Colour Bar

by Susan Williams

  After Ruth’s arrival, a delegation of elders asked Mrs Page-Wood, the proprietress of Serowe’s largest store, to teach her something about traditional customs. Mrs Page-Wood was fluent in Setswana and knew more about the life of the Bangwato than most other whites. But she felt she could not help: ‘You are asking more of me than I can do,’ she told the elders, but she sent Ruth a set of flowered dinner plates to show willing. Mrs Page-Wood had definite ideas of what the queen should do – she would have to

  lead the women with water on her head. She must choose the songs at harvest time. She must be first to smear the floor with cow dung – not much, but a little as a symbol of cleanliness. The people may appeal to her in any trouble, and she must intercede with the chief on their behalf. She is her husband’s menial, part of his job.21

  Mrs Page-Wood believed that Ruth’s life as the wife of the Chief looked pretty hopeless.

  Seretse wanted to improve the lives of his people and to bring improvements in the form of education and health care – the Cape Times had described him just before the third kgotla in June 1949 as ‘a modern young man with progressive ideas’.22 Very quickly, Ruth, too, was joining in discussions about what needed to be done. ‘Ruth and I,’ said Seretse to Margaret Bourke-White, who had come to Serowe to write an article on the Khamas for Life, ‘think alike about these things.’23 A rector of the Bangwaketse had great hopes for the work that Ruth could do. In a letter to Naledi ya Batswana, he argued that life in Bechuanaland was no better than in South Africa:

  The good Tswana customs have gone with the forefathers. I think Seretse’s white wife would do much to help right the wrongs of our territory and her appeals for better conditions would be listened to better. The wages paid the workers here are lamentably low.24

  ‘It would take me years to introduce all the reforms I want,’ said Ruth sadly. ‘The Bangwato may have had Queen Victoria’s protection all these years,’ she argued, ‘but precious little care.’ She was especially concerned about the hard lives of the women, who fetched water and wood, cooked, ploughed and looked after the children and the old people. ‘I am more convinced than ever that I, as the chief’s wife, could do so much for the women,’ said Ruth. ‘There’s no social life for them. The men have their kgotlas, but the women have nothing. They are just chattels. They must have a status.’ She went on to describe the conditions endured on the reserve:

  There are few, if any, organised sports. No radios or gramophones. There is no compulsory education. Hygiene and health are practically unknown subjects. There are no welfare centres or clinics worth mentioning. There is a terrific need of these things among the Bamangwatos.

  She contrasted these deprivations with the comforts of the British officials: ‘At the Residency there is a magnificent flower garden – but there are no proper roads in Serowe.’ The stores, too, she thought, were an affront to the community. The white traders did a good trade with the Africans and were able to send their children to expensive boarding schools in the Union and to drive smart cars; and their homes, though not elegant, were comfortable.25 But the ‘shacks that go for stores’ were a disgrace. ‘When I think of all the money that passes over the counters, year in, year out,’ she said, ‘I fume every time I have to enter the mouldy old places.’26 This tendency to ‘fume’ was a difference between Seretse and Ruth: for he rarely became angry, whereas Ruth lost her temper. ‘Perhaps that is why we have got on so well together,’ reflected Ruth years later. ‘Seretse is patient, peace-loving and slow to anger; I am hot-tempered.’27

  ‘We are extremely happy,’ wrote Ruth to Betty. But they found the ambiguity of Seretse’s position difficult to manage. ‘Although the Gvt. don’t recognise Seretse as chief,’ Ruth told Betty, ‘the tribe do, so he has all his work cut out for him.’ Duty was always calling him, she added proudly.28 Noel Monks accused the Commonwealth Secretary of hypocrisy. The Administration was relying on Seretse to support their work, he objected, as if he had been installed:

  Your representatives… told Seretse: ‘You’re not chief yet’ – but every day they went to him for help in running things.

  Seretse could have turned them down flat, and even greater chaos than there is now in this country could have resulted.

