Colour Bar

by Susan Williams

  I believe I could help in bringing those plans to a good end and it would be my aim and joy to try and do so.

  He was asked if he would miss the stores, the big football matches, and he replied – as he looked through his sitting-room windows at the bleak and grey February sky – that he could just as easily watch football in Bechuanaland. ‘I think I might put it this way,’ he explained:

  I think I should like it here if I came from my own country on an occasional holiday.

  But as I am living now I feel very much an exile – as though I had been banished here.

  All the time I feel restless – an urge to get back to where I rightly belong.

  ‘I have no doubt,’ he said, that ‘if it rested with the ordinary British people, I should be allowed back any time. But it is the British Cabinet that must give the decision.’ The Bangwato were asking for Ruth back, he added, as well as wanting him: ‘It is only the Government that seems to mind about her being white.’48

  23

  The ending of exile

  Tshekedi was smarting under his restrictions in the Bangwato Reserve and longed to resume political life. The only way of changing this, he knew, would be through a common front with Seretse – but he was adamant that Seretse would have to renounce the kingship. This for him was a sticking point, as he explained in a letter to Creech Jones towards the end of 1955:

  I wish to say that if I am invited by any Party in power to come to London for discussion with Seretse, I will gladly do so, but my attitude would be to inform Seretse that I would not take any part in his case if his line of action is to continue to fight for his return as chief.

  But should Seretse abandon his claim and fight for his return as an individual – ‘then I would support such an action’.1

  The Bangwato now needed Seretse’s return more than ever before. For there had been a new and significant development in Bechuanaland: mining companies were showing interest in the minerals of the Protectorate. Geological surveys had been carried out and copper, gold and silver had been discovered in exploitable quantities.2 The Anglo-American Corporation was particularly interested in the Bangwato Reserve and they were now keen to start negotiations. In March 1956, senior headmen met twice in Serowe to discuss the issue of mineral development with the District Commissioner. He was encouraging them to give their consent to concessions, but the Bangwato – although they accepted the idea of mineral development in principle – opposed any kind of agreement in the absence of Seretse and Tshekedi.3 They were afraid that, without the guidance of the Khamas, they would be taken advantage of by the Government and the mining companies. As well, many of the men had worked in the harsh conditions of the mines of South Africa, and they were determined to make sure that this brutal system was not replicated in their own country.

  Some of the diKgosi in the Protectorate had anticipated the discovery of minerals and prepared for it. In 1953, Kgosi Mokgosi of the Balete had engaged lawyers in Johannesburg to find out what rights the British Government had in relation to their land and to the minerals that might be found on it.4 He was assured that as the law stood the consent of the diKgosi and their people was necessary for any concessions.5 Fenner Brockway made sure that this point was put on record during discussions in the House of Commons in London: Commander Alan Noble, the new Commonwealth Under-Secretary of state, was required to give an assurance ‘that no leases will be given to any firms, South African or otherwise, without the consent and the knowledge of the African Native Authorities concerned’.6

  The Bangwato now had leverage over the British Government. Finally, for the first time since Seretse’s marriage, they had something to offer that the Government wanted. This put Tshekedi and Seretse in a very strong position. On 29 March 1956, three days after the second Kgotla at which the Bangwato refused to grant mining concessions, Tshekedi wrote to David Astor to tell him that he would be coming to the UK with his wife Ella, to take their sons to school in Ireland. He was ‘a shackled man’, he complained, heavily restricted by the Government. The question of the moment for Bechuanaland, he went on, was the exploitation of minerals, to which the people were not opposed – ‘but took the line that they needed advice from the two sons of Khama viz. Seretse and Tshekedi’. It was clear, he said, that

  there was a pronounced spirit of unity where there has been disunity and it would be most advantageous for the Government to try and bring the parties who differed on the effects of the Seretse marriage together. But the Government does not seem to be anxious to do this. Do not be led away to believing that there is any strong objection to mining developments, because there is none.7

  Tshekedi and his family went to Britain in June and met with Seretse and Ruth. Seretse welcomed his proposal that they work together and told him that he was willing to give up the kingship. But he insisted on being able to take part in politics, out of a sense of duty to his people.

  With this agreement from Seretse, Tshekedi now embarked on a relentless series of meetings with his many admirers in England and people of influence. One of the first men he went to see was his legal adviser in the UK, Graham Page, who reported on this meeting to Commander Noble. There were ways, argued Page, in which the Protectorate could be developed – notably, through the mining concessions sought by the Anglo-American Corporation. These concessions particularly affected the Bangwato Reserve, he explained, but the people were hesitant about supporting the project because they did not have their chief. Since Tshekedi had returned to the reserve without trouble, why shouldn’t Seretse return in a similar capacity?8The same argument was being energetically pressed by the Movement for Colonial Freedom. In June it published a glossy pamphlet, Bechuanaland. What Seretse’s Exile Means, with a foreword by Seretse and an introduction by Fenner Brockway. ‘As we colonials have no direct representation in the British Parliament,’ wrote Seretse, ‘our appeal for justice must be directed at the British public, regardless of party beliefs.’9

