Black Man’s Burden, White Man’s Liquor in Southern Africa

Chapter 6 examines the history of Britain’s colonization of South Africa as a clash between imperialists like Cecil Rhodes—who wielded liquor as a tool to get indigenous leaders drunk and sign away rights to their land—and native African tribal leaders. Rhodes’s greatest obstacle in his planned Cape Town–to-Cairo railroad were the prohibitionist leaders of Bechuanaland (present-day Botswana)—King Khama, Sebele I, and Bathoen—who in 1895 went so far as to travel to England to plead to Queen Victoria and the Colonial Office to maintain their sovereignty against white incursions and their prohibition against white liquor. Harnessing British temperance networks and building goodwill, the Bechuana kings emerged victorious: Bechuanaland would remain a protectorate, but not folded into Britain’s Cape Colony, foiling Rhodes’s machinations.