Empire and Religion in Colonial Botswana: The Seretse Khama Controversy, 1948–1956

Abstract

Western enthusiasm for ‘planting’ Christianity in Africa was often matched by that of indigenous peoples, in appropriating Christianity for their own ends.¹ In the case of the Ngwato kingdom, one of eight such polities in what is now the Republic of Botswana; African appropriation of Christianity in the late nineteenth century had important, long-term implications for religion and for empire in southern Africa. Here religion undoubtedly served, thwarted, transformed, mitigated and even at times reinforced the bonds of empire. In a major study of these complex processes, Paul Stuart Landau has described how ‘an originally tiny “Ngwato” polity’ wrested ‘a form of ecclesiastical state-hood from the expressions and habits propounded by a missionary society, expanded its own tenuous loyalties into a kingdom, and flourished for decades in the environment of British imperialism’.² Empire, along with Christianity, undoubtedly helped sustain this kingdom, and Ngwato kings were adept at playing off Western interests – imperial, commercial and religious – against each other. But changing imperial circumstances in the aftermath of the Second World War also helped to bring about the kingdom’s demise. A crucial factor in this occurrence was the highly controversial marriage that took place in London in 1948, between Seretse Khama, heir to the Ngwato kingdom, and Ruth Williams, a white English woman.