper in front of his face. He could hardly believe what he saw as he looked up from the pillow – banner headlines, proclaiming that his cousin, Ruth Williams, had married an African man called Seretse Khama.3 ‘Ruler-to-be Weds Office Girl’, announced the Daily Mirror. ‘Marriage that Rocks Africa’ was the headline of the Daily Mail.4 The press ‘began to make headlines of everything we did,’ said Ruth, ‘prodding, mocking, seizing almost every opportunity to make our marriage a public curiosity. People stared at us in the streets.’5 The newspapers insisted on calling her ‘a London typist’; they knew that she had had an office job in the City, but it never crossed their mind that she might be a confidential clerk, with her own typist.6
The Mirror and the Express were the worst offenders, watching the house all the time while Seretse was away. The Mirror reporter spent long hours standing outside Ruth’s bathroom window, trying to catch sight of her; he reported that she painted her nails with red varnish, in a way that was designed to raise questions about her reputation. He was so insidious that Ruth started to refer to him as ‘Creeping Paralysis’. To help Ruth get out of the house without being followed, Betty would act as a decoy: she dressed up in her friend’s coat, with a headscarf over her hair, and walked out of the front door. Ruth watched out of the window and as soon as she saw the posse of reporters chase after Betty, she slipped out of the house in the opposite direction. But she did not always manage to give ‘Creeping Paralysis’the slip. On several occasions, when she had taken a seat on a bus, her heart sank as she heard him ask from the seat behind her, ‘So what are you doing today, Mrs Khama?’7 When the Mirror offered Ruth £100 for an interview, she turned it down in fury.8 The South African press also watched Ruth. They reported that she was seen leaving her home ‘with a native escort’.9
Ruth was thrilled when she received a telegram from Seretse about the decision of the Bangwato: ‘Have been accepted by tribe. Will be recognized in three weeks. Delay passage till then.’10 She immediately made her final preparations. Her mother and Muriel had managed to collect enough clothing coupons to buy some cool cotton dresses for hot weather. After a day of shopping in London’s West End, Ruth came back to Adolphus Road and excitedly showed three new dresses to Betty. She was particularly delighted with one of them, because of its pattern on the skirt – a springbok leaping up. How appropriate, they thought, for her new life in southern Africa.11
But she had no romantic illusions about what life in Bechuanaland would be like. Seretse had made certain that she knew exactly what she would find there:
I did not try to romanticise the picture. I reminded her of the problems that might confront us, of the things we would have to face as two people of different races, reared on different continents.12
In any case, as Ruth was quick to point out, the automatic assumption that Britain was preferable to Africa was misplaced. London, with its severe rationing and the lingering effects of war, ‘wasn’t exactly the bright lights’.13
Gerald Nettelton, the Government Secretary of Bechuanaland, was on leave in the UK and heard the news about Seretse’s acclamation from the Commonwealth Relations Office. He and his wife went to see Ruth, wondering what kind of Chief’s wife she would turn out to be. ‘Ruth Khama is a nice looking girl,’ he wrote in surprise to Ellenberger:
much nicer looking than she appears to be from her photos – pretty golden hair – tallish – I should say 5 ft 6ins. She speaks and behaves nicely and is quite presentable – in fact, in Serowe, she can hold her own in the European social circle such as it is without trepidation. She was nicely and simply dressed and conversed freely and intelligently.
Ruth had told Nettelton and his wife how difficult the past year had been. ‘She says she has been so worried,’ he told Ellenberger, that ‘she lost 14 lbs when Seretse first went out and has lost 9 lbs since he left this time. She looks rather thin but not bad.’ But clearly, he thought, she would be a handful: ‘In fact, she is a tougher proposition than we had hoped she might be – she will never be bought off. Our impression is a good one.’14 Nettelton sent a similar account of Ruth to a friend at the CRO:
My wife and I had Mrs Khama, as she styles herself, to tea more out of curiosity than anything else. She will be no cipher and undoubtedly she will influence Seretse greatly. She is a young woman of her own ideas – better bred than we expected and with a special mission in life.15
John Keith, despite his initial reservations, was coming round to the same view. He had been asked by the CRO to visit Ruth and was surprised by what he found: that Ruth was ‘quite reasonable and more intelligent than he had previously supposed’.16 He was disgusted by the fact that the opponents of the marriage, even some members of the London Missionary Society, were advocating a divorce and a plan of ‘paying Ruth off’. The Khamas, he believed, ‘are decent Christian people who were deeply offended by this suggestion and by the fact that the Bishop of London prevented their marriage in a Church of the Ch[urch] of England’.17
Ruth Williams had been born on 9 December 1923. She and her sister, Muriel, who was one year older, grew up in Blackheath, a comfortable suburb in south London, where they attended Eltham Hill School for Girls. Leggy and athletic, Ruth loved games – lacrosse, netball, tennis and hockey. George Williams, their father, was a big and kindly man, who had been an officer in the British army in India in the First World War and was now working as a commercial traveller. Their mother Dorothy – ‘Dot’ – ran a happy and efficient home. She and Ruth were alike and shared a strong sense of humour.18 They were also similar in appearance and were both of average height. Muriel was tall, like her six-foot father. She looked rather forbidding, because she wore severe spectacles and her hair was scraped back from her face, whereas Ruth loved stylish clothes and had an eye for fashion.
