A History of Rhodesia 0394480686, 9780394480688

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Part One: The Chartered Company
1 The Land and the Early Conquerors 5000 BC-AD 1700
2 The Ndebele Kingdom 1700-1886
3 Cecil Rhodes 1853-89
4 The Concession and the Charter 1888-89
5 The Pioneer Column 1889-90
6 The Map is Drawn 1890-91
7 Settlement and War 1890-93
8 Conquest 1893-95
9 Rebellion 1896-97
10 The Aftermath 1897-1902
11 The Rule of the Company 1902-18
Part Two: A Self-Governing Colony
12 Responsible Government 1914-23
13 The New Order 1923-31
14 The Decline of the Rhodesian Party 1927—33
15 The Huggins Era 1933-39
16 War and Aftermath 1939-48
17 The Origins of Federation 1945-51
18 Federation Achieved 1951-53
Part Three: Federation and the White Backlash
19 Southern Rhodesian Society 1946-53
20 The Heyday of Federation 1953-57
21 A Turning Point 1957
22 The Fall of Todd 1957-58
23 The Decline of the Federation 1956-60
24 The Eclipse of Whitehead 1960-62
25 The Rhodesian Front 1962-63
26 The Fall of Field 1964
27 Smith 1964-65
28 UDI 1965
Epilogue
Appendix: The Beit Trust
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

A History of Rhodesia

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

[£rf.] The Private Papers of Douglas Haig i914-19 The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law 1858-1923 Disraeli The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill The Office of Prime Minister

A History of Rhodesia Robert Blake

EYRE METHUEN • LONDON

To Letitia

First published in 1977 by Eyre Methuen Ltd ii New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1977 Robert Blake Filmset in Great Britain by Northumberland Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear and printed by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

ISBN o 413 28350 x

Contents INTRODUCTION

xv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xix

CHRONOLOGY

XX

Part One : The Chartered Company

I

THE LAND AND THE EARLY CONQUERORS 5OOO BC-AD 17OO The British occupation in perspective - The land and climate — Victoria Falls — Bushmen s paintings - The Great Zimbabwe — Rhodes's grave — The Bantu The Monomatapa and the Changamire - Arrival and expulsion of the Portuguese.

2

THE NDEBELE KINGDOM I7OO-1886

14

Rozwi rule -The Zulu explosion -The Ndebele move north - Clash with Boers - Their origin and character - British policy in Cape Colony - Mzilikazi in Bulawayo - The Moffat Mission - White hunters - Lobengula, a Dark Age monarch - Gold in 'Zambesia' - Diamonds in Kimberley - The Patterson affair - The ‘ Voortrekker .

3

CECIL RHODES 1853-89

2Ç

Confederation in South Africa - 'Colonialism' v. the 'imperial factor Foreign rivalries - Gold on the Rand - Rhodes - His early life - His health Kimberley - Oxford - His friendship with Alfred Beit - His character and mode of life - His ideals - The struggle for South Africa - Significance of southern Zambesia - The Moffat Treaty - The dilemma of Lord Salisbury.

4

THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

42

Rhodes's problem — The Rudd Mission - Lobengula's difficulties — The discom­ forts of his court - A frock-coated envoy — The Rudd Concession - Its dubious morality - Maund and other rivals - Visit of indunas to England - Rhodes 'squares' his rivals - Selous - The charter sealed - Trouble in Bulawayo Character of Dr Jameson - His friendship with Lobengula - Execution of Lotje, 'Strafford of the Ndebele dynasty' - Jameson's second visit - Lobengula fails to ratify Rudd Concession.

CONTENTS

5

THE PIONEER COLUMN 1889-90

62

Frank Johnson - His proposed coup against Lobengula - Selous* alternative Johnson s contract and misleading account of it - The Pioneers - The military escort - Jameson threatens Lobengula - Departure of the Column Pennefather, Jameson and Colquhoun - Column reaches Salisbury.

6

THE MAP IS DRAWN 1890-91

7^

‘Effective occupation - Nyasaland and Harry Johnson — Lord Salisbury's ultimatum to Portugal - Nyasaland secured - Barotseland, the IVare Conces­ sion — Failure to gain Katanga - Need of an eastern port — Colquhoun s secret instructions - Coup in Manicaland against 'Gouveia' - Forbes abandons bid for Beira - Colquhoun unfairly blamed - Failure to acquire Gazaland - Sir John Willoughby - Skirmish at Choua Hill - Settlement with Portugal - the Adendorff trek rebuffed - Portuguese and Boer ambitions frustrated - Rhodes and Harry Johnston part company.

7

SETTLEMENT AND WAR 1890-93

93

The Pioneers discharged - Legality oftheir rewards - A torrential rainy season Hardships of settlers - Malaria, beetles, bullfrogs, rats and snakes - Visit of Lord Randolph Churchill - Arrival of Rhodes - Jameson, Chief Magistrate Colquhoun sacked - Economic depression — Black-White relations — The juridical situation - Irreconcilable claims - Origins of Matabele War - The Victoria Incident - War propaganda - Defeat of Lobengula - The Shangani Patrol, a Rhodesian symbol.

8

CONQUEST 1893-95

111

Lobengula's fate assessed - Force the basis ofcompany rule - Contrast with other colonies - Rhodes at his apogee - Powerlessness of Whitehall - Land and cattle - Indefensible policy ofJameson - Brutality and sexual exploitation by police - Boom in Bulawayo.

9

REBELLION 1896-97

123

Rinderpest - The Jameson Raid - 'Rebellion' in Matabeleland - Atrocities on both sides — Divergent Ndebele aims — Millenarian fanaticism — Burnham shoots the Mlimo — Course of campaign — Rhodes arrives — Plumer's Column — Lord Grey succeeds Jameson — Relief of Bulawayo — Shona revolt — The Mazoe Patrol - Defeat of Ndebele - Rhodes's indabas in the Matopos Chamberlain and the Charter - The Shona rebellion crushed - A vignette by Lady Grey.

vi

CONTENTS

IO

THE AFTERMATH 1897-1902 White conquest reaffirmed — The railroad revolution — Grey's view of the Shona — His mode of life — Rhodes seeks to allay settler discontent — Sir William Milton succeeds Grey — The new Constitution — Imperial control — A Legislative Council — Powers of the Administrator — The Rhodesian Civil Service — The South African War — Death and funeral of Rhodes — Question mark over Rhodesia.

II

THE RULE OF THÉ COMPANY 1902-18

155

Drastic impact of white rule on black life - Black passivity - Assimilation v. segregation - Observations of Henri Rolin - Sexual relations - Missionaries' limited success - Compromises in Native Policy - Ndebele grievances over land - Urban problems - Passes and registration - The Native Department - The debate on Rhodesia's future - Changes in the Legislative Council - The impact of the 1914-18 war.

Part Two : A Self-Governing Colony 12

173

RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT 1914-23

Sir Drummond Chaplin succeeds Milton - Amalgamation with north, or union with south - The Privy Councils decision on land - Cave Commission's award - Sir Charles Coghlan - Responsible Government v. union - Legco elections Funeral ofJameson - Churchill at the Colonial Office - The Buxton Committee - A new Constitution - Smuts's rival offer - The referendum decides for Responsible Government - Analysis of voting - Analogies with UDI.

13

189

THE NEW ORDER 1923-31

The end of 'greater South Africa' - Smuts fails to turn the tide - Expro­ priation of BSA Company - Analysis of new Constitution - Coghlan as 'Premier - 1924 elections - The political pattern - A one-party system Coghlan's outlook - Shirley Cripps and the evils of the settlers - African voices — Native reserves and native purchase areas — The Coryndon Commission — Its dubious predictions - The Carter Commission - African reactions - The Land Apportionment Act of 1931.

14

THE DECLINE OF THE RHODESIAN PARTY 1927-33

205

Relations with South Africa - Settler grievances against Whitehall - Economic

vii

CONTENTS

problems - Death of Coghlan - Moffat's premiership - The Meikle affair The Hilton Young Commission - Amalgamation recedes - The Copper Belt Paramountcy - The slump - Huggins crosses the floor - The Reform Party Huggins and racialism - Mineral rights - Moffat buys out the company - The ¡933 election - Huggins in office.

15

THE HUGGINS ERA 1933-39

217

Character and attitude of Huggins - The Industrial Conciliation Act - A political convulsion — Huggins easily wins 1934 election - The economic problems; minerals, tobacco, agriculture - Amalgamationists press their case African opposition - The Bledisloe Commission - The native problem African attitudes - The fight against African urbanization - Huggins com­ promises -The native problem unsolved.

16

WAR AND AFTERMATH 1939-48

231

Election of 1939 - Outbreak of war - Huggins creates Defence Committee with Guest and Tredgold - The colony's war effort - RAF training ground Domestic politics - 'Socialistic measures - Labour divisions healed - Party genealogies - The Central African Council - Huggins becomes more 'liberal to anger of Liberal Party - The 1946 election - A minority government - Huggins buys out the railways - An African strike - Huggins wins election of 1948.

17

THE ORIGINS OF FEDERATION 1945-51

243

Diverse characteristics of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland - Constitutional developments - Roy Welensky - 1948, a turning point - Effect of the Northern Rhodesian and South African elections - Amalgamation vetoed - The move towards Federation - The Conference of Officials 1951 - The Role of Sir Andrew Cohen — Details of the proposals.

18

FEDERATION ACHIEVED 195 I-53

255

Reactions to the Officials Conference - The Africans — The Liberal Party - Sir E. Guest - Sir R. Tredgold - Self-government or 'civilized standards' - Visit to Central Africa by Griffiths and Gordon Walker — Conference at Victoria Falls - Defeat of Labour Government - Oliver Lyttleton finally vetoes amalgamation - Mounting Labour and African opposition to Federation — Banda's tour of Scotland - The Capricorn Africa Society - The Lancaster House Conference - Constitutional disputes and agreements - The debate in Southern Rhodesia - Reports of the specialist commission - Huggins wins his referendum — The Federation inaugurated.

viii

CONTENTS

Part Thr ee: Federation and the White Backlash IQ

SOUTHERN RHODESIAN SOCIETY 1946-53

273

Quality of the immigrants - Umtali described as ‘Poonafontein - Myth that most Rhodesians 'have no other home' - An urban society, but rural social ascendancy - * The planter interest' - 'Surbiton in the Bush' - High standard of living - African servants and bad race relations - A cultural desert - Sense of insecurity - Relations with South Africa - Sexual taboos - Problems of prostitution - FFhite social distinctions - Ignorance about Africans - Rigid separatism - Illiberalism of immigrants.

20

THE HEYDAY OF FEDERATION I953“57

284

Complexities of the Constitution - Rivalry of Dominion and Colonial Offices Huggins as Federal Prime Minister - Wins 19s4 election - Southern Rhodesia now a 'territory - Rise of Garfield Todd - His antecedents and character Wins territorial election - Federal prosperity - Roads and planes 'Partnership' and its problems - Africans called 'Mr and 'Native' abolished Liberal measures - Todd's efforts to break down barriers - Kariba - Dominion status for the Federation refused - Sir Roy Welensky succeeds Huggins.

21

A TURNING POINT 1957

296

The franchise - The Tredgold Report on Southern Rhodesia — A parallel with the past - Welensky and the Federal Constitution - African disapproval Ascendancy of Todd - White misgivings about his 'style' - The Immorality Act - Modifications to Tredgold Report - Todd's threat to resign - The Party Congress — A Cabinet revolt quelled.

22

3°7

THE FALL OF TODD 1957-58

A second Cabinet rebellion - Todd forms a new Government - Repudiated by caucus and Congress - Whitehead becomes Prime Minister - Wins election of ig$8 by narrow margin - Todd's new party loses every seat - Reasons for Todd's fall - Welensky not involved - Nature of 'liberalism' - Difference between that of Todd and Whitehead - A personal recollection.

23

THE DECLINE OF THE FEDERATION 1956-60

319

Character of Whitehead - Alienation of Africans - Repercussions of Suez Change of course in UK - Extension of African self-government - Implications

ix

CONTENTS

for Federation - African unrest - Emergence ofNkomo and the Congress Party Bad relations between Welensky and Whitehall - Macmillan takes an interest State of emergency in Central Africa — The Devlin Report — The Monckton Commission set up - 'The wind of change' - Ian Macleod becomes Colonial Secretary - Macmillans defence of British colonial policy - De Gaulle and the French Empire — The Congo crisis — The'Monckton Report.

24

THE ECLIPSE OF WHITEHEAD 1960-62

333

A new Constitution for Southern Rhodesia - Volte-face by Nkomo - Whitehead wins referendum for 1961 Constitution - Central African politics in London - Macleod 'too clever by half - Dissension between Colonial and Commonwealth Relations Offices - Macmillan becomes bored - Welensky con­ templates UDI - The Plewman and Quinton Reports on land - Whitehead forces the pace - African Nationalist misjudgements - ANC banned Foundation of ZAPU - Violence - ZAPU banned - The Rhodesian Front — Winston Field - Defeat of Whitehead - Responsibility of Nkomo and Sithole.

25

THE RHODESIAN FRONT 1962-63

345

R. A. Butler takes charge of Central Africa - Dissolution of Federation inevitable - Rage of Welensky - Northern Rhodesia granted right to secede Field?s Cabinet - He aims for independence on 1961 Constitution - British refusal — Victoria Falls Conference - Ought Field to have gone? - Myth of promise of independence - Federation dissolved - Divisions in African Nationalism - Sithole founds ZANU - Rhodesian Front gains ground - Ian Smith returns from London empty-handed.

26

THE FALL OF FIELD 1964

356

Field visits London - No change from Sir Alec Douglas-Home - An interview with Wilson - Contingency plans for UDI - RF caucus ousts Field - He declines to fight back - Ian Smith becomes Prime Minister - His deviousness His identification with white ascendancy - His Rhodesian 'patriotism' — Advantages and drawbacks.

27

SMITH 1964-65

363

Clamp-down on African agitation - Renewed negotiations with Whitehall — Welensky tries to return to politics — Smith goes to London and withdraws threat of UDI - Welensky heavily defeated at by-election — Smith argues for an indaba of chiefs as test of African opinion — Preparations for UDI — Van der ByI deals with the media — Armed forces and civil service under control —

x

CONTENTS

The indaba held - Sir Alec refuses to accept its verdict - Labour wins the election — Wlisons strong warning — European referendum on independence on 1961 Constitution — Smith goes to London for Sir Winston's funeral — His strange conduct - Rhodesian general election May 1965 - Ought the dissolution to have been granted? - Overwhelming victory for RF- Final defeat of the 'old establishment'.

28

UDI 1965

374

Ideology of the RF - Smith committed to UDI - Dismissal of Evan Campbell An envoy to Portugal - Further negotiations with Britain - The Five Principles - Smith's last visit to London - Deadlock over franchise, African opinion, and retrogressive amendments - Wilson flies to Salisbury - His fury at treatment of Nkomo and Sithole - His chilly reception of Lord Graham's post-prandial humour - Renewed deadlock - Archbishop of Canterbury hints at force - Rhodesians bum Bibles - Wilson back in London - Final effort to dissuade Smith - UDI declared on November 11 - The reasons behind it - A rush of blood to the head? - Or a calculated move towards segregation and white consolidation?

EPILOGUE 1965-77

385

Constitutional questions - 'OAG' - Dupont - Effort to involve the Queen 'Smith's Crispins' - Treatment of the Governor - The opposition in Rhodesia Life after UDI - African docility - Question of force' - Wilson's rejection of it - Oil sanctions -Conservative attitude - Ill-founded optimism of Wilson Financial skill of Wrathall and Bruce - Portugal and South Africa - Beira Patrol - Byrd Amendment - State of the economy - The Tiger talks 1966 —Beadle's backbone — Smith pulls out - 'NIBMAR'— Judicial battles Execution of three Africans - Beadle ejected from Government House - The Fearless talks 1968 - New constitution - Smith declares a republic 1969 Conservatives back in office 1970 - Smith accepts Home/Goodman proposals — Pearce Commission finds them unacceptable to Africans - Portuguese revolution 1974 ~ Independence for Angola and Mozambique — Kissinger's intervention — Smith agrees to 'majority rule' on conditions — Geneva Conference — Smith's attitude - Bishop Muzorewa - The Patriotic Front - Power bases of Nkomo, Sithole and Mugabe - Chances of a peaceful settlement - A tribute to the Europeans who tried to make multi-racialism work.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

4IO 412

INDEX

416

appendix: the beit trust

xi

Introduction

This is *a history of the origins and course of the modem European occupation of ‘Southern Rhodesia1 - ‘Rhodesia’ as it has been termed since the old ‘Northern Rhodesia’ became independent under the name of Zambia in 1963. Rhodesian history is a strange and intriguing compound of romance, idealism, courage, arrogance, avarice and accident. Moreover it involves, even if on a miniature scale, some of the most intractable problems of the twentieth century: the relations between the races, the nature of political power, the limits of constitutional loyalty, the conflict between ideology and economics, the future of ‘White Africa’. The country’s history has, however, aroused only limited international interest. The drama of its beginning is, of course, famous - Cecil Rhodes, the Pioneer Column, the settlement of Salisbury, the war with Lobengula, the Shangani Patrol, the ‘rebellions’ in Matabeleland and Mashonaland. But, for many years after that, the history of the country is almost unknown except to specialists. A few people are aware that Rhodesia, like India, was governed by a chartered company - the last example in British history of this kind of regime. Fewer still have studied the hybrid constitution which followed the end of the British South Africa Company’s rule in 1923, though it is the key to the understanding of much that has happened recently. Some echoes of the Rhodesian contribution in two world wars may linger in some ears. A fair number of people know that Sir Godfrey Huggins (Lord Malvern) held the premiership of his country for longer than anyone in the history of the British Empire since Sir Robert Walpole. But in general it would be true to say that until the 1950s very little interest has been taken in the contemporary politics or past history of Southern Rhodesia. Then the colony became quite suddenly a subject of major attention. The creation of the Federation of the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland was a matter of burning political controversy in Britain. There were those who saw it as the

xii

INTRODUCTION

foundation of a great multi-racial Dominion which would be a counterpoise to a South Africa increasingly dominated by the principles of apartheid and only too likely to draw Southern Rhodesia into the same orbit. Others saw in it a bold but impracticable attempt by the white settlers to extend their power at precisely the moment when African nationalism was challenging white rule all over the continent. Whether the Central African Federation was regarded as a manifestation of idealistic multi-racialism or of Southern Rhodesian imperialism, it was a subject of much publicity and fierce debate. Its origins, its heyday, its dissolution with consequences, not least of which has been Southern Rhodesia’s unilateral dec­ laration of independence, are matters of high controversy still. To some extent this book reflects these contrasts in the interest taken from outside in the various periods of Rhodesian history. In the story of a nation, as in the lives of most individuals, there are long passages when nothing very much happens. These cannot be ignored, for they may contain the causes of later events which have a much greater significance, but there is no need to devote to them the same space which one gives to those events themselves. If the outside world has taken little interest in the history of Southern Rhodesia from the end of the rebellions to the beginning of federation this is largely because much of it is not very interesting. What matter in the history of a country are the turning points - the moments of decision when a different line of action might have changed the course of events. There are at least five in the modem history of Southern Rhodesia. The first is of course the European occupation itself. The second is the ending of Company rule in 1922 and the choice of ‘Responsible Government’ rather than adherence to the Union of South Africa. The third is the decision to opt for federation. The fourth is the dissolution of the Federation. The fifth is UDI. In between these there are less decisive episodes which none the less involved some change of course if not a sharp turn: the settlement after the rebellions; the Land Apportionment Act; the political crisis of 1933; the ousting of Garfield Todd in 1958; the general election of 1962; the fall of Winston Field in 1964. It is these major and minor turning points, their nature, causes and effects, which this book endeavours to discuss and analyse. The story of a country is not only the story of the economic, political, ideological and external forces which have shaped it, but also that of the individuals who made - or failed to make - decisions. An attempt has been made to portray such figures as Rhodes, Lobengula, Jameson, Coghlan, Lord Malvern, Roy Welensky, Garfield Todd, Edgar Whitehead, Winston Field, Ian Smith and others who played a crucial part in events. Many of them are still alive or were when I began this book. I am very grateful to them for allowing me to talk to them, but they should not be regarded as in any way endorsing what I have said. Indeed some of them will certainly disagree with some of my conclusions. Chronologically the story of Southern Rhodesia divides into three parts: Com­ pany rule from 1890 to 1923; ‘Responsible Government’ 1923 to 1953; federation, its dissolution and consequences 1953 to 1965. The book was intended to end

xiii

with UDI. What has happened since is too recent to have become ‘history’. Nevertheless, an attempt has been made in a brief epilogue to survey the principal events, in full consciousness that the future historian will have a great deal more to say about them. I have had the advantage of access to many collections of papers not normally available to historians. I have spent considerable periods of time in Rhodesia and have got to know most of the leading figures in the country’s recent history, also to understand something of the outlook of the white settlers which has a remarkable resemblance to that of the southern secessionists before the American Civil War (cf. R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and David Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style). I have also tried, though this is less easy, to get some insight into the mentality of the Rhodesian Africans, which is not quite the same as that of the Africans in neighbouring countries, for a host of historical reasons.

The Queen’s College, Oxford June 1977

xiv

Robert Blake

Acknowledgements

The idea of writing this book was suggested to me by Mr Harry St J. Grenfell who till his retirement held a prominent position first in the British South Africa Company and then in Charter Consolidated, the London end of the AngloAmerican Corporation of South Africa which absorbed the old BSA Company. The original plan was to write a history simply of the Company, but this was changed to a history of Southern Rhodesia and the history of the Company appears in these pages only insofar as it overlaps with that of the Colony. I planned to finish it at the Declaration of Independence in 1965, but I later decided to include an Epilogue to bring the story to the present day. It is only an outline and I must emphasize that many years will elapse before a proper history of that period can be written. I am most grateful to the Anglo-American Corporation and to Charter Consoli­ dated for their help which has been indispensable in producing this book, and I would in particular like to thank Mr Harry Oppenheimer and Mr Grenfell for their advice and support. I would also like to thank Sir Keith Acutt, Mr Tim Birley, Sir Frederick Crawford, Mr Adam Payne, Mr John Richardson, Sir Albert Robin­ son and Mr Robin Rudd. I have had many conversations with people who have participated in recent Rhodesian affairs. The list is too long to give in full and some of them, both African and European, prefer to remain anonymous; in particular I have not thought it right to mention by name any of the members of the present government since several of them gave me interviews on that assumption. I would particularly like to mention the help I have had from the late Lord Malvern, the late Mr Winston Field, Mr Garfield Todd and Sir Roy Welensky. Others who have been most helpful were the late Sir Ernest Guest, the late Sir Robert Tredgold, Sir Hugh Beadle, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, Mr Julian Greenfield, Sir Cornelius Greenfield, Sir Andrew Strachan, Mr Jack Quinton, Mr Evan Campbell, Mr Hardwicke Holder-

xv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ness, Mr Ellman-Brown, Senator Sam Whaley, Mr Stan Morris, Mr Abrahamson, Sir Ray Stockil, Mr George Rudland, Sir Patrick Fletcher, Mr and Mrs Richard Acton (Judy Todd), Sir Henry McDowell, Mr Donald Low, Dr Craig and Sir Robert Birley. One cannot write about Rhodesia without entering into the area of modern political controversy. I do not expect those whom I have consulted to agree with my judgement of events, and I ipust take full responsibility for it. One of my most useful sources has been the transcripts taken by Mr Rex Reynolds of his conversations with Lord Malvern who was in the unusual position of being able to comment on his own biography by Professor Gann and Dr Gelfand - itself, of course, a valuable work. I am very grateful for his help. No one can write about Rhodesia without acknowledging his debt to Professor Gann whose histories of Southern Rhodesia to 1933 and Northern Rhodesia to 1953 are books of major importance. The same can be said of Dr Gelfand whose many books on the medical history of the country and the religious beliefs of the Shona are indispensable. I also owe a heavy debt to Professor Ranger’s Revolt in Southern Rhodesia - a remarkable study of the rebellions of 1896. I have found the unpublished thesis by Mr Malcolm Rifkind, MP, The Politics of Land, very helpful in understanding one of the most puzzling aspects of Rhodesian history and I have also had the advantage of reading some of the draft chapters of Mr Richard Wood’s forthcoming history of the Federation. I would like to thank Miss Doreen Mackay, Mrs M. A. Read and Miss Sarah King-Turner for typing and retyping my chapters with such exemplary skill and patience. Finally, I would like to thank Miss King-Turner and my daughter, Deborah, for correcting the proofs, Mr F. T. Dunn for compiling the index and Miss Elsbeth Lindner for copy-editing my typescript and seeing it through the press.

xvi

Chronology 1509 1652 1693 1815 1822 1822-36 1836 1840 953 >954 >956 >957 »958 i960 1961

1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 I974

1976 1977

Death of Coghlan. Moffat Premier. Moffat wins general election. Land Apportionment Act passed. Chartered Company sells its mineral rights to Southern Rhodesian Government. Moffat replaced by Mitchell. Huggins narrowly wins general election. Second general election. Landslide for Huggins. Bledisloe Commission reports. Huggins wins general election. War-time government formed. Air Training Scheme begins in Rhodesia. General election. Huggins forms minority government. Huggins dissolves and wins general election easily. Conference of Officials on Federation. Conservatives win British general election. Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland inaugurated. Huggins becomes its first Prime Minister. Garfield Todd wins Southern Rhodesia general election. Welensky succeeds Lord Malvern (Huggins). New franchise in Southern Rhodesia. Nkomo founds new ANC. Fall of Todd. Whitehead wins general election. Macmillan makes ‘wind of change1 speech. Referendum confirms new Southern Rhodesian constitution. Monckton Report. ZAPU founded. Rhodesian Front wins general election. Field Prime Minister. Split between Nkomo and Sithole/Mugabe. ZANU founded. Federation dissolved. Field ousted. Smith Prime Minister. Smith wins every ‘A’ Roll seat at general election. Independence declared on November 11. Talks on HMS Tiger breakdown. ‘The Constitutional Case’. Abortive talks on HMS Fearless. New constitution. Rhodesia declared a republic. Conservatives win British general election. Home/Goodman proposals accepted by Smith. Pearce Commission finds terms unacceptable to Africans. Revolution in Lisbon leads to independence for Angola and Mozam­ bique. Kissinger and Vorster persuade Smith to agree to ‘majority rule’. Geneva Conference. Carter wins US Presidential election. Geneva Conference breaks down. Dr Owen proposes a fresh AngloAmerican initiative.

xviii

PART ONE

The Chartered Company

CHAPTER 1

The Land and the Early Conquerors 5000 BC-AD 1700

In the perspective of history the British occupation of ‘Zambesia’, as the area north of the Limpopo River was vaguely described, can be regarded as one of the last scenes in the European partition of Africa, and that partition itself as the final act in the astonishing drama of European expansion all over the world from the days of Vasco da Gama onwards. Like waves produced in ever widening circles by some vast sub-oceanic convulsion, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English spread first to America and Asia, then to the Antipodes, finally to Africa. And in 1890 the last ripple of all, even as the effects of that convulsion were dying away, carried the Pioneer Column into Mashonaland and three years later into Bulawayo. For over half a century the waters remained calm, almost stagnant. Then they began to ebb with ever increasing speed. This double transformation has been amazingly rapid. In 1870 less than one­ tenth of Africa was occupied by Europeans. By 1914 less than a tenth remained independent. Yet by the middle of the 1960s the only area governed from a European capital was the anachronistic Portuguese empire. British, French, German and Belgian colonial rule had vanished. With the Lisbon revolution of April 1974 the Portuguese empire vanished too. Today the only countries to be ruled by Europeans are those where the Whites have established themselves as autonomous indigenous élites - the Republic of South Africa and the self-styled Republic of Rhodesia. This is the framework within which Southern Rhodesia’s eighty-seven years of existence has to be set. It was not for lack of interest that Africa was the last of the great continents to be explored by the Europeans. Its fascination has been perpetual. From classical antiquity people dreamed of its strange marvels, mysterious wealth and magical possibilities. But the peculiar geographical configuration of the continent made penetration from outside a formidable task. Most of Africa consists of a high plateau of ancient rock (immensely rich in minerals) stretching from the

3

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Cape to the Atlas Mountains, surrounded by a narrow low-lying coastal belt. The rivers which would be the normal approach to the interior are nearly everywhere broken not far from the sea by unnavigable cataracts as they flow down from the plateau. The coast is inhospitably devoid not only of natural harbours, but of bays, inlets and channels. The coast line is no longer than that of Europe, but it encom­ passes a continent three times the size. The coastal belt, hot and steamy, has been from time immemorial until very recently the haunt of malaria and other lethal fevers. Tsetse fly, the killer of transport animals, was, and in great tracts still is, a deadly obstacle to movement both on the coast and further inland. Although the approach to the interior was so formidable, the climate and vegetation are by no means unpleasant for those already there. The latest theories suggest that mankind may originally have evolved on the plateaux of eastern and southern Africa. Whatever the truth of this, the great area of bush and grassland which runs up from South Africa, encircling the Congo basin and ending in Tanzania and Kenya, has been for thousands of years a corridor for the movement of men. Countless generations of nomadic peoples have moved along it from north to south, though sometimes there have been back eddies; indeed one of these accounts for the Ndebele who live in the western part of Southern Rhodesia today; another for the Whites who have ruled the land since 1893. Very little is known about the past history of southern and central Africa. The indigenous peoples never discovered the wheel nor did they evolve a written language. They experienced neither of the two great revolutions which have trans­ formed the Euro-Asiatic world: the urban revolution of Mesopotamia; the industrial revolution of England. This does not mean that the social order which prevailed among the African tribes when the European impact first occurred was at all simple. On the contrary, it was subtle and highly complicated - an elaborate web of hierarchical, spiritual and diplomatic relations. But it is true that the system had emerged largely in isolation. Even the Ndebele state, the most highly developed in Southern Africa, was no more than an Iron Age monarchy when it was finally destroyed by Cecil Rhodes in 1893. Southern Rhodesia constitutes a small section of this vast plateau of Southern Africa. Its area is three times that of England, i.e. about 150,000 square miles (the whole area of Africa is 11,000,000 square miles). The maximum distances from east to west and north to south are rather less than 600 miles, and the country lies almost wholly within the southern tropics. The cliché, ‘a land-locked island’, is no less true for being a cliché. Unlike so many of the states created by the European partition of Africa, it is not an artificial entity owing its shape merely to the political bargains of the chancelleries of Europe. On the contrary, it has had for centuries a geographical unity of its own and it possesses natural frontiers; on the north the formidable barrier of the Zambesi; on the south what Kipling erroneously called ‘the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’; on the west the dry sands of the Kalahari desert; on the east the mountains which divide Rhodesia from Mozambique and provide the pleasantest scenery and climate in the country.

