14.
BREAKING THE MOLD
T HREE A FRICAN C HIEFS
O N S EPTEMBER 6, 1895, the ocean liner Tantallon Castle
docked at Plymouth on the southern coast of England.
Three African chiefs, Khama of the Ngwato, Bathoen of the
Ngwaketse, and Sebele of the Kwena, disembarked and
took the 8:10 express train to Paddington Station, London.
The three chiefs had come to Britain on a mission: to save
their and five other Tswana states from Cecil Rhodes. The
Ngwato, Ngwaketse, and Kwena were three of the eight
Tswana states comprising what was then known as
Bechuanaland, which would become Botswana after
independence in 1966.
The tribes had been trading with Europeans for most of
the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, the famous Scottish
missionary David Livingstone had traveled extensively in
Bechuanaland and converted King Sechele of the Kwena
to Christianity. The first translation of the Bible into an
African language was in Setswana, the language of the
Tswana. In 1885 Britain had declared Bechuanaland a
protectorate. The Tswana were content with the
arrangement, as they thought this would bring them
protection from further European invasions, particularly
from the Boers, with whom they had been clashing since
the Great Trek in 1835, a migration of thousands of Boers
into the interior to escape from British colonialism. The
British, on the other hand, wanted control of the area to
block both further expansions by the Boers (this page–this
page) and possible expansions by Germans, who had
annexed the area of southwest Africa corresponding to
today’s Namibia. The British did not think that a full-scale
colonization was worthwhile. The high commissioner Rey
summarized the attitudes of the British government in 1885
clearly: “We have no interest in the country to the north of