Colour Bar

by Susan Williams

  I can see that the Tribe as a whole has not made up its mind to designate a Chief. I have, therefore, decided to disperse this meeting until after the ploughing season is over. You may now go to your lands and plough.60

  ‘My closing speech,’ he reported, ‘was received in complete silence.’61

  Batho had not got the consensus he wanted in favour of Rasebolai. But at least the Bangwato of Serowe had got their Kgotla back. Every day, groups of men met there informally to talk together.62 Life had returned to normal in many ways and the ploughing season passed uneventfully. But life in Serowe had lost its centre. A correspondent for The Times reported that it seemed to have gone downhill. ‘The huts have a dilapidated air,’ he noticed, ‘and where they have fallen into disrepair have not been attended to.’ This was no doubt caused by the problem of drought followed by rains but it also, he thought, ‘reflects the listlessness of the people and is one of the disadvantages of not having a Chief’.63

  V

  Colonial Freedom ‘The BigIssue of This Century’

  21

  A watershed in opinion

  At the end of the 1940s there had been little expression of concern in Britain about the welfare of the people of Africa. But by the start of the 1950s, argued Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican churchman and human rights campaigner working in South Africa, this was starting to change: questions were being asked about the practice of imperial rule and the future of the African colonies. One important reason for this was the growing awareness of the evil of apartheid. Before the election of the Nationalist Party, few people had understood what was at stake in South Africa. After all, wrote Huddleston, Jan Smuts had been one of the great wartime leaders and had also played a major role in drafting the constitution of the United Nations – and he was a South African. Furthermore, even if he had been defeated by Malan in 1948, the fact of Malan’s election was proof of the democratic structure of his country, even if the electorate was an all-white one.

  But since then, there had been a string of laws increasing the divide between whites and blacks and diminishing even further the quality of life of black people. The passing of the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act now meant that all African men were compelled to carry a pass or reference book. Canon John Collins drew attention to these evils in 1952, when he preached a sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral in which he described Malan as ‘this poor wretched man hag-ridden with fear’. After this, the press began to pay serious attention to the issue of racism in a Commonwealth country – that, as Huddleston put it, ‘anti-Semitism and the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis were not the only forms of racism alive and kicking in our world’. It would be hard, said Huddleston, to exaggerate the importance of this change at that time, because it was ‘a kind of watershed dividing the South Africa of the Empire and Commonwealth… from the South Africa in which the majority, being black, had begun their struggle for freedom and deserved support because they were oppressed’. This made people think hard not only about South Africa, but also about the inequalities of British rule in Africa. One could say, believed Huddleston, ‘that it was an awakening in every way comparable to that at the beginning of Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade’.1

  An additional influence on this watershed in opinion was the movement of the Gold Coast towards the installation of an all-African Cabinet Government, which was the first of its kind to be established in British Africa. In 1952, Kwame Nkrumah became the country’s first prime minister. All over Africa, following the end of the war, demands within British colonies for self-rule had grown louder and stronger, and were at last bearing fruit. What had seemed impossible before the war – African independence – was clearly going to become a reality in the near future. This had led to a sense of futility among some colonial administrators: the Colonial Office observed the prevalence of a feeling that ‘the show isn’t going to last much longer anyway and it doesn’t matter’.2

  There was growing concern about racial inequalities and exclusion. A series of minutes between officials at the CO discussed a need to ‘arouse interest in and friendliness towards Africans as human beings (and not only as domestic servants)’, and the CO wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to ask for help with ideas to reduce friction from racial antipathies.3