4

THE LAND AND THE EARLY CONQUERORS 5000 BC-AD 17OO

Most of Southern Rhodesia lies within the Tropic of Capricorn, but the climate is far from ‘tropical* in the ordinary sense of the term. This is because of its altitude. A quarter of its surface lies between four and five thousand feet above sea level; by far the greater part is over two thousand feet and scarcely any of it is below one thousand. Yet, although so much of Southern Rhodesia is above the top of Ben Nevis, one has no sense of height. The impression is one of a rolling plain with long vistas and endless blue horizons. On the high veld Europeans can live without discomfort. The best time of year is the early winter late April to the end of June. The rainy season is over, and the dusty aridity of the year’s third quarter is yet to come. By day the temperature, even in April, is not very much hotter than in a hot English summer. The sky is a deep blue and the fleecy clouds never bring rain. One can fix a date for a picnic years in advance. By night it is cool and in June and July there can be frosts, sometimes severe. The champagne quality of the air, the brilliant glitter of the stars in the vapourless night sky, the sense of illimitable space all combine to produce a feeling of euphoria and boundless possibilities. Yet it is well to take with a grain of salt the modern Rhodesian’s praise of what he calls his ‘wonderful climate’. The rainfall, averaging twenty-five to thirty inches a year, is confined to the summer (late November to early March). It is thundery and torrential, but there seldom seems to be enough of it, and complaints of droughts are endemic. Even on the high veld the temperature in October and November can be ioo°F or more in the shade; the visitor is illadvised to forget that he is in the tropics and that the almost vertical noonday sun really can burn. At the end of the long rainless winter the savannah vegetation is parched, brown and lifeless under the flaring October sun and under a sky cloudless but white and hazy, not from moisture, as at the corresponding time of year in England, but from the dust and fine ash produced by innumerable bush fires. A similar ‘double-take’ is the flaming red and gold of the Msasa and other indigenous trees at this time - the Rhodesian spring - their colours resembling in sharpened degree those of the autumnal beech woods of England in the same month. The arid atmosphere dries up the European skin and the dust produces symptoms rather like hay fever. Conditions away from the high plateau, whether one descends north into the Zambesi valley or south towards the low veld and the Limpopo, are much hotter and anything but agreeable. There are four notable sights for which Rhodesia is rightly famous, one of them natural, three of them man-made. The Victoria Falls in the extreme north west corner of the country, discovered by David Livingstone in 1855, are one of the wonders of the world. The Zambesi, after flowing in a leisurely way through some 800 miles of bush from its source in the north of Zambia, suddenly plunges over a huge basalt rock cliff into a series of narrow zigzag gorges. The falls are one and a quarter miles wide and their greatest height is 355 feet. An average over the year of 47 million gallons of water flows down every minute. At the flood season the figure rises to 120 million. The spray can be seen like a great plume of steam as far as twenty miles away on land - much further from the

5

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

air - and the roar is tremendous. Hence the Makololo name which is translated as ‘the smoke that thunders*. The scene has a magnetism that draws even the most blasé of visitors to return to it, and more than compensates for the damp enervating heat of the Zambesi valley. The exotic rain forest, the lunar rainbow, the grandeur of the gorge and the hypnotic noise of falling water are experiences which no one who has been there can ever forget. Oddly enough, Cecil Rhodes never saw it. The three man-made spectacles for which Southern Rhodesia is celebrated symbolize three eras in the history of the country. The Bushmen’s rock paintings are the earliest. No one has ever seen them all. Over two thousand have been discovered. Some of the finest are in the caves of the Matopos near Bulawayo. They are the work of a primitive tiny yellow-skinned hunting people. The Bushmen supplanted whoever were the previous inhabitants of the plateau at a time probably between 6000 and 5000 BC. The pictures are works of art and amazingly vivid. From them one can reconstruct, if only in shadowy outline, the way of life its heyday, decline and twilight - of a race now vanished except for a few pathetic survivors who still eke out a precarious existence in the desiccated wastes of the Kalahari desert. At a date not known with any precision they were driveñ out by the Bantu, a race unmistakably negroid, more advanced, formidable and aggressive - the forebears of the Shona-speaking peoples who constitute three-quarters of the African population today. Mention of the Bantu leads naturally to the second of the great man-made monuments for which Southern Rhodesia is famous - the celebrated dry stone ruins of Zimbabwe a few miles south of what is now Fort Victoria. The Great Zimbabwe (the word simply means ‘burial ground of the chiefs’) is spread over some sixty acres. It probably originated as a shrine of ‘Mwari’ and later became a political capital.1 The main features which still stand above ground are the ‘Acropolis’, a series of immensely thick walls built on a giant granite hill or ‘kopje’; and, below it in the valley, the ‘Great Enclosure’ or ‘Temple’ with free-standing, elegantly patterned walls thirty-five feet high and a curious conical tower believed by some experts to be a fertility symbol. The Great Enclosure may have been a royal residence. The purpose of the Acropolis, which commands extensive views in every direction, is uncertain - perhaps a fortress which would have been almost impregnable in the hands of determined defenders against the weapons of its day. These remarkable buildings are constructed from granite slabs laid upon each other without mortar or cement - resembling, though on a far grander scale, the stone walls which still divide fields in the Cotswolds. The Great Zimbabwe was built and rebuilt over many hundreds of years. The latest part was probably constructed in the early fifteenth century, after which the archaeological evidence suggests an abrupt social and economic decline. Zimbabwe was first ‘described’ in the archaeological sense by one Karl Mauch, 1 P. S. Garslake, ‘Zimbabwe Ruins re-examined’, Rhodesian History, Vol. 1,1970,17-29, gives the latest archaeological opinion.

6

THE LAND AND THE EARLY CONQUERORS 5000 BC-AD I7OO

a German schoolmaster and geologist with a taste for adventure. He was guided to it in 1871 by an American hunter-prospector by the name of Adam Renders (or Render) who believed, as many did, that there had once been some longvanished ‘white’ - or at any rate non-negroid - civilization in central Africa. Could this strange ruin be one of King Solomon’s fortresses? Renders thought that it was. Mauch concluded, less improbably though not less erroneously, that it was built by Phoenician artisans under Hebrew influences, that ‘the Temple* was a copy of the palace where the Queen of Sheba stayed when she visited King Solomon and that Zimbabwe was the capital of Ophir from which Hiram, the Phoenician ally of the Jewish monarchs, sent 420 talents of gold. This theory is now totally exploded. No serious modern student of the subject doubts that Zimbabwe was the work of the ancestors of the Shona-speaking peoples now inhabiting the eastern half of Southern Rhodesia. European travellers and explorers of the 1870s, confronted with the primitive condition of the Shona tribes whom they met, were understandably reluctant to believe that this could be so. Today, thanks to archaeological and other forms of research, we are more aware that civilizations can deçline as well as rise and there seems nothing odd in the notion, supported by all the available evidence, that Zimbabwe was built by black men and was for a time the political and religious capital of a highlydeveloped Bantu monarchy. The third symbolic man-made monument is the tomb of Cecil Rhodes who founded and gave his name to the modem colony. It is a plain slab on a kopje in the Matopos a few miles south of Bulawayo. Rhodes called the place ‘World’s View’ and he loved to sit there brooding about his plans and hopes, surveying the strange panorama - a seemingly endless prospect of grotesquely shaped granite hills with huge rocks perching on their tops at improbable angles that appear to defy the ordinary rules of balance and gravity. When there is rain in the air and clouds are building up and thunder reverberates far off, one need not be overimaginative to catch something of the sense of fear and magic which this queer region has inspired in generations of Africans. Similar slabs commemorate Dr Jameson - forgivably perhaps as he was Rhodes’s closest friend - and Sir Charles Coghlan, the not very memorable first Prime Minister of Rhodesia. But the least happy feature of this otherwise impressive setting was the direct result of Rhodes’s own instructions. He wished that the bodies of the Shangani Patrol heroes of the Rhodesian Valhalla, courageous victims of military ineptitude should be re-interred near his grave. Their collective tomb is not worthy of their courage. It is perhaps as well that no more man-made monuments are to be imposed on this naturally impressive scene. The Bushmen, the early Bantu, the British ... two significant sets of invaders are omitted. Neither the Portuguese nor the Ndebele left any monuments worthy of note, but they are important nevertheless, especially the latter. To survey in detail the history of Rhodesia from the arrival of the Bantu to the arrival of Cecil Rhodes does not come within the scope of this book. But some account, however brief, is essential, if the story of subsequent events is to make sense.

7

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

A great deal of our knowledge of early Rhodesian history must be based on conjecture. There is a world of difference between the reliability of history founded on written documents and history dependent upon oral tradition or archaeological evidence, however good. The first written documents on Rhodesia date from the Portuguese landings in the early sixteenth century. It is, however, generally agreed that several centuries beforç that an Iron Age negroid civilization was to be found over most of Central Africa; the peoples concerned not only knew how to smelt iron, but also to mine gold, though their techniques seldom allowed them to dig deeper than 100 feet. By this time there had been some contacts, however tenuous, with the outside world. Indonesian sailors had colonized Madagascar and reached the East African coast. From a very early stage Arab navigators and traders sailed to the same shores. The idea, current in late Victorian times, that the country was the Ophir of Biblical fame and contained fabulous quantities of gold, probably stems from travellers’ stories going back to remote antiquity when Muslim voyagers traded their goods for gold objects. It was a delusion. Although Rhodesia does have deposits of auriferous ore, no great lode has ever been discovered. Yet delusions can shape history as potently as reality. The lure of Ophir drew adventurers, explorers, invaders to Rhodesia over many centuries, and indeed led directly to the creation of the modem state. At a time which is uncertain, the Iron Age peoples inhabiting the Rhodesian plateau developed into primitive monarchies. We know nothing directly of the cause, but we can guess that the necessities of war, conquest and trade operated in much the same way as they did upon the Teutonic tribes of northern Europe and the Hebrew tribes of Biblical Palestine. There were evidently several of these monarchies, but the one about which we know most - or are least ignorant - is the kingdom of the Monomatapa which first impinged on European consciousness at the time of the Portuguese invasion. The tribe that formed the basis of this monarchy was known as the Karanga, who are believed to have come from some­ where in the vicinity of Lake Tanganyika. Exactly when their monarchy became established it is impossible to say. It was apparently centred originally on the Great Zimbabwe, although by the time of the Portuguese the capital had been moved to Chitako, over 200 miles north at the foot of the escarpment which leads down to the Zambesi valley. This move occurred in the fifteenth century and various explanations for it have been given: new discoveries of gold; exhaustion of the land near Zimbabwe; the search for salt, which is a rare and precious commodity for an inland people subsisting largely on cereals and vegetables. The original title of the paramount chief or King of the Karanga was the Mambo. It was their northern conquest which gave him his new name. Mutota, the King, who led his armies to Chitako and destroyed the rule of the indigenous tribes, was called by them ‘Mwene Mu tapa’, which means ‘master of the ravaged land’. The title may well have been conferred in a spirit of irony; but it became adopted first as the ‘praise name’ of Mutota himself and later, in the corrupted form of Monomatapa, as the hereditary title of the dynasty, like Tsar or Kaiser. According to oral tradition, the rule of the Monomatapa reached its zenith under

8

THE LAND AND THE EARLY CONQUERORS 5000 BC-AD I7OO

Mutota’s son, Matope, who reigned over what was probably a loose tribal con­ federacy said to extend to the shores of the Indian Ocean. His death at some date in the late fifteenth century began a series of dynastic feuds and wars of succession. The only one of his many sons who had inherited his ability was called Changa. According to one tradition his mother was a slave. Another says that he was not a son of Matope at all, but a grandson in the female line and that his father was a chief of the Rozwi, an important Karanga clan. In either case he was not in the line of succession, but at the time of his father's death he was acting as a sort of viceroy at Zimbabwe. He soon proclaimed his own independence and symbolized his alliance or connection with the Rozwi by calling his kingdom Urozwi. He personally assumed the Arab title of Amir - Arab influences were strong both at Zimbabwe and Chitako - and before long his own name and that of his title were amalgamated into ‘Changamire’. This in its turn became a title, like Monomatapa. Changa did not last long himself, but the struggle he started developed into deadlock. The Monomatapa could not dislodge the rebel dynasty from Zimbabwe. Equally the successors of Changa failed in their efforts to subdue the Monomatapa. The kingdom of the Monomatapa at the beginning of the sixteenth century was a well-organized hierarchical society. The monarch was supported by a military aristocracy, a priesthood and a large number of high-sounding office bearers. The system as described by the Portuguese chroniclers bears some faint similarity to European feudalism, though technologically far inferior. The Karanga, like all the Bantu people of south central Africa, knew the use neither of the cart, the plough, nor the draught animal. Human labour was their sole source of power. They had a certain skill in the useful arts - weaving, pottery, carving in wood or stone, welding, and building. They had a primitive calendar which divided the month into three ten day weeks, but they had no accurate system of dating the years. All their knowledge was based on oral tradition which, handed down by the old, tends to create a highly conservative social order. No people in this part of Africa discovered the secret of transferring spoken words into visible symbols. The art of writing remained unknown until it was taught by the Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century. The primitive nature of Bantu husbandry meant that only the barest reserve of food could be produced. There was no possibility of stock-piling grain as the Pharaohs of Egypt had done. Survival depended upon strict adherence to a traditional village system of agricultural co-operation. Although the upper classes of the Monomatapa kingdom seem to have been able to accumulate a certain amount of individual property, the general emphasis was on communal ownership. This rigidly traditional society, however resistant to innovation, was not necessarily an unhappy one. The Karanga were, after all, ignorant of the vast new horizons which were opening up in contemporary Europe of the Renais­ sance; they knew nothing of the rediscovered glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. Their religious beliefs, if one can judge from the extreme difficulty encountered by Christians of every denomination down the

9

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

centuries in converting them, must have been spiritually satisfying. They believed in an all embracing deity, a Creator whom they called Mwari. But he was too remote to deal with individuals; their fortunes were guided by an elabo­ rate hierarchy of tribal and ancestral spirits to be wooed and propitiated through spirit mediums or divines. The monarch himself possessed spiritual powers and he was aided in his authority by the advice of a priestly caste who pro­ claimed the judgement of ancestral rules and were repositories of the ancient traditions of the tribe. The witchcraft, human sacrifice and superstitious fraud which characterized this barbarous religion may not have irked unduly a society which had never known anything else.

This then was the nature of the Bantu kingdoms encountered by the first Portuguese visitors at the beginning of the sixteenth century. We can be sceptical of the grandiose descriptions of the state kept up by Monomatapa and the eloquent accounts of his wealth, which some of these travellers sent to Lisbon; they had their own motives for exaggeration. Nonetheless with every allowance made, it is clear that the Shona-speaking tribes of eastern Rhodesia were organized on a far higher level than their demoralized descendants whom the British hunters, missionaries and traders discovered some three hundred and fifty years later. The Portuguese colonization of Rhodesia has never been adequately dealt with by historians. This may be because there is little satisfaction in tracing the story of an enterprise which failed so completely and left so little behind it. The Portuguese endeavoured for nearly two centuries to establish their dominion in what is now Mashonaland, and to gain the heathen Bantu for Christianity. They had some notable successes; one Monomatapa professed to be converted, and a son of his actually became a Dominican monk, ending up as vicar of the Convent of Santa Barbara in Goa. At the height of their power the Portuguese effectively controlled the eastern part of Mashonaland, but by the end of the seventeenth century there was not one Portuguese outpost on the plateau, and when the first missionaries came up from the south 150 years later, they did not find a single indigenous Christian. Like the Latin kingdom of the Crusaders, the Portuguese rule in Rhodesia bequeathed nothing to posterity save the ruins of its fortresses and churches. The motives behind the Portuguese bid for Central Africa in the sixteenth century were similar to those of the British bid in the nineteenth century religion, adventure, trade, above all gold. At one stage they even contemplated a colony of settlement and assembled a suitable collection of colonists, but in the end diverted them to Goa, thus narrowly failing to create a precedent for Rhodes's Pioneer Column. It is unlikely that such a project would have succeeded. The gap between Portuguese military technology and that of the Karanga Chiefdoms was large, but not as large as the gulf between nineteenth-century Britain and the kingdom of Lobengula. The Portuguese could win battles - though not always. It was another thing to establish their rule. Communications with

10

THE LAND AND THE EARLY CONQUERORS 5OOO BC-AD 17OO

the metropolitan power were infinitely slower and more precarious. Portugal was herself a declining power for much of the period of her African venture, and in 1580 fell under the rule of Spain for the next sixty years. Above all there was the problem of disease - especially malaria. Even in Rhodes’s day its cause was still unknown, but its cure, quinine, had been discovered. The Portuguese had no such remedy nor any knowledge of the sanitary precautions which were taken for granted three centuries later. Like the British, the Portuguese occupation was a by-product of a wider imperial policy; in the case of Britain the struggle with the Afrikaners for the domination of Southern Africa; in the case of Portugal the struggle to share in and ultimately control the trade of the Indian Ocean and to oust the Muslims who had held a monopoly since the triumph of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape and sailed as far as the Fish River, proving that Africa did not, as some feared, extend indefinitely southward. In 1497 Vasco da Gama set out on one of the most famous expedi­ tions in the history of oceanic exploration. He sailed round Africa putting in at places which are now called Natal (so named because he landed on Christmas Day), Lourenzo Marques, Quelimane, and the island of Mozambique. Thence he went to Mombasa, one of the most flourishing Muslim ports, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. He returned in triumph to Lisbon in September 1499, having been away for twenty-six months. The wider implications of this extraordinary feat do not concern us. It is sufficient to say that the Portuguese interest in the east coast of Southern Africa began then. In 1505 the Portuguese sent out a much larger fleet under Francisco d’Almeida with the object of establishing themselves beyond dispute in the Indian Ocean. Rumours of the Monomatapa’s gold were already rife, and d’Almeida was instructed to set up en route a station on the African coast. This he did at Sofala, a few miles south of the modem Beira. The object was to intercept, or participate in, the trade in gold carried on between the Monomatapa and the Arabs of the coast. But the Muslims were powerful at court and they had little difficulty in diverting their commerce to ports further north. Lisbon therefore decided to send an emissary to the Monomatapa in person, and this dangerous office fell to a ‘degregado’ or condemned criminal called Antonio Fernandes, who was thus given an opportunity of redeeming himself. Fernandes accomplished his mission some time between 1509 and 1512. The dates are obscure and it is not easy to deduce from the terse notes of his report exactly what route he took. But he evidently met the Monomatapa and at least set foot in the kingdom of the Changamire. He can certainly claim the distinction of being the first white man to penetrate into what is now Southern Rhodesia. Viewed in one aspect, the history of the Portuguese venture is a tale of brutality, bigotry and rapacity, viewed in another, one of heroism, faith and devotion. At first they were content with a few posts on or near the coast, while their traders endeavoured to establish themselves at the Karanga court. Goncala da Silveira, a Portuguese Jesuit of aristocratic descent, in 1560 actually converted

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Nogomo, the young Monomatapa, to the Christian faith. Muslim influences, however, soon induced him to revert to paganism and cause da Silveira to be strangled. A series of natural disasters - locusts, floods, disease, famine - ensued, and convinced him he had made an unfortunate mistake. His Muslim counsellors were in their turn put to death, and he sent a message of contrition to the Portuguese. The new King of Portugal, Sebastian, who was half-mad, would not accept this olive branch and insisted on sending in 1569 an expedition to avenge the martyr’s death. It was led by Francisco Barreto, an experienced general. His sensible plan was to go overland from Sofala to the Mashonaland plateau. This was a reasonably healthy route, but he was persuaded by the expedition’s spiritual adviser, Father Monclaro, who had the ear of King Sebastian, to travel up the malarial Zambesi. Disease resulted in a heavy toll of deaths including in the end that of Barreto himself, though by then he had sufficiently alarmed the Monomatapa to extract a treaty ceding the Zambesi valley from Tete to the sea - a concession which was all the easier for the Bantu monarch to make since the area was not actually his to concede. The Portuguese authorities evidently believed that the Monomatapa was more like an Aztec Emperor than a Bantu Paramount Chief. His wealth was greatly exaggerated. Fernandes Homer, who succeeded Barreto and marched from Sofala to Manica by the healthier upland route in a second bid for gold, soon discovered that Ophir was a fable. He established posts in Manicaland, and a certain amount of gold began to trickle through, but never in large quantities. The rest of the story of the Portuguese in Zambesia need not detain us. Nogomo died in 1596. His successor but one, Kaparavidze, in 1629 tried to eject the European colonists, but was defeated temporarily, and a puppet Monomatapa was installed in his place. Two years later, however, he led an uprising which wiped out the entire Portuguese garrison and all the settlers in Mashonaland and Manicaland. But the Portuguese, displaying that extraordinary tenacity which right up to the revolution of 1974 characterized their attitude to their colonial possessions, refused to give in. They sent a punitive expedition which on July 24, 1632 annihilated Kaparavidze’s forces and installed the previous puppet for another twenty years. After the middle of the century Portuguese power began to wane. For a time they sought to preserve it by a policy of divide and rule, supporting the Monomatapa against the Changamire. Portuguese troops may even have reached the Great Zimbabwe and temporarily ejected the monarch from his capital. But in 1693 Dombo, the reigning Changamire, joined the Monomatapa, wiped out the Portuguese forces, massacred the settlers at the station of Dambarare, and flayed alive two friars in order to discourage missionary zeal. This was the end of the Portuguese presence in what is now Rhodesia. Their stations, with the exception of one or two in Manicaland, were abandoned. A series of defeats by the Arabs, culminating in the fall of Mombasa in 1698, had by the end of the century greatly weakened their position in the Indian Ocean.

12

THE LAND AND THE EARLY CONQUERORS 5000 BC~AD 17OO

At home the exhausting effects of the war with Spain continued for many years. Lisbon decided to throw such resources as it still possessed into opening up Brazil, which was less inaccessible and had a healthier climate than south east Africa. The Portuguese still clung to their coastal settlements and a few feverridden outposts on the Zambesi, such as Quelimane, Sena and Tete, which is one of the hottest and most disagreeable places in Africa. But by 1700 no white man was living on the Rhodesian plateau.

