Bathoen

Bathoen, chief of the Ngwaketse, was one of three Tswana leaders who traveled to Britain in 1895 to protect their states from Cecil Rhodes’s expanding power. In the book’s account, he was not merely the beneficiary of imperial policy: by joining Khama and Sebele in a diplomatic campaign, he helped shape the outcome, securing a settlement that kept the chiefs ruling their own people under the Queen’s protection.

Identity and Stakes

Bathoen ruled the Ngwaketse, one of the eight Tswana states that made up Bechuanaland, the territory that would become Botswana after independence in 1966. The Ngwaketse, Ngwato, and Kwena were among the states whose future was at stake when Rhodes began looking toward Bechuanaland. The chiefs considered military resistance impossible, but saw Rhodes’s takeover as a prospect of disaster and exploitation.

The Tswana had accepted Britain’s 1885 declaration of Bechuanaland as a protectorate because they hoped it would shield them from further European incursions, especially from the Boers. Britain, however, regarded the territory chiefly as a route into the interior and wanted to prevent Boer and German expansion without undertaking extensive administration or settlement. That gap between the protection the Tswana sought and the limited commitment Britain initially offered formed the political setting for Bathoen’s mission.

The Mission to Britain

On September 6, 1895, Bathoen arrived at Plymouth aboard the ocean liner Tantallon Castle with Khama and Sebele. The three chiefs then took the 8:10 express to Paddington Station in London. With assistance from the London Missionary Society, they had come to persuade Queen Victoria and the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, to take greater control of Bechuanaland and protect it from Rhodes.

At their first meeting with Chamberlain on September 11, Sebele spoke first, Bathoen next, and Khama last. Chamberlain said he would consider imposing British control as a safeguard against Rhodes. The chiefs then carried their case beyond official meetings, undertaking a speaking tour to build public support. They addressed audiences in Windsor, Reading, Southampton, Leicester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, Bristol, Manchester, and Liverpool. Bathoen’s presence in this joint effort made him part of a campaign that sought leverage not only through negotiation with officials but also through public attention across Britain.

Negotiation and Settlement

The chiefs met Chamberlain again in London on November 6, while Rhodes was preparing the Jameson Raid against the Boer Republic of the Transvaal. Chamberlain’s opposition to the raid, and the crisis it created, may have made him more sympathetic to the chiefs’ position. In the meeting, he discussed their lands, a proposed railway, and the law to be observed in their territories. He said Britain would take only the land needed for the railway, not more. Khama asked to be treated fairly, and Chamberlain promised to guard the chiefs’ interests.

The next day, Edward Fairfield of the Colonial Office clarified the arrangement: Bathoen, Khama, and Sebele would each retain a country in which they could live as before under the Queen’s protection; a British officer would reside with them; and the chiefs would continue to rule their own people much as they had previously. The settlement thus extended British authority without displacing the three chiefs from their local governing roles. Rhodes, outmaneuvered, objected to being beaten by the three African leaders.

Agency and Historical Significance

The book treats the chiefs’ success as more than good fortune. Bathoen and his colleagues chose the lesser of two dangers—stronger British control rather than annexation by Rhodes—and acted by taking their appeal to London. Their ability to undertake that initiative was linked to the unusual authority the Tswana chiefs possessed in comparison with many other tribal leaders in sub-Saharan Africa. That authority rested on the political centralization achieved by the Tswana and, perhaps, on a measure of legitimacy embedded in their institutions.

The settlement mattered because it spared the Tswana both intense indirect rule and the more destructive colonial expansion that could have turned their territory into a reservoir of cheap labor for white miners or farmers. Yet it did not erase racial and economic barriers: in a later example from Bechuanaland, a Tswana farmer, Masire, found that white practice could obstruct African enterprise even where formal restrictions did not tell the whole story. Bathoen’s achievement was therefore consequential but bounded. It helped preserve local political authority at a colonial turning point; it was one part of a longer history whose next critical juncture would come at independence, when Bechuanaland became Botswana in 1966.