The Establishment Of The Protectorate (Part 9) � �The Bramstone Memorandum�

Jeff Ramsay | Monday July 27, 2015 15:41

Disappointed by the “defiant attitude” of the majority, the British Administrator, Shippard, broke up the conference. In his report he noted:

“Khama who is thoroughly loyal and sincerely attached to the English appears to be completely isolated. He is left out of all the private meetings of the Protectorate Chiefs and seems to be regarded by them with suspicion and dislike as the white man’s friend.”

A month later a police report alleged that Khama had claimed that he had blocked Sebele’s proposal at Kopong to attack the British, adding: “Khama says Chiefs below blame Khama for inviting the white man in and backing them to the point of fighting them.”

Full colonial authority was finally imposed in 1890-91 through two proclamations. The first, the Order-in-Council of June 1890, authorised the High Commissioner at the Cape to:“provide for giving effect to any power or jurisdiction which Her Majesty, her heirs or successors, may at any time before or after the date of this order have within the limits of this order.”

These sweeping new powers were necessary because Shippard had to find a way to cancel concessions held by companies other than the BSACo. Bathoen, Linchwe, Moremi II (of Batawana), and Sebele had each sold concessions in their territories that contradicted the rights given to BSACo by the Royal Charter. Most of these rival concessions recognized the dikgosi, not Queen Victoria, as the “sovereigns of the soil”.

Shippard had tried to declare all non-BSACo concessions invalid earlier in 1889. He backed down when it was recognized that he had no authority to issue such an order. The British thus gave themselves absolute powers in the Protectorate by issuing the Order-In-Council. The Order also extended the Protectorate’s border to include all of northern Botswana. The peoples of Ngamiland and Chobe were thus brought into the Protectorate for the first time. 

But the dikgosi still claimed to be sovereigns of the soil. In the same month that the Order was issued their position was upheld by the High Commissioner’s own legal advisor, W.P. Schreiner who concluded that the proposals made by Gaseitsiwe, Khama, and Sechele, when accepting the Protectorate in 1885:

“do not per se convey to the Crown any legal jurisdiction within the territories of those Chiefs [so that] the delegation to the British South Africa Company of a legal jurisdiction founded upon the due acceptance of the proposals referred to, would be an act requiring for its validity the approval or assent of the Chiefs concerned.”

After Kopong, Shippard realised that the dikgosi would never voluntarily submit to colonial overrule. Indeed, in 1890 Bathoen, Linchwe, and Sebele worked together to block such British acts as the construction of a telegraph, the sinking of wells, and the stationing of police in their territories. When their protests failed they turned to lawyers. Their claim to be sovereigns of the soil thus posed a serious legal challenge to making the BSACo the rulers of the Protectorate.

To overcome the dikgosi’s objections, in February 1891 a Colonial Office official named John Bramstone drafted his landmark “Memorandum as to the Jurisdiction and Administrative Powers of a European State holding Protectorates in Africa.” This document provided the basis not only for colonial rule in Bechuanaland, but was later applied to other African Protectorates such as Uganda and Nyasaland. In his memo Bramstone defined Bechuanaland as:

“An uncivilised territory to which Europeans resort in greater or less numbers, and where, inasmuch as the native rulers of the territory are incapable of maintaining peace, order and good government among Europeans, the protecting Power maintains courts, police and other institutions for the control, safety and benefit of its own subjects and of the natives.”

Bramstone further argued that sovereignty in “an uncivilised African territory” could be “exercised by the same methods as if the ruler had ceded his whole country to her Majesty.” He based this conclusion on the Foreign Jurisdictions Act under which Botswana had originally been occupied.

The Act had been changed to allow the British Government to control its own subjects in “uncivilised” foreign territories. Bramstone concluded that if Britain was allowed to protect its citizens in Protectorates then it had the right as a “civilised power” to place its own courts and government officers in an “uncivilised territory.” Britain’s right to rule Botswana was thus justified not to protect Batswana from the Boers or any other whites but rather to protect all whites from Batswana.

On the basis of the Bramstone Memorandum a second, May 1891, Order-in-Council was issued. It authorised the High Commissioner to enact laws for: “the administration of justice, the raising of revenue and generally for peace, order and good government of all persons within this order including the prohibition of acts tending to disturb the public peace.”