CHAPTER 2

The Ndebele Kingdom 1700-1886

The Monomatapa did not gain from his temporary alliance with his hereditary foe. 'The Rozwi state was an expanding power, and the Changamire’s troops soon over-ran the older kingdom. By 1720 the Monomatapa had moved his capital to the Tete district to be under Portuguese protection. There the dynasty lingered on as shadowy Portuguese puppets until 1917 when their last monarch, Chocko, revolted against the Mozambique government and was deposed. They had long ceased to have any relevance to Rhodesian history. We know very little about events during the hundred and forty years which followed the defeat of the Portuguese. Most of what is now Rhodesia together with parts of what is now Mozambique came under the sway of the Rozwi Mambo (the title of Changamire seems to have fallen into disuse). The Rozwi clan was supposed to have magical powers and the Mambo himself, ruling from the Great Zimbabwe, the place where the voice of Mwari was believed to be heard, was a cross between King and High Priest. There was a certain amount of barter trade with Arab merchants, but in general this Bantu monarchy was as much cut off from the rest of the world as the kingdom of the Monomatapa had been before the coming of the Portuguese. All recollection of the techniques brought by the white man appears to have faded. The wheel, the draught animal, written language were none of them to be found by the next wave of European conquerors. Before their arrival, however, the Rozwi regime had been completely destroyed. At the beginning of the nineteenth century an extraordinary convulsion occurred among the Nguni people in what is now the northern part of Natal. It was initiated by Dingiswayo, Chief of a Nguni tribe called the Mthethwa, who was evidently a great organizer and built up a formidable army; with this base he set out on a course of territorial expansion. No one knows quite what the forces were behind this movement; whether it was a combination of population

14

THE NDEBELE KINGDOM I7OO-1886

growth and soil exhaustion, or desire to control the trade in gold and ivory with the Portuguese at Delagoa Bay or an indirect consequence of the arrival of white settlers in the south and west. Whatever the cause, the results were cataclysmic. The key figure was not Dingiswayo but Shaka, the illegitimate son of Senzanogakona, the chief of the Zulus who were then a relatively unimportant appanage of Dingiswayo’s confederacy. Aided by Dingiswayo, Shaka after his father’s death arranged the murder of his brother and succeeded to the chieftain­ ship in 1818. He was a military genius and created what has often been des­ cribed as a 'Black Sparta’. He formed a standing army quartered in barracks and forbidden marriage till forty. He invented the technique of the short stabbing assegai used at close quarters with the protection of a huge shield, and he gave his troops mobility by insisting on bare feet instead of sandals. After the death of Dingiswayo, Shaka became ruler of die Mthethwa as well and embarked on a series of conquests which made him master of most of northern Natal. He was a bloodthirsty tyrant whose reign was one of terror and he took a sadistic pleasure in slaughter for its own sake. Eventually in 1828 he came to a welldeserved end, being murdered by another of his brothers, Dingane, himself destined to give his name to ‘Dingaan’s Day’ - the annual celebration by the Afrikaners of his crushing defeat at Blood River on June 16, 1837 in revenge for the murder of Piet Retief and his followers. Long before Shaka’s death his course of massacre and pillage had set the whole of the Bantu peoples of the area on the move. This process known as the mfecane (the crushing) or difaqane (forced migration) caused untold deaths and reshaped in the course of a few years the whole tribal pattern of Southern Africa. By the end of it the high veld from the Orange River to the Limpopo was a devastated and depopulated area, and when the Great Trek began in 1835 the Boers found only whitening bones and burned-out kraals. The move­ ments of tribes which resulted from the mfecane and the Great Trek are immensely complicated to follow - rather like movements of fleets and squadrons in a huge naval battle. Of the many currents set in motion by the turbulent whirlpool of the difaqane^ two directly affected Southern Rhodesia. In each case, as with many other such movements, a relatively small force of Zulu ‘Kumalo’ or kindred warriors set out for the north or west to escape from Shaka’s vengeance. Like black snow­ balls, as they moved down they grew in size, encountering less martial tribes, massacring their men, forcibly enlisting their boys, carrying away their women and cattle. The first of these ferocious hordes was led by a sub-chief of the Ndandwe, a tribe which Shaka had defeated. About 1821 - no dates in this story are certain - Zwangendaba, as he was called, fled northwards. His followers confusingly called themselves Ngoni although the name is normally used as a generic term for the tribes living in the east of South Africa. Some ten years later he crossed the Limpopo and descended upon the unfortunate Rozwi. Zimbabwe was sacked. The last Rozwi Mambo according to one tradition was

15

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

flayed alive, according to another threw himself to his death from the belea­ guered citadel. Zwangendaba did not stay, but continued northwards across the Zambesi in 1835, eventually establishing the Ngoni kingdom on the west of Lake Malawi. In 1822 one of Shaka’s ablest generals, Mzilikazi, was rash enough to hold on to some captured cattle. This was regarded as a heinous crime since Shaka’s power and wealth depended largely on his successful claim to be sole owner of the enormous herds acquired in his wars of conquest. When he heard that Shaka was accusing him, Mzilikazi fled west and then north with two or three hundred men into the high veld across the Vaal River. The familiar process soon began. Before long he had an army of 5,000 whose tactics he modelled on those of Shaka, and his kingdom with a capital near modem Pretoria had become by 1825 the dominant power in what is how the eastern Transvaal. His people were called the Ndebele (or Matabele), meaning ‘people of long shields’. Seven years later he moved further west to the Marico valley in order to be out of range of continued Zulu reprisals. He was soon to meet a far more for­ midable foe. The Dutch had been established at the Cape ever since the arrival of Van Riebeeck at Table Bay in 1652. He was a ship’s surgeon, the first of many medical men to play a role in southern Africa - Livingstone, Jameson, Rutherfoord Harris, Godfrey Huggins, Hastings Banda. The original settlement was intended to provide fresh vegetables and water for ships on the way to and from the East Indies. From a very early stage it was considered necessary for this purpose to have a permanent farming community there. The word Boer strictly means farmer, though it came to be applied after the Great Trek to all Republican Afrikaners. The frontier of this colony of settlement gradually advanced, despite the intention and wishes of the Dutch East India Company. By the end of the eighteenth century the eastern frontier had reached the Great Fish River and the colonists had penetrated 300 miles north. The white population was 22,000. Non-Whites, mainly Hottentots - or Khoikhoi, as they should strictly be called - outnumbered Whites by 2 to 1, some 25,000 being slaves. In 1795, as a move in the Napoleonic wars, Britain seized the Cape, fearing that the pro-French ‘Batavian Republic’, as Holland had now become, would hand it over to their enemy. By the Treaty of Amiens it was restored to the Dutch in 1803. The resumption of war resulted in a renewed British occupation three years later, and this was confirmed at the Congress of Vienna. The Cape was to be a part of the British Empire for the next century and a half, and there began a conflict between Briton and Afrikaner which only ended in 1961 with the final departure of the Union from the Commonwealth. Rhodesia was in one sense destined to originate as a sub-colony of Cape Colony. Why were the British in the Cape at all? What made successive govern­ ments of different political complexion not only hang on to but expand this most refractory, most difficult, least predictable and least rewarding of all their

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THE NDEBELE KINGDOM I7OO-1886

overseas possessions? No doubt there were many reasons for individual Britons to go out there - religion, adventure, gain, escapism and others. No doubt ministers and the officials who advised them were conscious of these motives. But the decisions of the government were not primarily affected by such considerations. The Cape was important to Whitehall because of the route to India. That was why it was acquired in the first place. That was why official opinion for over a century regarded it as one of the keys to British imperial supremacy. To quote one of the best recent books on imperial history, ‘To all Victorian statesmen India and the British Isles were the twin centres of their wealth and strength in the world as a whole*.1 In 1881 the Carnarvon Commission declared that the Cape was ‘indispensable to your Majesty’s Navy* and ‘the integrity of this route must be maintained at all hazards and irrespective of cost*. The opening of the Suez Canal a dozen years earlier had made no difference at all to this assessment. It was taken for granted that in the event of war our most likely enemy, France, would be able to use her fleet to make the Canal useless. If Cape Town could have been treated as a sort of Gibraltar the situation would have been different, but it could not. Official opinion accepted as axio­ matic the proposition that paramountcy throughout Southern Africa was an in­ dispensable corollary of paramountcy at the Cape. ‘It is an entire delusion*, wrote Lord Kimberley, ‘to imagine that we could hold Cape Town abandoning the rest. If we allow our supremacy in South Africa to be taken from us, we shall be ousted before long from that country altogether.’ The problem, therefore, became the problem of an ever receding frontier. ‘South Africa’, as Sir Charles Dilke wrote, ‘is a Dutch colony which we have conquered in the Stadholder’s name from his soldiers, then conquered a second time, and lastly bought; all three against the will of the Dutch population.’ The Dutch pastoralists on the frontier never accepted this situation. They detested imperial rule. It provided a further reason for their longing for lebensraum. The Boer republics, created as a result of the Great Trek to the north of the Orange River, could neither be curbed nor assimilated. Yet their existence seemed a perpetual menace to British paramountcy. Where would it all end? There was force in the argument of the London Times in February 1853 (quoted by Derek Schreuder in his able study, Gladstone and Kruger)'.

Once embarked on the fatal policy of establishing a frontier in South Africa and defending the frontier by force there seems to be neither rest nor peace for us till we follow our flying enemies and plant the British standard on the walls of Timbucktoo. The Afrikaners by the end of the eighteenth century constituted a nation

1 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians^ 1961.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

of their own and were ceasing to have links of any real significance with Holland whence they had originally stemmed, but whither they had long ceased to wish to return. One author has seen in them the last and most formidable of the nomadic tribes which swept across the southern veld in those endless migrations which constitute so much of African history; a white tribe possessing the weapons of another technological world and endowed with a faith in their own mission and purpose equal to those of any rival. Whatever the virtues of this comparison may be, it at least emphasizes a point: the Afrikaners are a unique phenomenon, and there is nothing quite parallel to them in modern history. Conquering races have in the past usually become assimilated in the course of time - though in varying degrees - with the conquered. Thus the Normans in England, the Spaniards and Portuguese in South America, the succession of northern invaders in India. The Afrikaners have by contrast placed a rigid barrier against what is sometimes termed ‘miscegenation’. Reinforced by their interpretation of the Old Testament, this ‘people of the book’ treated the Africans from the start as hewers of wood and drawers of water. They were not necessarily cruel. In a curious way there was a sort of love/hate relationship between the races. In certain respects the Afrikaner understood better than other Europeans what made up the African mentality. He was, after all, in one sense an African. But he was at best paternalist; there could never be any question of equality or of political rights. British governments, in contrast, though far from liberal by modem stan­ dards, were at least influenced by some ideas which post-dated seventeenth­ century Dutch Calvinism. Likewise the first wave of English settlers who arrived in 1820. Moreover, from the beginning the latter tended to be artisans and traders, to be urban rather than rural - and town dwellers are seldom as rigid in their views as those brought up on the land. Their attitude towards non-Whites was never as repressive as that of the Dutch, and they brought some of the notions of the Enlightenment with them. The arrival of British missionaries was another element in the new situation. But the main effective pressure for reform stemmed from the British Govern­ ment which in 1825 imposed an advisory council and in 1832 executive and legislative councils on the hitherto autocratic governor. In 1828 the pass laws and other restrictions on the Khoikhoi were removed. In 1834 slavery was abolished throughout the British dominions. This came as the last straw for many Afrikaner farmers, especially as the compensation turned out to be con­ siderably less than they had been led to expect. In 1835 the Great Trek began and during the ten years course of this remarkable exodus 14,000 or something like one-sixth of the white population of Cape Colony left for the interior. The women and children travelled in those ships of the veld, slow-moving wagons drawn by oxen. The men rode on horseback. They were crack shots. Provided that they were not taken by surprise they had a fire power and mobility which made them certain victors against apparently overwhelming numbers of Africans,

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even when these employed the hitherto invincible tactics invented by Shaka. For defensive purposes th^Boer wagons drawn up in a circle or laager protect­ ing families and stores were an impregnable bulwark from which to shoot down the charging black warriors. Mzilikazi clashed with the Voortrekkers in 1836. It soon became clear that he had met his match. Early in 1837» after a number of skirmishes, his main force was attacked and heavily defeated by Hendrick Potgieter, one of the ablest Voortrekker commandants. The Ndebele monarch himself survived along with some ten thousand followers, but he knew that this could not last, and he decided to set out on yet another stage in his amazing Anabasis. He crossed the Limpopo and, after various vicissitudes which included an abortive attempt to settle north of the Zambesi and the reduction of the last strongholds of the Rozwi in what is now Wankie, he established in about 1840 a mobile capital which he called Matlokotloke in the Bulawayo-Inyati area. His kingdom and dynasty were to be safe for the next half century. The district within a radius of about fifty miles of modern Bulawayo was fully settled by the Ndebele, but their raiding parties dominated a far larger territory than that. The tribes known as the Makalanga in the south and west of Rhodesia came largely under their control, though oddly enough the con­ querors seem to have been influenced in no small degree by the religious beliefs of the conquered. These were similar to those of the Rozwi, and the priests of Mwari were allowed to continue their ministrations. The tribes inhabiting the nearer parts of the east and north east plateau, collectively called the Mashona, were likewise subject to continuous raids. But it is important not to exaggerate the extent of these depredations. White settlers in the early 1890s had a double reason for pitching it high. The Chartered Company’s claims in Mashonaland were believed to depend on concessions from Lobengula, Mzilikazi’s successor. It was to the Company’s interest to accept Lobengula’s own version of his sovereignty, which according to him extended at least as far as the Sabi and Hunyani rivers, if not beyond. In the second place a part of the moral ex post facto justification of the destruction of the Ndebele kingdom in 1893 came to be the argument that it saved the Mashona and Makalanga from impending extermination by the assegais of Lobengula’s impis. This made the ‘ingratitude’ of the Shona rising three years later all the more outrageous, and seemed to excuse the severity of its repression. There can be no question that the life of the Shona-speaking tribes after the mfecane was in every way worse than it had been under the relatively placid and prosperous rule of the Rozwi Mambos. But this was not solely due to the raids of the Ndebele, which never reached beyond the Sabi-Hunyani line and seldom as far. In the area between these rivers and the modern frontier with Mozambique there dwelt Shona chiefs who had scarcely heard of the Ndebele and recognized no suzerain whatever. They had their own troubles as the century wore on with the Portuguese and other enemies, but they were not affected

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

at all by Mzilikazi or Lobengula. Nor is it right to believe that even those within the Ndebele raiding area were the victims of totally arbitrary slaughter for the sake of slaughter. What prevailed was a tributary system, harsh, cruel and no doubt bitterly resented, not unlike an American mafia ‘protection’ racket. If tribute in terms of cattle, etc. was not paid, punitive action of a ruthless nature ensued. But this is not quite the same thing as the lurid picture of perpetual massacre drawn by the early European historians. After the rule of the Monomatapa and the Changamire, the Ndebele monarchy can be regarded as the third attempt to bring modern Rhodesia under a unified authority. It covered a much smaller area than its predecessor. Yet its very compactness made it a more formidable power. Unlike its predecessors it was a rigidly centralized military monarchy, not a loose confederation ruled by a priestly king with limited powers. Nor was it much concerned with trade. It was designed for war and the herding of cattle. At the top of the social and military hierarchy was the King, whose authority was absolute. He owned all the people, the land, the cattle and the ivory. There were only two Ndebele rulers in the history of the kingdom, both of them highly capable administrators, men of formidable ability by any standards. Beneath the King were the original Zulus or the descendants of Zulus, who had set out in 1822 to escape from Shaka. They were known as the Abezansi. Next came the Abenhla, those conscripted from the Swazi and Sotho peoples in the course of the long journey. Finally, there were the Amaholi^ Shona­ speaking peoples willingly recruited into the system after Mzilikazi’s arrival in Rhodesia. These castes were not completely rigid and, after the settlement in Matabeleland, the Abenhla rose in status and were on occasion given quite responsible posts. Both castes regarded the Amaholi as far inferior. The key commanders, the indunas, were almost always Abezansi. What is more, they were royal appointees who owed nothing to any hereditary right. The Ndebele territory was divided into four provinces, each under a senior induna. These in turn were subdivided into regimental areas, some forty altogether. There was rigorous military training, and the army totalled 15,000 to 20,000 men. Marriage was not permitted to members of a regiment until it had proved its valour in battle. Such a system presupposed continuous warfare and it was this need which the regular raids on the neighbouring tribes supplied. We have no reliable descriptions of Mzilikazi’s rule in Matabeleland before 1854. In that year the celebrated Methodist missionary Robert Moffat, Living­ stone’s father-in-law, paid a lengthy visit to the capital. It was not their first meeting. In 1829 the curiosity of Mzilikazi, still in the Transvaal, had been aroused by reports of Moffat’s charismatic activities at Kuruman, his famous mission station on the Bechuanaland frontier of Cape Colony. He sent emissaries. They were treated with hospitable courtesy. Moffat personally escorted them back. Mzilikazi was immensely impressed by the personality of this striking figure whose friendship seems to have filled some curious psychological need. They met again in 1835. Soon afterwards the Ndebele were driven across

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the Limpopo by Potgieter. Nearly twenty years passed before the incongruous couple saw each other again. In 1852, by the Sand River Convention, Britain reluctantly recognized the independence of the South African Republic, as the Voortrekkers of the Trans­ vaal called themselves - a fateful decision in the light of hindsight. Two years later the Orange River Sovereignty was accorded the same status. The history of South Africa thus moved on a course which, though not indeflectible, became far more difficult to change, and in the end, despite many a twist and turn, never was changed. The effects on Zambesia were to be long delayed, but profound. The first result of Transvaal independence was a detente with the Ndebele kingdom. Mzilikazi signed a treaty in 1853 with the Boers; he agreed to stop traffic in arms and to give protection to travellers, foreign traders, and hunters from the Transvaal so long as they adhered to the recognized and well-guarded route via the Mangwe Pass. It was a turning point in Ndebele history. From 1840 to 1853 the King had pursued a policy of diplomatic isolation. This now ended, less by consent than from prudent recognition of an ultimately irresistible military threat. The white man with gun and Bible had arrived. Nevertheless, for various reasons in which, as with all treaties, expediency played a larger part than morality, the Transvaalers stuck to their bargain. It was not they who were to destroy the Ndebele - which is not to say that they would have hesitated to do so if the political situation had turned out differently. In 1854 Robert Moffat, who was an explorer as well as a missionary, made a remarkable journey by compass across the uninhabited country between Shoshong, in what is now Botswana, and Mzilikazi’s capital. The King was delighted to see him, but he made it clear that there would be no encourage­ ment for him to convert the Ndebele. From his own view Mzilikazi was quite right. He must have seen that the whole social and political order on which his own power depended would be destroyed by the Christian faith. The religion of the Prince of Peace ill-accorded with a system based on perpetual war; the Ndebele way of life involved the consistent breach of most of the ten command­ ments, not merely as a matter of backsliding but of principle. Moffat had to content himself with dispatching supplies to Livingstone, then engaged in one of the greatest of all his expeditions, which resulted in his becoming the first Briton to see the Victoria Falls and to cross Africa from coast to coast. Three years later Moffat returned to Matabeleland and persuaded Mzilikazi to allow him to set up a mission station at Inyati. There was strong opposition from some of the King’s advisers, who saw the missionaries not only as a threat to their social order, but as the advance fifth column of an occupying power. But the King recognized the advantages of the presence of white men. They could act as interpreters, they knew how to mend wagons and weapons and they could perform other technical skills, for a missionary had to be a handy­ man in those days if he was to manage at all. Most important asset of all they had medical knowledge, even if they were not all qualified doctors.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Mzilikazi had personal reasons to value this. ‘He is much more aged than I expected to find him/ wrote Moffat in 1854, ‘and on examination I found his disease to be the dropsy.’ A diet of huge quantities of beef washed down by pot after pot of ‘Kaffir beer’ had damaged the King’s health. Not only did he display many of the symptoms of the chronic alcoholic, but he suffered acutely, as his son Lobengula was to suffer too, frpm ‘the statesman’s malady’ - the gout. He and Lobengula were thus interestingly paired with their respective contemporaries in England, the 14th Earl of Derby and Joseph Chamberlain, who, though from different causes, were martyrs to the same complaint. Moffat could ease Mzilikazi’s pain even as Dr Jameson was to alleviate the distress of Lobengula. Medicine, politics and religion are closely entwined in the history of Southern Africa. The mission at Inyati was an almost unredeemed failure. It has been so deeply revered in Rhodesian mythology as the first white Christian settlement in the country that its lack of success tends to be forgotten. Both Mzilikazi and Lobengula may have been moderate by the standards of Zulu Kings - though it is well to remember what those standards were - but they were autocrats whose single word could be death. None of their subjects who valued his life was likely to go over to Christianity in the knowledge of royal dis­ approval. For a whole generation hardly a single convert was made. Nor did the missionaries have the consolation of moral solidarity and personal friendship. Robert Moffat departed in i860. He left a party consisting of his son John, a tough extrovert Welshman called Morgan Thomas and the Rev. William Sykes, a pessimistic figure who suffered from indifferent health and the early loss of his wife. Life at Inyati was harsh, the climate exhausting. The supplies upon which even the most frugal white man depended were scarce and very expensive. The mere process of keeping alive left little time to sow the seeds of the gospel. In any case the soil on which it had to be scattered was even more barren than the dry veld where the missionaries tried to grow their crops. The missionaries were appalled at the mores of the Ndebele. Robert Moffat described them on one occasion as ‘an army of whoremongers ... a nation of murderers whose hand, is against every man’.2 On another he wrote that they worshipped ‘the god of war, rapine, beef-eating, beer-drinking and wickedness’. The Mashona, he continued in the same letter ‘are a more civilised and industrious tribe than these leonine mortals among whom I sojourn and are a very superior race’.3 This latter opinion would have been shared by few other white men. It is not surprising that life on the isolated mission station was marked by explosive quarrels and bitter resentments, often about matters of the utmost triviality. The tragi-comical story is far too long to recount here. By July 1865 the missionaries living in adjacent huts were communicating with each other 2 Quoted in Oliver Ransford, The Rulers of Rhodesia, 1968, 102. 3 Rhodesian National Archives MO5/1/1, to Mary Moffat, August 1854.

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THE NDEBELE KINGDOM I7OO-1886

by letter only, copies being duly sent on a journey of many months and several thousands of miles to the metropolitan headquarters of the London Missionary Society. ‘The Directors must have sometimes wondered’, Dr Ransford writes, ‘whether their brethren at Inyati were living in reality or in a confused dream world brought on by the African climate.’4 John Moffat decided that he could stand it no longer. In 1865 he left for the station at Kuruman. Fourteen years later he resigned from the LMS to carve out a new career for himself as a native commissioner in the Transvaal and Bechuanaland. But he was destined to see Matabeleland again. In the late eighties his role in negotiations with Lobengula was to be crucial. Meanwhile Sykes and Thomas were left to fight it out at Inyati. At first the battle went in favour of Thomas, partly because his letters to the LMS were at least legible. But he fatally blotted his copy book during the interregnum after Mzilikazi died. Not only did he establish himself as a sort of prime minister to the regent, who was in temporary charge till a successor could be found5 - an action which contravened all the Society’s rules against interference in politics, though Thomas justified it on the ground of preventing a bloodthirsty war of succession. He also took some part in the highly unchristian rites with which Lobengula was installed as the new Chief. In July 1870 he was dismissed by the Directors. A welter of recriminatory letters and appeals for justice followed. Thomas wrote a best-seller called Eleven Years in Central South Africa. He set up a station of his own at Shiloh twenty miles from Inyati. Sykes, victorious but as gloomy as ever, remained at Inyati. When he died there in 1887 there was not a single Christian convert in Matabeleland. Missionary activity was not the only manifestation of white interest. The quarter of a century after the Transvaalers’ treaty with Mzilikazi saw the heyday of the mounted white hunter. There was a large though fluctuating demand for ivory in Britain and Europe. It was the raw material for many a hideous piece of ornamental Victoriana, and for piano keys, billiard balls (until composition substitutes became more popular) and cutlery handles. The huge herds of elephants which from time immemorial had roamed the central plateau were almost exterminated. Black hunters, with guns obtained by barter despite the treaty, played their part in this disastrous slaughter. By the late seventies the surviving herds had made their way to remote tsetse fly areas where men on horseback could not pursue them. Although elephant shooting as a carefully con­ trolled ‘sport’ continues to this day, the great period of the ivory trade was over. Frederick Selous, said to be the original of Rider Haggard’s Allen Quartermaine in King Solomon's Mines and destined later to guide the Pioneer Column to Salisbury, saw the end of it. He arrived at Tati in August 1877 to seek his fortune, but in October we find him writing to his father from Daka, south 4 Op. cit., 158. 5 See below p. 25.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

of the Zambesi, ‘on this side of the river elephant hunting is virtually at an end, all the elephants being either killed or driven away’. Selous did indeed manage to make a living, though not a fortune, but as a guide to prospectors and sportsmen and a collector of specimens, not as a commercial hunter. In 1868 Mzilikazi died. He was eighty, and given his mode of life it was remarkable that he survived as long as he did. One cannot withhold admiration for the military and political skill which had enabled a man who in European eyes was a mere savage to bring his people safely to their destination after such extraordinary vicissitudes and so long a journey. His death created a complicated problem of succession. Under Ndebele law the heir was the son of the ‘senior* queen, i.e. the queen whose father was a higher ranking chief than any of the others whose daughters Mzilikazi had married. The late King was a great believer in dynastic alliances and had a large number of wives. The ‘senior’, however, was the daughter of a chief, Uxwiti, who back in the days when they were still in Natal had murdered Mzilikazi’s father. This gave the King an irrational dislike of her son, Kulumana; the story is that he had him secretly put to death. After a prolonged interregnum under an elderly regent by the name of Nombate, Lobengula, a son by a lesser queen, was persuaded to accept the Chieftainship. He was installed in March 1870. Lobengula had himself, according to tradition, been at one time the object of his father’s wrath, but had been smuggled away and brought up by priests in the Matopos. He was an intelligent man with an acute political sense. His career in many ways resembles that of certain Dark Age European monarchs educated under the auspices of the Church, and ruling a turbulent, ferocious, military aristocracy. His position was at first far from secure, for the Uxwiti family were not reconciled to the succession and it had been by no means established that Kulumana really was dead. In June one of the best fighting regiments rebelled in favour of a Ndebele Perkin Warbeck claiming to be Kulumana. Lobengula crushed them with the utmost ruthlessness, slaughtering every man. His claim to the Chieftainship was never seriously threatened again. Nevertheless Mzilikazi’s death marked another turning point in the fortunes of the Ndebele state and the role of the King. Not only did it coincide with the first European discoveries of gold in Southern Rhodesia and hence with the arrival of increasing numbers of white prospectors, traders and adventurers, but the interregnum caused a permanent shift in the balance of power within the monarchy. Lobengula does not seem to have succeeded to the same absolute authority that Mzilikazi possessed. He could not disregard - at least to begin with - the advice of the councillors who had conferred the Chieftainship upon him. Nor did he inherit one of his father’s vital assets, the great wealth derived from possession of all the cattle in the realm. By some process not wholly clear, the leading mdunas acquired a share of the royal herds and the King was rela­ tively hard up in the early years of his reign. Moreover, the iron military discipline which had, during their wanderings, been essential to the very survival of the Ndebele began to slacken in a period of relative security. The destruction of

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THE NDEBELE KINGDOM

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one of the most formidable fighting regiments in the army was another source of weakness. Personally Lobengula, a man of immense size and imposing demea­ nour, seemed a much more formidable figure than his father, who was not only small, but soft-voiced almost to the point of effeminacy. In reality he nevjer had quite the same degree of power. The first discovery of gold in Southern Rhodesia since the days of the Portuguese occurred in 1867. There is a dispute as to whether Karl Mauch was the actual discoverer, or Henry Hartley, a celebrated hunter who was with him. The place was near the Umfuli River, seventy miles south west of modern Salisbury. Mauch gave the discovery some picturesque publicity in the Transvaal Argus and also referred to another gold-bearing area found by Hartley at Tati which lies in what is now Botswana. Lobengula laid claim to the area but his claim was disputed by the Bamangwato, an important Bechuana tribe. There was a minor gold rush to this region, and in 1870 Lobengula granted what came to be known as the Tati concession to a body called the London and Limpopo Mining Company, represented on the spot by Sir John Swinburne, a relation of the poet. The Concession, like all such documents, gave away no land. It simply conferred the right to mine precious metal. In 1871 Lobengula granted a similar concession in the north to the South African Goldfields Exploration Company which employed Thomas Baines, the painter and explorer, as its agent. In the event little came of either of these ventures. Money was hard to raise. There was far less gold than expected. Baines, who had hoped to make his fortune, died in 1875 leaving something more valuable to posterity than wealth - the most famous paintings ever made of the contemporary Southern African scene. Mauch’s high-flown nonsense about the land of Ophir did indeed implant in romantic minds an image which was to have a cogent effect two decades later, but for the moment the eyes of every prospector and speculator turned to the new diamond fields of Griqualand West where in 1869 the celebrated stone, the ‘Star of Africa’ had been found. The discovery of diamonds at what became Kimberley had important political implications for the whole future of Southern Africa. The ownership of Griqua­ land West was disputable, though not disputed as long as it was empty veld. The bankrupt Transvaal Republic laid claim to one part of it, the Orange Free State to another. The British government had long regarded a confederation of the Boer republics with Cape Province and Natal, on the Canadian model, as the only satisfactory means of achieving a strong self-governing South African dominion under the Crown capable of dealing with the African Chiefs on its own, of coping with the endless problems of the moving frontier and above all ensuring the security of Cape Town and Simonstown. The snag was money, but if the Cape acquired the wealth of the diamond fields, confederation became a fiscal possibility. If on the other hand the Boers, with their latent hostility to England, succeeded in their claim, confederation would never come off. There had, furthermore, always been shadowy plans in the Cape to open a northern route into the ‘far interior’ at some future date. Griqualand West lay across

