KHAMA, TSHEKEDI

Tshekedi Khama (September 17, 1905-June 10, 1959), a man bound by tribal tradition was nevertheless a great nationalist who worked tirelessly to advance the people of the Bechuanaland Protectorate and was a key figure in resisting South African attempts to incorporate the High Commission Territories and South West Africa. Yet he is usually remembered for his opposition to the marriage of his nephew, Seretse Khama.

PHOTO CAPTION: Khama Tshekedi. SOURCE: EA Library.

Youngest son of Khama III, also known as Khama the Great and, like his father, a staunch Christian, Tshskedi was forced to leave Lovedale College in the Cape before taking matriculation when, in 1926, he was made regent of the Bamangwato during the minority of the chief-designate, Seretse. But he continued to educate himself and, seeing the vast social and political changes ahead for Africa, he strove with immense energy, determination, and obstinacy to move his people firmly into the new world.

The problems were enormous: bitter royal feuds, poverty and apathy in a huge arid country, British neglect (Bechuanaland was known as the Cinderella of the Empire), and, overall, the threat of neighbouring South Africa.

His confrontations with the administration outraged many local officials and, in 1933, an admiral led a naval detachment from Cape Town to the Kalahari to depose him, but even then his remarkable qualities won him support from the British Parliament and the public, and he was quickly reinstated. As a leading newspaper put it in 1931: “Tshekedi has opened all our eyes… He has reminded us that Africa is awakening.”

As chief, he was both revered and reviled: revered for constructive achievements and magnanimity and reviled by those who bore the brunt of his autocratic harshness. A forceful and creative debater in the Protectorate’s Advisory Councils, he was an innovatory cattle breeder, and his writings included plans for constitutional reform and for such practical projects as syndicates to develop water resources, demonstration farms, cooperative societies, village industries, and a railway to Walvis Bay.

Despite government opposition, and by driving his people hard, in 1949 he realised his greatest dream, the building of a secondary school with the object of fulfilling the needs of “a free responsible self-governing territory in its administrative, social, agricultural, industrial and economic life.”

But in 1948 the chief-designate, Seretse, married an English girl, and when Tshekedi and tribal elders opposed the marriage as contrary to tribal law and custom, the conflict split the tribe. The British government exiled Seretse from the Protectorate and also banished Tshekedi from Bamangwato territory. (He had already resigned the Regency and renounced any claim to the chieftainship.)

After a prolonged campaign, in which he took his case to Parliament and the people in Britain, Tshekedi succeeded in returning home as a private citizen and in 1956 helped negotiate the return of his nephew. Just as Bechuanaland was moving toward the self-government and economic developments he had long worked and agitated for, Tshekedi died.

His historic contribution to the struggle in Southern Africa is seldom acknowledged: between 1934 and 1954 he repeatedly rallied opposition both within the High Commission Territories and in the United Kingdom to South African attempts to incorporate Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland (as they are now known). Like his father, he was generous to refugees, among them Hereros, and in 1946 he organised Bechuana chiefs and such South African leaders as Dr. A.B. Xuma and Z.K.

Matthews in protesting to the United Nations against South Africa’s then imminent incorporation of South West Africa (now Namibia), and it was he who arranged for the Rev. Michael Scott to represent the Herero and other tribes in making their vitally important petitions to the United Nations.

MARY BENSON