Khama III of the Bangwato, baptised in 1860 against his father Sekgoma's bitter opposition, became the most consequential Christian ruler in southern Africa. Once secure in the chiefship he legislated his faith: initiation ceremonies lapsed, rainmaking was set aside, bride wealth practices were reformed, and above all he prohibited European liquor from his territory, enforcing the ban against white traders as firmly as against his own people, which made him a hero to the British temperance movement.
In 1895, when Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company sought to swallow the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Khama sailed to London with two fellow rulers, Bathoen and Sebele, and toured chapel Britain as the model Christian king. The three chiefs won their case; the Colonial Office kept their territories under direct protection, a decision without which modern Botswana would likely not exist.
Khama's Christianity was his own instrument as much as the mission's. He quarrelled with and dismissed missionaries who overreached, kept the church subordinate to the kgotla, and used the new faith to centralise a chiefship the old rites had dispersed among rainmakers and ritual specialists. He ruled until his death in 1923, and his grandson Seretse Khama became independent Botswana's first president, heir to a dynasty in which chiefship and Christianity had become one inheritance.