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

that route. In October 1871, having obtained a favourable arbitration award, Sir Henry Barkly, Governor of the Cape, annexed the territory, but the price was further consolidation of Boer hostility. Britain now seemed embarked on a ‘forward’ policy, and Lobengula began to feel the effects. In 1876 a mission under Alexander Bailie, a surveyor by profession, reached his court with the object of securing labour for the diamond diggings 600 miles south. The King agreed to this, but he was probably less happy when the thirty or so white traders at Bulawayo petitioned for a per­ manent British representative to be stationed there. Sir Bartie Frere, the new Governor of the Cape, sympathized with this request: he was a firm believer in ‘forward’ and he was strongly backed by Disraeli’s Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, a keen imperialist and believer in confederation, who had been Colonial Secretary in 1867 when Canada had been united. In 1877 Carnarvon authorized the annexation of the Transvaal and in 1878 a British force entered Bechuanaland. The English were now on the southern frontiers of Lobengula’s realm. The same year, with Frere’s approval, an embassy under a Captain R. R. Patterson was sent to Bulawayo by Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Adminis­ trator of the Transvaal. The Captain, alas, lacked tact. So did Shepstone. Seven years earlier the latter in a message to Lobengula had imprudently referred to Kulumana as the rightful heir to the Chieftainship. He could have touched on no more sensitive spot. Apparently Patterson followed suit, only in more threatening terms. He then insisted, against Lobengula’s will, on making a trip to the Victoria Falls. He and his companions, who included a son of Morgan Thomas, the missionary, never returned. They were almost certainly murdered on the King’s orders. This was the classical recipe for expansion; murder of an emissary or resident followed by a punitive expedition and advance of the frontier. In 1879 war broke out between the English and the Zulus under Cetewayo, who had been given a deliberately unacceptable ultimatum to dismantle the whole military system upon which his regime depended. In the ensuing campaign, after a fearful set-back at Isandhlwana, Lord Chelmsford, the British Commander, extinguished Zulu power for ever at the battle of Ulundi. These events on the face of things boded ill for Lobengula. He was saved by two episodes which lay quite outside his knowledge, comprehension or control. In 1880 Disraeli dissolved Parliament. The election was mainly fought on the Government’s policy in India and Africa. The Liberals were victorious and Gladstone took office with a strong commitment to Treasury economy and to the reversal of an imperial policy alleged to be alike extravagant and immoral. He had been in office less than a year when South African affairs blew up into a crisis yet again. The Transvaal Boers had bitterly resented annexation. The defeat of Cetewayo removed the only consideration which made it tolerable, the need for the help of British arms against the Zulus. Early in 1881 the Boers rose in rebellion and inflicted a humiliating defeat on the British at Majuba, the precursor of their successes two decades later at the beginning of the second

26

THE NDEBELE KINGDOM I7OO-1886

South African War. The Liberals, who had never approved of the original annexation, were disinclined to persist; they restored independence to the Transvaal Republic subject to a rather shadowy British claim of ‘suzerainty*. The decision was probably inevitable in the political circumstances, but it looked too much like conceding to force what would not be conceded to justice, for anyone to feel comfortable about it, and the consequences of the first Boer War for future relations between English and Afrikaner were to be baleful. As far as Matabeleland was concerned, the effect of British military ineptitude and Gladstonian fervour was to discredit the ‘forward’ policy and to leave the Ndebele state undisturbed for the time being. No more was heard of the Patterson affair. White traders, concession hunters and missionaries displaying considerable nerve continued to cluster around Lobengula’s kraal. The King, with subtle diplomacy, continued to play off one white interest against another, and to govern his country by a skilful blend of conciliation and ferocity. The scenes of slaughter and superstition regularly enacted at the Ndebele court continued to horrify white observers. Whereas most Europeans looked on the Mashona and Makalanga with mere contempt, they regarded the Ndebele with fear of their cruelty and hatred of their arrogance. ‘Never till I saw these wretches’, wrote Sir Sidney Shippard, Administrator of Bechuanaland, in October 1888, ‘did I understand the true mercy and love of humanity contained in the injunction given to the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites.’6 The sentiment was worthy of the Voortrekkers. It made certain that when the final crunch came, the Ndebele kingdom would be crushed without misgiving or remorse. Meanwhile, the Boers, who ruled the two ramshackle republics constantly teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, jogged along much as they had ever since the Great Trek; they led the same rough, independent, pastoral, semi-nomadic lives; they had the same rigid caste attitude; their politics were no less parochial, their administration no less deplorable; and their outlook - that of fundamentalists and flat-earthers - was almost as remote from the currents of the modem world as the minds of the Blacks and Coloureds who worked for them. But they hated England, they were deadly marksmen, they knew the veld like the backs of their hands and so they had for the moment put themselves beyond the long arm of London. But ... could it last? As Kipling wrote in The Voortrekker, one of his best poems: His neighbour’s smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest. He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed. He shall desire loneliness and his desire shall bring, Hard on his heels, a thousand wheels, a People and a King. He shall come back on his own track, and by his scarce cooled camp There shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick and the stamp: 6 Rhodesia National Archives NE 1/1/9, Shippard to Sir Francis Newton, October 29, 1888.

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There he shall blaze a nation’s ways with hatchet and with brand, Till on his last-won wilderness an Empire’s outposts stand. In 1886 gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. The world of Southern Africa could never be the same again.

CHAPTER 3

Cecil Rhodes 1853-89

The effect of the discovery of gold on the Rand has to be seen in the context of British objectives in the 1880s. These had not basically changed for twenty years. Gladstone’s decision to cede the Transvaal made no difference in that respect. The aim was still confederation on the Canadian model, the problem of the Boers being regarded as similar to that of the French Canadians and amenable to a similar solution. The differences among various Colonial Secretaries were of method not purpose. That continued to be the creation of a loyal selfgoverning union which could keep the Bantu chiefs in order, reconcile British and Afrikaners, and hence provide, without too much expense, a stable hinter­ land for the naval bases on the southern coast upon which Britain’s imperial security was believed to depend. There were two possible ways of achieving the needed union of South Africa. One was peaceful persuasion based on the economic and cultural drawing-power of the Cape, by far the largest and most populous of the potential components of such a federation. This in the language of the day was 'colonialism’ or 'the colonial factor’ - the words had a meaning different from their modern usage. The idea was that a self-governing Cape Colony under the British flag would by its own volition and momentum pull the Boer republics peacefully into a union based on mutual consent. In pursuance of this purpose the Cape, after receiving ‘representative government’ in 1853, was granted ‘responsible govern­ ment’ nineteen years later. The Colonial Office hoped that it would now take the initiative. Unfortunately ‘colonialism’, whatever its success had been in Canada and would be in Australia, came up against two great snags in South Africa; first, the Boers of the republics had no intention of giving up their autonomy; and secondly the Cape Afrikaners had a great deal of sympathy with them. As Leonard Thompson puts it, ‘The Cape Colony was not fitted to play the crucial

29

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

role in which it was cast by Britain’.1 Not only was the white population very thinly spread over a vast area, but it was uneasily divided. The Afrikaners may have regarded the Boers of the Transvaal with a certain sophisticated contempt as parochial, narrow-minded country cousins, but they also felt a sense of kith— and-kin. Carnarvon’s annexation brought out these feelings to a high degree. The Afrikaner Bondy their political organization founded in 1879, though never a majority, controlled a large block of seats in the Cape parliament. No govern­ ment could afford to ignore their sentiments. Cape ‘colonialism’ backed by Rhodes was in the end to colonize Rhodesia; it never managed to absorb the Boer republics. The alternative way of achieving South African union was direct intervention from London - ‘the imperial factor’, to use the language of the day. Eventually this was what succeeded, but there were only two Colonial Secretaries who can be regarded as ‘activists’ in the sense that they took positive steps to determine events. One was Lord Carnarvon whose coup of 1877 was reversed at Majuba four years later. The other was Joseph Chamberlain who first tried ‘colonialism’ through Cecil Rhodes and then, thwarted by the fiasco of the Jameson Raid, asserted the ‘imperial factor’ through Lord Milner in no uncertain way. Eighteen years after Majuba a second Boer War revenged the first - a pyrrhic revenge perhaps in the longer perspective of history, but one that served its purpose for half a century. And as Lord Salisbury in a different context had observed, ‘fifty years ... that period is something in the lifetime of a nation’. From the British point of view ‘activism’ and the ‘imperial factor’ may have proved in the end to be the right answer. The Colonial Office could hardly have accepted them in the aftermath of Majuba. The fourteen years from then till Chamberlain became Colonial Secretary in 1895 saw eclipse of‘activism’, and the creation of Rhodesia owed nothing to it. This was in part because British governments were worried by more serious matters than South Africa. The ‘eighties’ were a critical decade in British history. Ireland, the rise of radical democracy, the Egyptian imbroglio, the Penjdeh Incident - these were the issues that perturbed. English statesmen. As for South Africa, they were content to hope against all probability that union would somehow happen and that the Boer republics would accept the reality as well as the outward form of British suzerainty. The hope, such as it was, depended on two assumptions: that Britain remained the only European power of the first magnitude in the area; and that the Cape retained its economic supremacy and political drawing-power vis-a-vis the two republics. At the beginning of the decade both these assumptions were correct. Well before the end they had ceased to prevail. Until 1880 the only other European country with an interest anywhere near was Portugal, which possessed the coast line of Mozambique and Angola and 1 Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (eds), The Oxford History of South Africa, Vol. II, 1870-1966, 1971, 249.

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CECIL RHODES 1853-89

laid shadowy historical claims to the whole hinterland. The next to enter the scene was Belgium, or rather its King Leopold, who proceeded to carve out a huge personal empire in the Congo. Neither of these for the moment mattered greatly as far as Britain was concerned. But it was a different matter when in May 1883 Germany hoisted her flag at the port of Angra Pequeña in South West Africa and a year later proclaimed a protectorate over the whole of that vast but mainly arid area. The complex reasons for Bismarck’s initiative have been brilliantly analysed by A. J. P. Taylor.2 They related to the European balance of power and stemmed from the breakdown of Anglo-French relations after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 rather than any real desire to build up a colonial empire; Germany had neither the inclination nor the naval resources to make herself into a serious rival to Britain as the paramount power in South Africa. No one, however, could be sure of this at the time and the government of the Transvaal under Paul Kruger, its tough and determined President elected in 1883, was quick to play off Germany against Britain in order to strengthen the republic’s position. The immediate threat to Cape ‘colonialism’ was the extension of the Transvaal westwards across the ‘missionary road’ to the north until the Boer frontier became contiguous with German South West Africa. The ‘missionary road’ running through the eastern edge of Bechuanaland was the traditional route to the ‘far interior’ which, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, had been long regarded as the natural hinterland for the Colony’s eventual expansion. Not surprisingly the Transvaalers regarded it as their hinterland too. British governments, ready to bend over backwards since Majuba in order to placate Cape ‘colonialism’, could not afford to let the missionary road go to a hostile power. But the attitude of the Bond was uncertain. Its leader, Hofmeyr, was inclined to allow the Transvaal to absorb the two miniature Boer republics of Stellaland and Goshen, which had half-established themselves in Bechuanaland. Faced with this hesitancy, London acted. In January 1884 the Colonial Secretary, Lord Derby, arrived at an agreement with Kruger under what came to be known as the London Convention. This superseded the Pretoria Convention of 1881. Britain abandoned her right to have a say in the Transvaal’s native policy, and there was no mention of suzerainty, but the western frontier of the Transvaal was defined, and its line was drawn well short of the missionary road. When a few months later Kruger seemed to be breaking the Convention by declaring a protectorate over part of the forbidden territory, the ‘imperial factor* at once came into play. Sir Charles Warren with 4,000 men went out as a Special Commissioner in January 1885. He annexed the southern part of Bechuanaland, which became a crown colony. Ten years later it was incorporated into the Cape. Over the northern part, the modern Botswana, he declared a British protectorate. ‘The Suez Canal to the interior’, as Cecil Rhodes called the missionary route, was secure for the moment.

2 Germany's First Bid for Colonies^ 1938.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

In fact the German initiative did not amount to much. Born of diplomatic considerations relevant to the balance of power in Europe, it faded away when those considerations changed. But any feeling on the part of the Cape Government or the Colonial Office that they might have over-reacted was speedily dissipated by an occurrence of which the consequences were more far-reaching than any other single event in the history of Southern Africa. In 1886 vast gold-bearing deposits were discovered on the Witwatersrand south of Pretoria and deep into the Transvaal - an area of too miles by 170, which seemed to possess almost in­ exhaustible supplies of ore. Nothing like them had ever been known before. Within fifteen years ‘the Rand’ was to be producing one quarter of the world’s entire output of gold. It is true that the auriferous content of the ore was lower than anywhere else and the reefs were deeper, but the necessary engineering techniques, chemical knowledge and foreign capital were available on a scale which could not have been obtained a generation earlier. The Transvaal was thus transformed almost over-night into a country of great wealth. Moreover, the site of the gold fields, unlike the diamond mines of West Griqualand, was one to which no other nation could make even a faintly plausible claim. The economic ascendancy which diamonds had given to Cape Colony was at once challenged. The prospect of South African federation under the British flag abruptly receded. The Transvaal was now a magnet rivalling the Cape. It was by no means certain which would prevail.

It is in the context of the portentous changes produced first by diamonds then gold that the founder of modern Rhodesia appears on the stage of history. Cecil John Rhodes, whom a few of the older white Rhodesians still quaintly call ‘Mr Rhodes’ (even as he was called half in hest, when scarcely out of his teens, by his rough companions at Kimberley), was born on July 5, 1853 in the vicarage of Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire. His father, the Rev. Francis William Rhodes, who was the incumbent, had been educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a man of comfortable private means. By his first wife, who died in childbirth, he had one daughter. By his second, Louisa Peacock, he had nine sons, two of whom died in infancy, and two daughters. Cecil was the third surviving son. His two elder brothers, Herbert and Frank, went respectively to Winchester and Eton after early education at a small grammar school at Bishop’s Stortford, now extinct; the present school has no connexion with it. Cecil, possibly because of poor health, stayed on at the grammar school. He was a delicate looking, fair-haired boy, rather frail and gangling in appearance, at times thoughtful and slightly dreamy, at others full of fun and gaiety. His father hoped he would go into the Church. Indeed he rather surprisingly destined all his sons for this career, but in the end none of them took Orders. Cecil hankered after the Bar, but both sides were agreed on Oxford first. At sixteen he left school to be coached by his father. At this juncture he was taken seriously ill. All his plans were changed for the time being and he was sent out to South Africa in the (English) summer of 1870.

32

CECIL RHODES 1853-89

Seldom has a personal malady had more drastic effects on the affairs of a nation - or rather of the three nations which uneasily co-existed in Southern Africa. What exactly was it? Rhodes’s biographers have always assumed ‘T.B.’ or ‘consumption’, the popular name in those days for pulmonary tuberculosis. It seemed natural that he should be ordered out to the dry sunny uplands of the veld in order to avoid the English winter. His death thirty-three years later is usually attributed to an aortic aneurysm developed in later life. Certain papers discovered a few years ago at the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum at Livingstone in Zambia suggest a different explanation. Dr Charles Shee of Bulawayo, in a fascinating piece of medical detective work,3 concludes that the illness had nothing to do with the lungs, but was the first sign of a congenital deformity known to doctors as ‘atrial septal defect’ and to laymen as ‘a hole in the heart’. What Rhodes’s doctor advised was rest, a change of air, and a sea voyage, adding that ‘the lungs were sound, but the heart though not diseased was seriously over-taxed’.4 The choice of South Africa can be explained by the fact that a fairly long sea voyage was needed and that Cecil’s brother was already out there; he would thus have someone to look after him and not be cast among strangers. At that time atrial septal defect was extremely difficult to diagnose, but the explanation certainly fits in retrospect with Rhodes’s symptoms - recurrent heart attacks, becoming more frequent as he grew older; alternate phases of extreme pallor and cyanosis (the blue appearance caused by unoxygenated blood) which eventually became permanent; falls from his horse probably caused by syncope; and his terrible end as he slowly suffocated through lack of oxygen. ‘Death from the heart ... there is nothing repulsive or lingering about it; it is a clean death, isn’t it?’ Rhodes asked Dr Jameson a few months before his final illness. The doctor, no sentimentalist, could not meet his eye as he returned an evasive answer, and Rhodes knew what lay ahead. Before modern surgical techniques were developed, sufferers from this deformity were reckoned to have a maximum life expectation of forty-nine. Rhodes was some three months short of that when he died on March 26, 1902. This posthumous diagnosis may well account for another odd feature of Rhodes’s health, his ability in spite of heart attacks to engage in strenuous activity and to perform remarkable feats of physical endurance. It is a characteristic of the malady that for long periods the unoxygenated blood is pumped into the lungs in the ordinary way. The sufferer can conduct his life normally and if he happens to be a person of great drive and energy there is nothing to stop him displaying these qualities until his disability takes over, when he falls into a phase of exhaustion and inertia. 3 J. Charles Shee, ‘The Ill-Health and Mortal Sickness of Cecil John Rhodes’, Central

African Journal of Medicine, Vol. 11, No. 4, April 1965, 88-93. 4 Ibid. 91, quoting an anonymous fragment of biography in the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

It was agreed that the young Cecil Rhodes should make his sea voyage to Durban and join his elder brother, Herbert, who was growing cotton in Natal. What he did thereafter would depend on chance and health. He arrived just when the discoveries at Kimberley had excited the whole of South Africa and drawn adventurers, sometimes of highly dubious character, from all over the world. In March 1871 Herbert made his way to the diggings. At the end of the year Cecil followed him. He must have seemed an Incongruous figure, a slim, blue-eyed boy in white flannel trousers sitting pensively on an upturned bucket, sometimes sorting diamonds, sometimes deep in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, sometimes just dreaming - and all the while seemingly oblivious of the cosmopolitan collection of prospectors, miners, thieves, crooks, swindlers and confidence men who surrounded him. Kimberley was a shanty town, one of the rowdiest places in the world. Drink and prostitutes abounded, gambling was on an heroic scale, shootings were frequent, and the general atmos­ phere, though not quite so lawless, was reminiscent of the Wild West of America. Cecil Rhodes was unperturbed by all this; he made money steadily, though at first not on a scale that could be called startling, and he remained determined to go to Oxford. Herbert Rhodes, perpetually restless, soon returned to Natal, leaving his claims to be looked after by his brother. Cecil went into partnership with an older man, Charles Rudd, who was born in 1844 and had been educated like Rhodes’s father at Harrow and Cambridge where he distinguished himself in athletics. He had come out to South Africa in 1865, also for reasons of health. The partnership proved satisfactory. In 1873 Cecil felt safe enough to leave Rudd in charge and departed to England to read for a pass degree at Oriel College, Oxford. He must have been among the oddest undergraduates that the ancient University of Oxford has ever known. Instead of paying or drawing money by cheque, he obtained cash by selling uncut diamonds, of which he kept a supply in a small box in his waistcoat pocket. On one occasion, when bored at a college lecture, he caused an accidental diversion by dropping them on the floor after sur­ reptitiously showing them to his neighbours. His academic career was much interrupted. The authorities were more tolerant than now of such interludes - or more lax. After keeping Michaelmas Term of 1873 be went back to Africa for over two years. The reason was a recurrence of heart trouble. The doctor he consulted thought he had only six months to live. He returned in 1876 and kept seven consecutive terms till June 1878, devoting the summer vacations to his interests in South Africa. He was a member of Vincent’s, and of the Bullingdon Club. He was Master of the Oxford Draghounds and he played polo. He joined the Freemasons as a member of the University’s Apollo Lodge. In May 1876 he entered as a student of the Inner Temple, but he was never called to the Bar. He kept his final Oxford term, the last needed to qualify for a degree, in the autumn of 1881. By then he was twenty-eight, a millionaire and a member of the Cape Parliament. Oxford’s influence on him was lasting and profound. He was greatly impressed

34

CECIL RHODES 1853-89

by Ruskin’s famous inaugural lecture delivered two years before he went up. It is quoted often in books on Rhodes, but it deserves to be quoted again, for it so vividly illustrates the way in which attitudes have changed in the last hundred years.

We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled with the best northern blood... Will you youths of England make your country again a royal throne of Kings, a sceptred isle ... ? This is what England must either do or perish; she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to bear fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea: and that, though they live on a distant plot of land, they are no more to consider themselves therefore disfranchised from their native land than the sailors of her fleets do because they float on distant seas.5 This belief in a racial hierarchy with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ at the top, in an imperial mission to colonize ‘fruitful waste ground’ and in the creation of a politically unified empire was a common feature of the younger generation of the 1870s. Ruskin was preaching to a receptive audience. Rhodes was by no means unusual in absorbing the sermon with enthusiasm. Where he was unusual was in his ability to translate these visions into a measure of reality. This was partly because of his wealth, for by the end of the eighties his fortune was vast. He had, with the help of Alfred Beit, a German Jewish financier of genius, obtained a near monopoly in the diamond industry at Kimberley. He was also one of the greatest ‘magnates’ of the Rand, though Diamonds (which he always spelt with a capital D) were his real expertise and he chimed that he never understood gold. His biographers reckon that in 1887, when he was only thirty-four, he had an income of ¿200,000 a year from diamonds and something between ¿300,000 and ¿400,000 from gold.6 Money did not matter to him for its own sake. He lived simply, and had no expensive tastes. Anyone who interprets his political aims in terms of his economic interests put the cart before the horse. His wealth was useful to him as a means of power and he employed it as ruthlessly as he had gained it. Power to him was primarily the means to a political end, though no doubt like all who are lucky enough to possess great power he came to enjoy it for itself. Yet his huge fortune was not enough to give him his extraordinary position. He might half in jest talk about ‘squaring’ the Mahdi, the Pope, the Kaiser. But he possessed another gift no less valuable than gold and diamonds. He could, as was said of Lloyd George, ‘charm a bird out of a bush’. This talent of Rhodes is hard to recapture today. His speeches as printed are 5 Quoted in J. G. Lockhart and C. M. Woodhouse, Rhodesy 1893, 62, 63. 6 Op. cit., 128.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

dull and verbose, his letters slangy, unpunctuated, repetitive and at times barely comprehensible. Yet he had the personality, the magnetism, the conviction and the plausibility which can in some strange way persuade the most unlikely people and recruit the most improbable allies. Some people, it is true, refused to be convinced. One would expect the little-Englanders and the opponents of Empire to be hostile, but Lugard and Harry Johnston were two great imperialists who came to distrust him deeply; Joseph Chamberlain was only half-persuaded; Milner admired him in the end, but for long was sceptical; Lord Salisbury was highly resistant. It is probably right to say that most of the English establishment felt misgivings about him even when they admired him. They sensed that he was not one of them - and they were right. Socially, however, he could hold his own. He was not a parvenu. He spoke in the accents of an upper-class Englishman. He recruited noblemen, from dukes downward, to his company boards. The doors of the Kimberley Club opened at once for him, and he did not hesitate to use this bait when trying to ‘square* a flamboyant bounder like Barney Barnato, his great rival in the diamond industry. Rhodes was much loved by a few. He was also greatly hated by many, most of whom had never met him. The business methods of the ‘great amalgamator* were very rough. ‘So many done, so few to do’ was the malicious parody of his famous last words. There would have been no lessons for him to learn from the tycoons in the modern jungle of take-over bids. Naturally he had a host of enemies. His style of life made him the target of malignant rumours. He never married. He was surrounded by an entourage of young bachelors. When excited he would laugh or shout in a high falsetto. ‘Who do you think you are talking to, squealing at me like a damned rabbit,* Arthur Lawley once cried when repelling what he thought to be unjust abuse from Rhodes.7*Was he a homosexual? Was he impotent? Or did he perhaps suffer from a then unmentionable disease which rendered marriage out of the question? The last of these allegations gained a certain plausibility when Sir Edmund Stevenson, one of the doctors present at his death, stated nearly a quarter of a century later in a book of memoirs that an aortic aneurysm was found at Rhodes*s autopsy. There is a well known connexion between this and syphilis. Dr Shee, however, points out that the contemporary post-mortem notes do not refer to any such defect.® It is hard to believe that it would not have been mentioned had it existed. As for the other rumours, plenty of people have squeaky voices without being impotent or homosexual - Bismarck, for example. Rhodes was certainly not an Oscar Wilde. His rather emotional friendship with younger men, especially with his secretary, Pickering - to whom he had left all his fortune and whose death was a great blow to him - might perhaps suggest some sort of repressed inclination in that direction, but nothing more. The matter is of no importance. Some people — perhaps more then than now - do not marry for the simple reason that they do 7 See below p. 92. ® Shee, op. cit., 92.

