Colour Bar
Page 2
This book is the outcome of a genuine collaboration with my editor, Margaret Bluman, which transformed the proposal and the various drafts into the final product. Margaret has the remarkable gift of seeing what a book is – and what it is about – before I know myself. It is a privilege for me to write with her.
I have had unfailing support from my lovely aunt, Monica Ede. Benedict Wiseman has shown real interest and assisted me with the baffling cricket terms which were so favoured by colonial officials. My daughter Tendayi Bloom has given me many original and lively insights in our wonderful conversations, as well as loyal encouragement. Gervase Hood, my husband and my partner in everything, has been at my side at every stage of writing the book and has made important contributions. For that reason, the book is dedicated to him.
Note on Language
Any book about a British colony in Africa in the days of Empire needs to engage with problems of language. The British favoured the words ‘tribe’ and ‘chief’, which have pejorative overtones and seldom convey the right meaning. The narrative of this book uses the word ‘nation’ or ‘people’ rather than ‘tribe’, and the Setswana word ‘kgosi’ (plural ‘dikgosi’) or the English word ‘king’ rather than ‘chief’. To refer to Seretse Khama’s people in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, the British used the form ‘Bamangwato’. This book uses the more correct ‘Bangwato’. It also uses Lobatse and Mafikeng, which are the current names for these towns (different spellings – ‘Lobatsi’ and ‘Mafeking’ – were used by the British Administration in the colonial era).
However, all quotations from primary documents retain their original form and the colonial language is employed in the narrative where this is appropriate to the discussion.
Bechuanaland Protectorate and neighbouring countries in the 1950s
(showing dates of independence and post-independence names)
Prologue
Letter from Nelson Mandela to President Ketumile Masire on the death of Sir Seretse Khama
Robben Island.
My President,
The African National Congress of South Africa must have sent you a message of condolence on the death of Sir Seretse Khama, a message which expressed the sympathies of all our members inside and outside prison. Nevertheless I consider it proper to add a personal message because of the fine rapport he and I struck in our days at Wits, and the admiration and esteem in which I have always held him since then. Due to my current circumstances, however, this message could not reach you earlier than now.
Sir Seretse was an able and widely respected leader and his death was not only a loss to his family and people, but to Africa as a whole. As the first President of the independent Republic of Botswana his memory will long be illumined by the devotion and skill with which he served his country and people and by the statesmanship he evinced in world affairs. Under his leadership the contribution of Botswana to the Organisation of African Unity and the Front Line States has been invaluable. Without that contribution the major problems of Southern Africa would have been far more difficult to solve.
To the people of South Africa independent Botswana has become another home which provides a haven for those who flee from political persecution. Its tragedies are our tragedies. It is for this reason that Sir Seretse’s death has affected us in a special way, and it is because of this that we miss him so much. It is also in this spirit that we send our condolences to Lady Khama and family, and to the Government and people of Botswana.
Fortunately, Botswana is rich in men of talent and vision who are capable of closing the gap Sir Seretse left behind, and his mantle has now fallen on the shoulders of an equally able and respected man. In giving you my warmest congratulations on your honour, I would like to add that you enjoy our good wishes for the best of health and success in assuring continually rising living standards among the people.
It is remarkable to find that in Africa, as in other colonies on this continent, men who had no previous experience whatsoever in government as it functions today should be able to run modern states with such success and to curb, and even eliminate altogether, some of the evils of Colonialism so soon after gaining independence. The data that is available to us in our circumstances indicates that inspiring progress in Africa is being made. I am happy to note that this trend is particularly evident in your country, and that you can now look forward to a future of prosperity and happiness.
In conclusion I wish to repeat the statement I have made above that Botswana is to us another home. Long before the political conflicts that have rocked South Africa since the early sixties, and before the exodus of persecuted people from our country began, the Batswana and the oppressed majority at home were already bound together by strong historical ties. These conflicts have considerably strengthened those ties, and the knowledge that we enjoy the solid support and good will of the people of Botswana is a source of tremendous inspiration in our struggle to remove the evils of minority rule. My fondest regards to your government and your people and family. Pula!!!
Nelson Mandela
[July 1980]
Reproduced by kind permission of the Office of Mr Nelson Mandela and of the University of Fort Hare Library (Source: Oliver Tambo Papers, African National Congress Archives, University of Fort Hare Library).
I
The House of Khama
1
From Africa to wartorn Britain
In September 1945, a 24-year-old student called Seretse Khama arrived in England from his home in British colonial Africa. Victory in Japan had been celebrated the month before and Britain was at last emerging from the trauma of the Second World War. But the aftermath of the conflict was visible everywhere, in the pinched faces of the people and the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Everything looked grey and drab. It was a very different country from his own: the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland, 6,000 miles away in southern Africa. At home, dry scrubland stretched out far into the distance and the sun blazed hot in a blue sky.
