Seretse Khama

Sir Seretse Khama Ian Khama was born in Serowe, Bechuanaland Protectorate, on the first of July 1921, the son of Sekgoma II — paramount chief of the Bangwato — and grandson of Khama III (also placed in this archive). He was four when his father died; he was raised by his uncle Tshekedi Khama, who served as regent of the Bangwato until Seretse's majority.

He took his secondary education at Tiger Kloof in South Africa, his undergraduate degree at Fort Hare University in 1944, and his legal studies at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the Inner Temple in London.

In London in 1948 he married Ruth Williams, an English secretary. The interracial marriage — and Seretse's status as paramount-chief-elect of the Bangwato — produced a six-year diplomatic crisis. The South African apartheid government and the Southern Rhodesian government formally demanded the British colonial authority deny Seretse the chieftainship; the British acceded and exiled him from Bechuanaland in 1950. He renounced his hereditary chieftainship in 1956 in exchange for the right to return as a private citizen.

He founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party in 1962. Bechuanaland became the Republic of Botswana on the thirtieth of September 1966; Khama became the new republic's first President.

His fourteen years in office produced the political institution that has held: continuously democratic, multi-party, free-press Botswana — among the only African states to experience continuous free elections since independence. The discovery of diamonds at Orapa in 1967 transformed the Botswanan economy; Khama negotiated the De Beers concession terms that produced — by the late 1990s — the highest sustained economic growth rate in the world.

He died in office of pancreatic cancer in Gaborone on the thirteenth of July 1980, age fifty-nine.

He is honored here as the first president whose marriage cost him a chieftainship and whose presidency built Africa's longest democracy.