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Just four days after the fiasco at St George's Church – on Wednesday 29 September 1948 – Seretse and Ruth were married in a civil ceremony at Kensington Registry Office. Early that morning, Seretse collected Ruth from her little hotel in Bayswater. She was wearing a black suit with a white blouse; the jacket was fitted, flaring slightly at the back, and she wore a black hat. It was a severe outfit and not very bridal, but it reflected their determination.
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They walked swiftly to the Registry Office, looking over their shoulders to check whether anybody was following them.
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They were waiting outside the Office when it opened, with their three witnesses – ‘my sister Muriel, loyal to the last',
⁵⁴
John Zimmerman and one of Ruth's cousins.

Shortly after nine o'clock, Seretse and Ruth were husband and wife.
⁵⁵
Despite the combined efforts of the Regent Tshekedi, the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the Colonial Office, the Church of England and the London Missionary Society, as well as lawyers in South Africa and Britain, they had started their lives together. They walked from the Registry Office to the hotel where Ruth had stayed the previous few nights, to collect her things and move them into her new home with her husband – the little flat in Campden Hill Gardens. Seretse sent John Keith a telegram. ‘Have married Ruth,' he told him, adding playfully, ‘Do you still want to see me?'
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I
am
sorry,' wrote Coupland to the Commonwealth Relations Office, when he heard the news. ‘It will be a miracle,' he added, ‘if the marriage turns out happily in the end for either of them or for their children. It's a real tragedy or so it seems.'
⁵⁷

In the evening after the wedding, a cable arrived for Seretse from Tshekedi, who was unaware that they were now man and wife. ‘I
wish you [to] pay attention to what Commonwealth Office advises you,' he warned. ‘Your obstinacy can only result [in] serious consequences [to] yourself. On no condition can we agree to your marrying an English girl.'
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Next day, Seretse wired Tshekedi with the news that he was too late – that the wedding had already taken place.
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His uncle was outraged. ‘Formal signing of document in England does not constitute your marriage,' he thundered back in reply, ordering him to come home, and adding:

As far as we are concerned no marriage exists. Apparently you took my strong advice for a threat. We accept nothing short of dissolution of that marriage. Our decision firm. Welfare of tribe paramount in this case.
⁶⁰

Seretse tried to reason with his uncle: ‘Tribe and you important to me. Suspension of allowance being felt.' Then he made it clear that his commitment to Ruth was absolute: ‘Suggest passage for two. Dissolution unacceptable.'
⁶¹

The country of Seretse Khama was the Bechuanaland Protectorate – a vast expanse of sand dunes and scrub, with more animals than people. Herds of cattle wandered across the wide plains, together with sheep, goats and wild donkeys. In the more remote areas there was every sort of wild animal – lions, snakes, cheetahs, elephants, hippos, rhinos, zebra, crocodiles, hyenas and leopards. When Mandela sought refuge in Bechuanaland from apartheid in the 1960s, he fell in love with the country at first sight: it was a wilder Africa, he said, than the one he knew in South Africa and he was astonished when he saw a lioness crossing the road. After the jungle of Johannesburg, he reflected, he was in a place ‘where the survival of the fittest was the supreme law and where the tangled vegetation concealed all kinds of danger'.
¹

The Protectorate was a landlocked country, bordering South Africa to the south and the south-east, Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) to the north-east, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) on the other side of the Zambezi River in the north, and South West Africa (Namibia) to the west. Much of Bechuanaland was parched and inhospitable – about three-quarters of the western part of the country lay buried under the scrub and dust of the Kalahari, a semi-desert. Green grass would grow after good rains; but for much of the time, the soil was ravaged by drought. Water was so scarce that
pula
, the Setswana word for ‘rain', was one of the most important and frequently used words. It was used to offer greetings and ‘
Pula!
' was a shared cry of approbation at formal and informal gatherings. Thorn bushes were the chief source of shade from the blazing sun. Few of the roads in Bechuanaland were gravelled, and transport was limited to ox-drawn carts and wagons, although
there were a few cars belonging to wealthy cattle-owners; the British officials drove around in lorries.
²

