Colour Bar (27 page)

Although we were naturally polite to each other, there was no fraternization, for the racial barriers in Southern Africa were still high and we spent the
evenings apart. One day I ventured to ask him for an evening meal in the bush and he accepted, but I did not dare tell Forbes MacKenzie of this grave social transgression.

The tour was pleasant and uneventful until they reached Mahalapye. They stopped at the police station, just outside the village, when Seretse said he wanted to visit the Kgotla in the village and to see his uncle, Manyaphiri. Fairlie told him he could not agree to this, because the Administration had expressly forbidden any kind of meeting. Then Seretse's temper snapped. He shouted that he would go anyway – and jumped into his truck. Time stopped still for Fairlie as he waited to see in which direction Seretse would go:

Just ahead of the police station there was a fork in the road. One led to the village, the other to the Tuli Block. A lot happened in the next few seconds. Seretse considered the pros and cons of entering Mahalapye, while I prayed that he would resist the temptation.

Seretse
did
resist the temptation: he took the other road, to the Tuli Block, and Fairlie heaved a sigh of relief. He was immensely grateful to Seretse. A few days later, he received a note of congratulations from Sir Evelyn, on the way he had handled Seretse. But if any congratulations were due, thought Fairlie, ‘they belonged to Seretse for his mature bearing and good nature'.
⁵²

Seretse had just got back from his tour of the cattle-posts when – several weeks before their baby was due – Ruth went into labour. On the morning of Monday, 15 May, she lay in bed feeling restless. For four hours, from three to seven, she dozed, occasionally waking with a pain in her back. By seven she decided to see Dr Moikangoa. At first he thought it was a false alarm. But at nine o'clock she was admitted into the general wing of the Serowe hospital. ‘I could have gone in the European wing,' she explained later, ‘but I chose the tribal wing because I wanted to encourage Bamangwato women to accept the new world of hygiene that medical progress had brought to their country.'
⁵³
Ruth wanted to set an example, as Seretse's wife, because the maternal and infant death rates were very high in the Protectorate and many women were suspicious of modern medicine.

The news of Ruth's confinement reached Seretse at lunchtime. He
rushed off to find Peto and his lorry, which they quickly filled with fuel for the nine-hour drive to Serowe, 250 miles away. By 2.30 p.m. they were ready and went to collect the pass which local officials had arranged, giving Seretse permission to go home. At first, Seretse took the wheel. But after just five miles he drew to a halt and asked his uncle to take over. He was so anxious to get to the hospital and in such a state of excitement that he had been driving too fast and recklessly along the dirt roads. He knew that if he carried on, they would never get to the hospital at all.
⁵⁴

But Ruth had given birth before they even left Lobatse. At 1.25 p.m., after a quick and easy labour, she welcomed their daughter into the world – a healthy 7lb 4oz.
⁵⁵
Ruth was euphoric. But she desperately needed to see her husband and refused to go to sleep until he had arrived. Concerned that she should rest, Dr Moikangoa injected her with a powerful sedative. But she willed herself not to sleep. Fourteen hours later, when Seretse arrived, she was still awake. He was given the good news that mother and daughter were well and told that Ruth was sedated. But when he and the doctor looked in on her, she shouted out, ‘Seretse!' He rushed over and clasped her in his arms. As he held her, she fell asleep.
⁵⁶

Seretse was overjoyed with his new daughter – ‘a little crinkle-faced baby,' he said with pleasure.
⁵⁷
‘Everyone said how like her father she was,' said Ruth. ‘She had jet black hair and even her father's snub nose.' They named her Jacqueline Tebogo. Tebogo, meaning ‘thankfulness' in Setswana, was the name of Seretse's mother, and quickly became a popular name for girls born that year in the Bangwato Reserve, as people celebrated the birth of their Kgosi's daughter.
⁵⁸

There was immense relief at the CRO and in the High Commissioner's Office that the Khama baby was not a boy, who would then be next in the line of succession after Seretse. As early as January 1949, before Ruth had even fallen pregnant, Clark had referred to the damage that would be done if Seretse were to ‘produce a half-caste heir – a matter in which we are now powerless'.
⁵⁹

