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Tshekedi was utterly committed to the needs of his people and wanted to better their lives, especially through the building of schools
and the improvement of the water supply. But his methods were not always appreciated. He had numerous work projects going on at the same time, for which the labour provided by the age regiments was his only resource.
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This led to widespread resentment, especially in connection with his pet project, the building of Moeng College. Tshekedi had no money to pay for the College and had to rely completely on tributary labour and on cattle donations which were supposed to be voluntary, but were often enforced.
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Seretse's age regiment, which was called the Malekantwa, had been compelled by Tshekedi to take part in this work. Lenyeletse Seretse, a cousin and close friend of Seretse, belonged to this regiment and described ‘the suffering we went through':

It was 1948. It was a year of drought. It was hot, as only drought years can be and we worked all day outdoors. Each man had to bring along his own rations, paid for out of his own pocket, but it didn't really work out. Those of us who had more means were forced to share with those who had less. Soon, we were all starving. Some members of the regiment had brought their horses. They died. We ate them. We ate wild rabbits or anything we could catch in the bush.
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Most of the men wanted to leave but dared not, because men who left a work regiment were put on trial and punished.

Tshekedi's methods were harsh. But, on the other hand, his projects were often admirable – such as building the only secondary boarding school in the whole of Bechuanaland. Tshekedi had radical, progressive ideas for the College: for example, he wanted black and white teachers to live together in the same hostel as equals.
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Tshekedi also wanted to protect the freedom of people in other parts of the region: when Jan Smuts sought to incorporate mandated South West Africa into South Africa, he vigorously opposed the merger.

All over British colonial Africa, people had to pay a hut tax; in Bechuanaland, the hut tax had been introduced in 1899 for every man of 18 years or more. Since traditionally most families' wealth lay in cattle and grain, which would not pay taxes, men were forced into wage labour. Most of the able-bodied men of the Protectorate went to South Africa to find work: some of them were employed on farms or in domestic service, but most worked in the gold mines of Johannesburg
and the diamond mines of Kimberley.
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The working conditions of miners in South Africa were brutal. Margaret Bourke-White, an American journalist from
Life
, went on a fact-finding journey to South Africa in the 1940s and was appalled by what she saw. Although a miner worked an eight-hour day, he was often underground for as many as eleven hours:

The white-skinned foremen must come up first, before the elevators take up the blacks. On each landing stage, as I made the ascent, I saw the black gold-miners clustered in large groups, awaiting their release to the outside air and open sky. They would see little of this sky.

The miners had to endure harsh living conditions: ‘They would sleep in concrete barracks, without windows, rolled up like sausages on the floor, forty to a room, crowded into compounds surrounded with barbed wire.'
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Only once a year were the miners allowed to return home for a visit. For the women left behind in Bechuanaland, life was very hard.

Bechuanaland was a Protectorate. This meant that African traditional leaders kept some of their powers but were subject to British rule; the British Government was regarded as a sort of trustee for the population. This was a very different situation from Southern Rhodesia and Kenya, which were self-governing colonies with almost Dominion status; their governments were controlled by large white settler communities, entirely excluding the black majority of the population.

There were a number of Protectorates in the British Empire, including Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. But the designation of ‘protectorate' had a very particular meaning for the people of Bechuanaland – that of protection, in the most literal sense, from a threat of incorporation by South Africa. Bechuanaland had always been vulnerable to South Africa, because it was directly on its border. In the 1880s it had come under attack from the Transvaal Boers, which led the diKgosi to appeal for British protection. This was backed by Cecil Rhodes, for his own purposes, and in 1885 Bechuanaland was proclaimed to be under the protection of Queen Victoria.

Then, in 1894, people were horrified to hear that Rhodes had asked Britain to transfer the Protectorate to the British South Africa
Company. To prevent this happening, the three leading diKgosi – Khama III of the Bangwato, Bathoen II of the Bangwaketse and Sebele of the Bakwena – went to Britain in 1895 to appeal for help. They emphasized that they wished to remain under the protection of Queen Victoria, who received them at Windsor Castle. She wrote in her diary:

After luncheon I went to the White Drawing-room to receive 3 Chiefs from Bechuana Land, who are Christians… The Chiefs are very tall & very black, but their hair is not woolly. One of the Chiefs is said to be a very remarkable & intelligent man [presumably Khama]. One of their chief objects in coming was to obtain a permit from the Govt. to suppress strong drink, which demoralises & kills the poor natives. Alas! everywhere this terrible evil, which has such a fatal effect on the population, seems to follow civilisation!

She was given skins of leopards and jackals by the diKgosi and to them she gave New Testaments and framed photographs of herself, as well as Indian shawls for their wives.
²¹

As they toured the country, the three diKgosi were explicit about their fears for their land. At a chapel meeting in Leicester, Khama explained that:

We think that the Chartered Company will take our lands, that they might enslave us to work in their mines. We black people work on the land; we live on the farms. We get our food from the land, and we are afraid that if the British South Africa Company begin in our country we will not get these things and that it will be a great loss to us.

Why, he asked, should the British Government ‘hand us over to the other people without asking us?'

They hand us over like an ox, but even the owner of the ox looks to where the ox will get grass, and water, land, that sort of thing. I think they ought to have asked us, and found out what we think about it. Although we are black people we have tribes that we rule over, [and] if a chief wants to make a new law or anything he must speak with his people.

‘We were progressing very [well] under the Imperial Government,' he said, ‘but now you are teaching us the word of war, and I think these things ought to cease.'
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It looked at first as if the visit of the diKgosi would be wasted, because Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, simply told them to negotiate terms with Rhodes. But then the Jameson Raid took place in December 1895, when Jameson invaded the Transvaal from inside Bechuanaland, on Rhodes's orders. It failed within three days and Britain was widely criticized for allowing its Protectorate to be used as a springboard for an attack on another country. Not wishing to be further discredited and aware, too, of the widespread support for the diKgosi from the British public, especially among Nonconformists and teetotallers, the Government refused to transfer the Protectorate to the British South Africa Company.

Bechuanaland was still not safe from South Africa, however. For in 1908–9 the leaders of the Boers and of the British met to develop proposals for the unification of South Africa. Under this plan, the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony would unite to form the Union of South Africa. It was assumed that Bechuanaland, along with Swaziland and Basutoland (later Lesotho) would also form part of the Union. Once again, however, the people of Bechuanaland protested strongly and pleaded with Britain to protect them from South Africa and, in the event, neither Bechuanaland, Swaziland, nor Basutoland were included in the Union. But the Union of South Africa Act of 1909 empowered the King to ‘transfer' to the Union the government of any of these territories at any time, so long as their inhabitants had been consulted, their wishes had been considered, and the British parliament had approved. This left a prevailing feeling of vulnerability. On the one hand, many people had faith in the protecting power of Britain – in 1947, when George VI and his family visited Bechuanaland, Tshekedi greeted them in the full-dress uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, presented to Khama III by Victoria. But, on the other hand, there was a nagging fear that the transfer might take place some day.

This fear was felt even more keenly after May 1948 – just months before Seretse's marriage to Ruth – when the Afrikaner National Party, under Dr Daniel Malan, was voted into power by South Africa's white minority, defeating the United Party led by General Jan Smuts. It was a victory that was described by Malan as ‘a miracle of God'. The Nationalists came to power on an election platform
of apartheid, the dogma of the separate development of the races. Draconian legislation was rapidly prepared in order to maintain and to strengthen the domination of the majority by the few – of 8,500,000 black people by fewer than 2,500,000 whites, who owned nine-tenths of the land. But the idea of apartheid was hardly new. It was built on the foundations of the racist policies of the colonial-settler state, above all the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts that had placed the legal limit on African-owned land at 13.7 per cent of South Africa's total area. In 1948, shortly before the Nationalists came to power, Alan Paton published
Cry the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation
– much admired by Seretse Khama
²³
– which painted a picture of a society that was riddled with racial injustice.

The people of Bechuanaland continually opposed the idea of transfer to the Union, on any terms. But they could not avoid living under its shadow. The postal services were administered by South Africa, so the stamps were South African. The currency was the South African rand and customs, too, remained under South African control; Roman-Dutch law was in force. The only railway was a single-track system, operated by South African Railways, running inside the eastern border of Bechuanaland from Cape Town in South Africa to Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. Economically, the Protectorate was dependent on the Union. Even the administrative capital, Mafikeng, was located in South Africa – sixteen miles south of the southern boundary of Bechuanaland. It was the only capital in the world to lie outside the country it governed. This was a historical anomaly, but was consistent with the way in which Bechuanaland lay in the shadow of its southern neighbour. The houses and offices of the Protectorate Administration were on the edge of Mafikeng, on a square mile of land grandly called the Imperial Reserve.

The overall authority in Africa for Bechuanaland was the British High Commissioner, who was based in South Africa. As he was also responsible for the British territories of Basutoland and Swaziland, the three countries were described collectively as the High Commission Territories – or, for the sake of convenience, as the HCTs. They were different countries in many ways, especially geographically. Whereas Bechuanaland was the size of Kenya or France, the other two were tiny by comparison. Moreover, Basutoland was entirely enclosed by
South African territory; Swaziland, too, was dominated by South Africa, except where it shared a border with Mozambique.

Bechuanaland was managed by the British on a shoestring and little was provided in the way of formal education and health care. What services
did
exist were segregated along racial lines, with hugely preferential facilities for whites. At most of the few African and ‘coloured' schools, classes were often held under a tree, and the children used slates, not paper. Nor were there any secondary schools for Africans until Tshekedi decided to build Moeng College. Few places had electricity or running water. Serowe did have piped water, but it had to be collected in buckets. Many of the children and adults in Bechuanaland were malnourished and suffered from preventable diseases; malaria and yellow fever were endemic and diphtheria widespread.
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Throughout the period of British administration, at least a third of all children did not live to the age of 5.
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There was no official colour bar in Bechuanaland but the practice of segregation was firmly rooted in daily life. The small white community – or ‘Europeans', as they called themselves, although most of them came from South Africa – regarded black people as inferior.
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If a black person went to the home of a white, he or she was expected to go to the back door. In the shops and post-offices, black and white people were served separately, with blacks receiving summary service.
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One young colonial official, Michael Fairlie, was appalled by the level of separation between the lives of blacks and the lives of whites when he first arrived in Bechuanaland in the late 1940s. He found that ‘there was no social contact at all with the local Africans' and even Tshekedi, who was widely respected by the Administration, ‘was never invited into a European's house for a cup of tea, let alone a meal'.
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Fairlie wanted to invite some of the people who lived near him to his home, but white public opinion ‘would have been scandalized at this breach of the racial code'. He was already the subject of gossip for playing tennis on the government court with his African staff.
²⁹

On the trains, segregation did not stop once the train had crossed the border from South Africa into the Protectorate. Some trains were wholly reserved for whites. But even on the ‘mixed' trains, the rule of
net blankes
– ‘whites only' – applied to the first- and second-class
coaches. Black people had to make do with third and fourth class, which were far less comfortable. Nor were they allowed into the dining cars. At the stations, there were separate waiting rooms and facilities for whites and blacks.
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The nearest train station to Serowe was at Palapye, thirty miles away. Facing the station was the Palapye Hotel, which had a front entrance for whites, surrounded by pink bougainvillea bushes and tall palm trees, providing shade. It had a dingy back entrance for blacks, who were not allowed inside unless they were servants.