Colour Bar (14 page)

Sillery, the Resident Commissioner, was struck by the happiness of the Bangwato at Ruth's arrival. ‘One gets the impression that Seretse's cause is growing in strength and that the unpopularity of Tshekedi is increasing,' he reported to the High Commissioner. ‘Prior to Ruth's arrival,' he added, ‘we received a petition from 58 women of Mahalapye asking that Seretse be Kgosi and signifying their acceptance of Ruth.'
¹⁶
A Kgosi is ‘for us all,' insisted the petition, ‘and not for men only who speak in Kgotla; Seretse Khama is our only Kgosi'. Sillery was surprised by this intervention by women because, traditionally, Bangwato women did not become involved in political issues.

Within a week of their arrival in Serowe, on Monday 29 August 1949, the Khamas moved into their own home – a large bungalow, built for a British official – in a district of Serowe called Newtown. It was the only modern brick house in the area and was surrounded far into the distance by huts. There was a large garden in the front and the back, with a prickly pear tree at the entrance and thick thorn bushes around the perimeter. Ruth described the house in a letter to Betty:

It is far from being finished, but we couldn't care less. We are on our own, and as you know, it is pretty grim living with someone else. However the house is liveable, and in time will be completed no doubt. It has three bedrooms, lounge and dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and lavatory. Two of the bedrooms have yet to be furnished.
¹⁷

There were shelves over the fireplace, where they put their books: mostly law books, as well as a few volumes on African and world affairs – and Paton's
Cry the Beloved Country
.
¹⁸
Outside, there was a veranda with a red floor, where they played table tennis; part of the veranda had a roof, for use as a sleeping porch on hot nights. There was no electricity, no running water, no plumbing and no telephone, but the house was much grander than their garden flat on Adolphus Road in North London. There were five servants to do the housework.

As soon as they had moved in, headmen and their families came from all over the Bangwato Reserve, to welcome Seretse's wife and to offer gifts. They waited patiently outside the house for their turn to enter.
¹⁹
Church choirs and school choirs sang songs of greeting, and across the main road there was a huge banner welcoming the young couple. Women were especially keen to show their friendship to Ruth. ‘When Ruth Khama stepped out of a Serowe store here today,' reported a correspondent for the
News Chronicle
, the British Noncon-formist newspaper, ‘a group of women set up a welcoming chant. Soon thousands of natives were milling around the London-born wife of the chief-designate.'
²⁰

After Ruth's arrival, a delegation of elders asked Mrs Page-Wood, the proprietress of Serowe's largest store, to teach her something about traditional customs. Mrs Page-Wood was fluent in Setswana and knew more about the life of the Bangwato than most other whites. But she felt she could not help: ‘You are asking more of me than I can do,' she told the elders, but she sent Ruth a set of flowered dinner plates to show willing. Mrs Page-Wood had definite ideas of what the queen should do – she would have to

lead the women with water on her head. She must choose the songs at harvest time. She must be first to smear the floor with cow dung – not much, but a little as a symbol of cleanliness. The people may appeal to her in any trouble, and she must intercede with the chief on their behalf. She is her husband's menial, part of his job.
²¹

Mrs Page-Wood believed that Ruth's life as the wife of the Chief looked pretty hopeless.

Seretse wanted to improve the lives of his people and to bring
improvements in the form of education and health care – the
Cape Times
had described him just before the third kgotla in June 1949 as ‘a modern young man with progressive ideas'.
²²
Very quickly, Ruth, too, was joining in discussions about what needed to be done. ‘Ruth and I,' said Seretse to Margaret Bourke-White, who had come to Serowe to write an article on the Khamas for
Life
, ‘think alike about these things.'
²³
A rector of the Bangwaketse had great hopes for the work that Ruth could do. In a letter to
Naledi ya Batswana
, he argued that life in Bechuanaland was no better than in South Africa:

The good Tswana customs have gone with the forefathers. I think Seretse's white wife would do much to help right the wrongs of our territory and her appeals for better conditions would be listened to better. The wages paid the workers here are lamentably low.
²⁴