Seretse had been given permission to stay for a month in Serowe. For the first week, Ruth was in hospital and he went to see her and their baby three times a day. Then he brought them home.
Life
magazine described Seretse's pride as he went to collect his family:
‘He took Ruth's arm and supported her as she walked unsteadily to a car to be driven to the six-room bungalow which she and Seretse had expected to make their home.'
⁶⁰

‘We, the press, who had hounded this couple for nearly two years,' recorded Monks, ‘were waiting at the bungalow to welcome them home. I have never seen Ruth look prettier, or happier, than on the day she brought Jacqueline home. The marriage that had rocked Africa seemed to be making out fine.' Every day, the women of the Bangwato came to the house to see the baby and to pay their respects, bringing gifts.
⁶¹

When the time came for Seretse's return to Lobatse, he and Ruth decided to go together – now that Jacqueline had been born, the prospect of separation was too painful to bear. ‘So we settled in Lobatse,' said Ruth. ‘At times it seemed that we had hardly left Serowe, for so many of the tribe followed us down to camp near our new house.'
¹
This house was the ‘hovel' – as Monks described it – that had been arranged by the Administration for Seretse. It was hardly suitable for a one-month-old baby. ‘In any decent community,' said Monks, ‘the place would have been condemned. But the only hotel in Lobatse wouldn't put them up, so they had to live somewhere…'
²

Lobatse was very different from Serowe – it was a ‘European' town like Francistown, where black people had to live in the ‘African location'. Whereas in Serowe the white traders had to be careful not to offend Seretse, there was no such constraint on the whites in Lobatse, who looked on the Khamas with loathing. A few weeks after their arrival in the town, a journalist called Weighton, who had come to Lobatse to do a story for the London
Daily Express
, telephoned Baring in Pretoria in a state of hot indignation. He angrily complained that the Lobatse Hotel had refused to serve him lunch because of his guest – Mrs Seretse Khama. The hotel proprietor, said Weighton, had said this refusal was ‘in accordance with British Government's policy'.
³

Baring, who was continually worried about publicity, ordered an immediate investigation and Richard Sullivan, the District Commissioner, went to see the proprietor. He discovered that Weighton, with his wife and another couple, had been staying at the hotel and, after leaving it briefly, had returned with Mrs Khama as their guest and had ordered a round of drinks in the lounge. A little later the
proprietor anxiously noticed the group talking to the head waiter and went to investigate. When he discovered that they had reserved a table in the dining room for lunch, including Mrs Khama, he approached Weighton. It would have been more courteous, he told him, if he had come to see him about his wish for Mrs Khama to eat in the hotel – and then suitable arrangements could have been made. He could, for example, have arranged for them to eat in a separate room. This blatant endorsement of the colour bar made Weighton furious. He asked for his bill and the party left the hotel.
⁴

The fact that Weighton had stormed out of the hotel, Sullivan observed, had actually saved the proprietor. For it forestalled any need to refuse serving lunch to Mrs Khama – if he had done so, there would have been some justification for a charge of discrimination. For although segregation was practised freely by the whites, it was not allowed by law, as was the case in South Africa. Defending the proprietor, Sullivan said that he lived at Lobatse and had to consider the effect of his actions on his livelihood: ‘European feeling is still as strong as ever against Mrs Khama. Were she to be served once, she would expect to be served again and her presence in the hotel might expose her to unpleasantness if not to insults.'
⁵

One morning in Lobatse, when Seretse and Ruth were in a shop, she noticed that people were staring and that everybody had gone quiet:

Seretse went up to an African standing by the counter, said ‘Hello, uncle,' and turning to Ruth, called, ‘Come and meet my uncle.' Ruth had met many uncles and thought, as she shook hands, that this was yet another, until, instead of greeting her with ‘Dumela Mma,' he said ‘How do you do'. This, then, was Tshekedi Khama.
⁶

