Word: bamangwato
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...Bamangwato don't object to a white consort and the prospect of half-breed succession," boomed the London Times sternly, "it would not seem to be for the imperial government, pledged before nations to respect equal rights of all races, to overrule them in their own domestic concerns. There, if principle were to prevail over expediency, should be an end of the argument...
Unfortunately, as the Times well knew, neither principle nor the south African tribe of Bamangwato stood much chance of prevailing. When handsome, black, Oxford-bred Seretse Khama, hereditary chief of the Bamangwato, decided to make blonde Ruth Williams, a London typist, his queen (TIME, July 11), he touched off a problem that reached far beyond the hearths of his 100,000 subjects in Britain's Bechuanaland Protectorate. Few Bamangwato objected to Ruth. After a brief tribal squabble between the pro-Seretse forces and those of his domineering uncle, Regent Tshekedi, the tribe, their enthusiasm spurred by an unprecedented rainfall...
...election at home, he was left to cool his heels in London. Last week Seretse was called again to the Commonwealth Relations Office. Britain's government, he was told by plausible Patrick Gordon-Walker, the new Commonwealth Minister, had decided "that in the interest and welfare" of the Bamangwato, the young chief should be banished from Bechuanaland for five years...
...bride's answer to the traditional Bamangwato tribal welcoming cry was not recorded, but she indicated graciously that any friends of her husband's were of course friends of hers...
...Tshekedi prepared to leave the Bamangwato reserve for strange pastures in southern Bechuanaland, Seretse waited impatiently for his White Queen from London. But the British government would have to give approval first. "An extremely difficult problem," noted the Manchester Guardian. "Approval would scandalize . . . white South Africans . . . Rejection might irretrievably offend the [black] peoples . . . This is on its lesser scale a crisis comparable with the abdication of Edward VIII and its possible implications are almost unlimited...