‘It would take me years to introduce all the reforms I want,' said Ruth sadly. ‘The Bangwato may have had Queen Victoria's protection all these years,' she argued, ‘but precious little care.' She was especially concerned about the hard lives of the women, who fetched water and wood, cooked, ploughed and looked after the children and the old people. ‘I am more convinced than ever that I, as the chief's wife, could do so much for the women,' said Ruth. ‘There's no social life for them. The men have their kgotlas, but the women have nothing. They are just chattels. They must have a status.' She went on to describe the conditions endured on the reserve:

There are few, if any, organised sports. No radios or gramophones. There is no compulsory education. Hygiene and health are practically unknown subjects. There are no welfare centres or clinics worth mentioning. There is a terrific need of these things among the Bamangwatos.

She contrasted these deprivations with the comforts of the British officials: ‘At the Residency there is a magnificent flower garden – but there are no proper roads in Serowe.' The stores, too, she thought, were an affront to the community. The white traders did a good trade with the Africans and were able to send their children to expensive boarding schools in the Union and to drive smart cars; and their homes, though not elegant, were comfortable.
²⁵
But the ‘shacks that go for stores' were a disgrace. ‘When I think of all the money that
passes over the counters, year in, year out,' she said, ‘I fume every time I have to enter the mouldy old places.'
²⁶
This tendency to ‘fume' was a difference between Seretse and Ruth: for he rarely became angry, whereas Ruth lost her temper. ‘Perhaps that is why we have got on so well together,' reflected Ruth years later. ‘Seretse is patient, peace-loving and slow to anger; I am hot-tempered.'
²⁷

‘We are extremely happy,' wrote Ruth to Betty. But they found the ambiguity of Seretse's position difficult to manage. ‘Although the Gvt. don't recognise Seretse as chief,' Ruth told Betty, ‘the tribe do, so he has all his work cut out for him.' Duty was always calling him, she added proudly.
²⁸
Noel Monks accused the Commonwealth Secretary of hypocrisy. The Administration was relying on Seretse to support their work, he objected, as if he had been installed:

Your representatives… told Seretse: ‘You're not chief yet' – but every day they went to him for help in running things.

Seretse could have turned them down flat, and even greater chaos than there is now in this country could have resulted.

‘But he sportingly played along,' said Monks, ‘and used his influence for good.'
²⁹

Meanwhile, Ruth had settled into a daily routine as a Serowe house-wife. ‘Groceries and greengroceries, and bread, here,' she informed Betty, ‘is much more expensive than in England, but meat and eggs are very plentiful, and very cheap. Eggs are a penny each.' She enjoyed cooking their meals, which Seretse put on the table. She was making plans for ecru lace curtains to go with a rug she was having made of twenty lion skins; Seretse had given out the skins to the villagers, who were softening them up with fat and cattle brains.
³⁰
‘The countryside here is very pretty and lovely,' she exclaimed in pleasure. ‘We have been horse riding a few times.'
³¹
She had planted a little English flower garden but was finding it hard to keep the seedlings alive, because of the shortage of rain.
³²

‘I'd have been a dumb blonde indeed,' said Ruth, ‘if I failed to sense the great love the majority of the tribe, particularly the younger generation, have for Seretse.'
³³
Wherever Seretse and Ruth went in the reserve, people rushed to greet them. ‘I have seen old Bamangwato women fall on one bony knee, clutch at the hem of her flowered frock
and kiss it,' wrote Redfern, ‘as she was striding from her car to the stores or the Post Office.' When husband and wife appeared together in their car – the apple-green Chevrolet – ‘Bamangwato would jump up in front of the radiator as though they had been concealed underneath trapdoors.' The women danced and ululated.
³⁴
In the UK, Learie Constantine commented on the easy way in which Ruth had settled into Serowe. ‘These Africans would still have raised objections if they had found in Ruth anything to disapprove,' he pointed out. ‘They did not. They liked her.'
³⁵
She was accepted as the Kgosi's wife and as the mother of the people –
Mohumagadi
.