  On 1 August 1956, just before the summer recess, the banishment of Seretse was raised once again in the House of Commons. James Griffiths repeated his demand that the Government should convene in London a conference of tribal leaders, including Tshekedi and Seretse. But, he argued, a new factor had entered into the situation – the interest of certain mining companies in the minerals in Bechuanaland. And since Bechuanaland was a protectorate, not a colony, the mineral rights were vested in the population living there – ‘the written consent of the Tribes is essential for a concession; indeed, that it is obligatory upon us, by our act of protection, to obtain that consent’. The Tribe would not come to a decision, he added, in the absence of Seretse, and without his position being finally settled. But if an agreement was reached, then the lives of the people in the Protectorate would be transformed.

  Jennie Lee insisted that Seretse be allowed to return as Chief. ‘We must all be impressed by the dignity with which Seretse Khama and his wife have gone through those difficult years,’ she said. ‘It is not easy for a young couple to have to face, early in their married life, all the difficulties which they have had to face.’ But even if Seretse had been ‘far less able and distinguished a man than he is, and his wife Ruth a less lovely and gifted lady than she is’, the moral argument remained. It was time, she argued with conviction, to right the wrong which had been done to the Bangwato. Brockway took up her theme, asking how it was possible for the government to dare to say they held democratic principles:

  A Tribe in Africa, year after year, despite all the circumstances against it, says, ‘We want this man to return as our chief,’ while the Government, claiming to accept democratic principles, have the impudence and arrogance to sit on the Front Bench of a Parliament thousands of miles away, here in Westminster, and say to that Tribe, ‘You have no right to choose your own Chief. We shall not allow him to return and we impose a Native Authority on you.’10

  Bechuanaland, he observed sadly, ‘has become a symbol of the colour bar because of our treatment of Seretse and Ru
th Khama’.

  Wedgwood Benn then sought to push the Labour Party into an irrevocable position of support for Seretse. The Conference that was planned, he said, should not be to discuss if Seretse Khama should be allowed to go home, but how – the conditions under which he would return. ‘The view of my right hon. Friend and the party as understood by myself and others,’ he declared, ‘is that the return of Seretse Khama is something which is now the policy of the Labour Party.’

  Clem Davies, the leader of the Liberal Party, referred to Seretse’s banishment as a ‘great evil’. Another Liberal MP linked this injustice to the one against his uncle: he said he had met Tshekedi that very afternoon and wanted to see something done to put Tshekedi ‘not in charge of his own Tribe but at a higher level, because he is an outstanding African’. Clearly Tshekedi had been working his usual charm on the gentlemen of the British Establishment. Commander Noble, too, expressed his admiration:

  … may I add my word of praise to Tshekedi Khama? All of us know that he was Regent for many years, and we know what a forceful and enlightened person he is. I am very glad to have met him on two occasions during the past few days.11

  Seretse and Tshekedi were now working in partnership. On 14 August, they went together to the Commonwealth Relations Office and asked to see Lord Home. They were told that he was ‘very much pre-occupied with Suez’ – the nationalization by Egypt of the Suez Canal in July 1956, which was perceived as inimical to British overseas economic interests. Nonetheless, a meeting was arranged for the next day.12 The Commonwealth Secretary could hardly refuse their request, as the opposition would make political capital out of any refusal by Ministers to see the leaders of the two Bangwato factions, who were now cooperating with each other. The quarrel between Seretse and Tshekedi was so well known to the British public that one day, when Tshekedi was shopping in London and signed a cheque, the salesman exclaimed, ‘So you’re the wicked uncle!’13

  Uncle and nephew returned to the CRO the following day and handed to the Secretary of State a document in which they both unconditionally renounced for themselves and their children any claim to the kingship of the Bangwato. They added that all the previous differences of opinion between them, relating to questions of law and custom, had been resolved. But they both expected complete freedom to serve their people as members of a Tribal Council. The document ended, ‘We appeal to the Protecting Power to allow both of us to return to our country with our families as full citizens.’14 Lord Home took this document extremely seriously and gave it his full attention, despite the demands of the Suez crisis. He arranged for a telegram to be sent that night to Sir Percivale Liesching, the British High Commissioner in South Africa, in which he commented that, ‘Seretse’s renunciation of Chieftainship is obviously an important development’. He did not seem to realize that it was not a new development: that Seretse had made this very suggestion on several occasions already, to previous Secretaries of State.

