Joseph Chamberlain

Joseph Chamberlain, Britain’s colonial secretary, became the central British official in the Tswana chiefs’ 1895 effort to protect Bechuanaland from Cecil Rhodes. His response helped turn their appeal into an arrangement under which Britain would assume a protective role while the chiefs continued to rule their own people; the episode also showed that the chiefs were pursuing their aims through direct negotiation and public advocacy, not military resistance alone.

The chiefs’ appeal to British authority

By 1895, Rhodes had turned his attention to Bechuanaland, after his British South Africa Company began expanding north from South Africa in 1889. The Tswana chiefs judged that annexation by Rhodes threatened disaster and exploitation. Unable to defeat him militarily, they chose what they saw as the lesser of two evils: greater British control rather than control by Rhodes. With the London Missionary Society’s help, they travelled to London to ask Queen Victoria and Chamberlain to take greater control of Bechuanaland and protect it from Rhodes.

Chamberlain first met the three chiefs on September 11, 1895. Sebele spoke first, followed by Bathoen and then Khama. Chamberlain said he would consider imposing British control to protect the tribes from Rhodes. That initial response was not the whole of the chiefs’ campaign: while awaiting an answer, they undertook a speaking tour across Britain to build public support for their request.

Negotiation and public advocacy

The chiefs spoke in towns across the country, visiting Windsor and Reading near London, Southampton, Leicester and Birmingham, and the Yorkshire towns of Sheffield, Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford. They also travelled west to Bristol and north to Manchester and Liverpool. The tour carried their appeal beyond the private meeting with the colonial secretary, making the protection of their territories a public question as well as a matter of official negotiation.

Events in South Africa strengthened the urgency of that appeal. Rhodes was preparing what became the Jameson Raid, an armed assault on the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, despite Chamberlain’s strong objections. The account suggests that this conduct probably made Chamberlain more sympathetic to the chiefs’ predicament than he might otherwise have been. On November 6, the chiefs met him again in London, this time speaking through an interpreter.

Land, railway, and protection

In the November meeting, Chamberlain addressed the chiefs’ lands, a proposed railway, and the law to be observed in their territories. He used a map to discuss the railway’s route and said that the British would take only the land required for it. Khama replied that he would be content if Chamberlain took the land himself. Chamberlain then said that he would arrange for the railway to be made by an agent, take only what was necessary, and provide compensation where the land taken had value.

The exchange made the distinction between British protection and Rhodes’s expansion concrete: the question was not simply who would exercise influence, but how much land could be taken and on what terms. Chamberlain said the railway would pass through the chief’s territory but be fenced in, and that no land would be taken. Khama asked him to carry out the work fairly. Chamberlain answered that he would guard the chiefs’ interests.

The settlement and its limits

The following day, Edward Fairfield of the Colonial Office explained the proposed settlement in more detail. Each of the three chiefs—Khama, Sebele, and Bathoen—would have a country in which to live as before under the Queen’s protection. The Queen would appoint an officer to reside with them, while the chiefs would continue to rule their own people much as they had done previously. The arrangement therefore joined an enlarged British protective presence to the continuation of chiefly rule, rather than replacing the chiefs’ local authority outright.

Chamberlain’s intervention belongs to a negotiation in which the Tswana chiefs set the terms of their own appeal: they sought British involvement specifically to forestall Rhodes, built popular support through a nationwide tour, and pressed for limits on land-taking connected to the railway. Their success was not a victory over colonial power in general; the settlement placed the territories under the Queen’s protection and introduced a resident British officer. But it did prevent the outcome the chiefs most feared—absorption into Rhodes’s expanding sphere—and retained their authority over their people. Rhodes’s angry response to being outmaneuvered by three African chiefs underscores the political significance of their campaign and of Chamberlain’s role in the agreement.