Dirty Trick

"If the Bamangwato don't object to a white consort and the prospect of half-breed succession," boomed the London Times sternly, "it would not seem to be for the imperial government, pledged before nations to respect equal rights of all races, to overrule them in their own domestic concerns. There, if principle were to prevail over expediency, should be an end of the argument."

Unfortunately, as the Times well knew, neither principle nor the south African tribe of Bamangwato stood much chance of prevailing. When handsome, black, Oxford-bred Seretse Khama, hereditary chief of the Bamangwato, decided to make blonde Ruth Williams, a London typist, his queen (TIME, July 11), he touched off a problem that reached far beyond the hearths of his 100,000 subjects in Britain's Bechuanaland Protectorate. Few Bamangwato objected to Ruth. After a brief tribal squabble between the pro-Seretse forces and those of his domineering uncle, Regent Tshekedi, the tribe, their enthusiasm spurred by an unprecedented rainfall which accompanied Ruth's arrival, had declared overwhelmingly for Seretse. Final approval, however, had to come from Whitehall.

Doublecrossed. Last autumn Britain's Commonwealth Office sent a commission to Bechuanaland to investigate. Last month it invited Seretse to talk things over. He left his pregnant wife in their brand-new stucco bungalow in Serowe and came to London. What would he think, Commonwealth Relations Minister Philip Noel-Baker asked the young chief, of abdicating and coming to live in England on a comfortable allowance? Seretse declined the offer. Then for three weeks, while Britain's politicians got through an election at home, he was left to cool his heels in London. Last week Seretse was called again to the Commonwealth Relations Office. Britain's government, he was told by plausible Patrick Gordon-Walker, the new Commonwealth Minister, had decided "that in the interest and welfare" of the Bamangwato, the young chief should be banished from Bechuanaland for five years.

"They tricked me," exploded Seretse shortly afterward to reporters in his tiny flat off Haymarket. "They invited me to come to England, and now they say that I am to be excluded from my home. I thought these things were only supposed to happen in Russia. I said it was a dirty trick. They told me they didn't want me to say anything at all to the press until next week, but now I feel I have been doublecrossed."

"A Disreputable Transaction." In Parliament next day Gordon-Walker found himself faced with others who felt much the same. "One dislikes interference of this kind in matters between man and wife," said the Liberals' Clement Davies. "A disreputable transaction," rumbled Tory Winston Churchill. The government, refusing to publish its special commission's report, offered no answer beyond the statement that they "viewed with grave concern the danger which recognition [of Seretse] would cause." What His Majesty's ministers refused to admit was readily added by Seretse himself. "It has been firmly believed at home for a long time," he told reporters, "that there is pressure from the Union of South Africa."

With South Africa's rabid racist Prime Minister Daniel Malan ready to seize on any excuse to step into Bechuanaland, which borders his country on the north, Britain's ministers seemed far more willing to heed his wishes than those of the Bamangwato. This week in Serowe, 35 Bamangwato elders refused to go to a special Kgotla meeting called by Britain's High Commissioner Sir Evelyn Baring to inform the Bamangwato of the government's decision. "We cannot," they said, "attend any tribal meeting in the absence of our true chief Seretse."

In its timid efforts to propitiate Malan, His Majesty's government seemed to be sacrificing both the Bamangwato and its own principles.

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