Serowe

Forty men stood up, then four thousand

On the fourth day of the big kgotla in June 1949, a Thursday, Seretse Khama stopped arguing and asked for a count. Leaving the royal headmen out of it, would everyone who still did not want his English wife in Serowe please stand. No more than forty men got up. Then he asked for those who would have her, and the rest of the assembly rose, four thousand men by the reckoning of the British official watching, shouting “Pula!” The papers claimed the noise went on for ten minutes while brown dust lifted off the meeting ground. The main kgotla is still at the foot of Serowe Hill.

Seven months earlier the assembly had gone the other way. In November 1948 the men talked for five days, 85 of them spoke, and only seven were for the marriage. Nobody is sure how many came in June. Tshekedi Khama, the regent and the loser, said 3,500. Others said 10,000.

The six-room house and the ping-pong table

Ruth Khama came out in the middle of that August by flying boat to Victoria Falls and a small hired plane to Francistown, where Seretse was waiting in a new blue-green Chevrolet. He had arranged for them to stay with Minnie Shaw, an English-born trader and temperance campaigner, at Palapye, which was full of reporters. After a spell lodging with a clergyman in Serowe they moved, on 29 August 1949, into a house the Bangwato had paid to build for one of Tshekedi’s imported farming experts: six rooms, electric light, a fridge and a shortwave radio. They rode horses and played ping-pong on the stoep. Tshekedi had already gone, his followers’ belongings loaded onto three new lorries so red that Serowe called them kgapamadi, blood-red.

The press followed. Margaret Bourke-White of Life got her pictures and said it had been harder than getting Stalin to sit. Noel Monks of the Daily Mail walked Seretse into the whites-only bar of the station hotel at Palapye to break the rule. The High Commissioner’s press minder, driven to fury by all of them, was Nicholas Monsarrat, who had not yet published The Cruel Sea. He put the reporters into a later African novel, The Tribe That Lost Its Head.

Jacqueline, the Khamas’ first child, was born at Sekgoma Memorial Hospital on 15 May 1950. Her father, by then shut out of the Bangwato reserve, was let in to see her that evening.

The day nobody came

Sir Evelyn Baring, the High Commissioner, called a kgotla for 13 March 1950 after London had ruled against Seretse. He came all in white, with feathers on his sun helmet, and the world’s reporters were there in force to watch. The ground was empty. The Bangwato held that only a true kgosi could summon them, so they stayed away.

Serowe had embarrassed a man in uniform before. In 1933 marines were sent up from the Cape and Tshekedi was suspended for having a white man flogged. The inquiry was run by Vice-Admiral Edward Evans, who had been second in command on Scott’s last Antarctic expedition. Within weeks Evans was back under the same withered fig tree where the suspension had been read, announcing that it was over, and Time had settlers’ wives hurrying forward to shake the regent’s hand.

When Seretse, Ruth and the baby were flown out to exile in the High Commissioner’s RAF Devon on 17 August 1950, Monsarrat was their official escort. At his suggestion the plane buzzed the cheering streets of Serowe, the very stunt Baring had lent his aircraft to prevent. On Sunday 1 June 1952 a kgotla broke up in a riot, and three police constables, newly brought in from Basutoland, were stoned to death. Seretse landed back at Francistown on 10 October 1956 and drove into Serowe the next afternoon. As he came out of the tribal office behind the kgotla, thunder cracked and the crowd yelled that he had brought the rain. The welcome kgotla that followed drew five to seven thousand people.

What the camera kept

Serowe was filmed early and often. A London firm, W. Butcher and Son, shot the Bangwato regiments marching and riding past Khama III in June 1911. Newsreel crews were back in 1922, 1923 and 1925, and at least 21 newsreel clips cover the marriage years.

When A United Kingdom was filmed here, the crew found the Khamas’ house standing empty and close to derelict, and restored it to shoot in. David Oyelowo, who played Seretse, said it was the real one. Ian Khama, then president, dropped in on the set by helicopter and told Oyelowo he had never thought he would see his parents again.

A skew church and a duiker

The church where the London Missionary Society preached has its own comedy. The foundation stone went down on 6 August 1912 and services began in June 1915. Then a masonry instructor from Tiger Kloof, the mission’s trade school, looked the building over: main gables up to three inches out of true, a leaking roof, mortar already crumbling. His students came up in the middle of 1916 and had it nearly rebuilt by the following January. In 1918 roofing was fetched from the abandoned church at Old Palapye, sixteen years after a regiment burned the old capital. Months before the stone was laid, a leading church member had told the magistrate’s court whose building it would be: the missionary could preach in it, but it would belong to the tribe.

On the hill above, Khama III’s grave carries a bronze duiker, the totem of the Bangwato.

Rain Clouds

Bessie Head taught first at Tshekedi Memorial School, in 1964 and 1965. The house she built with the money from her first novel was finished in November 1969 and she called it Rain Clouds. It had a gas stove, a luxury then, and running water in the bathroom. Serowe had no electricity, so she wrote at night by paraffin lamp.

She is not on the royal hill. Her grave is in the old cemetery on the slope behind Botalaote ward.