  The injustices suffered by ‘natives’ in British colonies were exemplified in Kenya. In every sphere of life, there was segregation of Africans, Asians and whites – in terms of where they lived, where their children went to school, and in clinics and hospitals. Nor were they just segregated: essential services for black people were scant and inadequate. Nearly all the good land had been seized by white settlers, who prosecuted the colour bar vigorously. In the early 1950s, these injustices led to an outbreak of unrest which became known as the Mau Mau uprising and which was mercilessly put down by the Colonial Government, under the leadership of Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor – the very same Evelyn Baring who had pushed through the exile of Seretse Khama. As soon as Baring arrived in Nairobi on 30 September 1952 to take up his new appointment as Governor – fresh from his position as the British High Commissioner of South Africa – he was immediately put under immense pressure by the European settlers to crush the rebellion. Just over a week after his arrival, on 9 October, he cabled London to advocate a state of emergency; he also asked for more troops to be rushed to the colony.

  Six months later, Baring had Jomo Kenyatta, who had returned to Kenya from the UK the year before, convicted for being the leader of the ‘terrorist’ movement of the Mau Mau. Kenyatta’s trial, which took place at Kapenguria, was based on fabricated evidence. Baring had set him up, just as he had tried to set Seretse Khama up at the Harragin Inquiry in Bechuanaland in 1949, which effectively served as a rehearsal for Kapenguria.4 Up to this point, the Mau Mau rebellion had been relatively minor. But now, in response to Baring’s ruthless measures, it erupted into a mass movement, leading to a colossal loss of life and suffering by the Kikuyu people.5

  Before Baring’s arrival as governor, the Kenya African Union hadarticulated a clear and firm opposition to the appointment, because of his role in the exile of Seretse. It passed a resolution describing him as ‘an official closely identified with the policy of appeasement of South Africa who has apparently approved South Africa’s racialist policies’. Such a Governor, who had handled Bechuanaland’s affairs so disastrously, stated the resolution, could never be acceptable to Africans – and urged Her Majesty’s Government to appoint someone else.6 But their plea went unheeded.

  As far as Fenner Brockway was concerned, the Mau Mau crisis was of a piece with a larger picture of colonial inequality, like the treatment of Seretse and Ruth Khama. In the summer of 1952, he decided to intensify the campaign to end their exile.7 The Seretse Khama Campaign Committee had served a valuable role, but it was largely a fringe organization and had little impact on mainstream public opinion. What was needed, reasoned Brockway, was an all-party committee, in order to make use of the sympathy and support of well-known people across the political spectrum and from the fields of education, the arts, religion and athletics.

  The outcome of Brockway’s thinking was the creation of the Council for the Defence of Seretse Khama and the Protectorates. He was Chairman, the Vice-Chairman being Jo Grimond, a Liberal MP; the Treasurer was Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Members included the Conservatives Earl Baldwin and Lord Boyd-Orr, and Labour supporters such as the Reverend Sorensen, Lord Stansgate, and the compaigner Sir Richard Acland. Other members included Canon Collins, the cinematographer Frank Byers, Learie Constantine, MacDonald Bailey, the actors Alec Guinness and Dame Sybil Thorndike, the writer Sir Compton Mackenzie, Kingsley Martin, who was the editor of the New Statesman, the playwright and Labour politician Benn Levy, and Charles Njonjo. The Council was not intended to replace the Campaign Committee, which continued its work, but to bring Seretse’s case more directly into the public eye.

  The aim of the Council was primarily to secure ‘the recogn
ition of the right of Seretse Khama to return to Bechuanaland as Chief of the Bamangwato Tribe’, but it also called for the right of Tshekedi to take part in the political life of Bechuanaland. These demands were made within the context of a larger objective: the need to develop all three of the High Commission Territories ‘educationally, socially, and economically, so that they may become models of racial equality and African development’.8 In this way, believed Fenner Brockway, they would be able to influence South Africa, ‘where the colour bar operates so viciously’.9

