In 1933, the British Administration had, what in retrospect, looks very much like a practice run for the really major mess they were going to make of things 15 years later when Seretse got married to Ruth. Common to both of these of major disasters were issues of Chieftanship, its powers and succession, a dominant Chief, sex and fears about South Africa.
The McIntosh affair had its rather curious origins in 1930 when the hospital in Serowe was being built. Much to the horror of both Tshekedi and Colonel Rey, the British Resident Commissioner in Mafikeng, numbers of the white men involved in this project developed relationships with the local women. Both deplored this ‘degenerate’ behaviour and vainly sought means of putting a stop to it, Tshekedi being particularly concerned about the number of children resulting from such liaisons who were being left on the margins of society.
Perhaps involved in such early affairs were two tearaway white youths, Phinehas Mcintosh and Henry McNamee, both presumably of Scots descent who, from the record, later enjoyed a life style not so dissimilar to that enjoyed by many today. They lacked the cash to own and drive fast, expensive cars but for three years they boozed, got drunk, fought and fornicated. Without doubt, they were a social menace. The problem was that they were white residents of a black town. Colonial convention demanded that they had to be brought to order by a white, not black, authority.
In this case, it seems probable that successive British District Commissioners failed to respond adequately to Tshekedi’s requests that they deal with these two. When they were involved in yet another incident involving assault, Tshekedi heard the case in the kgotla. What happened next is unclear because of the lack of written records. Tshekedi may or may not have sentenced McIntosh to be lashed. If he did, McIntosh apparently moved towards Tshekedi, perhaps to appeal.
Kgotla officials took the move as a threat, threw him to the ground and gave him two lashes. Was he lashed for creating mayhem in Serowe or for physically threatening Tshekedi? As with so other key aspects of this bizarre affair, no one can now know. But for Lt. Col. Charles Rey in Mafikeng, it hardly mattered. From Rey’s first days in office, he and Tshekedi had contrived to get up each other’s noses. Each made it his business to sort the other out. When Rey received the news from Serowe that Tshekedi had ‘flogged’ a white man, he remarked to his Private Secretary, ‘I’ve got the little bugger now.’ It is immaterial, he argued, ‘whether McIntosh is a native clothed in a white skin. A fundamental principle is at stake and Tshekedi should be put in his place’.
Anticipating all the arguments that would be used about the Seretse-Ruth marriage, Rey raved on. The government would be held in contempt, the administration would collapse, the safety of European residents would be in jeopardy and South Africa would be bound to react. In Pretoria, Vice Admiral E.R.G.R. Evans was the Acting British High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of the Africa Station of the Royal Navy. Evans was a close friend of Oswald Pirow, the pro-Nazi Minister of Defence. Pirow was supportive of the idea that the British should bomb Serowe but was happy instead to help Evans and Rey put everything on a war footing by facilitating the movement through South Africa of 165 marines and naval ratings with four small field guns. Unfortunately such was their eagerness to put Tshekedi in his place, that they had overlooked the need to consult the Commission’s legal advisor (Leslie Blackwell) or even to inform the Dominions Office in London.
Both Blackwell and Shirley Eales, Administrative Secretary, were horrified that a small affair should have been so taken out of proportion, and tried to get the expedition stopped. They failed. Evans eventually informed London that he was sending a naval expedition into the Kalahari, that he was setting up a Commission of Enquiry and was suspending Tshekedi until, this inevitably found him guilty.
The unbelievable farce was duly played out. McIntosh told the Enquiry that he had no complaints and respected Tshekedi as his Chief. And Nelson’s Royal Navy came to Serowe, pointed its guns at a gathering of incredulous Bangwato and assembled ‘whites’ and then left leaving behind it a long standing but unfortunately unproven story that Tshekedi had sent his mephato to help the marines dig their guns out of the Ngwato sand. Tshekedi was banished to the Tati District (for just 11 days) where he promptly announced that he would be going to London to make his case.
McIntosh and McNamee, without being found guilty of anything, were sent to non-tribal Lobatse. Evans went back to his flagship in Simonstown and Rey, still believing himself the victor over Tshekedi, returned to Mafikeng.
In London, J.H. Thomas, Secretary of State for the Dominions who had met and admired Tshekedi, saw matters differently. If Tshekedi would state his acceptance of the key principle (to the British) that white could not be tried by black, he could be restored to office without the need of an awkward visit to London.
He (Thomas) would then be able to offer vague statements of support for the action taken by Rey and Evans, tide over the embarrassing incident and restore Tshekedi as Acting Chief.
When Tshekedi duly obliged by making a fulsome statement accepting what was required of him, Rey was able to claim that, ‘the little bugger’ had been forced to make a climb down. With that objective ‘achieved’, Rey and Evans then returned to Serowe where they solemnly restored a supposedly contrite Tshekedi to the office he had held before he ‘flogged’ McIntosh.
Re-examined today, this extraordinary and ridiculously played out incident can easily be dismissed as one of the great follies of the British Empire. But it wasn’t all about nothing because many of its key elements continue to be of great concern today - the balance of power between centre and periphery, the adequate definition of powers, respect for the law and for human rights and, above all, for a realisation that the sex drive is non-racial and crosses all boundaries.
As Michael Crowder explains, “what McIntosh unintentionally did was to raise the whole question of sexual relations between white and black in a part of Africa where most whites held strong views on the subject.
Among white residents in Serowe he was not alone in his attentions to Bangwato ladies; nor did the majority of Batswana have as puritan a view of extra-marital sex as did the Administration and Tshekedi”.
In the end, we are left to marvel at the historical irony and the vagaries of human understanding that Ruth Khama was refused service in the Lobatse Hotel because she had become an honorary black whereas poor McIntosh who had deserved that privilege by his chosen lifestyle, was eternally condemned to be white!
