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Now that Keaboka and Peto were in prison, there was a vacuum in the leadership of Seretse's supporters. To maintain the campaign for the return of their Kgosi, a new organization called the Bamangwato National Congress was founded by Leetile Raditladi, with the support of Lenyeletse Seretse, Monametsi Chiepe and some others. One of their aims, explained Raditladi in
Naledi ya Batswana
on 2 August 1952, was to find a way of uniting the different factions of the Bangwato. As part of their manifesto, they nominated Oratile as acting Kgosi – ‘Princess Oratile Sekgoma Khama, the highest scion of blue blood in the land, to be the Head of the Bamangwato People and Administration', assisted by a representative and elected body of men.
⁴⁰
Oratile, whom Ruth described as ‘a lovable and generous person',
⁴¹
commanded wide respect and affection. After the riot, she was often in Lobatse, supporting and helping the men and women on trial at the High Court.

This was the second time that Oratile had been put forward as a leader to replace the banished Seretse. Two years earlier, she had been nominated as President of a Council and the proposal had been rejected outright by the Resident Commissioner and the Government. But this time, the Resident Commissioner thought that Oratile might offer a solution to their problems: a Chief who would be approved by the Tribe as an alternative to Seretse.
⁴²
He sent this view to the High Commissioner's Office. But next day a strongly worded message came back from Sir John – that Oratile would
not
do.
⁴³
London took the same line. The appointment of Oratile, wrote Salisbury to Sir John was ‘out of the question' – she was not suitable and Tshekedi would never rest so long as she was in office. The Tribe had to be reminded, he said, that there was ‘no precedent in Bamangwato history for [the] appointment of a woman as chief'.
⁴⁴

Salisbury was right that there was no precedent in the history of the Bangwato for a woman Chief. But women in other parts of the Protectorate had taken leadership roles. Among the Bangwaketse, Gagoangwe and her daughter Ntebogang had served as Regents for Kgosi Bathoen II from 1923 to 1928.
⁴⁵
And when Oratile's name was
put forward in 1950 and 1952, Mrs Moremi was the Regent of the Batawana.
⁴⁶
The reason for Salisbury's objection to Oratile was not that she was a woman, but that she was closely linked to Seretse. As Le Rougetel warned, many Bangwato would regard her appointment ‘as keeping the Chief's chair warm for Seretse'.
⁴⁷

The Commonwealth Secretary set out to the British High Commissioner the details of a three-point programme: getting Seretse out of the Chieftainship and the Protectorate for a long time; getting Tshekedi back into the Reserve as a private individual; and promoting the appointment of Rasebolai Kgamane as Chief.
⁴⁸
Rasebolai was next in royal seniority after Tshekedi. However, he was not of the House of Khama, like Seretse, Tshekedi and Oratile, but of the House of Kgamane, Khama's brother, which had a reputation as warriors rather than statesmen. The CRO argued that Kgamane's war record, as the only regimental Sergeant-Major from Bechuanaland in the Second World War, made him eminently suitable for office. In the view of his Commanding Officer, ‘RSM Rasebolai had not only all the real dignity of an African of good breeding, but he had a modesty of demeanour and above all, that rarest of all things in the African, a capacity for understanding the white man.'
⁴⁹
But the chief reason for Rasebolai's appeal to the CRO – especially to those mandarins who continued to back Tshekedi, notably W. A. W. Clark – was his close relationship with the former Regent: he had gone with Tshekedi to Rametsana in 1950 and was his leading supporter. If he were to become Kgosi, he would become a channel through which Tshekedi could exert control over the Bangwato.