36

CECIL RHODES

1853-89

not want the bother. Rhodes himself said that when he was young he was too busy to look for a wife, and when he was older marriage would have been a distraction from his great objective. Why not leave it at that? His adversaries had a stronger case when they alleged that he drank too much. There is a conflict of evidence, but it does seem true that he imbibed freely - at least towards the end of his life; the reason may well have been the worry caused by his ailing heart. His favourite refreshment, like Bismarck’s, was champagne mixed with stout - a combination which to the taste of some drink-lovers, including the great Saintsbury, spoils both beverages. Whatever the reason, he aged prematurely. Lean and spare as a young man, he became thick and paunchy by forty. In his last years he looked at least a decade older than he really was. It is impossible to say with certainty whether this was caused by self-indulgence - he was also a heavy eater - or by his innate cardiac deformity, but the latter explanation seems more probable. Rhodes could be arrogant, autocratic and rude when he saw no reason to be charming. He talked endlessly himself and disliked listening to others. He could fly into a temper and use brutally scathing language. He could also be generous, kind and considerate - especially to young men of no importance, whose support did not matter to him in the least. He was intensely loyal to his friends, some of whom scarcely deserved his trust, but he never forgave an enemy nor forgot an injury. He could be very vindictive. If on the debit side he was unscrupulous in his dealings, harsh to his opponents, reckless in taking the short cut to his objective, much can be forgiven to a man conscious that his time was running out and obsessed by the goal he had set himself. Rhodes’s ideas were a strange hotchpotch of adolescent fantasy and grandiose realism. The provisions of his successive wills attest to the former, the story of what he achieved to the latter. The obvious nickname which was given to him corresponds to the truth. He always thought and acted on a colossal scale. Southern Africa in the 1880s and 1890s was perhaps the latest place in the history of the world where a single individual could operate in this way. Rhodes believed that ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’ and the British Empire were the heirs to the future. The heady atmosphere, the vast empty spaces, the unknown mysteries of the north, the reality of one new El Dorado, the prospect of another - all contributed to an almost unlimited optimism and self-confidence. If only the opportunities were seized, might there not be a British dominated belt running from the Cape to the Nile valley? This was Rhodes’s obsession, his dream, his success and his failure. In the splendid phrase of Mr Frank Clements, ‘Cecil John Rhodes was an Elizabethan - the endless rolling plains of Africa his sea’.9 Ironically in one sense, the man who has come to be regarded as the arch­ imperialist was a strong opponent of the ‘imperial factor’. Rhodes was a ‘colonialist’. This did not mean that he was anti-British, though for a time he had this

9 Rhodesia, Course to Collision, 1969, 14.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

reputation. ‘Who is Mr Rhodes?’ Salisbury asked once of Harry Johnston, and answering himself went on, ‘Rather a pro-Boer MP in South Africa, I fancy’.1011 Rhodes certainly believed in co-operation between Afrikaners and British, but he never deviated from the object of a Southern Africa united under the British flag. This was quite compatible with acute dislike for what he regarded as the hamhanded, fussy, ignorant attitude of Whitehall. He believed in the wisdom of the man-on-the-spot, which he contrasted with the allegedly doctrinaire attitude of the Colonial Office under the pressure of a host of ‘do-gooding* influences, missionaries, humanitarians, economizers, little-Englanders. He correctly saw that the cautious mandarins who advised ministers in London would never, if they could help it, take the risks involved in realizing his Cape-to-Cairo dream. The initiative would have to come from the Cape itself. From 1886 onwards the struggle for the supremacy in South Africa intensified. The Cape and Natal on the one side, the South African Republic (the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State on the other, waged a war of tariffs, railway concessions and claims to their respective hinterlands. The conflict was personified in the rivalry of Rhodes and Kruger. In this struggle Zambesia was a vital factor for two reasons: its alleged wealth in gold, and its geographical significance - gold or no gold - in the future pattern of Africa. Clearly there would be no Cape to Cairo railway, no broad red band traversing the continent from one end to the other, if the Boers moved into southern Zambesia and cut the access to the north. More significantly as far as London was concerned, the triumph of Kruger would be a fatal blow to British supremacy at the Cape and would bring the hesitant Bond down on the wrong side. In 1887 this possibility seemed all too likely to be realized. Lobengula was persuaded in July by an emissary of Kruger, one Piet Grobler, to sign a treaty of friendship with the Transvaal and to allow Grobler himself to take up residence as the South African Republic’s Consul at Bulawayo. The treaty was later denounced by Marshall Hole, the first official historian of Southern Rhodesia, as an im­ posture.11 There is no real reason to believe this,12 even though Grobler was a shady character. Clearly, however, Lobengula soon regretted signing it. Kruger’s power to make such a treaty was very doubtful under the terms of the Pretoria and London Conventions. Lobengula would not have known this, but he may well have become uneasy about Boer ambitions, and he could not have forgotten that they were the people who had driven his father out of the Transvaal into Zambesia fifty years earlier. The Grobler treaty was not at first made public, but rumours of its existence soon reached Rhodes and he was disturbed at its implications. He promptly saw 10 Quoted Woodhouse and Lockhart, op. cit., 164.

11 The Making of Rhodesia, 1926, 61-2. 12 See L. H. Gann, A History of Southern Rhodesia, Early Days to 1934, 1965, 72-3 for a discussion of the question.

CECIL RHODES

1853-89

Sir Hercules Robinson and urged him to declare a protectorate on the Bechuanaland model over southern Zambesia. Robinson knew that the Colonial Office would never swallow this, but he was prepared to accept Rhodes’s alternative proposal and send someone to negotiate with Lobengula. The man chosen for this task was John Moffat, now Assistant Commissioner to Sir Sidney Shippard in Bechuanaland. Moffat of course knew Matabeleland well from his missionary days and was liked, trusted and respected by Lobengula who called him ‘Joni’. The King would not have been so friendly if he had known that Moffat regarded the destruction of Ndebele power as the prerequisite for any improvement in ‘this gloomy land of sin and violence’.13 He arrived in Bulawayo in December and on February 11, 1888 obtained the King’s signature to what has come to be known as ‘the Moffat Treaty’. The text is set out in numerous books.14 The gist of it was that Lobengula, ‘ruler of the tribe known as the Amandebele, together with the Mashona and Makalaka tributaries of the same’, promised to give no part of his territories to anyone ‘without the previous knowledge and sanction of Her Majesty’s High Commissioner in South Africa’. If taken seriously this meant the abandonment of the right to conduct an independent foreign policy; and there was no quid pro quo in the form of British protection. But what did Lobengula and his indunas really understand by it? The question must often recur to any historian of this strange impact between two alien worlds. It comes up again with the even more controversial matter of the Rudd Concession a few months later. How far could a Matabele Chief and his advisers appreciate what was implied in the documents to which they put their marks implied, that is to say, in the minds of the sophisticated Europeans with whom they were dealing? Lobengula must have believed that he was getting something in return when he undertook not to alienate his lands without the British Government’s consent. Why was this not in the treaty? It is clear that Moffat and the Rev. C. D. Helm, a missionary to whom Lobengula also listened, encouraged the belief that British protection was being granted. It is also clear that no such undertaking was ever made. Lobengula’s later appeals to London or the Cape fell on deaf ears. In April the treaty was ratified by Lord Knutsford, the Colonial Secretary, and the fact duly appeared in the London Gazette. It created a sensation. Kruger promptly published the Grobler treaty and the Portuguese Consul in Cape Town protested with some justice at the inclusion of the Shona tribes as vassals of Lobengula. When Lord Salisbury declared the whole of southern Zambesia to be ‘exclusively within the British sphere of influence’, both Portugal and the Transvaal refused to accept the claim. Relations with the latter were made no better by the murder in slightly obscure circumstances of Grobler himself early 13 Quoted in Ransford, Rulers of Rhodesia, 156. 14 See Sir Lewis Michell, The Life of the Rt. Hon. Cecil Rhodes, 1910, Vol. 1, 240-1; Marshall Hole, op. cit., 54 and Lockhart and Woodhouse, op. cit., 139.

39

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

in July, while returning from Bulawayo to the Transvaal via Bechuanaland. Kruger believed that Rhodes was responsible, but there is not a scrap of evidence to support the charge. The British Government was in something of a dilemma as regards colonial policy. Salisbury could not afford to let southern Zambesia go by default to the Portuguese or to Kruger — especially the latter. It would ruin the British aim of paramountcy in southern Africa if the Cape Colonials were to be baulked of their northern ambition. On the other hand, it was clear enough that occupation of the territory was the only successful way of asserting that ambition, and it was no less clear that the ‘colonial factor*, if left solely to the Cape Parliament, would achieve nothing of the sort. Even the prolongation of the Cape/Kimberley railway the ‘Bechuanaland extension’ designed to run west of the Transvaal frontier - was the subject of endless dispute, for there was a party which preferred to build the shortest line to the Rand. If that came off, the chances of Zambesia falling to the Transvaal would be greatly increased. The alternative course of bringing in the imperial factor and declaring a protectorate was equally unsatisfactory. The British tax-payer, at least as inter­ preted by the Treasury, had a great aversion to paying for such seemingly barren additions to British rule. Lord Salisbury’s peculiar political position must not, in this context, be forgotten. His first Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph Churchill, resigned on a point of Treasury economy at the end of 1886. He was replaced by Goschen, a Liberal Unionist, and it was on the votes of the Liberal Unionists that Salisbury depended. The new Chancellor was a particularly strict exponent of Treasury dogma. Whether or not there is any truth in the famous story about Lord Randolph, it is quite certain that Salisbury could not afford to ‘forget’ Goschen. A protectorate, therefore, was to be avoided as long as possible. A further difficulty was the position of Portugal - an element in the situation too often omitted in the treatment of this complicated story. The Portuguese, however dubious their claim to a broad band of Africa running from coast to coast, had managed to get it accepted by France and Germany in 1887. They too could only make it good by occupation, and the British counterclaim seemed suddenly to have awakened them from an age-long torpor. They became unex­ pectedly active, especially in relation to the area that was later to become Nyasaland and is now Malawi. This was embarrassing because of the position of the Scottish missionaries there. It was a legacy of Livingstone and much religious zeal had been invested in it and in its subsidiary, the Lake Company (though not enough cash for the latter was nearly bankrupt). Salisbury did not wish to alienate the Scottish voters, who would be deeply incensed if their missionaries became subjected to Portuguese Papist bigotry. He therefore tried to fob off England’s oldest ally in October 1888 by offering, subject to the acquiescence of the Cape, a free hand in northern Zambesia in return for agreement to leave Nyasaland and southern Zambesia alone. Lisbon, perhaps unwisely in view of later developments, refused. Negotiations

40

CECIL RHODES

1853-89

continued for the rest of the year and on into 1889, but no agreement could be reached. Salisbury is sometimes depicted as a lethargic figure who needed to be prodded into activity by the energetic and dynamic ‘Colossus’. This is unfair. He was well aware of what was at stake. Unlike his predecessors at Ten Downing Street, he had actually seen the Cape. Indeed, he spent three months there in 1853 on his way to Australia and he knew personally something of the Colony’s problems, opinions and aspirations. But there were many constrictions on his freedom of action and there were other places besides southern Africa to draw his attention: Egypt, Russia, France, India, Ireland. Let us leave him for the moment in his Jacobean palace at Hatfield, heavy-bearded, silent, enigmatic, tireless, working through his red boxes, weighing this course against that, always aware of the limitations imposed by Cabinet colleagues, Parliament and public opinion upon the choices open to a statesman - even to one who combined, as he did, the Foreign Office with the Premiership. He is waiting upon events, looking for an opening. He could not take the initiative, but he would seize the opportunity when it came his way. And at the end of April 1889 it came. As a result of a complicated series of transactions which will be described in the next chapter, Cecil Rhodes was in a position to take the first step in his campaign for the ‘far interior’. He arrived in London and applied to the Colonial Office for a royal charter for a company which he proposed to form with no less an object than the development and colonization of north and south Zambesia, together with the extension of the Bechuanaland railway. British policy in Southern Africa had reached an impasse. Now there was a chance to get out of it.

41

CHAPTER 4

The Concession and the Charter 1888-89

The Moffat Treaty had given the British government a negative hold over Lobengula; it excluded the political intervention of other powers. But the situation from Rhodes’s standpoint remained precarious. It was clear that neither Whitehall nor the Cape would act on their own to secure effective occupation of the vast area north of Bechuanaland and the Transvaal. They would not indeed stop Rhodes from doing so, but he had somehow to raise the money either to add further funds to an established company or, as in fact he chose, to float a new venture. For this purpose a mineral concession from Lobengula - ‘the gold of Ophir’ - was essential. At this juncture, early in 1888, Rhodes paid a fleeting visit to London. He was disturbed to find that two other companies, the Exploring Company and the Bechuanaland Exploration Company, were in the field lobbying the Colonial Office. They were closely connected and had interlocking directorships. The key figures were George Cawston, a financier, and Lord Gifford who was just under forty, had won the VC in the Ashanti War of 1873-74 and had been Colonial Secretary first for Western Australia, then for Gibraltar. He was clearly someone y and his influence would not be negligible. Their ‘managing director’ was a young adventurer, Frank Johnson, who in a different capacity was to be deeply involved in the creation of Rhodesia. The Colonial Secretary, Lord Knutsford, received their overtures with non-committal courtesy; he rightly doubted their ability to raise the money. The Exploring Company’s ambassador in Bulawayo was Lieutenant E. A. Maund, a man of self-confidence, good appearance, much charm and some deviousness. He established a close rapport with Lobengula. Clearly Rhodes needed to act quickly on his return to South Africa, but he sent an odd triumvirate to Bulawayo. His partner of early days, Charles Rudd, was the leader - a tall, bearded, rather melancholy-looking person. He was reliable, efficient, loyal, businesslike and very discreet. Years after Rhodes’s death

42

THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

he threw a chest containing all his papers into the sea from his yacht off the Hebrides, declaring, ‘There go the secrets of the Jameson Raid’.1 He died in 1916 and something of South African history died with him. The next man in the party was J. Rochfort Maguire, an Irishman who had obtained three firsts at Merton College and had struck up a warm friendship with Rhodes when the latter was an undergraduate at Oriel. Maguire was a barrister and a Fellow of All Souls. Lastly there was F. R. (‘Matabele’) Thompson, a South African who had reorganized the compounds at De Beers. He was supposed to understand the African mind and some African languages. But he had as a boy seen his father murdered in an African revolt by having a ramrod hammered into his throat till it came out through his back; he was not the ideal choice for a role which required an iron nerve in dealing with Africans. They were an ill-assorted trio. Rudd was a man of experience in Africa and well qualified to deal with the business side of the affair, but he lacked imagination. Maguire was a neat, slightly donnish little man who prided himself upon cleanliness and correctitude; he treated everything with a dead-pan ‘Oxford manner’ which at least gave nothing away. His job was to see to the legal drafting of the con­ cession. He was, however, hopeless in the practical problems of life in Zambesia and, according to Thompson, could not even use a tin opener. Rhodes, however, thought that he had one important asset beside his legal expertise; he could teach the classics to Thompson on the long journey and sojourn in Bulawayo. Thompson had missed a university education (later, like Rhodes, he became an elderly Oxford undergraduate), and Rhodes was a passionate believer in the importance of the Greek and Roman authors. Maguire’s success or otherwise is not recorded, but we do know that the trio passed the weary days waiting upon Lobengula’s pleasure in backgammon and whist rather then Aeschylus and Livy. They set out from Kimberley on August 15, ostensibly as a big-game hunting expedition. Their baggage included an introductory but uninformative letter from Sir Hercules Robinson, £10,000 in gold sovereigns, together with appropriate quantities of brandy, champagne and stout to assuage their own thirst and that of Lobengula who had become highly partial to these non-African beverages. Other white men in the party were Rudd’s son, Frank, a friend by the name of Denny and a Dutch transport rider called Dreyer. The journey took ten weeks. Lobengula tried to stop them on his frontier, but they persisted and he received them civilly when they arrived on September 20. As Rhodes had expected, the situation was anything but clear. A host of speculators and concession­ seekers already hung around the Chief’s kraal, and others were hot on their heels. The doyen of the trading corps was S. M. (Sam) Edwards, born in 1827 who lived to the age of ninety-five. He was the principal inheritor of what was known as the Tati Concession acquired from Lobengula by Sir John Swinburne in 1869. ’Private information. It is odd that someone whose name will always figure in the history books is recorded neither in the Dictionary ofNational Biography nor in Who was Who.

43

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Even better established were James Fairbairn, the custodian of Lobengula’s great elephant seal which alone validated treaties, contracts and concessions, and William Usher, another confidant of the Chief. They were regarded as members of the tribe and were the two Europeans to remain in Bulawayo during the Matabele War of 1893. They did not welcome the arrival of Rudd. There was also present Thomas Leask who, along with Fairbairn, JL. C. Phillips and W. S. Tainton, had obtained in July exactly the concession from Lobengula sought by Rudd and his companions, but they lacked money, and in the end were easily bought out by Rhodes. Messrs Alexander Boggie, Cooper-Chadwick and Benjamin (‘Matabele’) Wilson, who defeated even Sam Edwards in longevity and died in i960 at the age of ninety-nine, constituted another group. They too found it prudent to come in on the side of Rhodes at an early stage. Finally - and more formidable - were Messrs E. R. Renny-Tailyour, Frank Boyle and Riley. This trio, perhaps luckily for Rhodes, arrived after Rudd and his party. Renny-Tailyour was acting on behalf of E. A. Lippert, a German banker recently established in the Transvaal. He was a cousin of Rhodes’s business friend and partner, Alfred Beit, but he had quarrelled with Beit and was very willing to put a spoke in the wheel of the partnership. For the time being Renny-Tailyour was frustrated. Three years later, again on behalf of Lippert he was able to cause Rhodes much trouble. The power of Mammon was thus well represented at Lobengula’s court - only Maund being absent - but that of God should not be forgotten. There was Dr Knight Bruce, Bishop of Blomfontein who, with a German count, was engaged on an inspection of the mission stations in Zambesia. There was the Rev. C. D. Helm of the London Missionary Society, presumably one of those being inspected. He was much trusted by Lobengula and was a witness of the signature of the Moffat Treaty. Finally there was Moffat himself, who could be said to represent church and state, a former missionary and now Assistant Native Commissioner for Bechuanaland - officially accredited as British representative at Bulawayo. With both Helm and Moffat on his side Rudd had important advantages over his rivals when dealing with the Ndebele King. As for their rivals, Rudd, or rather Rhodes had one supreme asset - gigantic wealth. The articles of association of De Beers, thanks to remorseless pressure by Rhodes on Bamato, Joel and their associates, had been drawn up in the widest possible terms. The company was legally entitled to do almost anything. Rhodes had taken the same precaution with his second great financial empire, Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa. The combined capital at this time of the two enter­ prises is estimated by his official biographer as thirteen million pounds.2 None of the other concessionaires, actual or potential, could lay their hands on resources remotely approaching such a figure. Rhodes was in a position to buy them out with ease and he did so, often spending extravagant sums on claims of a dubious nature. 2 Lockhart and Woodhouse, op. cit., 158.

44

THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

Money, however, was not in itself particularly relevant to the problem of Lobengula. The Chief lived in a style and on a level where gradations of wealth which meant a great deal in European terms meant nothing at all to him. Even if every rival concession-seeker vanished, it did not follow that Rudd would be successful. Lobengula, whom all accounts agree to have been a shrewd and perceptive ruler, was well aware of the constraints upon his action, and was in a dilemma. He knew that in a battle with European forces he was bound to lose. He could see everywhere the threat of European advance, apparently in peaceful form, but ultimately backed by armed strength - the Portuguese from the east, the British and the Boers from the south. He was faced with another problem. The Ndebele were no longer the all­ conquering soldiers that they once had been, even in combat with other tribes. Only three years earlier in 1885 one of his impis received a crushing defeat from the forces of Khama, the Chief of the Bamangwato. Armed with modern rifles, they destroyed the Ndebele army near the Okovango River. The Ndebele had failed to secure adequate firearms, nor did they possess any cavalry - again unlike Khama who had some 300 horsemen in his numerically inferior but technically superior army. Khama’s ascendancy was due to his prudent espousal of British protection, and to long-established trade relations which supplied him with the weapons he needed. His dynasty still survives. Why could Lobengula not achieve a similar relationship with the British? In fact he would probably have preferred it, but he was not an absolute monarch. He might move preceded by a grovelling claque proclaiming his praise in stylized but fulsome language; he might mete out arbitrary and unchallenged justice under the immense tree which still stands in the grounds of Government House outside modern Bulawayo; he might throw his assegai to indicate the direction of the next season's raids and be obeyed to the letter. But he depended, as perhaps all apparent tyrants do, on a certain degree of consent. Lobengula always consulted his principal indunas on matters of importance and often accepted their advice. The social structure of the Ndebele state militated against just those changes which were needed for political and military survival. Its economic bargaining power was on the decline with the exhaustion of its ivory. It could not easily obtain the modern rifles needed to replace the elephant guns and blunderbusses which constituted the army’s only alternative weapons to the assegai. Worse still, the whole mentality of the Ndebele military leaders was resistant to reform. Like the Prussians before Jena or the French before Sedan, they were rigid conservatives who thought in terms of the tactics of a vanishing world. There were clashes of interest within the state. The army was bitterly opposed to European penetration. Its hot-heads clamoured for the slaughter of every white man in the country - a demand which Lobengula knew would be fatal if conceded and which he continued to repulse with ironical contempt. On the other hand there existed among the indunas a group which profited from dealings with prospectors and traders, as indeed Lobengula did himself. They saw at least some hope for the future in a deal with the British whose attitude was to their minds,

45

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

even at worst, preferable to that of the Boers. Their leader was a rich and elderly induna by the name of Lotje who had much influence on the King and was a quasi-prime minister. Yet this party was not strong enough nor was Lobengula to take the path of Khama and put the country under British protection. It was hardly surprising that the King hesitated and vacillated, made promises first to one then to another European supplicant, granted concessions which contra­ dicted previous concessions, and generally behaved erratically and incalculably. Nor was his judgement improved by liberal potations from the numerous cases of champagne and brandy presented to him by aspiring concessionaires. Most contemporary accounts agree that the Ndebele Chief was intelligent, subtle, dignified and every inch a monarch (and there were a great many inches, for he was very tall, very stout and weighed twenty stone). But they agree too that negotiation with him was a trying experience. September and October are months of rapidly rising temperature, preceding the rainy season which usually begins some time in November. Ndebele court etiquette required the King’s visitors to squat (no chairs were provided) on their haunches before him in the royal goat kraal and eat large quantities of half cooked meat usually covered with fat flies, the un­ savoury repast being washed down with pot after pot of luke-warm ‘Kaffir’ beer. Maguire must often have sighed for the delicate viands and well-stocked cellar of All Souls College. The heat was intense, the smell overpowering, and the discussions or indabas - conducted for hours on end under the almost vertical sun - seemed interminable and often incomprehensible. Matters were made more difficult to bring to a head on account of Lobengula’s preoccupation with various magical activities in connexion with rain-making, which required lengthy and unpredictable periods of solitude. About the middle of October Maund arrived, bent on the purpose of securing a rival concession for Lord Gifford’s companies, but his nose was put out of joint two days later by the appearance of Sir Sidney Shippard, Deputy Commissioner of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, with an escort of sixteen troopers from the British Bechuanaland Police. His ostensible object was to enquire further into the cir­ cumstances of Grobler’s death, but he was also an ally of Rhodes. Having arranged for chairs, to avoid the humiliating posture normally required of the King’s visitors, he appeared before Lobengula in a tightly buttoned frock coat with the Star of the Order of St Michael and St George, grey kid gloves and patent leather boots. He carried a silver-headed malacca cane and wore a white solar topee. Since it was by now almost the hottest season of the year - well over ioo° in the shade - such garb required no small devotion to duty, but it was rewarded. Lobengula was much impressed and listened carefully. Sir Sidney then departed. At the end of the month, after two days of prolonged discussions with his indunas at which Rudd and party were present, Lobengula at last took a decision and on October 30 set his seal to a document drawn up in legal language by Maguire. It is in Rudd’s handwriting, signed by Rudd, Maguire and Thompson, and witnessed by the missionary Helm and by C. D. Dreyer, a Dutch transport rider in Rudd’s party. Helm, moreover, certified that he had explained the document to Lobengula

46

THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER

1888-89

and his council of indunas and that it had been executed in accordance with ‘all the constitutional usages of the Matabele nation'. The Rudd Concession3 gave the grantees ‘complete and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals situated and contained in my Kingdom, principalities and dominions together with full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to win and procure the same’. There was also authorization from the King to exclude, with his assistance if necessary, ‘all persons seeking land, metals, minerals or mining rights’, and an undertaking ‘to grant no concessions of land or mining rights ... without [the grantees’] consent and concurrence’. The rights under the Tati Concession were expressly reserved. The Rudd Concession made no positive grant of land, though negatively it precluded other people from securing such grants. In return for these rights the grantees undertook to supply the King with £100 a month, 1,000 Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles, 100,000 rounds of ammunition and a steam boat on the Zambesi armed with ‘guns suitable for defensive purposes’, or, if the King should prefer, £500 in lieu. It is doubtful whether Lobengula would have agreed at all but for certain oral promises made by the trio. The most important of these is mentioned by Helm who was only prepared to lend himself to the transaction on that basis. He wrote to the London Missionary Society on March 29, 1889: They [Rudd and party] promised that they would not bring more than ten white men to work in his country, that they would not dig anywhere near towns, etc. and that they and their people would abide by the laws of his country and in fact be as his people.4 If this undertaking really was given as an inducement — and there is no need to doubt Helm’s word - then Rhodes’s representatives were being disingenuous, to put it no more strongly. They were well aware that he planned a settlement in Mashonaland. Occupation of land was as much the object of the enterprise as extraction of minerals. Even if mining had been the sole purpose, there could never have been the slightest possibility of thus limiting the number of men. However that may be, the fact remains that this and other oral promises were not written into the concession. It is unlikely that the omission was accidental. The urgency which Rhodes impressed on his emissaries is shown by Rudd’s immediate action. The King’s seal was set on the document at noon on October 30, and Lobengula ‘gave Rudd the road’, as the expression was. Four hours later he departed post haste for Kimberley with the concession and £2,500 in gold, partly to bring the document to Rhodes as soon as possible and partly to get it away from Bulawayo before his numerous rivals could discover what had happened and 3 The full text is in Sir Lewis Michell, The Life of the Rt. Hon. John Cecil Rhodes, Vol. I, 1910, 244-5. 4 Printed in V. W. Hillier (ed.), Gold and Gospel in Mashonaland 1888, 1949, Oppenheimer Series 4, 227-8.

47

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

persuade the King to change his mind. Except for agreement that he nearly lost the concession, the gold and his life, accounts differ about what followed.5 He set out either on his own with a Kaffir driver, or with Dreyer, or with his son and Denny, from whom he became separated. Lost in the waterless, burning wastes of Bechuanaland he collapsed either under a tree, in a fork of which he placed the concession, or near an ant-bear hole where he buried the concession and/or the gold. He either remained there till he was rescued by some Bechuanas or he wandered onwards on horseback or on foot having left a letter fastened to a tree indicating the whereabouts of the gold and the concession,6 collapsing in a delirium later and being rescued by Bushmen or stumbling into a Bushmen camp. In one or other of these situations he was revived and recovered his precious possessions. He reached Kimberley without further mishap. Rhodes was cock-a-hoop when he saw the document. ‘With this signature and the certificate of the missionary’, he cried, using the jargon of a now obsolete card game, ‘I’m ready to go nap, double-nap, Blucher, or anything.’7 Early in December Rudd arrived in Cape Town with a copy for Sir Hercules Robinson. The High Commissioner, like most of the Crown officials in the Colony, was a Rhodes man. On December 15 he wrote to Lord Knutsford at the Colonial Office, forwarding the copy and adding his hope that ‘the effect of the concession to a gentleman of character and financial standing will be to check the inroad of adventurers as well as to secure the cautious development of the country with a proper consideration for the feelings and prejudices of the natives’.8 Rhodes was well aware that securing the concession was only the first stage in his campaign. Apart from other problems, there was the danger that Lobengula might repudiate it at any time before the rifles arrived - which could not be soon. True to his favourite shibboleth - ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ - he had insisted on keeping some representatives at the royal kraal until the deal could be finally ratified. Marshall Hole, author of the best account of these events, rightly con­ siders, however, that Rudd had made a tactical blunder in leaving with the con­ cession and not remaining in Bulawayo himself.9 Rudd was an old South Africa hand with long experience. Maguire and Thompson, who were left behind, lacked the knowledge, authority, hardiness and nerve needed to cope with the Ndebele monarch and the importunate crowd of rival suitors endeavouring to upset the concession.

5 Compare the differing versions to be found in Basil Williams, Cecil Rhodes, 1921, 127; Marshall Hole, The Making of Rhodesia. 1926; J. G. Lockhart and C. M. Wood­ house, Rhodes. 1963, 147; Colonel Ferris, Draft History of the British South Africa Company (unpublished), 31-2. ‘This at least appears to be correct for the paper has survived and is in the Salisbury Archives, RV2/1/2. 7 Ferris, op. cit., 32. 8 Quoted Lewis Michell, Cecil J. Rhodes. I, 247. 9 Op. cit., 76.

