The 1908-10 Campaign Against Incorporation Into South Africa

This was because there long existed a consensus among local Batswana that British overrule as a Protectorate was preferable to the likely alternative of incorporation into the white settler dominated states of the Union of South Africa and/or Southern Rhodesia.

Thus, for many decades, among nationalist minded Batswana one could find stronger advocates for the retention of imperial control than within the ranks the imperialists themselves who viewed the Bechuanaland Protectorate (BP) and a geographically strategic but economically marginal part of the Empire. This strategic significance was, moreover, reduced after 1914 with the end of German rule in Namibia.