There were eight principal nations in the territory – the Bakgatla, the Bakwena, the Bangwaketse, the Balete, the Bangwato, the Baralong, the Batawana, and the Batlokwa.
³
The largest of these was the Bangwato, to which Seretse belonged. The other inhabitants of the Protectorate included sub-clans and also the Basarwa, also known as the San or Bushmen, hunter-gatherers with very limited rights, who were widely used as servants.
⁴

Under British rule, the affairs of each nation were controlled by their own Kgosi, who was known as the Native Authority; he and his office were responsible for land tenure, educational arrangements, licensing, collection of taxes, administering justice within certain limits, and various other duties. He was subject to the overriding authority of the British Administration, which was represented in each reserve by a District Commissioner. But the Kgosi not only shouldered the secular leadership of his people: he was also responsible for his people spiritually and was at the centre of everything in their lives.
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There was a saying that the Kgosi ‘is a demigod, no evil must be spoken of him' –
Kgosi modingwana, ga a sejwe
.
⁶

Bechuanaland had far fewer white inhabitants than any of its neighbouring countries in which white settlers had taken most, if not all, of the fertile land away from the indigenous populations and had developed their own communities. But in Bechuanaland in 1946, out of a total population of nearly 300,000 people, fewer than 1 per cent – just over 2,000 – were white.
⁷
Most of these were farmers or traders, who were allowed to own land only in a few demarcated areas. Generally, white people were concentrated in or around Francistown, in the north of the Protectorate, which resembled a small Rhodesian or South African town in appearance and where Africans had to live in the ‘location', an area demarcated for occupation by people who were not white. But elsewhere in the Protectorate, ‘Europeans' were not allowed to purchase land. They had no title to the land upon which their houses and shops were built and held them at the discretion of the diKgosi.

The Bangwato lived a hard, but peaceful, existence, depending on their cattle for survival; crops were of secondary importance, because of the lack of good soil and rain. The capital of the Bangwato Reserve
was Serowe, where about 30,000 people lived in neat clusters of family groups, in mud huts thatched with straw. It was one of the largest villages in Africa, sprawling for five miles through shallow, parched valleys. The village was clean and tidy, but it was also rocky and dusty, with huge red ant-hills everywhere. Most people had three homes: one in their village; one at their lands; and one at the cattle-post where they kept their cattle. It was customary for boys to spend their childhoods at the cattle-post. Families lived in their village from about June to October or November, when the rainy season started and they moved to the lands to start ploughing. Women carried pots of water and grain on their heads, with their babies on their backs.

The royal family lived in the centre of Serowe in cool brick houses, near the tribal offices and the Kgotla ground – the place where a Kgotla, or Tribal Assembly, was held. It was a large open space, semi-circular in shape, and surrounded by tall camel-thorn trees. Overlooking the Kgotla place was a rocky hill, at the top of which was the sacred burial ground of the Bangwato royal family. There were a few stores scattered around the town – tin-roofed buildings, which were mostly owned by the few ‘Europeans' and so-called ‘coloureds', the South African term for people of mixed race. All traders had to construct their buildings out of corrugated iron and wood, so that if they had to be expelled for any reason, they could simply dismantle them and leave.
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The British officials lived on a hill-top in the south-west of the town, in brick houses. The largest building in Serowe was the LMS Church, which had been opened in 1912.

