Khama III

Khama Boikano III was born around 1837 in the Bangwato royal house of what is now Botswana. He became king of the Bangwato in 1875 and reigned for forty-eight years until his death in 1923.

His political achievement was unusual in the late nineteenth-century African record. He converted to Christianity in 1860 and used the conversion as a political instrument: banning the alcohol trade that British and German concession-hunters had been using to dispossess Tswana communities, prohibiting the imported guns that European traders supplied as one half of a slave-and-arms exchange across the region, and reorganizing the Bangwato state along reformed lines that preserved its sovereignty.

In 1885 the British Crown was considering whether to grant a charter to Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company that would have absorbed the Tswana kingdoms into Rhodes's colonial commercial empire — the fate that befell what became Rhodesia. In 1895 Khama III led a delegation of three Tswana kings (himself, Sebele I, and Bathoen I) to London to argue against the charter directly to Queen Victoria. They prevailed. The British Crown took the Tswana territories under direct Crown protectorate administration rather than ceding them to Rhodes. The Bechuanaland Protectorate that followed became, in 1966, the Republic of Botswana — one of the very few African states to achieve independence with its pre-colonial royal lineage intact and its territorial integrity unbroken.

Botswana has been continuously democratic since independence, has held free elections in every parliamentary cycle, and has — in 1995 to 2000 — the world's fastest-growing economy. The institutional foundation Khama III preserved is the principal reason.

He died in Serowe on the twenty-first of February 1923, age approximately eighty-six. His great-grandson Seretse Khama became the first president of independent Botswana.

He is honored here as the king who travelled to London to refuse Cecil Rhodes.