  Officials at the Commonwealth Relations Office watched the formation of this new Council in dismay. ‘The organisation chiefly concerned hitherto,’ observed one, ‘has been the Seretse Khama Campaign Committee, which has been a small affair under Communist influence’. But the new Council under Fenner Brockway’s chairmanship, they realized, was ‘clearly intended to be a much more influential body with a wider basis’. But there was nothing to be done, ‘except to prepare for the projected assault on the Government’.10 The campaign began in earnest on 16 February 1953, with a deputation to the Commonwealth Secretary. Signatures were collected for a huge petition to Parliament, supported by well-known people including the playwright Christopher Fry, the artist Augustus John, Bertrand Russell, the novelist Ethel Mannin, the actor Michael Redgrave, and A. J. Cummings of the News Chronicle. When 10,800 signatures had been collected, the petition was presented to Parliament on 23 March 1954.11

  For quite a while, CRO officials had been carefully watching meetings at which Seretse spoke; they did not think of him as an instigator, but simply as ‘a pawn in the hands of the “woolly-woollies”’.12 But now, as he started working closely with the Council in the autumn of 1952, his speeches became more powerful and more effective.13‘Whenever Seretse speaks,’ reported the Council in a letter to the people of the Bangwato Reserve, ‘he wins the sympathy and support of the British people.’14 He went all over Britain – to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Sheffield, Port Talbot and other parts of Wales – to tell the British people about Bechuanaland, its people, their customs and their problems.15 Many local newspapers had articles like one in the Yorkshire Post entitled ‘Seretse Khama pays a visit’, with a photograph of Seretse with smiling schoolgirls.16 There was a large meeting at Hammersmith Hospital in London, where Naledi was working as a nurse. His listeners were particularly struck when he told them that in Bechuanaland elderly people were looked after by their families, not put in homes for the aged.17

  The Council was a leading organization in the growing movement for black Africa in the UK. Another organization was the Africa Bureau, set up in March 1952; it was financed by David Astor and directed by Reverend Michael Scott, with considerable help from Mary Benson. Journalists for the Observer, such as Colin Legum and Anthony Sampson, were also involved. Out of the activity that led up to the setting up of the Bureau emerged a book called Attitude to Africa, published by Penguin in 1951. ‘A whole continent is stirring into political life,’ observed an editorial in the Observer, ‘and we in Britain are as directly responsible for the political fate of whole African communities as the people of America are for what happens in their Southern States.’ The Bureau felt particularly strongly about the planned creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, on the grounds that it was opposed by the Africans in the territories. Although it did identify the exile of Seretse as an injustice that needed to be addressed, it was far more concerned about Tshekedi and worked energetically to support him.18

  *

  On 27 February 1953, the Khamas had a second child – a boy, Seretse Khama Ian Khama. His second name was requested by a group of Serowe elders, in memory of the Great Khama III. Seretse Khama Ian’s birth changed Tshekedi’s position in the Bangwato nation, because he superseded Tshekedi in the line of succession after Seretse. On 10 March 1953, when baby Ian was just twelve days old, the Council for the Defence of Seretse Khama called a press conference in a room at the House of Commons, which was attended by Seretse. Cables were read from leading members of the Bangwato, pledging loyalty to Seretse and his son. It was known ‘all round the Ngwato tribe’, said one telegram, ‘that the 4th Khama is born. Again WE humbly request the Government to return our Chief Seretse and family back… We can never change our opinion.’19 Another cable congratulated

  both Chief Seretse Khama and Ruth Khama for having a baby boy whose only name is Khama – Pula! Pula! Pula! We ask that he and the family come and live amongst us. We want to nurse him ourselves… We, the Bangwato, Seretse’s people, want that child here.20

  ‘We are like sheep in a jungle and there being attacked by a leopard,’ was one sad message.21

  Brockway briskly announced the start of a new nationwide campaign to annul the banishment against Seretse.22 Seretse himself spoke briefly, recalling that the chieftainship was hereditary: ‘So long as it is the desire of the tribe that I should be Chief – and information from Bechuanaland indicates that this is so – I am ready to serve them to the best of my capacity.’23