Serowe was a quiet, peaceful world, into which Seretse Goitsebeng Khama was born on 1 July 1921. He was the grandson of Khama III, who was also known as Khama the Great. Khama had been converted by missionaries to Christianity when he was a young man, and when he became Kgosi he gave a monopoly on religion in the Bangwato country to the London Missionary Society, which had had strong roots there ever since Robert Moffatt and David Livingstone had been sent on missions to Bechuanaland in the nineteenth century. No other religious sect or society was allowed to operate under Khama and in effect the LMS became a state church. But Khama kept the missionaries firmly in their place and when he disagreed with any of them – which happened quite frequently – he sent them away.
⁹

Under Khama's influence, Christianity spread through the land. He banned polygamy and rainmaking ceremonies and outlawed the custom of the bride price. He also published an edict that there should be no cruelty towards ‘subordinate peoples'. But he did not simply ban traditional customs; rather, he changed and modified them, as in the case of the initiation of young men. From time to time, a new group of young men – known as an ‘age regiment' – was created and all those who had become adult since the previous regiment were enrolled in it. In the past, the young men had been taken into the bush, where they were circumcised and challenged with endurance tests which sometimes, it was maintained, led to the death of an initiate. Khama abolished these practices, but he did not abolish the age regiments themselves: instead, the initiation was transformed into a ceremony with prayers and lectures. The regiments were then given community projects to carry out, such as building a school, church or house. There were also age regiments of girls, who were given projects such as gardening and sewing. Under Khama's reforming zeal, a new order was created, which emphasized self-help, compassion and the needs of the community.

The drinking of liquor was strictly prohibited under Khama's laws. ‘Drink puts devils into men,' Khama told a British official, ‘and destroys both their souls and their bodies for ever.' When some European traders got drunk in his territory one weekend, he summoned them before him and told them to leave:

Well, I am black, but if I am black, I am chief in my own country at present. When you white men rule in the country, then you will do as you like; at present I rule, and I shall maintain my laws which you insult and despise…
¹⁰

Khama III died in 1923, leaving his son Sekgoma as Kgosi of the Bangwato. But after only two years, Sekgoma II died, which meant that Seretse – who was Sekgoma's son, by his fourth and last wife, Tebogo – was now officially Kgosi. But he was just a small child, so the tribal elders decided in 1926 to recall Tshekedi from Fort Hare, where he was studying, to act as Regent until Seretse was old enough to take on the role of Kgosi; as the son of Khama and Khama's fourth wife, Semane, Tshekedi was second in the line of succession. He was installed as Regent at an elaborate ceremony, which was attended by
4-year-old Seretse, dressed in the clothes that had been brought by the Scottish missionaries – a kilt, sporran, plaid and silver-buckle shoes. Tshekedi's mother Semane, in a dress of black silk and a long shawl, rested her hand gently on Seretse's shoulder.
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Tshekedi, like Khama III, was a devout Christian and a man of austere discipline who loathed alcohol. He was also highly charismatic. His manner was ‘always quiet and fatherly', said a woman school-teacher, but ‘there was something else indescribable about him that was very magnetic, like a force. I'd say one felt towards him what one felt about God.'
¹²
Growing up under Tshekedi's rule, observed a school-teacher, ‘we were encouraged to learn and education often went beyond book learning – there was a great stress on character building'. After school and family chores, the children were sent off in the evenings to Bible classes:

We were given simple Bible stories, the singing of psalms and hymns and yearly there'd be a competition for all the [Bible study] groups in the village. This way of life affected us all – it created a people who were keen to learn, responsible.

‘No other man,' she added, speaking of Tshekedi, ‘cared for us as much as he did.'
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Tshekedi had great plans for his nephew. At first Seretse's childhood was managed by his mother Tebogo. But gradually his care was taken over by Tshekedi, who called him ‘Sonny'; Seretse, in turn, addressed Tshekedi as ‘Father'. They rode together round the cattle-posts, inspecting the vast herds owned by the Khama family. The British Administration had wanted Seretse to go to Dombashawa, a vocational school in Southern Rhodesia, but Tshekedi vigorously resisted this: he was adamant that his nephew should receive a rigorous academic education in South Africa.
¹⁴

When he was 15, Seretse – dressed in wing collar and black tie – was best man at Tshekedi's wedding. This marriage ended in divorce and, three years later, Seretse was once again best man at his uncle's wedding. Tshekedi's second bride was Ella Moshoela, who had been a teacher and was a trained nurse; her father was a Methodist minister. This was a happy marriage, producing five children.