  ‘But he sportingly played along,’ said Monks, ‘and used his influence for good.’29

  Meanwhile, Ruth had settled into a daily routine as a Serowe house-wife. ‘Groceries and greengroceries, and bread, here,’ she informed Betty, ‘is much more expensive than in England, but meat and eggs are very plentiful, and very cheap. Eggs are a penny each.’ She enjoyed cooking their meals, which Seretse put on the table. She was making plans for ecru lace curtains to go with a rug she was having made of twenty lion skins; Seretse had given out the skins to the villagers, who were softening them up with fat and cattle brains.30 ‘The countryside here is very pretty and lovely,’ she exclaimed in pleasure. ‘We have been horse riding a few times.’31 She had planted a little English flower garden but was finding it hard to keep the seedlings alive, because of the shortage of rain.32

  ‘I’d have been a dumb blonde indeed,’ said Ruth, ‘if I failed to sense the great love the majority of the tribe, particularly the younger generation, have for Seretse.’33 Wherever Seretse and Ruth went in the reserve, people rushed to greet them. ‘I have seen old Bamangwato women fall on one bony knee, clutch at the hem of her flowered frock and kiss it,’ wrote Redfern, ‘as she was striding from her car to the stores or the Post Office.’ When husband and wife appeared together in their car – the apple-green Chevrolet – ‘Bamangwato would jump up in front of the radiator as though they had been concealed underneath trapdoors.’ The women danced and ululated.34 In the UK, Learie Constantine commented on the easy way in which Ruth had settled into Serowe. ‘These Africans would still have raised objections if they had found in Ruth anything to disapprove,’ he pointed out. ‘They did not. They liked her.’35 She was accepted as the Kgosi’s wife and as the mother of the people – Mohumagadi.

  But the European community did not like her. John Redfern witnessed their hostility at a film show in the Palapye hotel. Once a week at the Palapye hotel, where many of the whites’ social events took place, wrote Redfern,

  they put on ‘the bioscope’. The old-fashioned word is current in Southern Africa. Like many things in that region the word is forty years behind the times.

  It was ‘the bioscope’ on my second night. The film, a shockingly old number with Lon Chaney in the leading role, was shown in the lounge of the small hotel. Outside, young Africans pressed their noses against the meshed windows and strained to get a view of the marvels of the screen.

  Africans were not allowed inside, though an exception was made for Seretse – the white community assumed he would be Kgosi and they needed his consent to trade in the Bangwato reserve.

  Inside, Redfern listened to the conversation of the white men who were drinking at the bar:

  A young Afrikaner railway clerk wearing the same shape of beard as the Voortrekkers wore 100 years before, was boasting heavily of what he would do should Seretse turn up with ‘his woman’. Seretse had been an occasional visitor to the movies. But it would be another thing if he came along this time with the woman.

  The beefy Afrikaner and his friends fumed over their beer and cheap brandy, and began to rant about white civilisation. Their language was vigorous, and occasionally disgusting. Although they normally spoke in Afri kaans, they switched to English this night because there were English people in listening range.

  Then, just as the film began, the screen was momentarily blotted out by two shadows: Ruth and Seretse, quietly taking their places in a couple of chairs reserved for them by Mrs Shaw. ‘They sat there,’ observed Redfern, ‘holding hands just like a couple in a cinema in Purley. At the interval, one of Mrs Shaw’s party fetched soft drinks from the bar round the corner.’ The boasting men at the bar, however, did nothing. They knew that ‘Seretse and his woman’ had arrived, ‘but they were con
tent to stick to their boasting. They had a final round and then they too took their places to watch Mr Chaney’s exploits. It must have cost them a great effort.’36

