Colour Bar (24 page)

Lady Cripps appears to have genuinely believed the official story. It had a trace of truth: the difference of opinion between uncle and nephew. But this difference had been puffed up and magnified to such an extent that it really did seem to threaten the good order of the
Bangwato. Lady Cripps herself was free of racist prejudice: not only did she publicly denounce it, but also she did not object when her daughter Peggy announced in 1952 her wish to marry Joe Appiah, Seretse's friend from the Gold Coast.

A Cabinet meeting was arranged for 16 March. One of the items on the agenda was the question of the conditions under which Seretse would be able to return temporarily to Bechuanaland. Gordon Walker had asked Baring for his views. ‘I am more than grateful for your decision to consult me again,' replied the High Commissioner. He suggested that Gordon Walker grant permission for Seretse's visit – but only for so long as Seretse's behaviour did not make it impossible to maintain order. This proviso, he argued, would create a ‘loophole', which he thought was necessary to maintain stability in the reserve.
⁴⁴

At the Cabinet meeting, Gordon Walker explained to his colleagues that he had offered to pay Seretse an allowance of £1,100 a year for so long as he was in exile. Subject to good behaviour, he added – thereby building in Baring's ‘loophole' – Seretse would be allowed to visit Bechuanaland briefly in connection with his lawsuit. But Cabinet members objected. They could not see why it was necessary to prohibit Seretse from taking up residence in the Protectorate, so long as he was outside the Bangwato Reserve. If Tshekedi was allowed to live in the Protectorate, then why not Seretse? They also thought that the Commonwealth Secretary should say at once that he would be prepared to review the whole matter, if Seretse's presence in the reserve did not prejudice good government.
⁴⁵

The day after the Cabinet meeting, Gordon Walker went to the Colonial Office for a meeting with representatives of the Seretse Khama Fighting Committee, who included Learie Constantine and Nii Odoi Annan. The meeting was also attended by James Griffiths, who had replaced Creech Jones as Colonial Secretary after the February election. The Fighting Committee put forward strong views. The feeling of ‘the coloured people in this country and throughout the Colonial Empire,' they protested, ‘was one of extreme anger' at the British Government over this affair, which should have been left as a domestic affair for the Bamangwato. They described a general feeling that – as Joe Appiah was to put it in his memoirs – ‘Labour in office, as in the Seretse case, [had] adopted a policy of drift unworthy of any
responsible government.'
⁴⁶
Some extremists on the Fighting Committee, they said, wanted the whole colonial empire to boycott British goods and even to shoot British officials; but they had been firmly told to conduct the fight on constitutional lines. Constantine added that so far as he was concerned, the Seretse Khama affair was just one more example of racial discrimination. He gave examples of insulting treatment received in London by himself and his family and, in addition, he produced a copy of a concise
Pocket Encyclopaedia
published by Asprey, an exclusive shop in London's Mayfair district, ‘which included as part of the description of a Negro the words “breeds fast and is showing menace”.'
⁴⁷

Meanwhile, in South Africa, Baring felt under increasing pressure. On opening the
Cape Times
, an English morning newspaper, on 20 March, he was horrified to find a leading article with the title, ‘Seretse will win'. Two Labour MPs in London, reported the newspaper, were saying that the Government was retreating from its original position and that Seretse would be Chief of the Bamangwato before the end of the year. Baring hurriedly arranged a meeting with General Smuts. ‘He spoke very seriously to me about the serious risks of such an eventuality,' he reported to Gordon Walker. The possibility of Seretse staying indefinitely in Bechuanaland, he added, filled him with dismay and great anxiety.
⁴⁸

The White Paper – ‘Bechuanaland Protectorate. Succession to the Chieftainship of the Bamangwato Tribe' – was finally released on 22 March. It made a great deal of the danger to tribal unity posed by the rivalry between Seretse and Tshekedi and of the future attitude of the tribe towards the children of Seretse's marriage. No colour bar, it said, had been imposed on the tribe:

His Majesty's Government are fully aware of the very strong feelings that are aroused on the subject of the merits or demerits of mixed marriages, but that is not the issue which is here raised. This particular marriage assumed importance because of Seretse's position as a prospective Chief of the Bamangwato tribe.