But the European community did
not
like her. John Redfern witnessed their hostility at a film show in the Palapye hotel. Once a week at the Palapye hotel, where many of the whites' social events took place, wrote Redfern,

they put on ‘the bioscope'. The old-fashioned word is current in Southern Africa. Like many things in that region the word is forty years behind the times.

It was ‘the bioscope' on my second night. The film, a shockingly old number with Lon Chaney in the leading role, was shown in the lounge of the small hotel. Outside, young Africans pressed their noses against the meshed windows and strained to get a view of the marvels of the screen.

Africans were not allowed inside, though an exception was made for Seretse – the white community assumed he would be Kgosi and they needed his consent to trade in the Bangwato reserve.

Inside, Redfern listened to the conversation of the white men who were drinking at the bar:

A young Afrikaner railway clerk wearing the same shape of beard as the Voortrekkers wore 100 years before, was boasting heavily of what he would do should Seretse turn up with ‘his woman'. Seretse had been an occasional visitor to the movies. But it would be another thing if he came along this time with the woman.

The beefy Afrikaner and his friends fumed over their beer and cheap brandy, and began to rant about white civilisation. Their language was vigorous, and occasionally disgusting. Although they normally spoke in Afri
kaans, they switched to English this night because there were English people in listening range.

Then, just as the film began, the screen was momentarily blotted out by two shadows: Ruth and Seretse, quietly taking their places in a couple of chairs reserved for them by Mrs Shaw. ‘They sat there,' observed Redfern, ‘holding hands just like a couple in a cinema in Purley. At the interval, one of Mrs Shaw's party fetched soft drinks from the bar round the corner.' The boasting men at the bar, however, did nothing. They knew that ‘Seretse and his woman' had arrived, ‘but they were content to stick to their boasting. They had a final round and then they too took their places to watch Mr Chaney's exploits. It must have cost them a great effort.'
³⁶

To Seretse, the white traders were respectful. They spoke no ill of him – at least, when their servants were in earshot. But some of them, observed Redfern, were predicting that within three months the tribe would ‘put something' in Ruth's tea or that within six months Seretse would tire of her and seek consolation in his own tribe. Red fern also noticed that many of them, who had known Seretse from when he was a small boy, liked him as a person. But his wife was a different matter – she had let down her race and had broken the unwritten rules of their community. They were polite to her, out of deference to Seretse, but they smouldered with resentment. One day, when Ruth was driving through Serowe, she felt faint in the heat and asked a passer-by to fetch her a glass of water from one of the stores. He went to get her one and then, feeling better, Ruth went on her way. Later, when the incident was recounted to Redfern, a white woman nastily said to him, ‘If she thought she was going to get invited inside by a trick like that, she was dead wrong.'
³⁷

But Ruth did have some white friends, including Phineas McIntosh, the man who had been flogged by Tshekedi in 1933 for fighting over native women. As much as anything else, he had been punished for not respecting the colour bar against miscegenation, so they had something in common. Doris Bradshaw and her husband Alan, who worked for the Native Recruiting Corporation in Johannesburg, which recruited local labour to work in the gold mines of South
Africa, became special friends.
³⁸
‘When we knew Seretse had married a white girl,' wrote Alan to Doris's sister,

we knew she was going to face many difficulties in a strange and foreign country… We made a point of doing all we could for her. Seretse I have known for years and he is a good lad. I like many of his ideas for the future of his people. Our home was always open to them and they came to us very often.
³⁹

But the Bradshaws lived in Palapye. ‘The Serowe Europeans,' said Doris, ‘just about ignored her, only Stan Woodford and his wife and Phil McIntosh and his wife would even speak to her.'
⁴⁰

Sillery laid the blame for this on Ruth herself. ‘A good many stories are current about Mrs Khama,' he reported to Baring, ‘which, if true, indicate that she is not managing her racial relations as delicately as one would have wished.' He was also troubled by Seretse's wish for ‘European' alcohol, which Africans were not allowed to buy or drink. For unlike Khama III and Tshekedi, Seretse was not teetotal. It was a ‘minor but tiresome matter',
⁴¹
complained Sillery, who argued that