  To Seretse, the white traders were respectful. They spoke no ill of him – at least, when their servants were in earshot. But some of them, observed Redfern, were predicting that within three months the tribe would ‘put something’ in Ruth’s tea or that within six months Seretse would tire of her and seek consolation in his own tribe. Red fern also noticed that many of them, who had known Seretse from when he was a small boy, liked him as a person. But his wife was a different matter – she had let down her race and had broken the unwritten rules of their community. They were polite to her, out of deference to Seretse, but they smouldered with resentment. One day, when Ruth was driving through Serowe, she felt faint in the heat and asked a passer-by to fetch her a glass of water from one of the stores. He went to get her one and then, feeling better, Ruth went on her way. Later, when the incident was recounted to Redfern, a white woman nastily said to him, ‘If she thought she was going to get invited inside by a trick like that, she was dead wrong.’37

  But Ruth did have some white friends, including Phineas McIntosh, the man who had been flogged by Tshekedi in 1933 for fighting over native women. As much as anything else, he had been punished for not respecting the colour bar against miscegenation, so they had something in common. Doris Bradshaw and her husband Alan, who worked for the Native Recruiting Corporation in Johannesburg, which recruited local labour to work in the gold mines of South Africa, became special friends.38 ‘When we knew Seretse had married a white girl,’ wrote Alan to Doris’s sister,

  we knew she was going to face many difficulties in a strange and foreign country… We made a point of doing all we could for her. Seretse I have known for years and he is a good lad. I like many of his ideas for the future of his people. Our home was always open to them and they came to us very often.39

  But the Bradshaws lived in Palapye. ‘The Serowe Europeans,’ said Doris, ‘just about ignored her, only Stan Woodford and his wife and Phil McIntosh and his wife would even speak to her.’40

  Sillery laid the blame for this on Ruth herself. ‘A good many stories are current about Mrs Khama,’ he reported to Baring, ‘which, if true, indicate that she is not managing her racial relations as delicately as one would have wished.’ He was also troubled by Seretse’s wish for ‘European’ alcohol, which Africans were not allowed to buy or drink. For unlike Khama III and Tshekedi, Seretse was not teetotal. It was a ‘minor but tiresome matter’,41 complained Sillery, who argued that

  it is not only against the law but it is also strictly against Khama’s most stringent edict against liquor of any kind… While admittedly Khama’s law is now more honoured in the breach than in the observance, since the Bamangwato tipple as freely as anyone else, at the same time Government cannot abet an offence against tribal tradition any more than it can break its own law.42

  On the day that Ruth arrived in Serowe, Seretse’s uncle Tshekedi went into voluntary exile – ‘for as long,’ he announced, ‘as the white woman Seretse has married stays here’.43 Tshekedi and the headmen who were leaving made a public declaration about the crisis before they left. They were compelled to take this ‘drastic step’, they said, not because they did not love their country, but because of their concern for the future of the Protectorate. Nor did they challenge the position of Seretse as heir-apparent, but they questioned the legality of the steps that had been taken by his supporters. The administration, worried that violence between the two camps would break out, were maintaining a high level of police in Serowe: ‘three Europeans and 37 African ranks’.44

  About forty senior men of the Bangwato went with Tshekedi, with their families and their cattle. They were headed for Rametsana, in the Bakwena Reserve, about 200 miles to the south of Serowe and two miles outside the Bangwato Reserve. The Bakwena territory was the domain of Kgosi Kgari. Rametsana, reported the London Observer, lay on the ‘unfriendly fringe of the Kalahari Desert… everywhere sand lies ankle-deep like powdered mud’; it was as ‘inaccessible as it is friendless… sprawled among the leafless camel-thorn trees’. In this wilderness, almost entirely uninhabited, was a ‘thirstland given over almost entirely to herds of impala, springbok, ostriches and lions’.45

  ‘If we had stayed,’ recalled one of the men who went with Tshekedi, years later,

  there would have been bloodshed… This has always been an African tradition. Whenever it was felt that tensions had built up, either an uncle or son would remove himself from the main body of the tribe and this has recurred so frequently and is so much a part of our history, that the stories are really endless.

  But it was very hard to go into exile:

  I was among those two hundred and what at first seemed a joke, turning our whole life upside down. My father had died, so I packed up with my wife, mother and family. Tshekedi bought four red trucks and the women and children were transported on them, while the men took wagons and their cattle on foot.