Later that day, Tshekedi visited their home to see baby Jacqueline. Ruth said afterwards that she had found him ‘perfectly charming'.
⁷
Until now, they had never met and he had appeared to be implacably opposed to her, but this was the start of a reconciliation between uncle and nephew, after nearly two years of acrimony. They reached an agreement about their cattle: that Tshekedi would hand over to Seretse the Sekgoma estate and that Seretse waived all claim to the Khama estate. This meant that the lawsuit and the hearing at Lobatse
was off.
⁸
The two men then spent many weeks riding round the vast, widespread cattle-posts together. ‘Seretse has been to me during our recent trip together my Seretse of old,' wrote Tshekedi with heartfelt pleasure to his lawyer Buchanan.
⁹

But Tshekedi noticed that local officials were perturbed to see the two men coming together. They ought to have been delighted, if the animosity between the two men had been the genuine reason for Seretse's exile, as the Government had claimed. But as it had been merely a pretext, they regarded their reconciliation as a threat to the viability of the Government's cover story. Tshekedi and Seretse understood this weakness in the Government's case and started to talk together about the possibilities of a joint strategy to deal with the Government.
¹⁰

Meanwhile, in the Bangwato Reserve, the boycott was growing from strength to strength: no one would serve on the Finance Committee, School Committee or Livestock Improvement Centre Committee. There were no ‘native' taxes coming in, except from Bangwato miners in South Africa, whose tax was taken at source.
¹¹
Forbes MacKenzie called a meeting in the Kgotla in Serowe, but only one person turned up. This made his job impossible, he seethed, especially as there had been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and he needed to regulate the movement of cattle. As a last resort, he drove through the village in his Land Rover, broadcasting instructions through a loud-hailer; but his instructions were politely ignored. When he sent word to Mahalapye that he was going to hold a meeting there, Manyaphiri sent a message that he was too ill even to read the District Commissioner's telegram.
¹²

MacKenzie decided it was time to force the Bangwato into cooperation. He sent an official to withdraw sales permit books from all the villages refusing to present their cattle for inspection. If he found the culprits, he said, he would deal with them – and if there wasn't enough evidence for a prosecution, they would be made to report daily to his office.
¹³
But when he started to make arrests, Seretse cabled a report on them to the Fighting Committee in London, who immediately passed this information on to the press. This led to questions in the House of Commons and MacKenzie was instructed to back down.
¹⁴

While MacKenzie was failing so publicly to hold meetings with the Bangwato, Seretse's lawyer Fraenkel was being invited by villages throughout the Reserve to come and talk to the headmen. This infuriated MacKenzie. He insisted that Fraenkel be accompanied by a Government representative and that full transcripts were made of everything that was said. Fraenkel went to five different assemblies. At each one, he reported on the opposition in the House of Commons to the exile of Seretse, quoting Winston Churchill's judgement that it was ‘a very dishonourable transaction'. He explained that many of the press in the UK were on the side of the Bangwato and also told them about the Seretse Khama Fighting Committee.
¹⁵

Wherever Fraenkel went, the headmen asked him to act as their legal adviser. ‘May God help you in our sorrow,' said a man in Mahalapye – ‘We send you as our ears and spokesman.' ‘Please plead with the Government as we have no power,' asked Manyaphiri, in distress.
¹⁶
At a meeting in Shoshong, Goareng Mosinyi recalled the sacrifices made by the soldiers from Bechuanaland who had joined up to help the Allies in the Second World War. ‘Next war,' said Mr Mosinyi, ‘we shall not listen when the government asks us to fight, and then forgets us in times of peace. Our hearts are sore.' ‘You can rest assured,' promised Fraenkel, ‘that I and the barristers are trying hard to comply with your wishes.'
¹⁷

Once Seretse had returned to Bechuanaland, the issue of his banishment had been put on hold in London. ‘We decided, in effect,' wrote Gordon Walker in his diary, to let Seretse stay ‘on good behaviour'. There was a general feeling, he recorded, that Seretse had been treated badly: ‘The PM and [Herbert] Morrison stood firm: also McNeil. Lord Addison weakened on the question of return: but not on recognition. Bevan was hostile throughout and probably egged on the dissidents in the Party.'
¹⁸
But the High Commissioner was determined to get Seretse out of Bechuanaland. So long as he was there, observed Clark to Baring, the Administration was ‘on a very sticky wicket'.
¹⁹