Regarding South Africa, the document repeated the lie that Gordon Walker had given two weeks earlier:

His Majesty's Government were of course aware that a strong body of European opinion in Southern Africa would be opposed to recognition; but, as stated in the House of Commons on the 8th March, no representations on this matter have been received from the Government of the Union of South Africa or Southern Rhodesia.
⁴⁹

The full text of the White Paper was cabled to every British colony throughout the Empire.
⁵⁰

The White Paper had a mixed reaction in the UK. As far as the Seretse Khama Fighting Committee was concerned, it had not disclosed anything that was not known before.
⁵¹
From Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury sent a letter to the Prime Minister, expressing deep concern that the Government seemed to be taking a new – and unacceptable – policy on race relations. He enclosed with his letter a set of resolutions on the Seretse Khama affair, which had been passed by the British Council of Churches.
⁵²
The serious weeklies remained unanimous in their disapproval of the Government and letters to the editors were running about three to one in Seretse's favour.
⁵³
But
The Times
and the
Manchester Guardian
thought the White Paper put a somewhat better face on the banishment. The
Daily Telegraph
welcomed the Government's decision to release a written account of the situation. Some of the Labour Party members who had complained about the banishment now felt reassured.

In Britain's colonies, there was widespread disgust. From Lagos an angry telegram was sent to the Colonial Secretary: ‘Nigerians advise hands off Khama and let him rule his people as Britons do theirs.'
⁵⁴
The United Gold Coast Convention complained that, ‘We in the Gold Coast deplore any act likely to worsen the deterioration of colonial Africa's shaken confidence in the British justice.'
⁵⁵
‘I am afraid the White Paper has been very badly received,' wrote the head of the Bureau of Public Information in Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, to the Colonial Office, ‘to judge from the conversations wherever I go.' He added, ‘I should myself have wished that the White Paper had been worded with an ear for possible West Indian reactions. I do not think I have seen people of African descent, in all strata, so indignant since the Italo-Ethiopian war, and that is saying a lot!'
⁵⁶
In
Jamaica, a resolution of ‘profound regret' was passed in the House of Representatives.
⁵⁷

In the USA, reported the British embassy in Washington, the case had had ‘a very bad effect on Negroes generally, who felt much moved and almost personally affected by it.'
⁵⁸
The Council on African Affairs, of which Paul Robeson was Chairman and W. E. B. Du Bois Vice-Chairman, was appalled by the White Paper. It sent a letter of objection to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, pointing out that the British Government had violated the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 7 – ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile.'
⁵⁹

The Government had intended to publish the White Paper while Seretse was en route to Lobatse, well out of the way. But Seretse was determined to see it before he left and he postponed his flight for a day. The contents saddened him. From his flat in Airways Mansions, he wrote a long and thoughtful letter to
The Times
. ‘As hard as I tried,' he said, ‘I have failed to discover one single charge against me where I have done wrong.' He had committed no crime: all he had done was to marry an Englishwoman.
⁶⁰

Two days after the release of the White Paper, the Commonwealth Secretary was faced with a new crisis. He was told that in the House of Assembly in Cape Town, Sam Kahn, the Communist member, had confronted Dr Malan on South Africa's role in the Seretse Khama affair, asking whether ‘any representation' had been made to the British Government. Malan had been evasive in his answer and referred Kahn to the White Paper.
⁶¹
But Gordon Walker was horrified. He knew that if the truth emerged, his lies to the House on 8 March and in the White Paper would be exposed. He quickly telephoned South Africa House and summoned Egeland to Whitehall.