48

THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

The two most formidable opponents of Rhodes, representing different interests it is true, but ready to enter into a temporary alliance, were Maund on behalf of the Gifford group and Renny-Tailyour on behalf of Lippert. Rumours spread by various interested parties had questioned the very existence of the ‘Great White Queen*. Renny-Tailyour put the idea in Maund*s head of persuading Lobengula to send personal emissaries accompanied by Maund to London to clear up this question. His motive was in part to remove Maund from the scene. Both of them were seeking personal mineral concessions, and it is possible, but non-proven, that Maund obtained one, although any such document must have been invalid if the Rudd Concession stood. Late in November Maund departed from Bulawayo with two elderly indunas and two letters alleged to be from Lobengula to Queen Victoria. One, authenticated by Helm, was a declaration dated November 24,1888 of Lobengula’s territorial claims vis-a-vis the Portuguese in Mashonaland and in effect an appeal to the Queen under the Moffat Treaty for protection.1011 It was if anything helpful to Rhodes, for it reaffirmed Lobengula’s dubious claim to rule over those areas. This was a vital point in the effectiveness of the Rudd Concession as far as London was concerned. It was of course also equally vital for anyone who wished to substitute another concession from Lobengula for Rudd’s. The second letter was more questionable. It merely had the King’s elephant seal for authenticity and since the trader, Fairbairn, to whom this object was entrusted was by now in the pocket of the anti-Rhodes faction, one cannot be sure that it really represented Lobengula’s mind. The gist of it11 was that the King was sending his indunas as ‘his eyes to see whether there is a Queen’, that he was ‘much troubled by white men who come into his country and ask to dig gold’, that ‘there is no one with him he can trust, and he asks that the Queen will send someone from herself’. There is no mention of the Rudd Concession. On the way south at Kimberley Maund was to meet Rhodes who strongly pressed him to show the letter, but Maund refused. Later, in Cape Town, according to one account, Maund having heard of the possibility of a merger between Rhodes and the Gifford companies did agree to show the better authenticated of the two letters.12 Early in February he sailed for London with the two indunas and John Colenbrander, an expert interpreter. Rhodes was by now aware that Lord Gifford and Cawston had early in January put in an application on behalf of the Exploring Company for a charter to settle and trade in Bechuanaland, together with a strong suggestion that they had acquired concessions in Matabeleland which might shortly justify a similar application.13 What with this development and Maund’s mission, Rhodes saw that it was time to weigh in heavily. The visit of the indunas held out boundless possibilities of sentimental agitation by British ‘do-gooders’. He had better be on 10 For text see J. G. Macdonald, Rhodes, a Life, 1927, 104-5. 11 For text see Hole, op. cit., 79. 12 Lockhart, op. cit., 150. 13 Hole, op. cit., 85-6. Knutsford replied in non-committal terms.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

the spot as soon as possible. He sailed shortly after Maund and in May he was followed by the High Commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, who had a con­ siderable pull with Lord Knutsford at the Colonial Office, and was able to be^pf much assistance in the matter of the charter. Unfortunately just before leaving Cape Town Sir Hercules made a speech in which he referred to ‘the amateur meddling of irresponsible and ill-advised persons in Ejigland which makes every resident in the Republics, English as well as Dutch, rejoice in their independence, and converts many a Colonist from an Imperialist into a Republican’.14 There was a storm in Parliament. Sir Hercules felt obliged to resign, and on August 20 was replaced by Sir Henry Loch, a believer in the ‘imperial factor’ and far less favourable than Robinson to the policy of Rhodes. Maund and the indunas were suitably fêted. The two elderly chiefs (the oldest, Babyan, was seventy-five, his colleague, Mshete, ten years younger) were vouch­ safed an audience with Queen Victoria to assure them of her existence. They were also treated to a military display at Aidershot where the Gatlings jammed with deplorable frequency, and to a grand breakfast with the Aborigines Protection Society whose chairman, Sir Fowell Buxton, hoped that before long ‘Englishmen and Matabeles would meet in the valleys of the Limpopo as happily as they did that day in Westminster’. On March 26 Lord Knutsford wrote a reply on behalf of the Queen to the letters delivered by Maund and the indunas. He dealt primarily with the less authentic of the two, not even mentioning the Portuguese claims to Mashonaland. The operative words were that Englishmen who asked leave to dig in Matabeleland had no authority from the Queen, and that she advised Lobengula ‘not to grant hastily concessions of land or leave to dig’. Then came the key paragraph: It is not wise to put too much power into the hands of the men who come first, and to exclude other deserving men. A King gives a stranger an ox, not his whole herd of cattle, otherwise what would other strangers have to eat?15

This was bound to be read as a clear warning against the Rudd Concession, and it is hard to believe that it was not inspired by Maund. However, on the surface Maund and Rhodes, who saw much of each other, were friendly enough, and indeed the whole situation as between the rival interests was changing. Rhodes soon ‘squared’ Lord Gifford and Cawston who probably never had any serious expectation that their resources - a mere £50,000 - could compete with the millions at Rhodes’s command, and were chiefly engaged in raising the price at which they could be bought out. A suitable amalgamation having been arranged, Lord Gifford as Chairman of the Exploring Company made formal application to the Colonial Secretary on April 30 for a charter to develop Bechuanaland ‘and the countries lying to the north’. His letter was accompanied by one 14 Quoted Basil Williams, op. cit., 81. 15 Hole, 82.

50

THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

signed by Rhodes and Beit on behalf of Gold Fields of South Africa pledging their co-operation. Maund who ought, as far as his employers were concerned, to have moved over to the side of Rhodes, had departed early in April with the indunas, carrying the letter from Lord Knutsford and another from the Aborigines Protection Society equally inimical to the Rudd Concession, though obviously less authoritative. Maund later maintained that he had shown Lord Knutsford’s letter at once to Rhodes, who sent him back to persuade the Colonial Secretary to alter it, but Knutsford refused because the Queen was abroad and he would not do so on his own responsibility. According to Maund, Rhodes then suggested that he should drop it overboard ‘by accident* on the return voyage, but Maund refused.16 Rhodes’s account is quite different. He maintained that Maund never told him of the vital passage in the letter. ‘You remember how he hid in that room of mine and said that there was no such message in the Queen’s letter,’ he indignantly wrote to Cawston six months later.17 He described Maund as a liar18 and some of his coadjutors used even stronger language. It is hard to believe that Maund was not playing some crooked game of his own. If so, he did himself and his employers nothing but harm. The letters did not reach Lobengula until August and their effect was nearly fatal to the whole enterprise. Meanwhile Rhodes was busy in London on many other ‘squaring’ operations. There were a host of dubious claims and alleged concessions to be bought out. This was not too difficult, for he was prepared to pay lavishly in order to purchase peace. More serious were the forces that opposed the grant of a charter on grounds of principle. The London Chamber of Commerce saw it as a monopoly deal in favour of a rich Cape mining group and in contravention of the doctrine of free trade. The South Africa Committee, composed of such reputable parliamen­ tary figures as Albert Grey, who succeeded as 4th Earl Grey in 1894, tbe Duke of Fife who was a son-in-law of the Prince of Wales, J. Arnold Foster, who was a future Conservative War Minister, and the formidable Joseph Chamberlain, feared that the Company would seize the land of the natives. They were backed by the Aborigines Protection Society, and their fears were fully justified by the event. Colonial Office officials anticipated a Matabele war, and they too were to be proved right. Disagreeable questions were asked in the House by Labouchère and others who deeply distrusted Rhodes. Underlying all these objections was the profound apprehension felt by missionaries, philanthropists and imperial pa­ ternalists that ‘the natives’ would get short shrift from the ‘colonists’ and needed to be protected. At this juncture in his fortunes Rhodes displayed to the full his magical power of persuasion, that mysterious charm with which he was able to convert the seemingly inconvertible. It has to be remembered that he was not yet quite the 16Lockhart, op. cit., in. 17 Quoted Robert Cary, Charter Royal, 1970, 65. Lockhart, ibid. 18 Lockhart, ibid.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

celebrity that he soon became. Lord Knutsford appears to have been under the impression that he was Sir Hercules Robinson’s secretary. Salisbury, as we saw earlier, thought of him as ‘rather a pro-Boer MP in South Africa’. His achievement is therefore the more remarkable. He had been given a strong hint from Salisbury that a charter would not be granted unless some reputable non-South African names were on the Board. Believing in carrying the war into the enemy’s camp he approached Albert Grey, his opponent on the South Africa Committee. Grey, a man of the utmost probity, consulted Joseph Chamberlain who said, ‘I only know three things about Rhodes and they all put me against him: (i) he has made an enormous fortune very rapidly, (2) he is an Afrikander,19 (3) he gave £10,000 to Parnell’. Grey joined nevertheless, and so did the Duke of Fife, another member of the Committee, while Rhodes put the seal of respectability on his venture by recruiting the Duke of Abercom as chairman. He could not have achieved what he did without some strong cards in his hand, the two strongest being his vast wealth and his knowledge that the occupation of Zambesia was, though for different reasons, as necessary to the Government as to him, and that Whitehall could not or would not pay the cost from its own resources. But it was a remarkable performance all the same. In the realm of what would now be called the ‘media’ he was equally successful. W. T. Stead, the colourful and celebrated editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was an ‘imperialist’ who took an unfavourable view of the Rudd Concession, but after a luncheon followed by three hours talk he was won over, and eventually became a trustee of Rhodes’s will. He was, however, not a total convert; he later spoke his mind in no uncertain way on the Jameson Raid and eventually Rhodes put him out of the trusteeship in a codicil ‘on account of the extraordinary eccentricity of Mr Stead’. Another of his converts was The Times colonial correspondent, Flora Shaw. She later married Frederick Lugard, but Lugard, who had cause to feel badly let down by Rhodes, was never converted and always deeply distrusted his wife’s hero. In the journalistic world Rhodes received one slight set-back. Among the many people whom he saw in London was F. C. Selous, whom he had never met before. They got on well enough but Selous had been in Mashonaland four years earlier and was contemplating another visit in June to secure concessions for his newly formed Selous Exploration Company in which Frank Johnson was closely involved. Selous was not only highly sceptical of Rhodes’s plan, vaguely outlined at that time, to occupy Mashonaland via Bulawayo, he was also convinced that Mashonaland was not in Lobengula’s gift at all - or at least that a large part of it was not; and in May he wrote an article to that effect for the Fortnightly Review.2* Most modern historians would agree with Selous21 but it was an essential point in the case for the charter that the Rudd Concession covered all the lands claimed by 19 Chamberlain meant by this a ‘colonialist’ as opposed to an ‘imperialist’. 20 Charter Royal, 49. 21 See above, Ch. 2, pp. 19-20.

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THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

Lobengula and so included the whole of Mashonaland. Rhodes was to have some difficulty over this with Selous later, but for the moment he let it pass. Despite the arrival in London on June 18 of a fraudulent letter allegedly emanating from Lobengula and denouncing the concession, but in fact concocted by Fairbairn in the anti-Rhodes interest, progress continued smoothly towards the grant of the charter. It was a slow business. The petition was formally sub­ mitted on July 13. The approval of the Colonial Office was needed, then that of the Foreign Office and also of the Prime Minister - a process not necessarily expedited by the fact that he was Foreign Secretary as well. The charter had to go to a committee of the Privy Council which heard objections - and there were quite a number. Then it went to the whole Council. In the end the petitioners were able to show an unencumbered title to the satisfaction of the lawyers. On October 29, 1889, three hundred and sixty-four days after the signing of the Rudd Concession, the charter was duly sealed under Letters Patent signed by the Queen.22 Its scope was immense, though not quite all that Rhodes and his friends asked for. The Bechuanaland Protectorate, perhaps as a sop to the humanitarians, was not at once put into the Company’s hands, though there was a virtual promise that it soon would be. On the other hand, no northern frontier was placed on the Company’s operations, despite strong objections in the Colonial Office which favoured the Zambesi. Salisbury evidently felt no need now to placate the Portuguese. Acquiescence in this demand of Rhodes is surprising. Hitherto Salis­ bury’s policy had been to buy off Portugal with northern Zambesia. Now by agreeing to the revised territorial provisions of the charter he was in effect staking a British claim (which might or might not be enforceable) over a vast new area of which very little was known. His decision has never been adequately explained, nor is it known just how Rhodes managed to persuade him. The upshot was that the Company could operate anywhere in ‘the region of South Africa lying immediately to the north of British Bechuanaland [the colony, not the protectorate], and to the north and west of the South African Republic [the Transvaal], and to the west of the Portuguese dominions’. Yet one should not overstate the power thus granted. The preamble states: the Petitioners desire to carry into effect divers concessions and agreements which have been made by certain of the chiefs and tribes inhabiting the said region and such other concessions, grants and treaties as the Petitioners may hereafter obtain ... with a view of promoting trade, commerce, civilisation and good government.

Whatever the Company did depended, legally at least, on agreements with local 22 The original directors were the Duke of Abercom (chairman), the Duke of Fife (deputy chairman), Albert Grey, Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Beit, Lord Gifford, George Cawston. The full text of the charter is in Michell, op. cit., 331-42.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

chiefs or rulers. The Crown could not and did not purport to confer more than this. The most important clause was number 3, which authorized the Company, subject to the approval of the Colonial Secretary,

to acquire by any concession agreement grant or treaty, all or any rights interests authorities jurisdictions and powers of any kind or nature whatever, including powers necessary for the purposes of government, and the preser­ vation of public order in or for the protection of territories, lands, or property, comprised or referred to in the concessions and agreements made as aforesaid or affecting other territories, lands, or property in Africa, or the inhabitants thereof, and to hold, use and exercise such territories, lands, property, rights, interests, authorities, jurisdictions and powers respectively for the purposes of the Company and on the terms of this Our Charter.

This was certainly a very wide authority, but it could not be exercised except on the basis of concessions present or future, and the only existing one was Rudd’s. On this narrow and insecure basis there balanced a vast inverted pyramid of potential future power. The charter contained many other points of substance, some permissive, some restrictive. The Company could raise its own police force and fly its own flag. It could make roads, railways, telegraphs and harbours. It could establish banks and conduct mining operations. It could settle territories that it ac­ quired and it could irrigate and clear land. It could make loans for any of its purposes. The Colonial Secretary, however, had a veto on most of its actions, and, in the event of disputes between chiefs, dealings with foreign powers or adverse claims, the Company had to accept his ruling. It was obliged, ‘so far as may be practical’ - a proviso which enraged the humanitarians - to abolish the slave trade and the sale of liquor to natives. It had to respect the customs, laws and religion of the peoples who might come under its jurisdiction, and if the Colonial Secretary dissented from its policy in this respect, his word prevailed. The Company had to furnish him with accounts and an annual report of its administrative, though not its commercial, activities. After twenty-five years the charter could be replaced or amended by the Colonial Secretary, and would be subject to similar review at ten year intervals thereafter. One important point not mentioned in the charter itself was an under­ taking by the Company to push ahead with the railway from Kimberley first to Vryburg then to Mafeking, and to extend the telegraph from Mafeking to Shoshong. Salisbury seems to have regarded the new company with some misgivings. He considered that its functions would be more appropriately performed by the Government. It was true that in theory the Government could control most of the Company’s actions, but there was a gulf between theory and practice, and the fact that Rhodes was picking so many of Whitehall’s chestnuts out of

54

THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

the fire gave him a hold which no amount of legal provisos would in practice easily slacken. For there was no other way out of Salisbury’s dilemma. He had to keep the Cape Colonists on his side by preventing the Transvaalers from seizing the ‘far interior’, but both he and the Cape lacked the means. Treasury economy and the exigencies of colonial policy were alike satisfied by Rhodes’s offer. There was no obvious alternative, and any doubts about the grant of a charter were removed by Lord Knutsford’s argument that the position would be even worse

if it were left to these gentlemen to incorporate themselves under the Joint Stock Companies Act as they are entitled to do. In the latter case Her Majesty’s Government would not be able effectually to prevent the Company from taking its own line of policy which might possibly result in complications with native chiefs and others, necessitating military expenditure and perhaps even military operation.23

The original share capital of the Company consisted of one million shares. De Beers subscribed for 200,000, the promoters reserved 90,000 for themselves, and the public rushed eagerly for the rest. There was, however, a certain suppress™ veri involved, which must be regarded as one of Rhodes’s least creditable actions. The public and indeed the Government assumed that the Rudd Concession belonged to the Chartered Company. This was not so. It was owned by an ephemeral body called the Central Search Association formed in April 1889. The directors were Rhodes, Beit, Gifford, Cawston, one A. O. Maund and Charles and Thomas Rudd. They agreed at the end of 1889 to let the Chartered Company have the use of the Rudd Concession in return for half the profits. In July 1890 the Central Search Association turned itself into the United Concessions Company with a capital of four million ¿1 shares based on its claim on the Chartered Company’s profits. The United Concessions was happy to be bought out for one million specially created shares in the Chartered Company. Since these stood at £3 to ¿4 each and were to go higher, the potential windfall for the principal holders was enormous. When the facts emerged in 1891 there was something of an uproar, and in 1892 Lord Ripon, Colonial Secre­ tary in the new Liberal Cabinet, receiving the Company’s report about the con­ cession, formally put on record that ‘it is clear that Her Majesty’s late Government was unaware of it when they advised the grant of the Charter. Whether knowledge of the arrangement would have influenced their action is a question which they alone could answer ...’ Since the departure of Rudd on October 30, 1888 much had happened in Bulawayo. The Maund mission has already been described. In itself it was a sign of increasing doubt on the part of Lobengula. Maguire was still in sufficiently good odour to accompany an impi sent early in the New Year in order to turn back a party heading for Tati and led on behalf of the Austral Company by 23 Hole, op. cit., 100.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Alfred Haggard, the brother of the famous novelist.24 Thereafter, however, things went badly. Maguire, after cleaning his teeth with scarlet toothpaste in what he took to be quiet, secluded waters some miles from the King’s kraal, stripped and was about to take a bath when he was apprehended by a group of furious Ndebele and hauled naked before Lobengula. It was a sacred pool of vital importance in Ndebele religious and medical practices. The sinister colour of the toothpaste told its own tale. Poisoning and witchcraft could alone explain his conduct. He was let off with a warning and a heavy fine in cloth which he happened and was known to possess, and his toilet accessories including a much prized bottle of Eau-de-Cologne were confiscated.25 Understandably, Maguire became impatient to get out, while Thompson grew ever more jittery. Rhodes was worried about his representation in Bulawayo even before he sailed to England in February (1889). A notice had appeared in The Bechuanaland News and Malmani Chronicle on January 18 purporting, under Lobengula’s signature, to suspend the concession. Its authenticity was dubious, but clearly all was not well. Early in February Rhodes persuaded two Kimberley doctors to visit Lobengula on his behalf. One, Dr Jameson, was to play a major role, partly good and partly evil, in Rhodes’s career and in the affairs of Rhodesia. The influence of the other, Dr Rutherfoord Harris, was to be wholly baleful. Leander Starr Jameson had become Rhodes’s closest confidant after the death of his secretary, Neville Pickering, in 1886. He was an exact contemporary and, after a brilliant start to his medical career in England, he left for South Africa in 1878 because of the strain of overwork when he was only twenty-five. He set up his plate in Kimberley and in that cosmopolitan, easy-going ambience his charm, bonhomie and genuine medical ability soon gave him a large practice and great popularity. ‘The Doctor’, as he was called (‘Dr Jim’ is a subsequent invention of the English press), became one of the ‘characters’ of Kimberley. He was a notable gambler, particularly at whist which he played for large stakes badly. He never married but, unlike Rhodes, he had the reputation of being, in the phrase of the day, ‘a lady’s man*. In some ways he was a cynic. He would listen to Rhodes’s endless monologues in silence broken only by an occasional deflatory interpolation. Yet at heart he was a romantic adventurer, and he fell totally under the magician’s wand. In spite of all that has been written about him, this mercurial, unscrupulous, intrepid, reckless, restless, tireless medical man is one of the great enigmas of his time. His career was extraordinary on any view. The man who won over Lobengula, made possible the success of the Pioneer Column, shattered Ndebele power (and was rewarded with a CB), was a hopeless administrator, provoked a rebellion, committed the crowning folly of the raid (and was rewarded with a prison sentence). Yet he recovered, became Prime Minister of Cape Colony, 24 Williams, op. cit., 127; Hole, op. cit., 75 n. 1; Lockhart, op. cit., 148. It is amusing to note the different versions. 25 Lockhart, op. cit., 148-9; Ferris, op. cit., 32.

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THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

a Privy Councillor and a Baronet, and is buried on World’s View near Rhodes as one of Rhodesia’s heroes. All this is on the record, but what were his ‘springs of action’? Most of his papers have disappeared, as seems so often to be the case with Rhodes’s closer colleagues (e.g. Rudd and Frank Johnson). His official biography is adulatory and unrevealing. No one has adequately analysed his per­ sonality. Perhaps the materials do not exist. Rhodes depended greatly on him and up to a point his flair was an invaluable aid. In the end he let his master down disastrously, not only over the raid, but in his deplorable adminis­ tration of Rhodesia which led directly to the ‘rebellion’ of 1896. To him Gladstone’s phrase applied to Disraeli’s relationship with his leader, Lord Derby, might be justly adapted - ‘Dr Jameson, at once Mr Rhodes’s necessity and his curse’. Rutherfoord Harris was a less important character. A bom gas-bag, he talked incessantly and too much. He was unstable, impetuous, and anything but straight­ forward. His part in the Jameson Raid was very shady. Jameson himself in retrospect had little use for him: ‘a muddling ass - on the surface a genius but under the crust as thick as they are made’.26 Flora Shaw described him as a bom intriguer and a mischief maker. One can only marvel at the lack of judgement which Rhodes could sometimes display when he made him some months later the Chartered Company’s Secretary at Kimberley. The two doctors arrived in Bulawayo on April 2, accompanied by a contractor bringing goods of the utmost importance, the first half of the consignment of arms and ammunition promised under the concession. If Lobengula accepted this - he was already taking the £100 per month - it would be a clear sign that the concession was ratified. The King, however, was still torn by doubts. He placed the weapons in charge of a guard of his soldiers under J. C. Chadwick, one of the traders who had plumped for Rhodes, but he did not formally take possession and, though Maguire and Thompson claimed that he had thus ratified the concession,27 this was clearly not correct. Jameson stayed for only ten days, but he at once established a close rapport with Lobengula, whose gouty pains he was able to alleviate and whom he delighted by his breezy charm and genial bedside manner. However, he had his practice to look after in Kimberley, and he left on April 12. He was accompanied by Maguire who understandably felt he had had enough of Bulawayo. The only survivor of Rudd’s party was now Thompson, whose nerves cannot have been strengthened by the nightly adjuration in a low whisper from his trusted servant, ‘Ou Master we never come out of this country alive’.28 By now there was a horde of white concession hunters and the anti-Rhodes party was soon in the ascendancy again. They hinted that the King had been tricked into giving away the whole country. It was at this stage that the bogus letter which reached London 26 Ian Colvin, Life ofJameson, Vol. I, 1922, 239. 27 J. G. McDonald, Rhodes, a Life, 1927, 108. 28 Lockhart, op. cit., 148.

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Á HISTORY OF RHODESIA

on June 18 denouncing the concession was concocted and dispatched.29 Yet, though a fraud, the letter did express something of Lobengula’s uneasiness. The younger and more militant of his indunas had always detested the concession. Their fears were exacerbated by Renny-Tailyour and his minions, and the King found himself on the defensive against a powerful element of his own people. Lobengula consulted the local missionaries, in whom he had much faith. Had he really given away his land under the concession (the original document was not available)? Could the white men dig anywhere in search of gold? Were there any limits? Their replies did not reassure him. The months of the South African winter passed uneasily. Then in August Maund arrived with two indunas, carrying the letters from Lord Knutsford and the Aborigines Protection Society. Just before setting off from Cape Town at the end of April he had been informed by telegraph of the amalgamation of the Gifford/Cawston interests with those of Rhodes and Beit. He was instructed henceforth to use all his efforts in favour of the Rudd Concession.30 But he did not feel able to suppress a letter written in the name of the Queen. As for the Aborigines Protection Society, it took no risks and had already had its missive published in a Mafeking newspaper.31 The immense delay between the sending and receipt of letters from London or even Cape Town to Bulawayo is one of the most confusing features of this narrative. The railway had not gone beyond Kimberley. A thousand miles of parched semi-desert lay ahead. It could take as long as three months to cross by slow bullock-wagon. Knutsford had written on March 26 under the influence of an anti-Rhodes group before its subsequent amalgamation with Rhodes and their joint request for a charter. The letter was - if one can imagine such a thing - like an accidentally constructed and long delayed time bomb, and it was to kill a good many people. It was read out at an audience with the King attended by Maund, Moffat and all white men in Bulawayo, together with the two indunas^ one of whom was drunk and alleged that he had been advised in London to tell the Chief to allow no white men to dig for gold except as his servants. On August 10 Lobengula dictated a letter to Moffat who used an empty champagne case for a table. He took up the point about ‘servants’, which was indeed one of the oral provisos confirmed by Helm as an inducement to sign the Rudd Concession. But the letter did not reach London till November 18 and much had happened by then. The prospect for the pro-Rhodes party now darkened. Knutsford’s letter could be readily interpreted as a warning from Queen Victoria against the Rudd 29 See p. 53. The letter was dated April 23, 1889 and was not witnessed by Helm or anyone of repute. Nor was it sent, as would have been normal, via Moffat. See Hole, op. cit., 107-9. 30 Hole, op. cit., no. 3'Lockhart, op. cit., 151.

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THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

Concession. Early in September Lobengula summoned a council of indunas at which he denounced Helm for deceiving him. Then he rounded on the unfortunate Lotje, leader of the pro-concession party among the Ndebele, whom he accused of 'blinding his eyes’. Accounts of what followed differ in detail, but not in substance. Lotje was either strangled or had his skull beaten in by a knobkerry that night or a few days later. His wives, descendants and dependants - sixty according to one version, three hundred according to another - were slaughtered. Even his animals were exterminated and all that remained of his kraal was a heap of smouldering ash. Thus perished the Stratford of the Ndebele dynasty - victim partly of the caprice of a tyrant, partly of a letter written by a wellmeaning English peer thousands of miles away and many months earlier in obsolete circumstances. These events finally broke the nerve of ‘Matabele’ Thompson. Returning from a visit to Helm’s mission station the day after the slaughter, he was given an ominous message - ‘Tomoson, the King says the killing of yesterday is not over’. Simultaneously he observed a crowd of Ndebele warriors whose attitude seemed threatening. He unharnessed and jumped on to the nearest of his horses, borrowed a saddle3233from Fairbairn’s store and rode hell for leather south. The horse, ‘Bulawayo’, was a notorious bolter. Four years later in the first Matabele war it ended its own and its rider’s life by heading straight into the middle of an impi.** But on this occasion its vice was a virtue. Thompson rode for two days till ‘Bulawayo’ foundered, and then continued on foot till, exhausted and thirsty, he reached Shoshong, proceeding thence at a more leisurely pace to Mafeking. The vacuum, abhorred by Rhodes if not by nature, had now been created. Apart from Maund who, having been hitherto on the other side, carried little weight with Lobengula, and Moffat who was tied by his semi-official position, the pro-Rhodes faction had wholly vanished. Nor can there be any serious doubt that Lobengula and his councillors regarded themselves as rid of the concession. True, the King, with his remarkable capacity for procrastination and his extra­ ordinary dislike of ever actually saying no to anything, never formally repudiated it, but he did not need to. He had never accepted the rifles. Until he did so the concession had no validity. At this juncture Rhodes intervened. He had left England in August, leaving negotiations for the charter in the hands of his agents. He was weary of being feted. Feeling rather like those American senators who in recent years have complained of being ‘steaked to death’ by Washington hostesses, he declared that he ‘saw no reason to make my interior a dustbin for anyone’. On receiving the news at Kimberley of Thompson’s flight, he realized that urgent action was needed. Once again he switched on all his charm. Once again Jameson responded. Along with Denis Doyle, an interpreter - and picking up a very reluctant Thompson at Mafeking en route - ‘the Doctor’ arrived in Bulawayo on October 17. 32 Hole’s version, op. cit., 114. Other accounts say that he rode bare-back. 33 Ibid., n. i.

