The Political Consequences of Seretse Khama: Britain, the Bangwato and South Africa, 1948–1952

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Abstract
Ruth Williams was not a typist. She was apt to be put out when the newspapers called her that. In fact she was a secretary, a confidential clerk, with a firm of Lloyds' underwriters in London. On 30 September 1948, at a registry office in Kensington, she married Seretse Khama, heir to the chieftaincy of the Bangwato in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. No-one knew whether the Bangwato would accept a white consort. British newspapers ran features headed ‘Shall typist be a Queen?’ (Sunday Dispatch, 28 November 1948), and ‘This girl can upset the peace of Africa’ (Sunday Express, 10 July 1949). White opinion in South Africa was aghast: the marriage was condemned as ‘distasteful and disturbing’ (Johannesburg Star, 28 June 1949), as ‘striking at the root of white supremacy’ (Natal Witness, 2 July 1949). Ruth's parents opposed the marriage and did not attend the ceremony. Her father, George Williams, was a retired Indian army officer, working as a commercial traveller. Ruth was born in 1923, and brought up in Blackheath and Lewisham. She attended Eltham High School, took polytechnic classes in cookery, and served for four years in the war as a corporal-driver with the W.A.A.F. Together with her sister Muriel, she was a churchgoer, keenly interested in the African work of the London Missionary Society. They were constant visitors to the colonial students' hostel at Nutford Place in Bayswater. It was at an L.M.S. meeting in 1947 that she met Seretse, a quiet, friendly, relaxed and thoroughly Anglicized law student of twenty-seven, with an alert mind and honest manner. The sexual attraction between them was apparently strong. But there was also in their decision to marry a challenging element of anti-apartheid zeal. Ruth abhorred the colour bar, and felt she could do at least as much good in Bechuanaland as missionary wives had done.

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