Seretse had come to study law at Oxford University. Tall and long-legged, with a strong build and genial good looks, he was the heir to the kingship of the Bangwato, the largest nation in Bechuanaland. His uncle, Tshekedi Khama, who was ruling the Bangwato as Regent, was grooming him carefully for his future role as Kgosi and had long been interested in the idea of Seretse studying law in Britain; European law, he thought, would help him to deal from a position of strength with the colonial administration.1 He also wanted to remove Seretse from the racial segregation and inequalities of southern Africa, which had made his nephew bitter. ‘I had adopted certain attitudes towards a certain race, if I may put it that way, and that is the white race,’ said Seretse years later. ‘I disliked them intensely because I thought that they disliked me. I suppose some of them did.’ All whites seemed to him cruel and unjust and he had ‘just no trust at all for any white man,’ he told his uncle. ‘Well,’ replied Tshekedi, ‘that is all the more reason why you should go to the United Kingdom to continue your studies.’2
Seretse was already extremely well educated. He had attended the premier schools for Africans in South Africa: Adams College, a mission school near Durban; the missionary-run Lovedale College in Alice, in the Eastern Cape; and Tiger Kloof in Vryburg, which was not very far from the Bechuanaland border and was run by the London Missionary Society. At all these schools he distinguished himself as a scholar and an individual. After secondary school he went to Fort Hare Native University, near Lovedale in Alice, which was the only black university in South Africa. Here he took courses in Native Law, Native Administration, Roman-Dutch Law, History, English and Setswana, and obtained his BA degree in 1944. These years at Fort Hare were inspiring ones. The University was the focus for the intellectual elite of black South Africans and was ‘a beacon for African scholars all over Southern, Central and Eastern Africa,’ wrote Nelson Mandela, who also studied at Fort Hare. It educated many of the future leaders on the African continent – not just Seretse and Mandela, but also Oliver
Tambo, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Herbert Chitepo, Desmond Tutu, Robert Mugabe and many others.3 Debates about social injustice and the future of the region were recurrent and urgent.
After Fort Hare, Seretse registered for a law degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.4 Here he grew to know Mandela, who was also studying law, who later referred to ‘the fine rapport he and I struck in our days at Wits, and the admiration and esteem in which I have always held him since then’.5 Seretse also became a very good friend of Joshua Nkomo, who was not a student at Wits but was staying at one of the university hostels.6 Seretse, Mandela and Nkomo frequented the Blue Lagoon restaurant in Johannesburg, where they mixed with other Fort Hare graduates, including Oliver Tambo.7
Being a student at Wits was difficult and unpleasant in many ways. There was only a handful of black students, who were not allowed to use the sports field, tennis courts or swimming pool, and were treated with contempt by some of the white lecturers. Mandela recorded many humiliations – when he sat at a table in the law library, a white student moved away; and when he went to a café with some white students, they were kept out because a ‘kaffir’ was among them.8 But, added Mandela, he also met students such as Joe Slovo and Ruth First and was introduced to stimulating new ideas about the future of southern Africa:
Wits opened a new world to me, a world of ideas and political beliefs and debates, a world where people were passionate about politics. I was among white and Indian intellectuals of my own generation, young men who would form the vanguard of the most important political movements of the next few years. I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared, despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the oppressed.9
But whereas Mandela stayed at Wits to complete his course, Seretse left Africa for Britain after less than a year. In the chill of the British autumn, he went up to Oxford for the start of the Michaelmas term and became a student at Balliol College. His initial plan of study included both Law and a combined course of Politics and Economics: he would take examinations in both, which would add up to an Oxford BA.10 He made an excellent first impression on his academic adviser, Sir Reginald Coupland, the Beit Professor of Colonial History. ‘I have seen Seretse Khama,’ wrote Coupland soon after the young student’s arrival. ‘What a very good sort he is!’11
But Seretse had trouble settling in. The British students showed no interest in getting to know him and there were hardly any students from Africa. In 1945 there were about 750 students from Africa in the UK, but most of them were at the Universities of Edinburgh (where Julius Nyerere was a student of history), Aberdeen and London, or at the Inns of Court in London.12 ‘I was miserable the first term,’ recalled Seretse later. ‘I thought I was intensely disliked because nobody talked to me or showed any interest in me and I thought it was just another way of showing me that I did not belong.’13 This isolation was especially painful because he had always been popular with his peers – at Fort Hare, he had been regarded as likeable and unassuming, even though he was one of the most prominent royals. ‘He was not posing himself as if he was going to be king,’ commented one student. ‘He was just part of the student body; that is one of the things I liked about him. He never put his personality above anybody else.’14
Seretse felt, too, that in Britain he was always identified by his colour: that people did not see him as a student from Bechuanaland, but as a ‘coloured’ man or ‘negro’.15 It was usually assumed by the British public that he was American or West Indian. But he had very little in common with American GIs or with West Indians who had come to the UK to find work, apart from the colour of his skin. His family background and his experience were those of a crown prince, who had been marked out for privilege since the day of his birth.
The number of black people in Britain in the early postwar years was tiny – less than 0.02 per cent of the population, who mostly lived in London or the major port cities of Liverpool, Bristol and Cardiff.16 There was no official colour bar, but black people in Britain were routinely refused employment and accommodation. They also encountered colour prejudice in their everyday contacts with the general public, on public transport, and in restaurants. One Nigerian student noticed that
in trains, if I enter a coach first, very few people will enter the coach if they can find room in another. In cafes very few like to sit beside a coloured person unless personally known to them. In picture houses some people asked what I was doing there as they were sure I should not understand the picture.
