Bechuanaland Protectorate

A protectorate acquired to stop someone else from having it, and largely left alone thereafter. Britain proclaimed it in 1885 at the request of Tswana chiefs who feared Boer encroachment from the Transvaal, and to keep open the missionary road north to the interior before Germany, expanding from South West Africa, could close it. The territory was never valued for itself. Its administrative capital sat at Mafeking, outside its own borders and inside South Africa, from 1895 until 1965 - a detail that captures the arrangement better than any description of policy. Britain spent almost nothing there and repeatedly expected to hand it over. The transfer to the Cape Colony was intended in the 1890s and averted in 1895 when three chiefs, Khama III, Bathoen and Sebele, travelled to London and appealed directly over the administration's head. Transfer to the Union of South Africa was written into the South Africa Act of 1909 as a future possibility and hung over the territory for decades, becoming unthinkable only as apartheid hardened after 1948. The Seretse Khama marriage crisis of 1948, in which Britain exiled the heir to the Ngwato chieftaincy for six years to avoid offending South Africa, showed exactly whose interests the protectorate was being managed around. It also created the country's first national political figure. Independence came on 30 September 1966 as Botswana, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a few miles of tarred road and almost no secondary schools. Diamonds were found at Orapa the following year.

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