  ‘Those of us who left,’ he added, ‘had all been at the head of the tribal administration – senior treasurers, tax collectors, heads of tribal police and so forth – and we’d all been in a position to judge the quality of Tshekedi’s character.’ Rametsana was infested with lions, which ‘used to come right inside the village and kill our cattle – I was the first man to shoot a lion there!’ They had to start from scratch and build a school. ‘It was not a question of loving power or position, which we all had,’ he said. ‘It was a question of moving off with a man we could not do without. It takes a man years to build his home, so you can see what it cost us. That is our history and that is the way our history always turned out. It broke our lives.’46

  The world was watching events in Serowe. For many months, the village had been flooded with reporters, who were sending regular reports to Britain, the USA, and other countries. ‘The little wooden post office,’ said Noel Monks, ‘where an ex-Royal Navy signaller did service as postmaster and telegraph operator – and yeoman service it was! – became the hub of the sprawling mud-hut capital.’ There was so much traffic over the single telegraph line to the outside world, that extra operators had to be sent down from Salisbury, 500 miles away to the north. ‘I always felt that the thirty or so Europeans in Serowe resented our intrusion on their back-bush privacy,’ added Monks. ‘They certainly resented both sides of the Seretse Affair being sent out to the world, having been used to one side only, the Administration’s.’47

  It was quite true that some of the journalists who came to Serowe over the next few months gave the Khamas’ side of the Seretse Affair. Noel Monks was sympathetic, especially towards Ruth. ‘You can’t help admiring her,’ he said. ‘She’s not a tart, she’s a respectable girl with ideals.’48 But this was not true of all the journalists, and certainly not of Fyfe Robertson, who came to Serowe to write a feature for the British magazine Picture Post. Robertson, tall and thin in his khaki safari outfit, was uncomfortable about the Khama marriage. ‘One of our strongest taboos, particularly to a girl of Ruth’s class,’ he told his readers, ‘is the marriage of a white girl and a black man.’ He disliked Ruth:

  the more I saw of her at Serowe the less I liked her… She is of medium height, with hair between corn and red, the very fair complexion that often goes with this… She often uses, when speaking, an appealing and beautiful turn of the lips, and her voice is good but monotonous.

  ‘Most people’, he said – referring to the small numbers of Europeans in Serowe – ‘thought her laugh affected. She appears to take quick dislikes, and to nurse them tenderly. Her humour takes the form of sarcasm, aimed at friend or foe, and she goes embarrassingly out of her way to be cutting to people she dislikes.’ But he had some grudging praise. ‘Though she can be peremptory with them, I liked the way she addressed her servants,’ he said. And he could not help but admire her for her courage: ‘Few women would bear up as she did under her difficulties.’ He was sur
e, too, that ‘Ruth is very much in love with Seretse’. His personality, he thought, ‘was much more pleasing’ than Ruth’s:

  He will be a big man, for already he is thickening about the hips. His complexion is surprisingly light, and his face is Negro rather than Negroid – he has not the finer features, showing Nilotic influence, found among many Africans. His lips, over fine teeth, are thick, the lower one rather pendulous. His upper lip is long, his nose short, broad, flat. He has wit, a quick intelligence, wide knowledge and a sense of humour, proof against misfortune. He never breaks a promise.

  ‘He is obviously,’ he added, ‘deeply in love with Ruth.’49

  Margaret Bourke-White was very sympathetic to Seretse and Ruth, although she had difficulty persuading Ruth to be formally interviewed or to have her photograph taken. ‘I hate to disappoint you,’ wrote Ruth politely in a note, ‘but I just don’t want to have my picture taken. Please understand that this is not personal, but drop in on us any-time to sample my coffee.’50 Finally, after long weeks of argument, Margaret told Ruth that getting a story in Life would help her husband. Ruth went to ask Seretse if he thought so and when he said that he did, she finally agreed.51 Margaret thought that Seretse had been on her side all the time: during one of their conversations, he had wandered in from time to time and said with great amusement, ‘Haven’t you girls come to a decision yet?’52