This is an odd book: a narrative history of a little-known visit to London in 1895 by three Bechuana chiefs and, to a rather limited extent, an epic tale of the events that will eventually lead to the founding of what would become in the 1960s the independent state of Botswana. While the 1895 [End Page 206] visit led eventually to the so-called "Chamberlain Settlement" (and thus, in the 1960s, to the founding of the independent state of Botswana), the author seems less interested in that epic story than in an "anthropological" one. The eye-catching title implies that Parsons has attempted to narrate the story of the visit of those chiefs from their own perspective, thereby presenting his readers with a sort of reverse anthropological adventure: late-Victorian Britain through African eyes. Unfortunately, Parsons fails to follow through with telling this story in a satisfactory way at least partly because the available sources he has to work with are chiefly British (newspaper accounts, diaries, and especially the journal of the Reverend Willoughby, a London Missionary Society figure who accompanied the three chiefs to London as their chief translator and guided them through the difficulties of unfamiliar protocol). Moreover, as the book hints on more than one occasion, the three chiefs' visit was carefully staged--notably by officials of the London Missionary Society--to present the chiefs to the British public as benevolent, charismatic, indigenous alternatives to their chief political antagonist, Cecil Rhodes, who was, during the time of their visit in 1895, immersed in preparations for the notorious Jameson Raid. The attempt to present Victorian Britain as an odd and unaccountable place is ventured in only a half-hearted way in King Khama. In addition, the deliberate staging of the chiefs before a British audience for political purposes makes them less useful for Parsons's purposes than he seems to think: They are finally unreliable ethnographers of the peculiar customs of a little-known northern European people.