The late Sir Seretse Khama was the first President of the Republic of Botswana. He inherited an impoverished and internationally obscure state from British rule and left it as a democratic and increasingly prosperous nation with a significant role in Southern Africa.
Seretse Khama was born on the 1st of July 1921 at Serowe in what was then the Bangwato Tribal Reserve of the Bechuanaland Protectorate. He was the son and heir of Sekgoma Khama and Tebogo (nee Kebailele). In 1923 his father succeeded his grandfather as the Kgosi or ruler of the Bangwato. His reign, as Kgosi Sekgoma II was, however, short as he died in 1925. With the death of his mother, in 1930, Seretse remained in the care of his uncle Tshekedi Khama, who ruled the Bangwato as his regent.
Seretse received his higher primary and secondary education in South Africa, at two prominent mission schools, Lovedale and Tiger Kloof, before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree at Fort Hare College. Thereafter he studied law at the University of Witwatersrand and Balliol College, Oxford, before taking up further Barrister Studies at Inner Temple in London.
In June 1947, while in London, Seretse first met Ruth Williams, who was then pursuing a career in the financial sector. Their interracial marriage in September 1948 ultimately threw the British Empire into turmoil. Initially, it was Uncle, Tshekedi, who ordered Seretse home to demand a divorce. But, after a series of public meetings in Serowe, Seretse was popularly recognized as Kgosi together with his wife. Tshekedi then gave way and went into self-exile.
The proclamation of a black chief with a white wife, in a territory strategically located between South Africa and the Rhodesias, caused an outcry among white settler politicians. South Africa had come under the control of white Afrikaner nationalists in 1948. The then Labour Party government in Britain was desperate to secure its economic as well as political ties with the new apartheid regime. It therefore quietly agreed to bar Seretse Khama from chieftainship.
A judicial inquiry was set up to try to prove Seretse's personal unfitness to rule. But, instead, it concluded that Seretse was eminently fit to rule. The Commission’s report was therefore suppressed by the British government, while Seretse and his wife were exiled to England.
The persecution of Seretse and Ruth Khama received extensive international press coverage and outrage was expressed by a wide range of people around the world. Eventually, in 1956, the British finally allowed Seretse and Ruth to return to Botswana as private citizens. What the London authorities had not expected was the political acclaim that six years of exile had given him back home, where Seretse Khama was acclaimed as a nationalist hero.
From 1957-62 Seretse Khama was involved in the reform of local and territorial Government leading to the establishment of a Legislative Council as a key step towards decolonisation. In 1962 he founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party (BDP). With its call for reform leading to a non-racial independent republic, the BDP was able to draw overwhelming support. It won the first universal franchise elections in March 1965, allowing Seretse Khama to become the first prime minister of a self-governing Bechuanaland Protectorate before leading the country to full independence a year later.
At independence, Botswana was entirely surrounded by white racist regimes. It was, therefore, widely but falsely assumed that the country had no option but to sell out to its neighbors, South Africa (including occupied South-West Africa) and Southern Rhodesia.
The new government, moreover, could not cover the costs of administration from taxes and was continually indebted to Britain. The first task was to lay the groundwork for an export-oriented economy, based on beef processing and copper and diamond mining.
Between 1966 and 1980 Botswana had the fastest-growing economy in the world. It also came to be seen as a remarkable state with high principles, upholding liberal democracy and non-racialism in the midst of a region embroiled in civil war, racial enmity, and corruption. State mineral revenues were invested in infrastructural development, education, and health, and in subsidies to cattle production. The result was a great increase in general prosperity, in rural as well as urban areas.
Seretse Khama also used his unique authority to develop local democracy and curtail the powers of traditional chiefs, to develop citizen administrative capacity without over-bureaucratization, and to promote the rule of law in the operations of the state.
