Sebele

Sebele, chief of the Kwena, was one of three Tswana leaders who went to Britain in 1895 to protect their territories from Cecil Rhodes. His role in the delegation helped secure a settlement that left the chiefs ruling their own people under the Queen’s protection, and the book presents their success as the product of Tswana political authority and initiative, not merely good fortune.

A mission to Britain

On September 6, 1895, Sebele arrived at Plymouth aboard the ocean liner Tantallon Castle with Khama of the Ngwato and Bathoen of the Ngwaketse. The three chiefs took the 8:10 express train to Paddington Station in London. They represented three of the eight Tswana states that made up Bechuanaland, later Botswana. Their journey was a deliberate appeal for greater British protection before Rhodes could bring the territory under the control of his expanding British South Africa Company. The Tswana had accepted Britain’s declaration of Bechuanaland as a protectorate in 1885 partly in the hope of protection from further European encroachment, especially from the Boers. British interest, however, was limited: the territory mattered chiefly as a route to the interior and a means of checking rival expansion. When Rhodes’s company began pushing north in 1889, the danger changed. By 1895, the chiefs judged that annexation by Rhodes would bring exploitation and loss of control. Unable to defeat him militarily, they chose to seek stronger British oversight as the lesser of two dangers, travelling with help from the London Missionary Society to appeal to Queen Victoria and Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.

Speaking and negotiating

At their first meeting with Chamberlain on September 11, Sebele spoke first, followed by Bathoen and then Khama. Chamberlain said he would consider imposing British control to protect the tribes from Rhodes. The chiefs did not rely on private negotiations alone: they then undertook a speaking tour to win wider support. They addressed audiences in Windsor and Reading, Southampton, Leicester and Birmingham, and travelled through Yorkshire to Sheffield, Leeds, Halifax and Bradford, as well as to Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool. The political circumstances shifted while they campaigned. In South Africa, Rhodes prepared the Jameson Raid, an armed assault on the Transvaal that Chamberlain strongly opposed. The episode likely made Chamberlain more sympathetic to the chiefs’ case. When they met him again in London on November 6, the discussion included their lands, a proposed railway, and the law to be observed in their territory. Chamberlain said that Britain would take only the land needed for the railway. Khama asked to be treated fairly, and Chamberlain promised to guard the chiefs’ interests.

Settlement and significance

The following day, Colonial Office official Edward Fairfield explained the arrangement: each of the three chiefs would retain a country in which to live as before, under the Queen’s protection; the Queen would appoint a resident officer; and the chiefs would continue to rule their own people much as they had. For Sebele, the outcome meant protection without the immediate displacement of his authority. Rhodes, outmaneuvered by the chiefs, objected to being beaten by them. The settlement did not make Bechuanaland free of racial and economic discrimination. The book describes a later incident in which a black farmer, Masire, was charged four times the white rate to move his crop by rail after a station master at Lobatse reluctantly agreed to rent him trucks. But Bechuanaland avoided both Rhodes’s annexation and the more intensive colonial expansion that turned parts of South Africa into reservoirs of cheap labor. The chiefs’ intervention helped shape this difference. The book treats that intervention as a critical juncture made possible by existing Tswana institutions. Compared with many other tribal leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, the chiefs possessed unusual authority, rooted in a greater degree of political centralization, and perhaps unusual legitimacy through the measure of pluralism embedded in their institutions. Sebele’s journey to London was therefore more than an appeal to imperial power: it was an exercise of local political capacity at a moment when the territory’s future could still be altered. The settlement did not determine Botswana’s later success, which depended on developments after colonial rule, but it helped prevent a worse starting point.