rationalized so that the successful competitor appeared to
be the rightful heir. The Tswana captured this idea with a
proverb, with a tinge of constitutional monarchy: kgosi ke
kgosi ka morafe , “The king is king by the grace of the
people.”
The Tswana chiefs continued in their attempts to
maintain their independence from Britain and preserve
their indigenous institutions after their trip to London. They
conceded the construction of railways in Bechuanaland, but
limited the intervention of the British in other aspects of
economic and political life. They were not opposed to the
construction of the railways, certainly not for the same
reasons as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian monarchs
blocked railways. They just realized that railways, like the
rest of the policies of the British, would not bring
development to Bechuanaland as long as it was under
colonial control. The early experience of Quett Masire,
president of independent Botswana from 1980 to 1998,
explains why. Masire was an enterprising farmer in the
1950s; he developed new cultivation techniques for
sorghum and found a potential customer in Vryburg Milling,
a company located across the border in South Africa. He
went to the railway station master at Lobatse in
Bechuanaland and asked to rent two rail trucks to move his
crop to Vryburg. The station master refused. Then he got a
white friend to intervene. The station master reluctantly
agreed, but quoted Masire four times the rate for whites.
Masire gave up and concluded, “It was the practice of the
whites, not just the laws prohibiting Africans from owning
freehold land or holding trading licenses that kept blacks
from developing enterprises in Bechuanaland.”
All in all, the chiefs, and the Tswana people, had been
lucky. Perhaps against all odds, they succeeded in
preventing Rhodes’s takeover. As Bechuanaland was still
marginal for the British, the establishment of indirect rule
there did not create the type of vicious circle playing out in
Si