For three hours, they sifted through the details of the meeting on 30 June 1949, when Egeland had presented Malan's point of view on Seretse to Philip Noel-Baker, Gordon Walker's predecessor. Liesching joined in the discussions. They were anxious to find a way of showing that the South African High Commissioner's communication was ‘
not
a “representation” made on instructions from Dr Malan'.
⁶²
They looked at Noel-Baker's record of the meeting, which stated that
Egeland ‘was making only semi-official or private representations' – even though, as Egeland now pointed out, Noel-Baker had fully understood that Egeland had been instructed by Malan to come and talk to him.
⁶³

This was the first time, cabled Egeland to his Prime Minister, that he had seen this record; he himself had kept no written account of the conversation. He did not remember every detail, but he was ‘extremely surprised' to find that this had been Noel-Baker's impression. And even though the issue was one of ‘interpretation and perhaps of rather fine distinctions', he knew that he had left Noel-Baker ‘in no doubt about your attitude which, of course, would have been well-known to him in other ways'.
⁶⁴
In other words, Malan
had
made a representation to the British Government. This telegram from Egeland to Malan was copied to the Commonwealth Relations Office, from where it was forwarded to Attlee, to other senior officials in the British government, and to Baring in South Africa.
⁶⁵

Egeland also wrote a private letter to Malan, which was intended for his eyes only. Noel-Baker's note, he said,

set out quite fairly and fully the implications which I had stressed and at the very start made it clear that my call was on your instructions. Noel-Baker's reference lower down to ‘non-official' representations may, I think, be fairly ascribed to the ‘woolly-mindedness' which cost him his place in the Cabinet.
⁶⁶

It is unlikely, however, that Noel-Baker – as Secretary of State – would have written this record himself. Almost certainly it was written by a Private Secretary and its contents may have been influenced by Liesching, the Permanent Under-Secretary, as an insurance against any accusation of collusion with the South African Government.

But in any case, what Egeland described as Noel-Baker's ‘woolly-mindedness' was his successor's lifeline. In a statement to Attlee, Gordon Walker insisted that his statement to the Commons on 8 March had been borne out by Noel-Baker's record. And although Dr Malan had claimed in a speech to the Nationalist Party Congress in 1949 that he had sent a telegram to the UK Government, this was demonstrably untrue: ‘No such telegram was ever received by us from the Union Government.'
⁶⁷
No evidence existed, therefore, to suggest
that South Africa had made an official representation to the British Government.

Egeland received a swift reply from Douglas Forsyth, the South African External Affairs Secretary. ‘Prime Minister appreciates, of course, delicacy of situation,' he assured Egeland, ‘and wishes Secretary of State to understand that should question again be raised here he will deal with it with all possible discretion so as to avoid embarrassment to Gordon Walker.' The Commonwealth Secretary was hugely relieved. ‘The most helpful and understanding reply which you returned to my telegram of the 24th', wrote Egeland to his Prime Minister, ‘has been received with warm appreciation by the CRO.'
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But no sooner had Gordon Walker dealt with the issue of representations from South Africa, than once again he was on the defensive in the House of Commons. A debate on the Seretse Khama issue started two minutes before midnight on 29 March, lasting well over an hour. It was listened to by Seretse himself, sitting at the back of the Chamber. It began with Fenner Brockway describing the case as a symbol – ‘an issue of the division of the world between the white and what are known as the coloured races'. The colour bar, he said, ‘is the real issue behind the decision… against which this House should protest with its last breath'. Quintin Hogg was equally critical. ‘What we have to discuss here tonight,' he said acidly,

is whether the Government have acted wisely, not in endorsing or refusing to endorse the marriage between a Bechuanaland prince and a London typist, but in over-riding the decision of the Bechuanaland tribe to accept this man and his wife as their prince and princess.

‘It seems to me,' he added, ‘that this is the matter upon which the Government have virtually offered no case at all.'
⁶⁹

Gordon Walker found the debate heavy going. ‘I went over to the attack, having been so far conciliatory,' he recorded in his diary. ‘I asserted our rights and said the critics had done harm by spreading misconceptions.' But he found that: