Seretse Khama

Sir Seretse Goitsebeng Maphiri Khama was born in Serowe, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, on the first of July 1921, the son of Sekgoma II, paramount chief of the Bangwato (Bamangwato), and grandson of the great Khama III. His name, meaning "the clay that binds," marked a reconciliation within the royal house. When his father died in 1925, the four-year-old Seretse became kgosi-designate, with his uncle Tshekedi Khama serving as regent.

He was educated at mission schools in South Africa and at Fort Hare College, earning his degree in 1944, before travelling to England to read for the bar at the Inner Temple and to study at Balliol College, Oxford. In London in 1948 he married Ruth Williams, an Englishwoman. The interracial marriage alarmed apartheid South Africa and the colonial authorities, who barred him from the chieftaincy and forced the couple into exile from 1951 until 1956.

Renouncing his claim to the throne, Khama turned to democratic politics. He founded what became the Botswana Democratic Party in the early 1960s, led it to victory, and served as prime minister from 1965. On the thirtieth of September 1966 the protectorate became the independent Republic of Botswana, and Seretse Khama was elected its first president.

Over four terms he built a nation of laws — nonracial, incorrupt, and steadfastly democratic — that grew from among the world's poorest countries into one of Africa's steadiest. He died in office on the thirteenth of July 1980. He is honored as the founding father of Africa's longest continuously democratic state, the clay that bound a people into a nation.