  There were aspects of the suggestion that worried Home, especially the question of whether Seretse should be allowed to go home before a Chief had been designated by the Tribe. But he made short shrift of the problem of South Africa, which had assumed so much importance when the issue of Seretse and his white wife had first come up in 1949. The Union’s attitude might well be an issue, he acknowledged in a cable to Liesching – ‘but I think we may have to face whatever objections they might raise’.15

  There were many good reasons for disregarding the views of the Union. In the past few years the South African Government had become a villain in the eyes of many people in the world, especially after Dr Malan was replaced in December 1954 by Johannes Strijdom, who was even more right-wing and had backed Hitler. Policy differences between South Africa and Britain had now become very marked. A few months earlier, in April 1956, the Tomlinson Commission, which had been set up in South Africa to advise on plans for the country’s social structure, had issued a summary report advocating total apartheid, through the creation of so-called Bantu Areas, or Bantustans, as separate ethnic homelands for all African citizens. This policy was intended to excise Africans irrevocably from the body politic and to consolidate the supremacy of whites. It would protect and preserve the status quo, in which three million whites owned 87 per cent of the land. Eight million Africans would be relegated for ever to the remaining 13 per cent, with the least fertile land and a lack of basic amenities.16

  Although racial discrimination was still practised in many countries, observed Father Huddleston, only South Africa ‘openly asserts it as a legitimate and even desirable basis for Government… There can be no doubt, in a Commonwealth of Nations numerically non-European, South Africa is a hideous embarrassment.’17 It was also – as were the white settlers of Kenya and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland – running against the trend of other Western countries. In the USA, ‘Jim Crow’ was starting to be seen as unacceptable by the general population, and when Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, her act of courage sparked a black boycott of the buses. It also triggered a campaign of non-violent protest, led by Dr Martin Luther King, which brought about the outlawing of segregation on buses and the start of a mass movement for civil rights.

  International concern about apartheid focused in June 1955 on the Congress of the People at Kliptown, near Johannesburg, where the Freedom Charter was adopted, which became the programme of the ANC. Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, although they were banned, drifted around the edges of the meeting in disguise as the Charter was recited in three languages, each clause approved by shouts of ‘Africa!’ from the crowd. The Freedom Charter began:

  We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.

  On the second day of the meeting, police with sten guns burst into the crowd and announced that the names of everyone there would be recorded on suspicion of high treason. Later Mandela wrote that the raid that day ‘signalled a harsh new turn in the fight for emancipation’.18

  When John Hatch had examined the Seretse question in 1954, he had consulted various people on the likely reaction of the Union Government if Seretse were allowed to go home with Ruth. The Director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Quentin Whyte, thought that South Africa might simply ignore it, particularly if Seretse did not come back as Chief, although there was a chance that it might be used to whip up reaction against British African policy.19 Julius Lewin, a Lecturer in Native Law at the University of Witwatersrand, believed that the National Government were unlikely to take any kind of position, because of the risks of publicity at the United Nations. Nor, he added, has the ‘atmosphere or temperature here been such as to require the Nats to do anything by force. They are now more securely and safely in the saddle of office than in 1949.’ Seretse’s return as Chief, he acknowledged, might be used as a cry in the republican issue. But, like the transfer of the Protectorates, ‘this question will be raised anyhow in the coming years, not just because of Seretse’.20

  Even the issue of transfer, however, had slipped off the agenda, as far as Britain was concerned: it would have been folly in the mid-1950s for any British Government even to consider the possibility of transferring the High Commission Territories to South Africa. As Prime Minister in 1954, Churchill had made a statement to the House of Commons in which he warned the South African Government against ‘needlessly’ bringing up the incorporation issue.21 The Tomlinson Report had referred to Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland as ‘heartlands’ for the Bantu Areas, but the CRO swiftly and firmly responded, making it clear that the transfer of the HCTs was simply not an option. There was now a consensus outside South Africa and Southern Rhodesia that, as the Freedom Charter of the ANC stated in one of its clauses, ‘The people of the Protectorates – Basut
oland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland – shall be free to decide for themselves their own future.’22

  In June 1956, Strijdom was in London and addressed the South Africa Club on what he described as a ‘great problem’: the survival of the white man and his heritage in southern Africa. To ‘all clear-minded people,’ he said, it should be plain that if the whites in southern Africa, far outnumbered as they were by the non-whites, should allow the control of their countries to pass out of their hands, ‘they would be doomed either to leave or to be absorbed by the huge majority of blacks’. He argued that whereas it had

  taken the European 2000 years or more to emerge from barbarism to his present degree of development, the Negroes and Bantu have during all that period, with few exceptions, clung to their primitive and native way of life. Many decades and probably generations will pass before they will, generally speaking, reach the white man’s stage of development – and that notwithstanding all the assistance that they are receiving.23

  Next day, Strijdom, with Eric Louw, his Minister of External Affairs, met with Lord Home and Commander Noble. He expanded on his themes of the night before, emphasizing the danger to white South Africa if any of Britain’s colonies in Africa were granted self-determination. ‘Any form of political association in one State which gave the blacks political rights and a vote, however qualified,’ he insisted, ‘would be the end of the whites. It might take time but the end would be inevitable. Ninety-nine per cent of the whites in the Rhodesias would share his view.’ Home parried. Time alone, he said, ‘would show whether his system or ours was right but that as political realists we must recognise that his apartheid policy had roused passions which would take time to cool’. Another issue discussed was that of the Protectorates: