Talk about a story you don’t see every day.
“A United Kingdom” recounts the true tale of an African royal, Seretse Khama, who fell in love with and married a white woman, Ruth Williams, while studying in England shortly after World War II.
A hereditary tribal king from Bechuanaland, then a British protectorate on the border of the racist Union of South Africa, Khama led the effort that eventually threw off British rule and established the independent successor state Botswana. Khama was elected Botswana’s first president; his and Ruth’s son Ian is the fourth and current president of one of Africa’s most prosperous and consistent democracies.
As you may imagine, none of this was easy to achieve. And the movie starring David Oyelowo (“Selma”) and Rosamund Pike (“Gone Girl”) presents a plethora of personal and macropolitical details as to why.
That was crucial to director Amma Asante, like Oyelowo, who brought the project to her, a Londoner with African parents (hers are from Ghana, his from Nigeria).
“When I came onboard, there was very much an idea that this had to be completely a love story, tamp down the politics as much as possible,” says Asante, who like many had never heard about the Khamas before Oyelowo and producers brought her the project, which is based on Susan Williams’ nonfiction book “Colour Bar.” “I sort of understood why, but to me it didn’t fully make sense because you don’t understand the power of the couple’s love and their courage and what they stood up to unless you understand exactly what they’re up against. They only way you can convey that is to explain the politics. And it was important to me to contextualize the world in which Ruth and Seretse fell in love.”
And what a world it was. Britain was still pretty broke from the war. Independent Commonwealth member South Africa supplied cheap gold to its former colonial master, not to mention uranium for the U.K.’s Cold War nuclear program. Additionally, South Africa’s white minority government had just established apartheid as the law of the land and had long coveted Bechuanaland’s potential mineral wealth (Khama’s grandfather was the one who’d requested protectorate status — a more voluntary, slightly less odious form of colonialism — from Queen Victoria to keep South Africa out of his country).
The racists running South Africa pressured Britain to do all in its power to prevent an interracial couple from taking Bechuanaland’s throne, which Whitehall dutifully did. But snooty British bureaucrats weren’t the Khamas’ only obstacles. Seretse’s own uncle, who’d been serving as regent while his nephew grew up, broke with Seretse over making a white woman their people’s queen, as did most of his relatives and a good portion of their subjects. She had to prove herself to them and did over months and years, often separated by continents for long stretches from her husband.
A former child actor whose previous film, “Belle,” told another little-known, true story about an 18th century mixed-race woman in an upper class English family, Asante did and did not relate to the Khamas’ struggle.
“When two people of a different race decide to get together, it is immediately seen as a political statement by people and by sight, even if the couple don’t want it to be that way,” says the filmmaker, whose husband of six years, Soren Pedersen, is Danish. “Even if the couple are together because they have a purity of love, other people will project ideas and ideals onto them. So Ruth and Seretse would have had to have dealt with politics, even if it was a small ‘p,’ from the get-go. As it happened, they had to deal with it massively with a capital ‘P’ too.
“We have not experienced anything even remotely close to what Ruth and Seretse had to stand up to,” explains Asante, who knew she wanted to marry Pedersen while on their first date. “In many ways, that’s the inspirational element of their story. I say this with my husband in the room; he knows how much I love him, I know how much I love him. Whether I would have had the courage and the tenacity to have withstood what that couple withstood, I don’t know. It could be quite easy to just say, ‘You know, this is too hard. I love you, but maybe it’s just going to be easier for us and our families if we separate.’ Ruth and Seretse never did that.”
Asante also insisted on filming the Africa portions of “A United Kingdom” in Botswana. Although her crew was by necessity international — the mostly desert nation’s production experience rests almost exclusively in “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” TV series — she says she “really wanted the DNA of Botswana to run through the veins of this movie.
“That’s really because, when you’re dealing with such an incredible story, you want as much authenticity as you can get,” Asante adds. “We filmed in the real home where Seretse brought Ruth when he returned to Africa with her. We shot in the hospital where their children were born.”
Of course, many local Botswanans appear in the film too, alongside actors from elsewhere in Africa. All told, it allowed Asante to present this incredible story in a way she could truly be proud of.
And not just her.
“A woman from Botswana approached me recently to say that she’d lived in America for a number of years and the movie made her miss home,” the director says. “That was the greatest compliment I’ve ever received. It meant that I depicted Botswana in a way that somebody who was born and raised there could recognize — and with a normality. Without exoticizing it, without, hopefully, making the people of color in the story accessories but depicting it in a way that was recognizable and made people from the country proud.”
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