Plaque Commemorating the three African Kings who came to Britain to resist the colonisation of their homelands

This plaque is in memory of three African chiefs, King Khama, Sebele, BathoenI. It is mounted on the exterior of the Botswana Embassy in London.
1895 saw the arrival in England of King Khama and two other Bechuanaland Kings who were resisting the Colonisation of their homelands planned by Cecil Rhodes.
Few places or people capture the scale, ambition and avarice of the British Empire at its peak than Cecil Rhodes.
Rhodes was the Premier of the Cape Colony and another territory– Rhodesia –had been named after him. In Rhodes’ view the superiority of the British made the expansion of empire the destiny of his race.
His great ambition was to drive a railway across the entire length of Africa. Running from the Cape to Cairo, you would be able to cross the whole continent without ever leaving British territory.
But there was a problem. The railway needed to cross Bechuanaland, which was a “Protectorate” - territory claimed by the British but governed by local rulers.
Most prominent among the local rulers was the multi-lingual, Christian convert, King Khama III. Khama saw through Rhodes’ scheme to its real ultimate purpose–colonisation.
So while Rhodes was busy lobbying the British government to get control of Bechuanaland, in 1895 Khama, along with the two other Bechuanaland Chiefs, headed to the heart of the empire itself: England.
Knowing they’d be no match for Rhodes militarily, their aim was to out manoeuvre him by winning over the British public, touring Britain with the help of the London Missionary Society.
Their strategy paid off. Towards the end of 1895, with public opinion swinging behind the Kings, Khama and his delegation were granted an audience with the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain.
At that meeting, the Africans were granted most of the protections from Cecil Rhodes that they’d been looking for. Just over seventy years later, in 1966, Bechuanaland became the independent state of Botswana. The story of Botswana’s genesis can be traced back to that moment in the 1890s when three Kings came to Britain to win over Victorian public opinion.
The plaque was created by BBC History and is one of twenty placed around the world for the series Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016).