Ruth left school to start a two-year course in hotel and restaurant cookery. But then war arrived, disrupting family life. On 1 September 1939, she and Muriel – along with one and a half million other children in London – were evacuated to the countryside.19 Ruth went by train to Sussex, where she was billeted in a cottage on a country estate; she was treated kindly but, like many evacuees, suffered badly from homesickness and begged her mother to let her come home. By January 1940, more than half of the evacuees had returned to the city.20 Muriel, though, who had been sent to Folkestone and then to Wales, was content to stay there. She had been billeted with chapel people and although the Williams family was Anglican, she decided to become a Congregationalist.
By the time the Luftwaffe began their raids on London, Ruth was back in London. One night in September 1940, when she was 16, her road in Blackheath was bombed. Several people living in the road were killed and her own house – like two out of every seven homes in Britain during the war – was rendered unfit for habitation.21 The family searched for several weeks for another home and finally found a ground-floor flat in Belmont Hall Court, an apartment building in Lewisham, not far away.22 Ruth, who had a strong sense of duty,23 now started to take turns with fire-watching. In 1942, as soon as she was old enough, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, beco
ming one of the half million British women serving with the forces.24 In the powder-blue uniform of the WAAF, she began a routine of drilling and discipline. ‘There is nothing like the Service to knock the ego out of a girl,’ she observed. She volunteered as a driver and was very proud when she learned that she had passed her training courses – it was, she thought, ‘the first major achievement’ of her life. ‘Some poor girls,’ she realized with sympathy, ‘just could not make the grade.’
Her first posting was to a section of the Royal Air Force Battle of Britain Group: ‘nice people to drive about, unassuming fighter pilot heroes,’ thought Ruth. But it was at her next posting, a satellite airfield at RAF Friston, near the south coast, that she came ‘face to face’, as she put it later, ‘with the stark reality of war’. To this airfield flew the crippled planes of bomber command which had been hit by the enemy over Berlin, the Ruhr or the Channel. It was Ruth’s job to stand by with a crash ambulance and to rush out whenever a plane landed. The crashes were frequent: ‘One minute you would hear the cheery voices of pilots over RT [radio telephone]: “Coming in now. Not sure whether the old kite will hang together, but will have a go. Cheerio.”’ Next moment, a tongue of flame would shoot along the runway. ‘One of our fighters,’ said Ruth, ‘had returned to base only to perish. I would rush my crash ambulance over, but little could be done.’ Sometimes, though, the damaged aircraft would survive the landing: ‘I would dash over to be greeted by grinning pilots, who would say: “Not this time, chum.” They would pile in and I would drive them back to the canteen.’ The runway and station buildings were frequently bombed and she risked her life on many occasions. Twenty months of this work, said Ruth wearily, ‘took all the glamour out of war for me’.25
Ruth stayed in the WAAF for a year after the end of the war. Then, in 1946, she went on her last parade. ‘The first thing I bought when I went home after being demobbed,’ she remembered later, ‘was a pair of nylons. They had just come back in the shops again. A friend of mine had a tip where I could get them.’ She had saved up her clothing coupons and was eager to get back into civilian dress. ‘Girls,’ she thought, ‘were never really meant to live in uniforms.’26 Now, she wanted some fun. ‘I had come out of the war completely heart-whole, believe it or not,’ she said, ‘and all I wanted were days of sleep, some home life, and pretty clothes again, in that order.’ Like many other ex-servicemen and women, she and her cousin ‘went mad’ some evenings.27 She found a good job and enjoyed the freedom of peacetime – ice-skating, listening to music, and ballroom-dancing.
The years of war – and especially her four years in the WAAF – had toughened Ruth into an independent and determined young woman. But in any case, she was by nature very capable: ready to roll up her sleeves and get on with things. She also had a strong sense of justice and was forthright, never hesitating before speaking her mind. She became very angry if any of the other servicemen or women made jokes at the expense of Jews or black people – pointing out that this kind of prejudice was exactly what they were supposed to be fighting.28
Seretse admired Ruth’s spirit. He also believed, reported Lawrenson, the District Commissioner, that ‘it might be an advantage as far as the women of the tribe are concerned for him to have an enlightened wife’.29 Bangwato society was strongly patriarchal and women were excluded from the kgotla; they also did most of the hard work necessary to keep their families alive, such as carrying water and ploughing the land. For the large number of women whose husbands were away working in South Africa, life was especially tough and many women felt they had suffered additional burdens under Tshekedi’s regime. Women in the village of Mahalapye were especially angry at Tshekedi because he opposed prostitution and beer-brewing, which were some of the few ways in which they had been able to make a living.30
But many more women than men in Bechuanaland had received some kind of education. Boys spent much of their childhood at the family’s cattle-post, which meant that they were unable to attend their village school – so that the number of girls at school far exceeded the number of boys. At one school in this period, there were sixty-six girls and only one boy.31 Moreover, the Bangwato Royal Family often sent their daughters to South Africa to be educated, as well as their sons. Seretse’s younger sister Naledi, who was his half-sister by his mother Tebogo and to whom he was devoted, was sent to Lovedale and then went on to train as a nurse in Durban.