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He was to stay in those insalubrious surroundings for the next four months. The saga of Jameson’s sojourn has often been told. Hastiness and impatience were to be the defects with which later he ruined both himself and Rhodes. On this occasion his conduct was precisely the opposite. Thompson had wanted Rhodes to come in person, and Lobengula seems to have expected his arrival, for which there was on the face of things much to be said. In fact Rhodes would never have put up with the seemingly interminable indabas in the goat kraal. Nor of course did he possess the medical knowledge of Jameson who with his syringe and his morphia could relieve the King’s gout and with various oint­ ments alleviate his sore eyes - and could do so moreover with inexhaustible good humour, great charm and infinite patience. One of Lobengula’s demands was to see the original concession. Jameson had brought it with him and he handed it to the Chief, taking the risk that it would be at once torn up. Lobengula, however, scarcely glanced at it, and handed the paper to Moffat for safe-keeping.34 A dangerous fence had been jumped. Jameson’s purpose now was to have the concession ratified - or at least stop positive repudiation - and to ‘get the road’ for the expedition planned by Rhodes for the occupation of Mashonaland. It was not a simple operation and it was made no easier by the numerous white rivals whom he had to buy off or otherwise placate. Early in December he managed a preliminary break-through. Lobengula gave permission to mine for gold north of Tati. He still thought in terms of a few white men ‘digging a hole’. Happy to go along with this idea, Jameson at once dispatched a small party of prospectors. It was the first mining operation of the Chartered Company and as such one of the least successful, but it served a purpose. The warm, wet, weary weeks of the Rhodesian summer passed slowly, but although Lobengula continued to treat Thompson with sarcastic contempt, he became more and more cordial to Jameson. He even made him an honorary indunay which necessitated dressing up in a cloak of ostrich feathers and other paraphernalia for a grand army review. On January 27, 1890 a party as incon­ gruous as could well be conceived turned up at Bulawayo. On November 15,1889, only three days before the receipt of Lobengula’s reply to his letter of March 26, Lord Knutsford had dispatched a lengthy missive to the Chief intended to undo the effects of that earlier letter. At Rhodes’s instigation and as a riposte to Maund and his two indunas, the letter was entrusted to a party consisting of two officers, a corporal-major and a trooper of the Royal Horse Guards in full uniform. The physical discomfort of the four military men in the heat of Bulawayo must have equalled if not surpassed that of Sir Sidney Shippard in his frock coat, and their appearance had a similar effect. Lobengula was much impressed by the scarlet coats, the glittering brass, the polished leather. The dispatch itself was worded in the worst Whitehall jargon and made no mention 34 According to Hole, op. cit., 116, this episode occurred on Jameson’s arrival. J. G. McDonald, Rhodes, a Life, 117, dates it on November 28.

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THE CONCESSION AND THE CHARTER 1888-89

at all of Rhodes, referring only to the now almost forgotten names of Rudd’s mission. But any doubts that Lobengula might have had about its meaning were forestalled by Jameson, who substituted a version of his own. In this the unqualified support of the Queen for Rhodes and the charter was strongly emphasized. Moreover, rumours of a Portuguese incursion from the east and a Boer trek from the south were made the most of by Jameson to influence the King’s mind. A day or so later ‘the Doctor’ informed the Chief that the operations north of Tati had yielded no result. Lobengula replied that he had better look somewhere else. Might he go east, asked Jameson, since any move further north would inconvenience the Ndebele kraals? Aware by now of Selous’ plan for the Pioneer Column35 he showed on a map the proposed north east route to Mashona­ land. The King, unpredictable as ever, agreed. Would he supply some of his own men to help to cut the road for the wagons? Again the surprising answer was yes.36 The only condition was that Jameson should himself accompany the party. After four exhausting months Jameson had now got as much as he could expect. ‘Given the road’ on February 13, he departed next day with Thompson for the south. Within twenty-four hours the King appeared to vacillate once more. He summoned his indunasy the military envoys, Moffat, Colenbrander and Doyle. How, he grumbled, was he to answer the contradictory letters of March 26 and November 15 from the Great White Queen? In the end he sent a temporizing reply which neither confirmed nor denied the Rudd Concession, but he still declined to take over the arms and ammunition.

35 See Chapter 5. 36 Hope, op. cit., 125.

61

CHAPTER 5

The Pioneer Column 1889-90

When Rhodes returned to South Africa in September 1889 it was clear that he had to act as quickly as possible to occupy Mashonaland. His vast plans for Barotseland, Katanga, Nyasaland, Manicaland and a sea port in Mozambique depended on this break-through. But he could not move in before the dry season of the following year. At first, doubtless for financial reasons, he envisaged a comparatively modest expedition. He recruited an élite group of twelve men of character and ability as the nucleus; they were known as Rhodes's ‘apostles’. Obviously they could not go alone without an armed escort. Temporarily enrolled in the British Bechuanaland Police, they were to be pro­ tected, so Rhodes planned, by a specially raised troop of one hundred of that corps financed by the Chartered Company. The ‘apostles’ arrived at the police training centre at Elebe in Bechuanaland on November 9. Other counsels soon prevailed. A new character at this juncture appears on the scene. Frank Johnson, son of a Norfolk country doctor, was only twentythree, but he had already had an adventurous career. He had served on the Warren Expedition at the age of eighteen. Along with three friends, Henry Borrow, Maurice Heany who was American, and Ted Burnett, he had formed in 1887 a syndicate called ‘the Great Northern Trade and Gold Exploration Company*, with the object of obtaining concessions from Khama and Lobengula. He succeeded with Khama, but six months of weary waiting at Bulawayo produced nothing except a fine of j£ioo for witchcraft. From that moment onwards Johnson had it in for Lobengula, whom he regarded as treacherous, murderous, unreliable - and formidable. Subsequently he and his friends were in­ volved in various complicated company transactions and he became Managing Director of the Bechuanaland Exploration Company, one of the two commercial concerns through which Cawston and Lord Gifford operated. In the course of their sell-out to Rhodes, Johnson found himself jettisoned without compensation for his own claims.

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THE PIONEER COLUMN

1889-90

He was furious, but meanwhile early in 1889 he had joined up with Selous in the Selous Exploration Syndicate, the object of which was to secure conces­ sions in Mashonaland direct from the chiefs concerned. Selous set out by boat from Cape Town to Quelimane in July 1889, and thence to Tete, Zumbo and the mountain which he named Mount Darwin. He obtained mineral concessions in the Mazoe valley area from two leading headmen of the Makorikori tribe. Part of his purpose was to discover whether Mashonaland could be occupied from the east via the Zambesi. We have seen how, earlier in the year, while in London, he had poured cold water on Rhodes's admittedly very vague plan of entering via Bulawayo. Selous was still sure that this would be disastrous, but he now realized that the Zambesi was not a possible alternative. He returned to Cape Town at the beginning of December convinced of three things: first, that the alternative route must be found from the south; secondly, that the Portuguese had penetrated much further west than had hitherto been appreciated; thirdly, that the area of Mashonaland which he had visited recognized no alle­ giance whatever to Lobengula. During Selous' absence Johnson, Heany and Borrow from mid-November on­ wards were in close touch with Rhodes, who saw that they could be useful to him. He offered to reserve 3,000 shares for them in the Chartered Company and to buy them plus Selous out of the Selous Exploration Syndicate. The great man was in a state of anxiety. Jameson had been at Lobengula's kraal since late October, but no clear news had arrived. Rhodes was unsure how to proceed. Johnson convinced him that Lobengula's military power was too strong to risk a peaceful expedition to Mashonaland via Bulawayo. Instead Johnson proposed a military coup - 500 trained ex-members of the South African police and other forces to be raised at Rhodes's expense in order to make a dash for Bulawayo and either kill the King or hold him as a hostage; the joint reward of success for Johnson and Heany was to be ¿ 150,000 and 50,000 morgen of land together with all captured horses and cattle. The 500 were also to receive various land and prospecting rights. This crazy scheme was taken sufficiently seriously by its two promoters to have it all set out in a rather loosely worded contract, a copy of which survives in the National Archives at Salisbury.1 In the same place can be found Johnson’s own account of the episode12 intended as a part of his autobiography, Great Days, which came out in 1940. The passage was suppressed at the request of Sir Godfrey Huggins, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, on the ground that it would do harm at a moment when Germany was trying to stir up African opinion against the British.3 According to Johnson the contract, which is dated December 7, was actually signed by Rhodes and witnessed by Rutherfoord 1 NAR JO3/2. The document and the names of the witnesses and signatories are typed. 2 Ibid., JO3/6. 3 Johnson had in fact published this story in the Cape Times of September 12, i93°> but it attracted no particular attention.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Harris. He claims that the scheme was only frustrated by Heany, who talked too loudly in his cups in the presence of the Rev. E. D. Hepburn, Khama’s missionary at Shoshong. Hepburn passed it on to Sir Sidney Shippard, who rushed to Cape Town to inform Sir Henry Loch, who summoned Rhodes, who denied all knowledge in public but privately told Johnson that the deal was off. This story has been closely analysed by Robert Cary in Charter Royal, pages 54-8. It is clearly a fabrication. The dates do not fit and journeys of impossible celerity have to be presupposed. Moreover, the original contract has never been recovered from its burial place along with Johnson’s other papers in the garden of his house in Jersey, whence he fled to escape the Germans in 1940. So there is no evidence beyond Johnson’s word that it was ever witnessed and signed. Mr Cary considers that it almost certainly was not. The contract purports to be with Rhodes as representing the Chartered Company. Rhodes could be very reckless, but it is scarcely credible that even he would have committed without consultation such pillars of respectability as Grey and the two ducal directors to an illegal foray involving the likelihood of a major political scandal and the certainty of spending more than a seventh of the whole capital of the Company. As Mr Cary suggests, it is much more likely that the contract was a very rough draft, formulated by two over-enthusiastic young men as a result of frequent talks with Rhodes in which many hypothetical plans were tossed into the arena. There is no need to doubt that a filibustering expedition was one of these. Six years later the Jameson Raid showed that such an idea was by no means alien to Rhodes’s moral outlook, but it also showed the limits to his imprudence. There were no contracts signed, sealed and delivered; and, far from having committed the Chartered Company, Rhodes had to resign his post as Managing Director and his place on the Board when the raid failed. There is other evidence that a military solution was being talked about at the end of 1889. J. G. M. Millais in his Life of F. C. Selous (1918), which is based on personal knowledge as well as Selous’ papers, states ‘Rhodes’ original plan was to attack Lobengula with a small force. This, Selous pointed out to him, would be certain to lead to disaster since Rhodes* information as to the strength of the Matabele was obviously incorrect.’4 Whether Rhodes, if left to himself, would ever have taken the risk of a military coup is doubtful. The chances are that he would not, but it was Selous’ advice, not alcoholic boasting by Heany, which finally put a stopper on Johnson’s plan; and Mr Cary may well be right in surmising that Johnson’s dislike of Selous and his subsequent efforts to diminish the part played by Selous in the story of the Pioneer Column were caused by being thus overruled. For Selous, who arrived in Kimberley on December 6 or 7, came up with a solution of his own - a peaceful expedition with a military escort following a route which would give the widest possible berth to Bulawayo and the Ndebele villages. His plan 4174, n. i.

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THE PIONEER COLUMN

1889-90

was to cut a road eastwards from the Macloutsie river to Tuli. From there the party would bear north east through the high plateau. Once on the plateau it would head north for Mount Hampden - an eminence already familiar to Selous from a previous expedition. As far as possible, hostilities with Lobengula were to be avoided, but for the sake of security a military escort considerably larger than the hundred men envisaged earlier would be needed - not less than two hundred and fifty.56Selous offered to lead the expedition himself, and by December 9 the broad outline had been agreed between Selous, Johnson, Heany and Borrow on the one side and Rhodes on the other. The plan had obvious advantages over anything else hitherto proposed. Selous was a semi-legendary figure, well known and much admired both in South Africa and Britain. His book, A Hunter s Wanderings in Africa published in 1881, had been a best-seller. He seemed the personal embodiment of the contemporary romantic attitude towards the far flung bounds of empire; the crack shot, the big game hunter, the self-sufficient hero who could spend months on his own in the bush, courageous, chivalrous, imperturbable - in fact just the man whom Englishmen liked to regard as typical of their nation, though in reality nothing of the sort. If the names of Grey and the two dukes added respectability to the Chartered Company, that of Selous gave glamour and éclat to the Pioneer Column. Rhodes could not have been unaware of this aspect when he made his choice, but there was of course an even more important point. No other man possessed the prestige, confidence or expertise to lead an expedition through country which had been so little explored and was so little known. There was one minor difficulty. Selous, whether from conviction of the truth or from a desire to enhance the value of the concessions which he had obtained, persisted in arguing that Lobengula had no suzerainty over the eastern part of Mashonaland and even proposed to write a series of newspaper articles to that effect. Rhodes had to do much work ‘on the personal’, as his phrase was, to persuade Selous to the contrary. But he succeeded at the modest cost of ¿2,000 from his private funds. Johnson, Heany and Borrow also agreed to abandon their rights in the Selous Exploration Syndicate in return for suitable compensation. It was at this stage that Johnson entered into his celebrated contract with the Chartered Company. His published version of this affair is no less dubious than his unpublished story of the military coup, although it has been re­ peated in book after book about Rhodes and Rhodesia. According to Great Days* Johnson was breakfasting in the Kimberley Club on December 22 when Cecil Rhodes, arriving a few minutes later, ‘looked vaguely at me and then suddenly recollecting me, silently sat down at my table’. They discussed, so Johnson says, the problem of occupying Mashonaland. Sir Frederick Carrington had told Rhodes that 2,500 men was the minimum military force needed. This 5 This was at any rate better than the figure advised by Sir F. Carrington - 2,500 which Rhodes rejected as financially ruinous. 6 94, et sq.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

could not cost less than £ 1,000,000. Rhodes was in no position to raise more than £250,000. Then, Johnson says, ‘purely from a desire to cheer up Rhodes I suddenly broke in ... “Why, with 250 men I could walk through the country” Rhodes asked him whether he meant it. ‘My one idea1, Johnson claims, had been to cheer up a worried man and I might just as well have said twenty-five men as 250.’ But he replied that he did mean it. ‘How much will it cost?’ asked Rhodes and Johnson answered that, if Rhodes would give him a room and plenty of foolscap, he would have the figure by lunch time. Johnson continues that ‘a very brief “appreciation of the situation” ’ convinced him that the route must avoid ‘the existing trade route through the heart of the Matabele country’. It must instead go ‘well to the eastward of the occupied part of Matabeleland*. After four hours of arithmetical calculation he came back with a figure of £94,000. His story goes on that Rhodes at once agreed; but that Johnson, detesting the names of Gifford and Cawston on the Board, refused to act as a servant of the Company; that Rhodes having departed to Cape Town, summoned Johnson to see him there on December 28, and, after a long haggle, agreed to the deal on the basis of Johnson being an independent contractor rather than an employee. It is a pity to tarnish what Sir Winston Churchill calls ‘these gleaming toys of history’, and no doubt there is a substratum of veracity buried somewhere in Johnson’s story. He certainly did operate as an independent contractor and the sum of £94,000 was not far off the mark. But the whole impression is wrong. He had been engaged for many weeks before December 22 in negotiations with Rhodes who, far from recollecting him suddenly, must have known him very well indeed by then. The suppressed account in Johnson’s own book of the proposed military coup would in itself have contradicted this part of his story. As for the idea that Johnson conceived the eastern route into Mashonaland, this was clearly an attempt to steal the credit from Selous who had successfully persuaded Rhodes to adopt that particular plan on December 9 at the latest. Indeed by that date the scheme for the occupation of Mashona­ land had been largely worked out. Johnson may have done some final financial calculations after breakfast with Rhodes at Kimberley on December 22, and he may have had a row with Rhodes about Gifford and Cawston six days later in Cape Town, but this hardly justifies the romantic and egotistical version given in his autobiography.7 ’That version is effectively destroyed by Robert Cary, Charter Royal, Chapter II. It first appeared in 1918 when Johnson wrote some reminiscences in Vol. Ill of the Royal Sussex Herald (Lahore 1918), the journal of the regiment in which he served during the First World War. It finds no place in any of the numerous books on Rhodes and Rhodesia published before that date, but it is reproduced in most subsequent books and seemed to have gained renewed authority from being repeated in Johnson's article in the Rhodesia Herald on September 12, 1930, and in Great Days., 1940. It is perhaps significant that Marshall Hole, whose Making oj Rhodesia, 1926, is much the most reliable account of these events, makes no mention at all of the story.

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THE PIONEER COLUMN

1889-90

However, a contract dated January 1, 1890 was undoubtedly made by Johnson with the Chartered Company. He undertook, in return for £87,500, together with 80,000 acres of land and 20 gold claims for each of 12 friends to be nominated by him, to construct a good wagon road from Palapye to Mount Hampden on or before July 15, 1890, and to occupy ‘a certain portion of the territory which is included in the Company's sphere of operations until the 30th day of September 1890 at which date the said Company shall be bound to relieve the said Contractor of all further responsibilities'. The contractor's ‘staff’ - the tech­ nical name of the Pioneer Corps - were to receive 15 gold claims each together with the right to occupy 3,000 acres of land. Nobody seems to have bothered about the not unimportant point that the Rudd Concession, the sole authority for the whole enterprise, made no grants of land to the Chartered Company. Although the contract was in Johnson's name alone, there was an agreement to share the profits with Heany and Borrow, though not with Selous. Johnson later claimed to have made £20,000 on the deal, but whether this represented his share or had to be divided with his partners is not clear. Whatever his defects as a chronicler, Johnson had plenty of assets as an organizer. He was a pusher and a hustler. Rhodes did not always rightly judge his man, but on this occasion he picked a winner. Dark, squat, broad shouldered, with a voice like a foghorn, Johnson set about his task of supplying men, food and transport with immense energy. He intended to keep to his contract and he succeeded. The first problem was to recruit the Pioneers themselves. This was one of Johnson’s responsibilities, but Rhodes took the keenest interest in the personnel. He wanted the Corps to be a cross section of Cape Colony Society from every walk of life, with a strong emphasis on the British side, but with some Afrikaners as well. Nor was it to be confined to Cape Colony. The Boer republics and Natal were also represented. In the words of Lockhart8 ‘they in­ cluded farmers, artisans, miners, doctors, lawyers, engineers, builders, bakers, soldiers, sailors, cadets of good family and no special occupation, cricketers, three parsons and a Jesuit’. There were some two thousand applicants, and less than a tenth were chosen. Opinions about their quality differed. Marshall Hole, a sound historian but conditioned by all his past to take a benevolent view, said that ‘no finer corps d'elite than the British South Africa Company’s Police and the Mashonaland Pioneers has ever been raised’. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Labouchère, who hated Rhodes, described them as ‘border ruffians of Hebraic extraction’. In between, Victor Morier, son of the British Ambassador in St Petersburg and himself a trooper, thought that they were ‘on the whole an excellent body, but neither the police nor the pioneers are quite all we heard from the enthusiasts in London ... chiefly miners, etc. thrown out of employment by the smash of the Johannesburg goldfields, a sprinkling of army and navy deserters, clerks, etc.' There had indeed been a disastrous slump on the Rand, 8 Rhodes, 180.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

which may have explained in part the rush of candidates. Major Leonard, another participant, observed: ‘Such a mixed lot I never saw in my life, all sorts and conditions from the aristocratic down to the street arab, peers and waifs of humanity mingling together like the ingredients of a hotch-potch.’9 Perhaps ‘a mixed lot’ is the best description. This was in one sense Rhodes’s intention; he wished to create a colony of settlement which from artisans upwards would be self-sufficient - a microcosm of white society. Later vast areas of the African map north of the Limpopo were to be coloured red, but none of the British possessions thus transiently acquired would have quite this character; the white men who were to govern in most of the territories till the early 1960s were less differentiated socially and less dug in. Of course there were exceptions - landowners in Kenya for example - but in general it was a world of missionaries, civil servants, merchants and business executives without real roots in their tem­ porarily adopted countries - more like the British Raj in India after the Mutiny than the American colonies or the Dominions in the Antipodes. As in those latter countries the Whites of southern Zambesia had come there to stay, but the in­ digenous population was there to stay too, and it was both more numerous and less vulnerable than the Red Indians or the Aborigines. Perhaps the nearest parallel to the situation was the arrival of the 1820 settlers in the western part of Cape Colony. This too had been a planned settle­ ment made with the authority of the British Government. This too had a basically similar purpose - to preserve a vital strategic interest on the cheap; and it was to be that very same interest, the route to India which seventy years later, in­ directly and at many removes, conditioned Lord Salisbury’s reaction to Rhodes’s plan for the Pioneers. Finally, to make the parallel even closer, the Pioneers of 1890 did not think of themselves as agents of British global policy any more than the settlers of 1820 did. Each body of men had its own mixed and divergent motives for joining in these strange adventures. There has been in Rhodesia and elsewhere a certain amount of hagiography about the Pioneers. This has provoked the inevitable denigratory riposte. In fact the men who marched in the column were for the most part neither heroes nor villains. A few were idealists who believed that they were bringing progress and protection to the timid Mashona, victims of Matabele ferocity - ‘romantics with the strenuous Puritan romanticism of the Victorians, of Charles Kingsley and Arnold of Rugby’, in the words of Philip Mason. At the other end, a very few may have been reckless adventurers of the sort immortalized by Kipling in The Lost Legion (1895).

’Arthur Leonard, How we made Rhodesia, 1896, 26. He is referring specifically to the British Bechuanaland and British South Africa Company Police, not the Pioneers, but all three bodies were much the same.

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THE PIONEER COLUMN 1889-90

We’ve laughed at the world as we found it Its women and cities and men From Sayyid Burgash in a tantrum To the smoke-reddened eyes of Loben, (Dear boys!) We’ve a little account with Loben.

The great majority were drawn above all else by the lure of the gold of Ophir and the chance of making a fortune. No doubt the charisma of Rhodes, the sheer excitement of entering these unknown lands, the feeling that they were promoting the destiny of Britain, that they were part of a great surging movement of progress, that the future belonged to them, all played a part too. At an early stage the question of the military escort had to be reviewed. The authorities at Cape Town were convinced that 250 was not enough. Rhodes, though acutely conscious of the cost, felt obliged early in March 1890 to double the number and also to accept Sir Henry Loch’s nominee as Commander, Lieutenant Colonel E. G. Pennefather of the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoon Guards, with Captain Sir John Willoughby, Bt., of the Royal Horse Guards as secondin-command. The detachment of 500 which guarded the Pioneer Column became the nucleus of the British South Africa Company’s Police. Both corps were to be under military discipline, and Johnson, who became a Major, insisted that the Pioneer commissions should be signed by the High Commissioner represent­ ing the Queen, as well as by Rhodes on behalf of the Company.1011 The collecting of stores and transport, the recruiting of the Pioneers, the doubling of the armed escort inevitably took time, and time was precious. The dry season in Rhodesia normally lasts from late April to late November. No one could be sure how long the journey would take. Added impetus for haste was given by rumours of a Boer trek from the Transvaal organized by one Louis Adendorff. This threat was to vex the Chartered Company off and on for over a year, and it was not finally scotched until June 1891 when Jameson had a confrontation with its new leader, Colonel Ferriera.11 For the moment, however, it diminished. Loch and Rhodes met Kruger and Steyn (President of the Orange Free State) on March 12, 1890 at Blignaut’s Pont on the Vaal River, and Kruger, aware that he had not got a legal leg to stand on, agreed to discourage the movement. While the expedition was being organized, a further difficulty emerged. No one can know for certain quite what Lobengula thought was the quid pro quo for his rifles, ammunition and armed steamer on the Zambesi, none of which he had yet accepted. Probably he envisaged a relatively small number of white men digging ‘a hole’ in the ground rather like the miners on the Tati who had given him no particular trouble. His intelligence service - Ndebeles working 10 Ferris, op. cit., 47. 11 See Chapter 6.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

for white employers on the Macloutsie - now revealed a far bigger enterprise, a white impi of formidable strength. He began once again to have misgivings, and his position was made no easier by the ‘hawks’ who had been in the ascen­ dancy among his councillors since the liquidation of Lotje. He rounded on Doyle and Maxwell, the only remaining representatives of Rhodes and the Com­ pany after Jameson’s departure in mid-February, and told them that he had been deceived. When Selous came up in March to Palapye he found no sign of the hundred Ndebele promised orally by Lobengula to Jameson. Selous promptly rode to Bulawayo, arriving on March 17 to remonstrate with the King, who denied the promise and raised numerous objections to the proposed route of the Pioneers in spite of his earlier concordat with Jameson. Selous had once shot a hippopotamus without Lobengula’s consent and was therefore persona non grata in Bulawayo. He returned empty handed. Clearly the answer was to send Jameson once again to Bulawayo. Not sur­ prisingly he needed much persuasion, but Rhodes brought it off. Jameson agreed to go ‘as a favour’12 and left Kimberley on April 11. Selous accompanied him at Rhodes’s behest, but Jameson who knew the form with Lobengula managed to shake him off at Tati and rode on to Bulawayo alone, arriving on April 27J3 Two picturesque accounts, both of them from Jameson himself, describe his last interview.14 Lobengula declared that the only route to the interior which he would allow was via Bulawayo. Jameson reminded him of his promise. Lobengula demanded a visit from Rhodes. Jameson did not commit himself on this but said that the white impi would fight if it was not granted the road agreed by Lobengula. ‘The King told me I might make the road. Did the King lie?’ There was a long silence. Lobengula at last replied - ‘The King never lies’. Jameson answered ‘I thank the King’, and he departed at once for the south on May 2. He never saw Lobengula again. By now everything was in train for the great adventure. On May 6IS at dawn the Pioneer Corps set out from Kimberley for their long journey, the first stage being the Macloutsie River. They arrived on June 14 and camped at Grobler’s Drift (so named as the site of the death of Kruger’s unlucky emissary), some twenty-five miles east of the area where the five troops of the BSACP were concentrated under Colonel Pennefather.16 At this late moment a telegram arrived for Rhodes at Kimberley from the High Commissioner giving the final go-ahead to the expedition. He insisted, however, that both corps should be inspected and certified as militarily efficient by Major General (afterwards Lord) Methuen, Deputy Adjutant-General in South Africa. 12 Colvin, Jameson, I, 129. 13 Ibid., 130. 14 Seymour Fort, Dr. Jameson, 94-5; and Lockhart, op. cit., 182-3, quoting a memor­ andum in the papers at Rhodes House by Howard Pim, a friend of Jameson. See also Marshall Hole, op. cit., 135-7. 13 Colvin, I, 139. 16 Leonard, op. cit., 34.

