In the 1960s, Africa experienced a stampede for independence. The independence of the Gold Coast, re-christened Ghana, opened the scorecard in 1957. Harold Macmillan, the Tory Prime Minister of Britain, portrayed the domino effect of Ghana's independence in his blunt "Wind of Change" speech, delivered in the all-white South African Parliament in Cape Town in 1960. Botswana, a rank outsider in the prospective game, also plunged herself into the hectic universal busyness of changing countries' names, designing new flags and venturing into the unknown sphere of democratic dispensation.
Botswana became independent on September 30, 1966 after a somewhat turbulent period during which one of its royal heirs-apparent, Seretse Khama of BaNgwato, was first castigated for marrying a white woman when the rhetorical slogan in apartheid SA was, "Would you like your daughter to marry a black man?" The colour-obsessed white MPs stamped the rhetoric quickly with the authority of two legislative pieces: one, the Immorality Act of 1949, forbidding carnal relations between blacks and whites; the other, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1950, outlawing, as the name implies, marriage between persons of different races and colours.
