Annual report on the Bechuanaland Protectorate / Commonwealth Relations Office.

  • Great Britain. Office of Commonwealth Relations.
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report on the Bechuanaland Protectorate / Commonwealth Relations Office. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    48/62 (page 38)
    Other important tribes of the Bechuana are the Bakgatla, the Bamalete and the Batlokwa. These are fairly recent immigrants into the Pro¬ tectorate from the Western Transvaal, having arrived here in the nine¬ teenth century. The Barolong, the greater number of whom to-day live in the Union, originated from the north, from whence they migrated under a chief named Morolong. They live along the southern border of the Protectorate and round Mafeking. Robert Moffat’s Kuruman Mission was founded among the Batlhaping, a tribe of the Bechuana group. Very soon after Moffat’s arrival the existence of the tribe and of the mission was threatened by Mantatisi’s brigands, who, after severely handling the Bahurutshi, were now advancing on Kuruman, scattering everything in their path. Moffat acted with much vigour and enlisted the help of the Griqua half-castes who lived about 100 miles to the south of his station. These came to his aid and inflicted much execution on the invaders, who had by then outrun their supplies and were not used to firearms. In the following years Moffat obtained an extraordinary ascendency over Mziligazi and, though the Matabele ceaselessly and mercilessly raided the unhappy Bechuana tribes to the north (among the worst sufferers being the Bakwena), the Mission at Kuruman and the peoples in its immediate surroundings remained inviolate. The 50 years between 1820 and 1870 were periods of chaos and anarchy, of internecine quarrels and struggles which it would be tedious to recapitulate in detail. Internal and inter-tribal difficulties were com¬ plicated by the impact on these borders of the Boer trekkers. To the latter, however, belongs the credit of ridding the immediate neighbour¬ hood of the Matabele; after several engagements with the Boers, disastrous for his tribe, Mziligazi removed himself northwards in 1838, preying whenever he got the chance on weaker people on the way, Bechuana and Makalanga. To these tactics few of the Bechuana chiefs made effective resistance with the exception of chief Sekgoma of the Bamangwato, who was made of sterner stuff than the rest, and who in 1840 inflicted several minor reverses on Matabele raiding parties. In the meantime David Livingstone who had married Robert Moffat’s daughter, Mary, established a Mission among the Bakwena, where he stayed until the early ’fifties. In 1872 there acceded to the chieftainship of the Bamangwato the most remarkable African of his time and possibly one of the most remark¬ able of any time. This was Khama. He succeeded to the chieftainship of the Ngwato tribe (descendants it will be remembered of the adherents of Ngwato, son of Malope) after a youth troubled by dissensions within the tribe and by the ever-present peril of the Matabele. During the first few years of his reign he much enhanced the standing of his tribe until the Bamangwato were amongst the most prominent of the people of this part of Africa.* He was no mean strategist, had a well-trained and well-equipped little army and earned the respect of Lobengula, son of