Colour Bar: The triumph of Seretse Khama and his nation - Susan Williams

Penguin

Price: R240

We take so much for granted in this 21st century on the southern tip of Africa.

We worry about crime, unemployment, inflation and the fact that our sports teams can't seem to win their games, but the one thing we don't seem to worry about over much anymore is politics. And even if we are interested, it's more in the salacious stuff; Jacob Zuma and his myriad travails or the SACP and Cosatu snubbing the president.

The one thing nobody ever thinks about is intermarriage, and by intermarriage I mean interracial marriage. It simply isn't a talking point and, to a certain extent, nor is gay marriage.

Fifty years ago though, one single act of intermarriage transfixed the British empire - and its ripples were felt as far afield as the US.

Seretse Khama, kgosi-designate of the Bangwato nation in Botswana, was in London studying to become a lawyer. There he fell in love with Ruth Williams, a confidential clerk.

His uncle Tshekedi, the regent of the Bangwato, turned against him, while the British colonial office and the then Labour government actively conspired against him. All of them did their utmost to stop the two from getting married and, once they were married, from allowing them to return to Bechuanaland.

When we think of racial discrimination, we think immediately of the worst excesses of apartheid and no further, but we forget the egregious hurts and mindless bigotry of British colonial authorities, secretly aided and abetted in this case by South Africa's nationalist government which was just beginning to lay the foundations of apartheid, but which also held the uranium Britain so dearly wanted to construct its own atomic weapons.

Exiled, separated and even shunned in Bechuanaland, Seretse and Ruth's love for one another was tested and then forged in a crucible of incredible adversity and opposition.

When Seretse died in 1980, three months after seeing Zimbabwe finally achieve independence, Ruth survived him for another 20 years, refusing to leave the adopted country that her husband had forged.

All of which has almost been completely forgotten in the shadow of our own miraculous transition to democracy, until Susan Williams' fantastic love story of modern times, one that is almost Shakespearian in its drama, intrigue and pathos.

Unlike Shakespeare, though there is no unhappy ending, unless you count Seretse's untimely death from overwork, walking the tightrope between the frontline states and the beleaguered white south that surrounded him on three sides.

Not only did he protect his new nation's sovereignty from the depredations of its racist white neighbours; South Africa, Rhodesia and South West Africa, but he also succeeded in preventing Botswana from becoming another Bantustan while working for the liberation and development of the entire region.

As Williams notes, the fact that the world's biggest diamond mine, Orapa, was discovered shortly after independence helped transform Botswana from being one of the world's 10 poorest nations and least developed country in Africa in the '60s. It was Seretse's management of this boon, coupled to what would be termed "nation building" in this country, that helped transform Botswana into the economic powerhouse that it is today with complimentary literacy levels and health standards.

Seretse was called the "Other" Mandela while the real one was still locked up in Robben Island. Mandela himself has paid tribute to Seretse's legacy to Africa, but it is in Seretse's own words, spoken in 1967 on a trip to Malawi, that we clearly see why the name is so apt.

"Bitterness does not pay. Certain things have happened to all of us in the past and it for us to forget those and to look to the future. It is not for our own benefit, but … the benefit of our children and our children's children that we ourselves should put this world right."

Thanks to Williams, Seretse's legacy, the enduring and abiding love he and Ruth shared and his founding of Botswana can be remembered for another generation.

We should not forget it. He is the architect of perhaps the most successful SADCC country, one that became an icon for peace, development and tolerance, years before Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu coined the immortal phrase, "the Rainbow Nation".

As Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith notes in the preface, it is "a story of forgiveness and healing … as relevant today as when the whole drama was being played out".