Khama III

Khama III, the hereditary chief of the Ngwato, was one of three Tswana leaders who crossed the sea to ask Britain to protect their states from Cecil Rhodes. The bargain they pursued was neither simple submission nor a rejection of all outside power: Khama accepted stronger British control as preferable to Rhodes’s annexation, while seeking to safeguard his people’s land and political institutions. The episode illuminates both his diplomacy and the collective traditions that gave Tswana political life a measure of accountability.

Identity and Political Setting

Khama III ruled the Ngwato, one of eight Tswana states in Bechuanaland, a territory that would become Botswana after independence in 1966. Alongside Bathoen of the Ngwaketse and Sebele of the Kwena, he represented a political order with established institutions and a degree of centralization unusual in the region. Their states had traded with Europeans for much of the nineteenth century, but that contact did not erase their own systems of authority and decision-making.

Britain had declared Bechuanaland a protectorate in 1885. The Tswana accepted the arrangement in the hope that it would shield them from further European incursions, especially those of the Boers, with whom they had clashed since the migration known as the Great Trek began in 1835. Britain, for its part, wanted to block Boer expansion and guard against German influence, while initially regarding the territory mainly as a route into the interior rather than a place worth extensive settlement or administration. The protectorate thus began as a limited and uneasy safeguard, not a guarantee of full protection or self-rule.

The Mission to Britain

The danger sharpened in 1889, when Rhodes’s British South Africa Company began expanding north from South Africa and expropriating large areas that would become Northern and Southern Rhodesia. By 1895, Rhodes was also looking toward Bechuanaland. Khama and the other chiefs believed that rule by Rhodes would bring exploitation and disaster, yet they knew that they could not defeat his power by force. Their chosen alternative was to seek greater British control before Rhodes could annex their lands.

On September 6, 1895, the ocean liner Tantallon Castle docked at Plymouth. Khama, Bathoen, and Sebele disembarked and took the 8:10 express to Paddington Station in London. With help from the London Missionary Society, they had come to persuade Queen Victoria and colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain to protect Bechuanaland. The journey itself was a political act: the chiefs carried their case to the imperial center, seeking to use British authority against a private company’s expansion while preserving their own standing at home.

They met Chamberlain on September 11. Sebele spoke first, followed by Bathoen and then Khama. Chamberlain said he would consider imposing British control to shield the tribes from Rhodes. While awaiting a decision, the chiefs mounted a speaking tour to build public support. They addressed audiences in Windsor and Reading, Southampton, Leicester and Birmingham, and farther afield in Sheffield, Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, Bristol, Manchester, and Liverpool. Their campaign made the chiefs’ appeal visible beyond the Colonial Office and Chamberlain’s immediate circle.

Negotiation and the Railway

The political crisis in South Africa strengthened the chiefs’ position. While they were in Britain, Rhodes was preparing the Jameson Raid, an armed assault on the Boer Republic of the Transvaal that Chamberlain strongly opposed. The episode likely made Chamberlain more sympathetic to the chiefs’ fears. When they met him again in London on November 6, the discussion turned to their lands, the railway, and the law to be observed in their territories.

Chamberlain proposed taking only the land needed for the railway and no more. Khama replied that he would be content if Chamberlain took the land himself. Chamberlain then promised that the railway would be built under his authority, that only the required land would be taken, and that compensation would be paid if the land had value. He also said the line would pass through Khama’s territory fenced in, while insisting that no land would be taken. Khama asked to be treated fairly, and Chamberlain pledged to guard his interests. The exchange shows the limits and character of the chiefs’ immediate achievement: they sought to make British intervention answerable to specific protections, not to endorse an unrestricted seizure of territory.

The following day, Edward Fairfield of the Colonial Office described the settlement: each of the three chiefs would retain a country in which to live as before, under the Queen’s protection; a British officer would reside with them; and the chiefs would continue ruling their own people much as they had. The arrangement placed British authority inside the protectorate but did not replace the chiefs’ local rule. Khama’s diplomacy therefore secured a form of guarded continuity, even as the railway and the resident official marked the reach of imperial power.

Tswana Institutions and Their Survival

Khama’s position is best understood in relation to the political institutions the chiefs were defending. The Tswana kgotla, or council place, was the setting for general assemblies of adult men where matters of tribal policy were discussed. Assemblies considered disputes, quarrels between a chief and his relatives, new levies, public works, and decrees. Participants could speak openly, air grievances, and criticize the chief and his advisers; on occasion, an assembly could overrule the chief’s wishes. Authority was not merely exercised from above: the council provided a recognized forum through which people could make their views count.

The chieftaincy itself was also less rigidly hereditary in practice than its formal rules suggested. Among the Rolong, John Comaroff’s research found that succession rules could be interpreted to remove poor rulers and allow talented candidates to become chiefs. A successful competitor could later be presented as the rightful heir, joining political achievement to a language of legitimate succession. The Tswana proverb captured the principle: “Kgosi ke kgosi ka morafe.” The English rendering given in the book is “The king is king by the grace of the people.” This conception of limited chiefly power and public accountability formed part of the political inheritance that the chiefs sought to preserve against both Rhodes’s expansion and wider colonial intervention.

After the London mission, the chiefs allowed railways to be built in Bechuanaland but continued to restrict British involvement in other areas of economic and political life. Their stance was not opposition to railways in themselves. They recognized that infrastructure under colonial rule would not automatically produce development for the people of Bechuanaland. The later experience of Quett Masire, an enterprising farmer in the 1950s, illustrates the problem: after developing sorghum cultivation techniques and finding a potential buyer across the border in Vryburg, Masire asked to rent two railway trucks at Lobatse. The station master refused at first; after a white friend intervened, he quoted Masire four times the rate charged to whites. Masire abandoned the plan. The episode shows how discriminatory practice, alongside laws restricting landownership and trading licenses, could block African enterprise even where transport existed.

Legacy in Independent Botswana

British rule over Bechuanaland remained limited, and the territory was administered from Mafeking in South Africa. By independence in the 1960s, Tswana states had retained institutions that constrained chiefs and provided some accountability to the people. The new capital, Gaborone, was planned not to wipe out indigenous political practices but to build on them: new kgotlas were planned as the city took shape. The persistence of those institutions was not unique in Africa, but their survival through the colonial period was notable.

The independence movement was led by the Botswana Democratic Party, founded in 1960 by Quett Masire and Seretse Khama, the grandson of Khama III. Most Tswana chiefs and elites joined the party. After independence, the government established the Botswana Meat Commission in 1967, rather than using a marketing board to expropriate ranchers and cattle owners. The commission supported the cattle economy through measures including fencing to control foot-and-mouth disease and promoting exports, which contributed to development and support for inclusive economic institutions.

The later discovery of diamonds brought a further test. Tswana chiefs had tried during the colonial period to block mineral prospecting because they understood that a European discovery of precious stones or metals could end their autonomy. The first major diamond discovery was beneath Ngwato land, Khama III’s traditional homeland. Before the discovery was announced, Seretse Khama changed the law so that mineral rights below the soil belonged to the nation rather than to the tribe. The resulting national claim helped prevent diamond wealth from creating great inequalities and strengthened the process of state centralization. Khama III’s significance in this longer history lies not in a single act of resistance, but in the political inheritance his generation defended: local institutions survived, and later leaders could adapt them to the construction of an independent state.