  Towards the end of this busy year, Seretse and Ruth decided it was time to leave Chipstead. With their growing family, they needed more space, andthey also wanted to find a friendlier neighbourhood, where people were less conscious of racial difference. They found a house in Addiscombe, a suburb near Croydon, twelve miles from London, where things started to change. ‘People have seemed more friendly to us,’ said Ruth, relieved. ‘Whenever I go shopping in the market with Seretse, people chat with us, and seem pleased to see us. Little Jacqueline has made friends at school, and she brings them home for little spreads and things.’24 The house had a small strip of garden around it, where the children could play. A special pleasure for Seretse, who badly missed the vast spaces of Bechuanaland, were the open fields nearby, where he and Ruth went horse-riding.25 Brockway often came to visit and was pleased to see that in Addiscombe they were treated by their neighbours ‘without a trace of colour feeling’. Three of the neighbours had cars and they would take it in turns to give the children a lift to school.26

  England was becoming an easier place to live, without the austerity and controls of the early postwar period. Meat stayed on the ration books until July 1954, but other foods that had been rationed for a long time, such as eggs and sugar, were now widely available. Televisions and refrigerators were found in more homes, as well as other modern amenities. By the time of the next election, in 1955, observed Brockway, the Tories were able to say with some truth, ‘You’ve Never Had it so Good.’27

  Every Sunday, Ruth cooked a curry or a joint for lunch and the house was full of friends. The Khamas’ Croydon home, recalled Charles Njonjo years later, was ‘a haven to many people from everywhere’ – Ruth, he said, was very welcoming and proud of her home. Seretse had his ‘own’ pub, where he was popular; he and Charles used to go there on Sunday morning, while lunch was cooking.28 The Khamas were finally able to enjoy a settled family life. People seemed to think, said Ruth, that the pressure of exile must have led to a ‘good old family tiff’, but this was not the case – ‘We have them, of course. But they are mostly over the children. Seretse wants to spoil them. I have to do all the disciplining.’ But they were perfectly united in their marriage. ‘Seretse and I’, she stated firmly, ‘are one race. Colour doesn’t enter into it. It never has.’29

  A reporter from the Evening Standard came to Addiscombe to interview Seretse in their 1936 Tudor-style house, with black beams and leaded windows. In the firelit lounge, she said, leopard-skin karosses hung on the old walls, adding ‘a magnificence that the Tudors never knew’. She heard Seretse telling his children about life in Africa – ‘You don’t like animals,’ accused his daughter Jackie, as he described a lion hunt. ‘Yes I do,’ he explained gently, ‘but lions must be killed because they eat the cattle.’ Then Jackie, wearing jodhpurs because she had just come back from her weekly riding lesson, took ‘a spectacular leap’ into her father’s lap and his reflective face burst into a smile. One thing was certain, said the report
er – this was a marriage that would last. She quoted a crisp comment made by Ruth: ‘All marriage is an experiment. It is not the race, or races, of the couple concerned, but the couple themselves.’30

  ‘Our house became quite a cosmopolitan centre,’ said Ruth. ‘We were visited by West Indians, Africans, Indians, Arabs and Americans.’31 Visitors from Africa included a number of South Africans who were leaders in the struggle against apartheid. Walter Sisulu, the Secretary-General of the ANC, came to Addiscombe during a visit to London for political reasons. He found Seretse especially impressive in his understanding of the South African situation and he raised with him the possibility of reviving political activity in the High Commission Territories.32 Sisulu was accompanied to the Khamas’ home by Lionel Ngakane, a South African film maker who had gone into exile in the UK after his work on the 1951 film of Cry, the Beloved Country; this film of Alan Paton’s novel, starring Sidney Poitier, was a powerful and harrowing portrayal of the suffering caused by racism, and contributed to the growing criticism of apartheid among the British public. Like Seretse, Ngakane was a graduate of Fort Hare and had also been to Wits.