As Botswana progressed, Seretse Khama was also able to turn more of his attention to foreign policy, finding key early allies in Presidents Kaunda of Zambia and Nyerere of Tanzania. In his final decade, he played an increasingly prominent role as a Pan-African statesman. He was one of the "Front-Line Presidents" who negotiated the future of Zimbabwe and Namibia. In the face of the terrorist activities of the Smith regime in particular, the Botswana Defence Force was created to guard Botswana’s borders, protecting growing numbers of refugees as well as the citizenry.
During this period Seretse Khama articulated a clear vision of the future of Southern Africa after colonialism and apartheid, as a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous region. He was thus the key founder of what has since become the Southern African Development Community.
The rigors of constant travel for international negotiations, leading up to the independence of Zimbabwe, finally exhausted Seretse Khama. But he had the final satisfaction of witnessing both the independence of Zimbabwe in March 1980 and the launching of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference in April, before his death on the 13th of July 1980.
Khama is fondly remembered for his intelligence, integrity, and sense of humor. Of his lasting legacy it can be said that the perpetual democracy, socio-economic development, political stability, and unity that Batswana experience today are what Sir Seretse Khama always stood for.
In 1966 when Khama became president of Botswana, Botswana was the third poorest country in the world due to British neglect and had been written off as a ‘desert for Bushmen’. Twenty years later, in 1986, the World Bank classified Botswana as a middle-income country and later in 2005, as an upper-middle-income country. Botswana had the longest-running multi-party system in Africa, with a history free of civil war, strife, and coups—one which hardly any state in Africa could boast of.
Khama was educated at the Tiger Kloof Educational Centre in South Africa and, subsequently, at Fort Hare University College from which he graduated with a BA in 1944. Like many of his post-colonial counterparts, he sought a legal education in England in 1945 and enrolled for a year at Balliol College, Oxford University. His eventual marriage to Ruth Williams in 1946 would trigger a political controversy that would shape his image, both at home and abroad.
EXILE BY THE UNITED KINGDOM
Britain was in its so-called ‘age of austerity’, being heavy-laden by debt accrued due to the Second World War. This placed immense pressure on Britain’s ruling Attlee ministry which was reliant on cheap South African gold and uranium supplies. The ministry also feared that the tensions could escalate to the imposition of economic sanctions or a military incursion into Bechuanaland by the belligerent Afrikaner government if it failed to act. As such, Britain commenced a judicial inquiry into Khama’s fitness for ruling the Bangwato people and, subsequently, ruled that Khama was fit to rule the Bangwato people but for his marriage which posed a threat to peaceful international relations with neighboring nations. Unsurprisingly, Britain succumbed to the South African government in order to protect its economic interests, suppressed the report, and exiled Seretse Khama and his wife from Bechuanaland in 1951.
The exile was considered racist and thus was stiffly opposed by various groups in Bechuanaland as well as Britain, who repeatedly demanded that Lord Salisbury, the Minister responsible for the decision, tender his resignation. Lord Salisbury was heavily criticized by the press, with the Daily Express writing: ‘For the nation’s good, Lord Salisbury’s first deed as Commonwealth Relations Secretary should be his last’.
In the face of the swelling opposition it faced, the British High Commission ordered that Khama be replaced as kgosi. The people of Bechuanaland, however, refused to accede to these directives. Regardless, Khama was still denied entry into his homeland until 1956 when he and his uncle Tshekedi were allowed to return as ‘free citizens with as full political rights as anyone else…’ after signing a joint agreement of the renunciation of his Chieftainship. Thus, in 1956, Khama and his wife returned to Bechuanaland as private citizens, after which he started a cattle ranching business. Following the failure of the business, Khama switched to local politics and was elected as the secretary of the tribal council in 1957.
Khama had health challenges that began with his diagnosis of diabetes in the 1960s. He had undergone treatment from 1968 to 1969 and was fitted with a pacemaker in 1977. His worsening health was exacerbated by the rigors of travel and, thus, he died at the age of 59 from pancreatic cancer. Notwithstanding the level of development in Botswana’s health sector, Khama almost entirely sought medical treatment abroad, in either Johannesburg or London—to, interestingly, very little public reaction or outcry, judging by the absence of related literature.