In August, the exclusion order on Tshekedi was finally lifted. He was now allowed to return to the Bangwato Reserve, though he was not allowed to take part in political affairs. But he and his followers did not return to Serowe, knowing they would not be welcome. Instead, they established a new village called Pilikwe, south of the Tswapong Hills, about fifty miles from Serowe.
⁵⁰
Under Tshekedi's iron rule, Pilikwe swiftly became a model village. A new junior official from Britain, George Winstanley, was impressed. ‘The thatching was immaculate,' he found, ‘and untended sheep and goats were not tolerated in the village. There was not a scrap of litter to be seen.'
⁵¹
In his office, Tshekedi had a plentiful library – classics, Shakespeare,
Dickens, modern novels, works on law and colonial legislatures, history and economics, horse and cattle breeding, irrigation and education, as well as manuals of instruction on mechanics, fruit-growing and football.
⁵²

Winstanley was surprised, though, by the extreme deference accorded to the former regent. One day, when he was taking tea with Tshekedi on his veranda, one of Tshekedi's women servants brought him a message. When she approached her master, she was ‘so low that she was almost on her knees and after he had received the message she retreated in similar fashion'. Winstanley wondered if the woman was disabled, but Tshekedi explained that his servants usually approached him in this way. ‘Nobody ever walked past him without acknowledging his presence,' said Winstanley. ‘The villagers stopped and bowed and greeted him with a gentle soundless clapping of their hands.'
⁵³

Le Rougetel was putting pressure on the Administration to deliver the results demanded by Salisbury. At the start of September, Beetham distributed letters throughout the Bangwato Reserve, in English on one side and Setswana on the other, announcing the return of Tshekedi and the need to choose a new Chief.
⁵⁴
Batho held a meeting with royal headmen of the Bangwato as well as diKgosi from other parts of the Protectorate, who agreed that an Assembly should be held on 11 November. For this, the Serowe Kgotla would at last be opened.
⁵⁵

But many people were unhappy about the proposed Assembly, especially because Keaboka and Peto were still in prison. At a meeting in the village of Sefhare, strong feelings were expressed. ‘The government is a snake, or chameleon,' complained one man, ‘it changes colour every day.' Then he referred indignantly to the presence at the meeting of an informer:

I see a policeman at the meeting. I know that he represents the DC and I know that he will report the things that we say in this meeting. We are going to fight again. If a Rametsana man were to touch me now, I will fight him. I do not care if I am arrested. I have been in gaol before.

The policeman who was exposed made careful notes. The overall tone of the meeting, he reported, was highly charged: ‘Most men appeared to be very angry. They seemed to shiver as they spoke.'
⁵⁶

Early in the morning of Monday 10 November 1952, the Kgotla
was officially opened by Batho, for the first time in over five months. Security police stood by, with two armoured cars. Up to 2,500 men had come from every direction and the diKgosi of six other nations had also arrived. So had Fraenkel, at the request of the Bangwato. Tshekedi, who had been visiting Serowe, greeted the diKgosi and then left, as he was debarred from taking part in politics.
⁵⁷

Batho told the Assembly about the need to appoint a new Chief and he renewed the Government's promise that no Chief would be imposed. Then he opened up the discussion. Raditladi made the first speech, in which he argued that Rasebolai had not been accepted back in Serowe by the Bangwato people; this was heard with enthusiastic applause.
⁵⁸
By the next day, well over 3,000 men had assembled. ‘Government promised not to force a Chief on us,' objected Oabona Nthobatsang, ‘and it is shameful that Government should now try to force one on us. You can kill us but we stick to our decision – we want Seretse only. He has committed no wrong.' This was followed by long and hearty applause and
pulas
.
⁵⁹
On the third day of the Kgotla, low rain-clouds hung over Serowe and the men looked anxiously at the sky, reported the
Star
, ‘thinking of their lands, which should have already been ploughed'. No decision had been reached, but Batho dispersed the assembly:

I can see that the Tribe as a whole has not made up its mind to designate a Chief. I have, therefore, decided to disperse this meeting until after the ploughing season is over. You may now go to your lands and plough.
⁶⁰

