Engevakeci Kingdom

The Ngwaketse state was one of eight Tswana states in Bechuanaland, and one of three whose chiefs traveled to Britain in 1895 to forestall annexation by Cecil Rhodes. Its history in the account shows how Tswana leaders used diplomacy to protect their territory while defending institutions that combined political centralization with collective decision-making and limits on chiefly authority.

Position among the Tswana states

The Ngwaketse was among the eight Tswana states that comprised Bechuanaland, the territory that would become Botswana after independence in 1966. Its chief Bathoen traveled to Britain with Khama of the Ngwato and Sebele of the Kwena. Their mission was to protect their own states and five others from Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company was expanding north from South Africa and had turned its attention toward Bechuanaland by 1895.

The campaign for protection

Britain had declared Bechuanaland a protectorate in 1885. The Tswana accepted this arrangement in the hope that it would shield them from further European incursions, especially those of the Boers. The British, meanwhile, sought to block Boer and possible German expansion without undertaking extensive administration or settlement themselves. Rhodes’s growing ambitions changed the stakes: the chiefs judged that they could not defeat his company militarily and chose the alternative they considered less dangerous—greater British control rather than annexation by Rhodes.

With help from the London Missionary Society, Bathoen and the other chiefs went to London to ask Queen Victoria and colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain to protect Bechuanaland. On September 11, 1895, they met Chamberlain, with Sebele speaking first, Bathoen next, and Khama last. Chamberlain said he would consider imposing British control. The chiefs then carried their case to audiences across Britain, speaking in towns from Windsor and Southampton to Sheffield, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool.

The settlement preserved a measure of local rule: each chief was to retain a country in which to live and rule his people much as before, under the Queen’s protection and with a British officer resident among them. Rhodes objected to being outmaneuvered by the three chiefs. Their success was not independence from Britain, but it prevented the immediate transfer of their territories to Rhodes’s company and left the chiefs with authority over their own people.

Political institutions and participation

The Tswana states had developed institutions that the account describes as unusually centralized by regional standards, yet also marked by collective decision-making. The kgotla, or council place, was where adult men assembled to discuss tribal policy. The matters raised included disputes, disagreements between a chief and his relatives, new levies, public works, and decrees. Anyone could speak, and the assembly could overrule a chief’s wishes. The institution therefore gave people a forum to voice grievances and placed practical constraints on chiefly power.

Chieftaincy, too, was not simply hereditary in practice. Although rules appeared to specify succession, they could be interpreted to displace an ineffective ruler and allow a more capable candidate to become chief. A successful claimant might later be presented as the rightful heir, but political authority depended in part on achievement and acceptance. The Tswana proverb “Kgosi ke kgosi ka morafe” expressed this relationship: the king was king by the grace of the people.

Preserving room for self-government

After the London mission, the chiefs continued trying to maintain their independence from Britain and preserve their own institutions. They conceded the construction of railways in Bechuanaland but limited British intervention in other parts of economic and political life. Their position was not a rejection of technology itself; it reflected their concern that infrastructure under colonial control would not, on its own, bring development to the territory.

The Ngwaketse’s significance in this account is thus bound to a larger institutional contrast. Its chiefs negotiated with imperial powers from a position of military weakness, but they did not simply accept the loss of local political authority. The kgotla and the constraints it placed on chiefs offered a basis for participation that the chiefs sought to preserve against both Rhodes’s expansion and deeper British intervention.