Colour Bar

'The Tribe has accepted me', she will say. It is the white people of South Africa. They need something to knock them off the pedestals they have set themselves on.

Shortly after nine o'clock, Seretse and Ruth were husband and wife. Despite the combined efforts of the Regent Tshekedi, the British High Commissioner in South Africa, the Colonial Office, the Church of England and the London Missionary Society as well as lawyers in South Africa and Britain, they had started their lives together.

This marriage (native and European) is a contradiction to age-long tradition and racial custom and a cause of internal hatred and splitting the Bamangwato race. Acknowledgement of the marriage will mean social equalisation of black and white, and if this example of the King be followed - which certainly will be done - racial purity will gradually be wiped out. This will mean that European Christendom in South Africa has a dark future.

(Propos tenus le secrétaire de la "Dutch Reform Church" de Natal le 1er septembre 1949)

Another false claim was that she met Seretse in a dance ball. Another was that she was a typist. Also that Serowe is a place of baboons, hyenas and marauding lions - Ruth commented that the only baboons she had seen were the reporters.

He was angry that men who had been seen as equal in war and death, were no longer seen as equal in the postwar political and economic life of the colonies.