‘My closing speech,' he reported, ‘was received in complete silence.'
⁶¹

Batho had not got the consensus he wanted in favour of Rasebolai. But at least the Bangwato of Serowe had got their Kgotla back. Every day, groups of men met there informally to talk together.
⁶²
Life had returned to normal in many ways and the ploughing season passed uneventfully. But life in Serowe had lost its centre. A correspondent for
The Times
reported that it seemed to have gone downhill. ‘The huts have a dilapidated air,' he noticed, ‘and where they have fallen into disrepair have not been attended to.' This was no doubt caused by the problem of drought followed by rains but it also, he thought, ‘reflects the listlessness of the people and is one of the disadvantages of not having a Chief'.
⁶³

At the end of the 1940s there had been little expression of concern in Britain about the welfare of the people of Africa. But by the start of the 1950s, argued Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican churchman and human rights campaigner working in South Africa, this was starting to change: questions were being asked about the practice of imperial rule and the future of the African colonies. One important reason for this was the growing awareness of the evil of apartheid. Before the election of the Nationalist Party, few people had understood what was at stake in South Africa. After all, wrote Huddleston, Jan Smuts had been one of the great wartime leaders and had also played a major role in drafting the constitution of the United Nations – and he was a South African. Furthermore, even if he had been defeated by Malan in 1948, the fact of Malan's election was proof of the democratic structure of his country, even if the electorate was an all-white one.

But since then, there had been a string of laws increasing the divide between whites and blacks and diminishing even further the quality of life of black people. The passing of the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act now meant that all African men were compelled to carry a pass or reference book. Canon John Collins drew attention to these evils in 1952, when he preached a sermon at St Paul's Cathedral in which he described Malan as ‘this poor wretched man hag-ridden with fear'. After this, the press began to pay serious attention to the issue of racism in a Commonwealth country – that, as Huddleston put it, ‘anti-Semitism and the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis were not the
only
forms of racism alive and kicking in our world'. It would be hard, said Huddleston, to exaggerate the importance of this change at that time, because it was ‘a kind
of watershed dividing the South Africa of the Empire and Commonwealth… from the South Africa in which the majority, being black, had begun their struggle for freedom and deserved support because they were oppressed'. This made people think hard not only about South Africa, but also about the inequalities of British rule in Africa. One could say, believed Huddleston, ‘that it was an awakening in every way comparable to that at the beginning of Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade'.
¹

An additional influence on this watershed in opinion was the movement of the Gold Coast towards the installation of an all-African Cabinet Government, which was the first of its kind to be established in British Africa. In 1952, Kwame Nkrumah became the country's first prime minister. All over Africa, following the end of the war, demands within British colonies for self-rule had grown louder and stronger, and were at last bearing fruit. What had seemed impossible before the war – African independence – was clearly going to become a reality in the near future. This had led to a sense of futility among some colonial administrators: the Colonial Office observed the prevalence of a feeling that ‘the show isn't going to last much longer anyway and it doesn't matter'.
²

There was growing concern about racial inequalities and exclusion. A series of minutes between officials at the CO discussed a need to ‘arouse interest in and friendliness towards Africans as human beings (and not only as domestic servants)', and the CO wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to ask for help with ideas to reduce friction from racial antipathies.
³

The injustices suffered by ‘natives' in British colonies were exemplified in Kenya. In every sphere of life, there was segregation of Africans, Asians and whites – in terms of where they lived, where their children went to school, and in clinics and hospitals. Nor were they just segregated: essential services for black people were scant and inadequate. Nearly all the good land had been seized by white settlers, who prosecuted the colour bar vigorously. In the early 1950s, these injustices led to an outbreak of unrest which became known as the Mau Mau uprising and which was mercilessly put down by the Colonial Government, under the leadership of Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor – the very same Evelyn Baring who had pushed through the
exile of Seretse Khama. As soon as Baring arrived in Nairobi on 30 September 1952 to take up his new appointment as Governor – fresh from his position as the British High Commissioner of South Africa – he was immediately put under immense pressure by the European settlers to crush the rebellion. Just over a week after his arrival, on 9 October, he cabled London to advocate a state of emergency; he also asked for more troops to be rushed to the colony.