Colonial students from Asian and Mediterranean backgrounds also suffered from the colour bar. One Indian student from Kenya complained that when he was travelling on the underground with an English girl, two men shouted, ‘These bloody foreigners, they come here and spoil our girls.’ Another Indian from East Africa observed the way in which colour prejudice was learned –
It is taught to children, it is bred in them, but it is not natural to them. I was in hospital to have my tonsils removed, and there were no beds, so I was put in the children’s ward; one of them said to me: ‘Tell me mister, have you been out in the sunshine long?’17
‘Yes, there are penalties if one has a coloured skin, and hardly a day goes by without one being reminded of them,’ observed Learie Constantine, the legendary cricketer from Trinidad, who had moved to Britain in 1929 and who had been employed as a welfare officer to care for West Indians arriving for work. In 1944, Constantine had sued Imperial Hotels in London for refusing him accommodation, and successfully established a case of discrimination.18 ‘Is there a Colour Bar?’ asked the illustrated British weekly, Picture Post. The answer to this question, it argued, was a resounding yes. It reported the case of a man in Liverpool who had lived in five European countries and had been a British prisoner-of-war in Germany, but who knew of no European country where the ‘coloured’ man was treated with more unofficial contempt than in Britain, from restaurant-keepers and landladies, employers and employees, even from the man in the street.19
The issue of the colour bar had been spotlighted by the arrival in Britain of American servicemen. By the end of 1942 there were about 170,000 American men, of whom about 12,000 were black and rigidly segregated. White American troops became angry if they found black soldiers in places of entertainment, especially if they were with white women. Under pressure from American command, the British Secretary of State for War asked the Cabinet to approve a policy of educating the army to adopt the attitude of the US authorities towards black American troops. But some members of the Cabinet strongly resisted this plan. It was agreed that personnel should respect the American attitude, but not adopt it – that there could be no question of segregation in Britain.20
Within the British services, the colour bar became less oppressive during the years of war. The army changed its rules so that men who were ‘not of pure European descent’ were allowed to hold commissions as officers.21 There was also a sense that everyone was fighting the same enemy, which created a feeling of camaraderie between blacks and whites. But this did not transfer to civilian life once peace had been restored.22
Men had come from every part of the Empire to fight for the Allies in Europe and the Far East. Among them were 10,000 men from Seretse’s own country, the Bechuanaland Protectorate, who had served in the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps.23 Seretse watched the victory parade in London in 1946, when some of the Bechuanaland veterans marched down the city streets.24 They were loudly cheered by the British spectators, but instantly forgotten. Seretse thought it was odd that British people, who were so proud of their Empire, appeared never to have heard of Bechuanaland and were unaware of its contribution to the war.25 He was angry that men who had been seen as equal in war and death, were no longer seen as equal in the postwar political and economic life of the colonies. This feeling was shared in British colonies across Africa and was a contributing factor in the outbreak of the riots that rocked the cities of t
he Gold Coast in February 1948 and in the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the early 1950s.26
One of the Protectorate veterans who spoke to Seretse at the victory parade noticed that he ‘did not seem taken up with the English. He said to me: “The English like to show you their nice side but they hide their poverty and slums.”’27 What could not be hidden, though, was the austerity of daily life and the rationing of food and clothes – even bread rationing was introduced for the first time by the Ministry of Food in July 1946.28 ‘I am still feeling awfully homesick,’ wrote Seretse to his uncle. ‘Perhaps that is one reason beside [the] food shortage that I am losing weight so rapidly.’29 Some people in England tried to be friendly, including members of the London Missionary Society, the Congregationalist organization which dominated the religious life of the Bangwato Reserve. Dr Roger Pilkington, one of the LMS directors, who had a doctorate in genetics from Magdalene College, Cambridge, took a special interest in Seretse and invited him on several occasions to stay with himself and his wife. But Seretse was lonely.
In his second term at Balliol, Seretse started to feel happier. He struck up a friendship with John Zimmerman, another Balliol student who, like Seretse, was an outsider, because he was Jewish.30 Seretse also found acceptance on the sports field. He was an outstanding sportsman and a strong team player, characteristics which had distinguished his school and university career in South Africa and earned him such nicknames on the soccer field as ‘Small Hops’, ‘Machine Gun’, ‘Flexible Six Forty-Five’ and ‘C to C’ (Cape to Cairo).31 Now these gifts made him an asset to his Oxford College. ‘For some reason,’ he wrote years later, ‘somebody asked me if I played rugby in South Africa, and I said yes. I was picked to practise. I then played for my college; then I boxed for my college.’32 He was ‘an unstoppable wing three quarter’ for the college rugby XV, commented a rugby enthusiast at Balliol.33 Seretse was now starting to fit into College life. ‘We liked him as a person,’ observed the Master of the College – ‘he was a very acceptable member of the College, and he worked well.’34