Three African peoples asked Britain for protection, not out of love for the empire but to escape something worse: Boer commandos, Rhodes's company and, later, apartheid South Africa. Britain ran them cheaply from outside their own borders, drained their men to the South African mines, and for half a century planned to hand them to Pretoria. They held out, and became independent in 1966 and 1968.
Britain never governed these three territories as ordinary colonies. They were run by the British High Commissioner in South Africa, through a Resident Commissioner in each, and became known together as the High Commission Territories. From 1931 the High Commissioner even had his own flag "for Basutoland, the Bechuanaland Protectorate and Swaziland".
The arrangement suited London: little money was spent, local kings and chiefs ran daily life, and the territories supplied tens of thousands of migrant workers to the mines and farms of South Africa. It also left them dangerously close to the South African state, which wanted them for itself.
Squeezed between Boer expansion from the Transvaal and German South West Africa, Tswana rulers accepted a British protectorate on 31 March 1885. The southern part, British Bechuanaland, was annexed to the Cape Colony in 1895 and is now in South Africa. The northern part became the Bechuanaland Protectorate, today's Botswana.
In 1895 Cecil Rhodes asked for the protectorate to be handed to his British South Africa Company, which had just occupied Zimbabwe by force. Three dikgosi (kings), Khama III of the Bangwato, Sebele I of the Bakwena and Bathoen I of the Bangwaketse, sailed to Britain. They toured the country from September 1895, speaking in chapels and town halls across the Midlands, the north and London, and won over the nonconformist churches who mattered to the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. In November 1895 they met Queen Victoria. Most of their land stayed under the Crown, not the Company.
Britain then ran Bechuanaland on almost nothing. Its capital was Mafeking (now Mahikeng), a town outside the territory in South Africa, until 1965. Investment was kept to a minimum. At independence there were only a few kilometres of tarred road.
Seretse Khama, grandson of Khama III and heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy, studied at Oxford and the Inner Temple in London. In 1947 he met Ruth Williams, a clerk at a Lloyd's of London firm, from Blackheath. No church would marry them, and they married at Kensington Register Office on 29 September 1948.
The marriage outraged the new apartheid government in South Africa, which had just come to power and banned the couple from its territory. Britain needed South African gold and uranium and feared South African action against Bechuanaland. The Labour government held a judicial inquiry, then suppressed its report, and in 1950 barred Seretse from his own country. The couple lived in exile in Croydon. They were only allowed home in 1956, as private citizens, after Seretse gave up his claim to the chieftaincy.
The man Britain had exiled founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party in 1962, won the first election in 1965 and became the first President of Botswana in 1966.
King Moshoeshoe I built the Basotho nation in the 1820s and 1830s from his mountain fortress at Thaba Bosiu. In the 1850s and 1860s the Boers of the Orange Free State took much of his best farmland in a series of wars. Facing defeat, Moshoeshoe appealed to Britain, and on 12 March 1868 Basutoland was declared British territory. The Treaty of Aliwal North of 1869 then fixed the border, leaving the fertile land west of the Caledon River, the "Conquered Territory", to the Free State and cutting the kingdom roughly in half.
Moshoeshoe died in 1870. In 1871 Britain handed Basutoland to the Cape Colony without the consent of the Basotho. When the Cape tried to disarm them, they rose in the Gun War of 1880–81 and fought the Cape forces to a standstill. The Cape gave up, and from 1884 Basutoland was ruled directly by the British Crown again.
Basutoland became a labour reservoir. Most of its men worked for years in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. In the Second World War Basotho volunteers served with the British army in North Africa and Italy; many died when their troopship was torpedoed off the Tunisian coast.
Britain and the Transvaal recognised Swazi independence in 1881. But in the 1880s white speculators obtained hundreds of concessions from King Mbandzeni, over grazing, minerals, trade and even tax collection, which together covered almost the whole country. From 1894 the Boer South African Republic administered Swaziland. After the Boers' defeat in the South African War, Britain took over in 1903, and from 1906 the territory was run by the High Commissioner.
In 1907 the British partition of the concessions left the Swazi nation only about a third of its own land; the rest went to white concession-holders. King Sobhuza II, who took up his powers in 1921, led a Swazi delegation to London in 1922 to petition King George V for the return of the land. He was refused, but the Swazi nation spent the following decades buying land back, and by independence it held around half the country.
When Britain created the Union of South Africa in 1910, the South Africa Act included provisions for the High Commission Territories to be transferred to the Union later. South African governments asked for them again and again, in the 1920s, the 1930s and after 1948, when apartheid became law.
The kings, chiefs and peoples of all three territories made their opposition clear, and the rise of apartheid made a transfer politically impossible for Britain. But London kept the question open for decades, and the territories stayed underdeveloped while it did.
Botswana: Bechuanaland's government moved from Mafeking to the new town of Gaberones (Gaborone) in February 1965. Seretse Khama's party won the first election under universal suffrage on 1 March 1965. On 30 September 1966 the Republic of Botswana became independent, with Sir Seretse Khama as President. It was then one of the poorest countries in the world.
Lesotho: after elections in April 1965, Basutoland became independent on 4 October 1966 as the Kingdom of Lesotho, with King Moshoeshoe II as head of state and Chief Leabua Jonathan of the Basotho National Party as Prime Minister. Its capital is Maseru. It remains entirely surrounded by South Africa.
Eswatini: a constitution for limited self-government came in 1963, and in 1967 Swaziland became a protected state with Sobhuza II recognised as king. Full independence followed on 6 September 1968. Sobhuza reigned until his death in 1982, one of the longest reigns in recorded history. On 19 April 2018 King Mswati III renamed the country the Kingdom of Eswatini.
These are three of Africa's oldest surviving kingdoms and chieftaincies, whose rulers outplayed Boers, Rhodes and Pretoria to keep their land. Botswana's 100 pula note carries the three dikgosi of 1895. Our partner sites continue the story:
The plaque to the three kings is on the Botswana High Commission in London. The files on Seretse Khama's exile, the 1895 deputation and all three territories are at The National Archives in Kew. The London Missionary Society archives, which tell much of the Bechuanaland story, are held at SOAS, University of London.
In Botswana, visit the Three Dikgosi Monument in Gaborone and the Khama III Memorial Museum and royal cemetery in Serowe, where Seretse and Ruth Khama are buried; the Chobe and Okavango regions are reached via Kasane, close to Victoria Falls. In Lesotho, climb Thaba Bosiu outside Maseru, where Moshoeshoe I is buried. In Eswatini, see the royal and parliamentary centre at Lobamba with the National Museum, and the capital Mbabane. All three are easiest to reach from Johannesburg.
Entrance fees are included in the tour price; tips are not included but are always welcome.
From Johannesburg:
Victoria Falls, next to Botswana's Chobe region:
In London:
The Union these three territories refused to join.
What happened to the land Rhodes did get.
The man the three kings went to London to stop.
All of Britain's African territories, country by country.
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