When we returned to London from Oxford, I went to the Trafalgar Square and bought a copy of the Daily Telegraph. It was probably the only British newspaper that morning which carried a two-paragraph story from Africa with a three-word headline: Seretse Khama dies. That was on July 1, 1980. I was among 10 senior journalists from 10 Commonwealth countries of Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe (Africa), India, Jamaica, Gibraltar, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and Canada - sent to Oxford University for workshops and seminars on the origins of the Zimbabwean problems as part of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Commonwealth Press Union (CPU) fellowship programme.
The death of Sir Seretse Khama interested me most because he had just pioneered the Southern African Development Coordination Conference, which later became the Southern African Development Community (SADC) with its headquarters in Gaborone. I mentioned this fact to my 'comrade' Vijay Kumar from the Deccan Herald in Bangalore, India. Vijay later in the evening bought - if my memory serves me right - a copy of the Guardian, which had a longer story on Khama, making reference to his "Marriage of Inconvenience" to Ruth Williams, which the Boers in South Africa would not entertain. So Looking at the circumstances under which he was born, Ian, like his father and mother, has to be controversial.
