Abstract
In 1950, the British Government exiled Seretse Khama from his own country, the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland in southern Africa (which became independent Botswana in 1966). Twenty-eight-year-old Seretse was the acclaimed kgosi (king) of the Bangwato, the largest of the eight nations of Bechuanaland. The reason for his banishment was his marriage in 1948 to Ruth Williams, an English woman — who happened to be white. Seretse was initially exiled for five years by Attlee’s Labour Government; in 1952, Churchill’s Conservative Government made the exile permanent.
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Notes
David Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics 1945–1961: From ‘Colonial Development’ to ‘Wind of Change’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 23.
John Redfern, Ruth and Seretse (London: Victor Gollancz, 1955), p. 11.
Michael Dutfield, A Marriage of Inconvenience. The Persecution of Seretse and Ruth Khama (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 117.
Noel Monks, Eyewitness (London: Frederick Muller, [1956]), p. 267.
Quoted in Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 9.
See Michael Crowder, The Flogging of Phineas Mcintosh: A Tale of Colonial Folly and Injustice, Bechuanaland 1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
Quoted in Julian Mockford, Seretse Khama and the Bamangwato (London: Staples Press, 1950), p. 4.
Diary entry for 2 April 1950, Patrick Gordon Walker. Political Diaries 1932–1971, ed. Robert Pearce (London: The Historians Press, 1991), p. 188.
Uniform described by Charles Douglas-Home, Evelyn Baring: The Last Proconsul (London: Collins, 1978), pp. 120–1.
Nicholas Monsarrat, Life is a Four-Letter Word. Vol. II, Breaking Out (London: Cassell, 1970), pp. 271–3.
Michael Fairlie, No Time Like the Past (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1972), p. 147.
See David Cannadine, Ornamentalism, How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin, 2001).
Quoted in John Lewis, Lord Hailsham: A Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 144.
See Susan Williams, Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama over British Imperialism and Apartheid South Africa for the Love of His Wife and His Nation (London: Penguin, 2006).
David Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics 1945–1961 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 160.
Ronald Hyam, ‘The Political Consequences of Seretse Khama: Britain, the Bangwato and South Africa’, Historical Journal 29, 4 (1987): 947.
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© 2006 Susan Williams
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Williams, S. (2006). The Media and the Exile of Seretse Khama: The Bangwato vs. the British in Bechuanaland, 1948–56. In: Kaul, C. (eds) Media and the British Empire. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230205147_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230205147_5
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