There had been a long line of powerful women in the Royal Family. Three of Khama III’s daughters – Baboni, Mmakgama and Milly – had challenged their brother Tshekedi’s authority in the 1920s, arguing that he was authoritarian and cruel. In a letter of complaint to the High Commissioner, they objected that he had revived ‘ridiculous native laws and customs, which as you know Khama had abolished’.32 Seretse’s other half-sister, Oratile, the eldest daughter of the late Kgosi Sekgoma, joined in this protest. Twenty years older than Seretse and a widow, she lived in Francistown, her husband Simon Ratshosa having been banished there by Tshekedi many years earlier. She wrote a further letter to the Resident Magistrate in 1929, in which she argued that Tshekedi had none of the qualities which had distinguished Khama – and that the Government ought ‘to teach him to learn to think in the new ways of new things, to perform his duties as Kgosi’.33
Sekgoma II had shown an enlightened attitude towards his daughter Oratile: when he died, he had left cattle, small stock and money not only to Seretse, but to Oratile as well. She and her aunts argued in a letter to the high commissioner that ‘Khama’s law was equal to both sexes, women had the same right as men. Estates were always proportionally divided to the deceased family, sons and daughters.’34 But when Oratile claimed her inheritance, Tshekedi withheld it from her – just as he had done in the case of her aunts. She wrote a letter of protest to the administration:
Tshekedi has confiscated every one of my cattle without saying a word to me. I am shocked that he has burnt down my houses when I have done him no wrong, and that he has gone further and confiscated my cattle that my father gave me.35
As Ruth waited for permission to travel to Africa in 1949, she was looking forward to meeting her sisters-in-law, Oratile and Naledi, for the first time. When the British High Commissioner, Sir Evelyn Baring, gave instructions that she might travel to Bechuanaland after 23 July 1949, she quickly bought a ticket for the BOAC flying-boat.36 This would take her to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River, between Southern and Northern Rhodesia. From there she would fly to Bechuanaland in a two-seater plane. John Keith had gently warned her not to fly to Johannesburg, where her notoriety as the white wife of Seretse Khama might lead to some unpleasant incidents. This was good advice. John Redfern, a reporter working for the Daily Express, who stopped in Johannesburg on his way to Serowe, was astonished by the invective triggered by even a mention of Seretse’s name:
I had flown into Palmiefontein, Johannesburg’s main airport, from London, and had unwittingly raised a crop of scowls by asking how I could get on to Seretse Khama’s country. ‘God, man!’ whispered an airport official. ‘Don’t mention that name here!’… Seretse was a menace. At the mention of his name jaws jutted, eyes glared, and hatred joined the company.37
But even going to the Victoria Falls was problematic, because the flying-boat usually landed on the Southern Rhodesian side. Sir Godfrey Huggins, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, knew that if Ruth were to disembark there, it would provoke an outcry from the whites of his country. He had been sent a letter from a particularly hostile man, insisting that she be forbidden from landing in Southern Rhodesia:
I submit that this is one of those occasions in which those who understand Africa should protect the Continent against silly women and politicians, who, in their ignorance, have a tendency to lower the prestige of the European races. I am confident that pucka Rhodesians will be glad to hear that our Government will prevent ‘Ruth’ from using our soil to fulfil her desire.38
Huggins took this seriously. He decided to get in touch with Bari
ng, who was a good friend – Baring had been the Governor of Southern Rhodesia from 1942 to 1944, when they had struck up a rapport. He asked Baring to make sure that Ruth would land on the other side of the Falls, in Northern Rhodesia, at a town called Livingstone. From there, he added, she should fly to Bechuanaland, to avoid having to drive through Southern Rhodesia. ‘It would help me (in the event of the lady coming by air)’, he wrote to Baring, ‘if she stayed at Livingstone and flew direct from there to her palace in Bechuanaland. I think you know the background here well enough to make it unnecessary for me to elaborate.’39
‘The lady will arrive at the Falls by British Overseas Air Corporation flying boat on the 19th August,’ wrote Sillery to the Provincial Commissioner in Livingstone, ‘and in order to save further publicity, and possible embarrassment, it has been decided to fly her from Livingstone to Francistown, where Seretse will meet her. May I once more invoke your good offices?’40 The pilot was given instructions to fly along the edge of the Kalahari Desert, in order to keep as far away as possible from Southern Rhodesia.41
Ruth left London on 15 August 1949. The press were still hanging around her flat, at all hours, but she managed to give them the slip. She and Muriel borrowed their father’s car and went late at night to Adolphus Road. Here they parked the car at the end of the road and then collected Ruth’s suitcases – in darkness, because they didn’t dare to use a torch – and put them in the car, which they drove back to Lewisham. Next morning, Ruth went to Waterloo to catch a train for Southampton; she took an ordinary train, not a fast boat train, in case this attracted attention.42