It is therefore difficult to agree that ‘a series of colonial proclamations and ordinances…undermined the institution of chiefship’ (Vaughan 2003: 28) or that ‘the cumulation of multiple acts of British authority and the pervasive influence of commercialisation served to undermine the morafe as a system of rule’ (Peters 1994: 42). As long as such claims are not substantiated by an examination of the real political impact of the proclamations on the authority of the dikgosi and the hierarchies of authority relations over which they presided, we cannot simply assume that the British right to issue proclamations had an undermining effect. First, the British often preferred, I repeat, to let the dikgosi legislate (see Chapter 1), and if they wanted to legislate themselves, the dikgosi were usually thoroughly consulted in the Native/African Advisory Council (see Makgala 2010: 60), as is abundantly evidenced by the extensive minutes from the meetings. Secondly, it can also be argued that proclamations might increase the dikgosi's authority since they expanded the field of their exercising jurisdiction – an activity central to the reproduction and strengthening, as I argued in the preceding chapter, both of their authority and of their respective merafe's sociopolitical order.
It is tempting to suggest, therefore, that in the long run the dikgosi triumphed in important respects. This point is underscored by the arrival of two new proclamations in 1943 by which both the tribal councils and the tribunals were abandoned. Moreover, ‘the list of offences excluded from the jurisdiction of the Courts is now reduced to cases in which a person is charged with an offence punishable by death or imprisonment for life’ (Hailey 1953: 226), a change which largely restored the authority of the dikgosi to its original form (cf. Ashton 1947: 239).21
The increasingly relaxed attitude of the British to implement reforms stipulated in the proclamations of 1934 which might be seen as the background of the prevailing uncertainty – virtually throughout the colonial era – about whether to hand the protectorate over to the Union of South Africa, militated against implementing a reform that would have implied substantial costs. More basically, as reflected in a British official assessment, in due course the British recognized that it was not a straightforward matter to impose radical changes on the indigenous institutions of authority. In view of the colonial state's heavy reliance on these institutions, it is no surprise that it was criticized. ‘[I]n insisting on the establishment of a formally constituted Tribal Council and of Tribunals of a fixed composition to take the place of traditional trial by Kgotla, the law made a radical change in some of the most characteristic institutions of the Bechuana people…the people saw a menace to a system of trial to which they were as deeply attached as is a Briton to the procedure of trial by jury’ (Hailey 1953: 222).22
With some important exceptions, which I shall address subsequently in this chapter, the pragmatics of extensive indirect rule lasted virtually to the end of the colonial era as suggested, for example, by a highly critical observer of dikgosi's rule during the final decades of the colonial era, Botswana's former state president, Quett Masire. He clashed with Kgosi Bathoen II at several occasions (see below) and came to realize how protected Kgosi Bathoen actually was by the British, reflecting their need ‘to reinforce the powers of the chief in their method of controlling, or ruling, the people’ (Masire 2006: 259). That there was a mutuality of dependency – despite the ambivalence, tensions and conflicts over the years – between the dikgosi and the British is curiously demonstrated in Photo 3, where the two major Tswana figures of the colonial era – Bathoen and Tshekedi – are expecting the British royal family in British uniforms.
Finally, this also means that in relation to the conflicting relationship between the distinctive Tswana principles of politicojural practice and the ideals of Western bureaucratic rationality, the British made great concessions to the Tswana mode of exercising authority. Their rationale for considering another line – that of reconstructing indigenous institutions in line with modern principles of bureaucracy – was obviously reflecting a sense of losing control of the dikgosi, being perceived as increasingly autocratic and even exterior to the order of the colonial state.
Yet, in due course, they certainly came to realize that to challenge these authority figures more than necessary might well make them – and their institutions – less integral to the colonial state, creating potentialities of forces of a rhizomic kind. The central point is that the strengthening of the authority of the dikgosi under the British wing was, as I have explained, much a matter of the progressive expansion of the power structures radiating from the bogosi of the officially recognized Tswana merafe. As suggested by Hailey's statement above, the British came to realize how strongly these structures – which they had themselves contributed much to reinforce – were anchored in the indigenous cultural construction of authority, upon which the British always remained dependent. In other words, the British had to realize that with the extensive practice of indirect rule, they had given rise to a colonial state highly dependent on instruments of government of mainly a pre-modern kind, whose major agencies fiercely resisted transformations towards modern, legal-rational institutions. However, at the same time, the dikgosi depended upon the colonial state as a source of power – a mutual dependency prevailed in important respects (Ashton 1947: 238). Only in some few instances did the colonial administration intervene with harsh measures in relation to Tswana royal centres, examples of which we shall see in the following sections.
Illustration 3. Regent of Bangwato, Kgosi Tshekedi (left) wearing a uniform of Royal House Guards Blue acquired by his father (Kgosi Khama III) during the three dikgosi's visit to England in 1895 (Parsons 1998) and Kgosi Bathoen II (right) of Bangwaketse wearing the scarlet uniform of the Dragoon Guards presented to his grandfather (Kgosi Bathoen I) by Queen Victoria on the same visit to England. They are seen waiting for the arrival of the British royal family in the Bechuanaland Protectorate on 17 April 1947. Courtesy of Associated Press.
Issues of modernity vs traditionalism at Tswana royal centres
The dikgosi's distaste for Western, ‘rational’ principles and practices of government and administration of justice does not mean that they held on to customary practices and resisted modernity in all respects. On the contrary, as already suggested in Chapter 1, in their actual political practice within the frame of their institutions, many of them represented driving forces in implementing many smaller and larger reforms in positive response to the progressive arrival of Western modernity. The three dikgosi on the cover of this volume – Bathoen I, Khama III and Sechele I – featured already before the turn of the century in Western suits which soon became the daily dress of men of authority in the kgotla context. This practice was adopted under the impact of the evangelizing missionaries as a prominent sign of being a civilized (rutega) person. And in such guise the dikgosi took, I recall, Britain with great positive surprise when traveling across the country for gaining popular support for their cause (see Chapter 1, cf. Parsons 1988). The acceptance of many aspects of Western modernity became even more apparent as the succeeding dikgosi acted upon the European impacts in ways that are reflected in Schapera's (1970) notion of ‘tribal innovators’.
Nevertheless, in Tswana parlance there is a distinction between Setswana (Tswana ways) versus Sekgoa (the ways of the white people). Comaroff and Comaroff (1991: 212ff.) have examined thoroughly the complexity of the Setswana-Sekgoa interface in the case of the Southern Tswana in the South African context. In the present case I am concerned with the significance of these categories in terms of distinct and conflicting political identities at the royal centre of Tswana polities. That is, conflicting political identities entailing factionalism challenging the ruler.
In the preceding chapter I discussed the conflicts surrounding the dikgosi's acceptance of Christianity and the presence of an evangelizing missionary, forming a church congregation. At an early