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The General had already inspected the BSACP. He now inspected the Pioneers. After putting them through various exercises he had them on parade on June 24 and addressed the officers thus.17 Gentlemen, have you got maps? Yes, sir. LORD METHUEN: And pencils? the officers: Yes, sir. lord methuen: Well, gentlemen your destiny is Mount Hampden. You go to a place called Siboutsi. I do not know whether Siboutsi is a man or a mountain. Mr Selous, I understand, is of the opinion that it is a man; but we will pass that by. Then you get to Mount Hampden. Mr Selous is of opinion that Mount Hampden is placed ten miles too far to the west. You had better correct that: but perhaps on second thoughts, better not. Because you might be placing it ten miles too far to the east. Now good-morning, gentlemen.

lord methuen: the officers:

Encouraged no doubt by this interesting disquisition, the Pioneer Column next day ponderously lumbered forward with its hundred wagons, oxen enough to furnish two spans for each, and ‘a respectable mob of slaughter cattle’.18 Three days later it joined up with a Troop of the BSACP, a hundred strong commanded by Captain Heyman.19 The plan was for three Troops (A, B and C) of the mounted police to accompany the expedition. The other two (D and E) remained on the Macloutsie as a reinforcement and a rearguard. The story is not made any easier to follow by the fact that the Pioneers too were divided into Troops - in this case three, also called A, B and C; and to com­ plicate matters even further the leading Pioneer Troop for a large part of the journey was B (under ‘Skipper’ Hoste). An even more difficult matter to disentangle is the precise chain of command. There were five key figures. Johnson, who had hoped to command the expedi­ tion, found himself - much to his annoyance - demoted by the ‘Imperial Factor’. Loch’s insistence on a large military escort meant that its commanding officer was in charge of the whole column, and Johnson merely commanded the Pioneers. He was, of course, also contractor to the expedition and there was a possibility that his own financial interests which required speed would conflict with the dictates of military prudence. The situation cannot have been made any easier if Major Leonard was correct in attributing to Pennefather ‘an entire absence of tact and a furious temper’.20 There was also Selous who was, strictly speaking, merely Intelligence Officer but whose authority as a guide 17 Colvin, ibid., 140. 18‘Skipper’ Hoste’s Diary, Typescript NAR HO14/1/1, 32. 19 Ibid., 46. 29 Leonard, op. cit., 162.

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was absolute. Nor was the situation made clearer by Jameson’s presence. In theory he had no official position at all, but Rhodes in his capacity as Managing Director had conferred a power of attorney on the Doctor. This rather surprisingly seems to have made him a sort of arbitrator between Pennefather and Johnson. If they disagreed he would have the final say.21 The fifth figure of importance was Arçhibald Colquhoun, former explorer, colonial servant and journalist. He was to be the Administrator of the new colony. In the end he fell foul of both Jameson and Rhodes, and he tends to be de­ picted as a stiff conventional bureaucrat tied up with red tape and precedents. Clearly he was nothing of the sort. What typical bureaucrat would take sixty cases of whisky and thirty of champagne with quantities of pâté de foie gras and caviare as part of his baggage on a journey like this, and demand (though it is not clear that they arrived in time) ‘1,000 best Havana cigars and 1,000 good Havanna cigars for entertainment’? Indeed Colquhoun’s very presence on the expedition was due to an action which was not at all typical of a civil servant. In his Burma days he had accidentally put two letters in the same envelope to his official superior; one, correctly addressed, was a reply to certain criticisms; the second, intended for The Times correspondent, was a well in­ formed attack on governmental policy concluding with an addendum: ‘when reference is made to this by you ... see that the information cannot be traced to me’. Colquhoun was shunted at once into a humbler post. He was glad to take service under the Company. But he was restless and bored by having nothing to do as Administrator until there was something to administer. He was given the job of checking Johnson’s ‘schedules’, and early on became a source of discord. Despite the polite retrospective public observations of the members of this odd quintet, their relations were anything but harmonious at the time. If a real crisis had arisen, the obscurity of the constitutional arrangements might have been disastrous. Rhodes, the one person who in such circumstances could have given decisive orders, was, late in the day, prevented from coming. A political crisis in Cape Town had been brewing for several weeks. It resulted in an offer of the premiership. Rhodes wondered whether the post was compatible with his vast business interests, but he naturally decided that it was. The conven­ tions of the time did not require the resignation of directorships. On July 17 he accepted, but there was no chance of him accompanying the Column. Luckily, in the event all went well. On July 5 B Troop of the Pioneers under Hoste accompanied by Jameson and Selous crossed the Shashi River at Tuli. Six days later the main column followed along the road cut by the advance guard. The number of those involved varies from one account to another.22 Something under 200 Pioneers (196 is the conventional figure), including the ‘apostles’ who now amounted to thirteen, escorted by 350 mounted police and 21 Ferris, op. cit., 47. 22 In general I have followed ‘Skipper’ Hoste.

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THE PIONEER COLUMN 1889-90

followed by 400 or more Cape ‘boys’ and other ancilliaries, moved north - perhaps a thousand men. The residue of the BSACP, about 150, remained as a rear­ guard and reinforcement at Tuli. The dangerous period was the long haul through the hot steamy low veld to the southern escarpment of the plateau. Here the thick mopane bush limited visibility to a couple of hundred yards. A Ndebele impi could have seriously damaged, if it did not destroy, the four mile train of men, oxen, horses and wagons crawling slowly through unknown country which even Selous had never traversed before. The four Maxims, the two seven pounders, the Gardner gun and the two rocket tubes which, along with Henry-Martini rifles, composed the armament of the column would have been nothing like as effective in the low veld as on the open grassland of the high plateau, and there can be no doubt that a big risk was involved. The organizers of the expedition did, however, take some precautions. The drill for the nightly laager was very strict. An ingenious psychological weapon was carried by the Column as a means of striking fear into their superstitious foes. This took the form of a 10,000 candle power naval searchlight charged by a steam engine. (The earlier notion of an immense balloon had been abandoned for practical reasons.) The effect at night of these strange beams accompanied by the thud of the engine and periodic explosions of electrically fired dynamite cartridges may well have caused the Ndebele scouts, who were never far away, to pass on alarming stories of white men’s magic to Lobengula. Whatever the reason the King, though under severe pressure to go to war, never gave the order to attack. Possibly he was placated to some extent by the arrival on June 14 of two snow white pedigree bulls as a present from the Duke of Abercorn. It was a very belated present. The Duke, to the horror of ‘Matabele’ Thompson at Cape Town, had in the first instance sent two black bulls. These were promptly returned; black to the Ndebeles meant war, white meant peace, and Albert Grey was given the task of selecting substitutes. True, the bulls, unaccustomed to the coarse and scanty pasture of Matabeleland, expired after three months, but by then the Column had reached its objective. However, it is more likely that Lobengula was actuated above all else by the knowledge that even a victory over the Pioneers would in the end be fatal. On June 30, while the Column was between the Macloutsie and Shashi Rivers, Jameson received a sarcastic but ambiguous letter from Lobengula, to which he returned a diplomatic answer. On August 6, however, just as the Column was nearing the end of the dangerous first phase of its journey and was near the escarpment, Colenbrander rode up from Bulawayo with a much sharper letter. Lobengula protested that he had never given permission to dig in Mashonaland. There is some evidence that the King was making a gesture of appeasement to the war party and that he knew the message would arrive too late to affect events. Pennefather replied that he had the Queen’s orders to proceed and that he could not withdraw unless they were countermanded. Meanwhile, only four days earlier, Selous had solved the problem which had been worrying him all along — how to climb the seemingly impenetrable hills

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leading to the plateau. He discovered a narrow winding pass along which the column could safely make the thousand foot ascent. This was a great relief and he named it ‘Providential Pass’. On August 14, after four days of laboriousprogress, B Troop of the Pioneers arrived on the high veld. Hoste writes:

Our relief on leaving the hot steamy low veld, where for months we had seldom been able to see more than two hundred yards round us and arriving on the open veld with a cool invigorating breeze blowing may be imagined. A place was selected to build a fort to guard the pass. It was named Fort Victoria. Next day Hoste and a party set forth to visit and photograph the fabulous ruins of Zimbabwe which so many people had heard of, so few had seen. Compared with the first five weeks of the trek, all was now plain sailing. There was no longer any serious military threat. The going was much easier, and the climate must have been an agreeable contrast. It is hot, but not exces­ sively so by day, and the heat is tempered by cool breezes; it is quite cold, with even an occasional frost, by night. A shower or two of rain might fall, but in general the weather is dry; the haze in the sky, then as now, was the result of ash dust from bush fires. The scene was one of rolling open plains covered by a golden brown savannah, far blue horizons, herds of antelope and other game. It was a fresh, entrancing, almost magical world. The morale of the Column shot up. The rest of the journey was uneventful. Early in the morning of September ii, while the Column was crossing the Hunyani River, Pennefather, Willoughby and Captain Burnett of the Pioneers went ahead to choose a site for fortifica­ tion and settlement. The story that they mistook the kopje in the middle of what is now Salisbury for Mount Hampden is a myth; there had never been any special reason for settling at Mount Hampden, which was only chosen as a general objective because it was a landmark known to Selous and identifiable on the map. Having selected what they considered a suitable site near the Makabusi River, Pennefather and his companions camped for the night. At dawn next day the Pioneers set off again. They were met by Burnett who directed them to the place of their final laager.2 3 They arrived at 10 a.m. on September 12. The Orders of the Day announced that the name would be Fort Salisbury. Evening Orders declared that at 10 a.m. next day there would be a parade ‘to celebrate the hoisting of the British Flag’. The same Orders congratulated the Column on successful attainment of its objective and expressed special appreciation for the work among others of Selous as guide and of Heany and Hoste as com­ manders of A and B Troops. 23 Probably in the area where today First Street meets Manica Road. See E. E. Burke, ‘Fort Victoria to Fort Salisbury ...’ Rhodesiana, No. 28, July 1973, 12. This is the best modern account of the episode.

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THE PIONEER COLUMN

1889-90

At 10 a.m. on September 13, the Column paraded dismounted in full dress on what is now Cecil Square. A rough flag staff had been cut by Hoste and his men. Pennefather, his ADC, Captain Shepstone, and his second-in-command, Sir John Willoughby, stood by it along with Lieutenant Tyndal Biscoe, RN, who had been in charge of the searchlight, and Canon Balfour, one of the clergy accompanying the expedition. The Canon gave a short address and an extempore prayer. The bugles sounded the Royal Salute. The Column presented arms while Tyndal Biscoe slowly ran up the Union Jack. When it reached the top the seven pounders fired a twenty-one gun salute. The bugles sounded again, and once again the Column presented arms. Pennefather called for ‘Three Cheers for Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria’. The parade was dismissed, and in the words of Hoste, on whose account this description is was now a part of the British Empire, another jewel in the British Crown’.24 ‘Pioneer Day’ as it is now called has been celebrated on September 13 from that day to this amongst the budding jacarandas on Cecil Square. It is now the only place and occasion where the Union Jack flies regularly in Rhodesia - or anywhere else in Africa.

24 Hoste’s Diary, NAR HO14/1/1, 91.

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CHAPTER 6

The Map is Drawn

1890-91

Three notables of the Pioneer Column were absent when the flag was hoisted at Fort Salisbury. Jameson, Selous and Colquhoun had left the line of route on September 3, heading east as fast as they could for Manicaland. Their foray was one part of Rhodes’s grand design for Central Africa. It must be considered in relation to similar exploits destined to shape the frontiers and future of Southern Rhodesia. Rhodes regarded the Pioneer Column in one aspect as a knife to cut through the Ndebele crust and obtain a number of juicy plums. If the Company could establish ‘effective occupation’, a vast area was available limited to the north only by the ill-defined borders of the Congo Free State and German East Africa, and to the east and west by the no less uncertain frontiers of Mozambique and Angola. ‘Effective occupation’, however, did not always mean what the words might be expected to mean. Physical occupation was not in the first instance necessary. The Pioneer Column was an exception to the general rule. What was needed were concessions and treaties with local chiefs, usually taking the form of grants of trading and mineral rights in return for cash, rifles, cartridges and a vague promise of protection against other, usually more aggressive tribes, like the Bemba or the Ngoni, whose leaders had not signed. In the chancelleries of Europe these scraps of paper, sometimes obtained in dubious circumstances from dubious chiefs, were regarded as if they were binding agreements with monarchs whose territories, like the Balkan kingdoms, formed a static multi-coloured pattern on the map. The reality on the ground was different. The African signatories were for the most part transient if not embarrassed phantoms, tipsy unstable rulers of shifting tribes with no fixed abode, incapable of binding their unpredictable successors. The concessionaires had no delusions on that score, but they also had no delusions about the utility of the documents in the world of political and commercial diplomacy. If enough of them could be secured

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THE MAP IS DRAWN

1890-91

in a particular region, a claim would be staked, which, though not in itself con­ clusive, for the map in the end had to be drawn by high-level government bargaining, at least pre-empted those of other powers or commercial companies. The hands of a foreign minister would be strengthened - if he wanted them to be strengthened - by concessions in the ownership of his co-nationals. The documents were a useful form of currency when eventually a diplomatic settlement was made and spheres of influence or protectorates were established. The map of south central Africa was drawn for the most part during the twenty-six months between October 29, 1889, when the charter was granted, and December 20, 1891, when, to Rhodes's great annoyance, the Congo Free State flag was hoisted in Katanga and that rich province finally eluded his reach. During this confused period he spread his tentacles far and wide to the north, north-east and east. By the end he had got most of what he wanted, though not all. Katanga was one of his failures, and he was unable to drive the Portuguese from the east coast and obtain either Beira or some other outlet to the Indian Ocean. Nyasaland too, though apparently secured by the end of 1891, was, by a strange chapter of accidents and conflict of personalities, destined soon to slip from the grasp of the Chartered Company, though not from British rule. In order of time Nyasaland comes first. There had been Scottish missionary settlements inspired by the example of Livingstone in the area of Blantyre since 1875. British interest was recognized by the appointment of a consul there in 1883, but the Colonial Office, for financial reasons, had no intention of establishing a protectorate. The settlements were miserably poor. In 1878 the African Lakes Company was founded, with mixed motives of philanthropy and profit; its dividend was limited and any surplus went to the missions. In 1887 war broke out between the Company and the Arab slave traders at the northern end of the lake. The cost soon exhausted the Company’s funds. By 1889 it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The situation was made more difficult by the attitude of Portugal. Lisbon was alarmed at the rising British challenge to its own cherished dream, the claim, stigmatized by Lord Salisbury as ‘archaeological’, to sovereignty over the interior north of the Zambesi. It had been vividly depicted in the famous ‘rose-coloured map’ published by the Foreign Minister, Bocage, in 1887 showing a broad band of Portuguese territory stretching from the northern half of Mozambique to the southern half of Angola. The officials in Mozambique decided to be as obstructive as possible, and, since the only known route to the missions involved porterage across Portuguese territory, they were well placed to make trouble. True, the Zambesi could be argued to be an international waterway, but at this time its large delta was believed to be unnavigable. For a whole year arms for the Lake Company were held up and other supplies only let through after the payment of extortionate dues. Nor was this all. Early in 1889 news reached England that the celebrated Portuguese explorer Serpa Pinto was setting off in the direction of the Shiré River with a force of seven hundred armed men, which seemed somewhat excessive if, as he alleged, he was merely going on a scientific expedition. At this juncture a new and important figure appears on the scene. H. M.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

(later Sir Harry) Johnston, artist, explorer, botanist, zoologist, journalist, novelist, adventurer and empire-builder was a visionary almost as exuberant and eccentric as Cecil Rhodes.1 His parents were typical of the prosperous middle class in most respects, apart from being adherents of the Irvingite or Apostolic Catholic Church. At the age of nineteen Johnston lost his faith - which was hardly surprising since it entailed believing that the Tsar wa$ Anti-Christ, the second coming was imminent and that when it arrived the Irvingites, having been swept up to Heaven, would become immortal and govern the world, along with the Son of Man, for the next thousand years.2 Johnston substituted evolution (to which he was ready to give a helping hand) for God, but he never lost the sense of being one of the elect. His interest in Africa was stimulated by a painting holiday of seven months in Tunis. There at the age of twenty-one he heard the news of Disraeli’s defeat at the general election of 1880, and he resolved to do all he could to promote the imperial cause in the face of Gladstone’s policy of contraction and retrenchment. He went on a series of botanical, zoological and artistic expeditions in Angola, the Congo, Uganda and Kenya. Anyone less like an explorer it would be hard to imagine. He was five foot three inches in height, looked almost childish and spoke in a high-pitched squeaky voice. When he gave a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was on the same platform, observed 'Quel pays où même les petits enfants sont des explorateurs'.3 Johnston compensated for these defects by talking incessantly, wittily, scandalously and outrageously. His dispatches were equally lively and unorthodox. In 1885 he entered the Consular Service and played a much publicized and controversial role in the affairs of Nigeria. When he returned to Britain in 1888 he was a celebrity. The rumour, wholly false but denied by him with tantalizing hesitation, that he had eaten human flesh in the course of duty made him a popular guest at fashionable dinner parties. He met Lord Salisbury who was a connoisseur of eccentrics. An invitation to Hatfield followed and he regaled the little Cecils in the billiard room with stories about cannibalism. The rapport that he established with the Prime Minister who was also Foreign Secretary gave a decisive impetus to his career. On August 22 The Times published a pseudonymous article by him in which he adumbrated the idea of a continuous band of British territory from the Cape to Cairo. When Rhodes later claimed it as his, Johnston insisted that he himself was the orginator.4 Early in 1889 Johnston was appointed Consul in Mozambique. It did not sound much of a post, but Salisbury knew what he wls doing when he offered it. At some moment during the past year he had made up his mind about Africa. He did not care a fig for Cape to Cairo but he had decided that the 1 See Roland Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa, 1957, for a vivid portrait. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Alex Johnston, The Life and Letters of Sir Harry Johnston^ 1929, 23. 4 Johnston to Rhodes, October 8, 1893, quoted in Oliver, op. cit., 153.

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south and east were what mattered to Britain and that, if the French had a free hand in the west, they might be distracted from Egypt. The decision to concentrate on the south east meant that Portuguese pretensions must be checked. No doubt compromises and adjustments might be made to save face and keep the House of Braganza on the throne, but there must be an end for ever to the rose-coloured map. The aspirations of Cape Colony and the susceptibilities of the Scottish voter brooding about Livingstone were more important than the goodwill of ‘our oldest ally’. Johnston was a tough operator, and a man of initiative was needed if the Nyasa missions were to be saved. He also had the asset of speaking fluent Portuguese. In May, just as he was on the verge of leaving London, he met Rhodes for the first time, at a dinner party given by a clergyman who was assistant editor of the Fortnightly.3 Among the other guests were Walter Pater and Frank Harris. Johnston at once fell under Rhodes’s spell. They talked till midnight, when their host more or less turned them out. They continued the conversation at Rhodes’s hotel till breakfast. Johnston was fascinated with the vast prospects unfolded by his companion. He learned for the first time about the proposed charter. He learned that Nyasaland, if Rhodes got his way, was to be a part of the chartered territory through the absorption of the Lakes Company. Rhodes made out a cheque for £2,000 to Johnston for expenses in securing treaties in and west of Nyasaland. A day or so later the Consul saw Salisbury and imparted some of Rhodes’s plans to him. That was the occasion when, if Johnston’s memory is correct, the Prime Minister asked ‘Who is Mr Rhodes?’.S 6 Salisbury vetoed the idea that Rhodes’s money could be used for treaty-making within Nyasaland. West of it there was no objection, but he would not commit himself to handing over Nyasaland to a chartered company. Johnston arrived in Mozambique on July 9. A navigable channel into the Zambesi had now been discovered. He went up it in a gunboat on July 28 and was soon in the lower Shiré. Serpa Pinto’s forces were close to the junction of the Ruo and Shiré Rivers, the boundary as far as Whitehall was concerned between the British and Portuguese spheres of influence. Johnston warned Pinto of the danger of war and - with no authority whatever - told the Acting-Consul, John Buchanan, to declare a British Protectorate if the Portuguese crossed the Ruo. Pinto made it clear that he meant to spread Portuguese influence to Lake Bangweolo and thence westwards to Angola. But the threat caused him to pause and return for orders from higher authority. Johnston then disappeared northwards to conclude as many treaties as he could in the general direction of Lake Tanganyika, simultaneously dispatching a London solicitor turned big game hunter, Alfred Sharpe, to do the same thing westwards from the Shiré Highlands to the Loangwa River. While he was away events moved rapidly. A skirmish between the Portuguese SH. M. Johnston, The Story oj My Life, 1923, 230. 6 Ibid., 238.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

and the Makololo tribe on the Ruo frontier prompted Buchanan to declare a Protectorate on September 25. On November 8, in pursuance of the same cam­ paign, the Portuguese under Serpa Pinto’s second-in-command crossed the Ruo. When the news reached Britain in mid-December there was a Protestant and patriotic outcry. Salisbury welcomed the opportunity and acted with Palmerstonian vigour. After the usual diplomatic moves he issued an ultimatum on January 11, 1890, backed by sending the Channel Fleet to the Tagus with sealed orders and a squadron from Zanzibar to Mozambique.7 The Portuguese backed down. It was an unconditional surrender. In Britain the ultimatum of January 1890 was soon forgotten. In Portugal it was traumatic and its shadow lies long over the years that followed. The ‘insult’ was remembered till very recently, and to this day the relevant papers in the Lisbon archives remain incommunicado. The government fell, the windows of the British consulate were stoned and members of the English colony in Oporto could scarcely walk abroad without insult. Mourners put black crape over the statue in Lisbon of Camoes whose epic poem, the Lusiads, celebrated the voyage of Vasco da Gama, and who had himself sojourned in Mozambique from 1567 to 1569. It was the end of an old song. One of the few English historians who has shown some sympathy for Portugal writes: Essentially the conflict was between two dreams, nourished on the modem equivalent of Don Quixote’s chivalric romances: small scale maps of Africa coloured in rival shades of red. Of the two, that of Rhodes and Johnston had less to commend it from an economic point of view .... The south to north drive of the British prevailed not because of its superior rationality but because they carried bigger guns and because an eccentric and idealist multi-millionaire was at hand to give it a forward push at critical time - a time when common sense personified by Goschen, Salisbury’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, was unwilling to find a mere two thousand pounds for its incidental expenses.8

Many months were to elapse before a final settlement of the Anglo-Portuguese dispute, but Nyasaland was now clearly within the British sphere. It remained to be seen whether Johnston, who was back in Mozambique soon after the ultimatum, or Rhodes, who was busy weaving his plans in Kimberley, would be the dominant force. At the moment they saw eye to eye, but this harmony was not destined to last long. Although no northern limit, apart from the frontiers of the Congo Free State and German East Africa, had been assigned to the Chartered Company, this did not mean that it could actually take possession without specific authority from the British Government. That authority would not be forthcoming unless some 7R. I. Lovell, The Struggle for South Africa^ New York, 1934, 217. 8R. J. Hammond, Portugal and Africa 1815-igio, Stanford University Press, 1966, IJ1“*-

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evidence of effective occupation could be shown. Rhodes therefore dispatched a number of emissaries to fill in the blank spaces on the map. Several foregathered at the Kimberley Club in May 1890, and a formal photograph has survived which includes some of them, along with other agents of Rhodes.9 There we can see Colquhoun, soon to leave with the Pioneers; Joseph Thompson and J. A. Grant (son of the Grant who accompanied Speke in search of the sources of the Nile) about to depart at Rhodes’s behest to Lake Nyasa and make a foray westwards to Katanga; J. W. Moir, a key figure in the Lakes Company; Harry Johnston, in a sort of smoking cap, en route to negotiate with the Foreign Office, having left behind him Alfred Sharpe also charged with the task of visiting Katanga; and finally, to complete the moustached, stiff-collared, heavily waistcoated octet, Rochfort Maguire (who may well have felt that his exploring days were over) and the Colossus himself. Apart from Jameson, Frank Johnson and Selous, there were two notable absentees. One who might have been there was Aurel Schulz, a colonial doctor of giant physique who was in Kimberley making preparations for an expedition to obtain concessions from Gungunhana, Chief of Gazaland in southern Mozam­ bique. The fact that Gazaland was regarded - and not just by Lisbon - as being well into the Portuguese sphere of influence did not of course worry Rhodes at all. The other was F. E. Lochner who had been sent months earlier in October 1889 on the thousand mile road west of Lobengula’a domains to Barotseland. In September that year Rhodes for £9,000 and 10,00010 chartered shares had purchased a concession, rather like the Rudd Concession, secured by a Kimberley trader-cum-hunter called Harry Ware in June from Lewanika, the Barotse Chief. Lochner’s task, similar to Jameson’s vis-a-vis Lobengula, was to get it confirmed. He was also instructed if time and logistics permitted to continue northwards to Katanga. Lochner obtained confirmation of the Ware Concession from Lewanika on June 27, 1890, aided by the famous missionary Francis Coillard. Lewanika’s friendship with Khama and hostility to Lobengula contributed to the result. Lochner was too exhausted and too ill to go any further north and returned to Cape Colony. One of the terms of the treaty was that a resident should be left in Barotseland to reassure Lewanika and incidentally guard the company’s interests. For various reasons this was not done, and only in 1897 did Robert Coryndon, one of Rhodes’s original apostles, take up the post of resident in Barotseland. The company was lucky not to have lost it in the interval. The three-pronged attempt to obtain Katanga ended in failure. The area was ruled by an able and ferocious tyrant called Msiri who by a combination of terrorism and military skill had built up a kingdom stretching from the Luapula River and Lake Mweru on the east to the Lualaba River on the west. Thompson never even reached Msiri’s sinister kraal ‘decorated with the rotting heads of decapitated ’Hole, op. cit., facing 131. 10 Hole, op. cit., 214. Not 100,000 as stated in Lockhart, op. cit., 239.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

victims’, as Hole puts it.11 He had to return to Nyasa, though by no means empty-handed as regards treaties with other chiefs. Sharpe who proceeded from Karonga at the northern end of Lake Nyasa managed, after many vicissitudes, to arrive in November at Msiri’s capital. He was badly received and his efforts to secure concessions and treaties were furiously rebuffed. He retired despondent to his base but he too secured many concessions from the chiefs, and the treaties obtained by'Thompson, Grant and Sharpe were to be the principal basis of the Company’s claim to the whole area between Nyasaland and Barotseland. The story goes that Msiri subsequently had doubts about rejecting Sharpe’s offer and sent a message asking him to come back, but his letter was intercepted by a British Army officer, Captain Stairs of Nova Scotian origin, who was leading a mission on behalf of the Katanga Company, an inter­ national syndicate with a charter from the Congo Free State. Stairs destroyed the letter, and proceeded to Msiri’s kraal, arriving in December. In the course of a skirmish the old Chief whose subjects were now in open rebellion was shot dead, and the whole of his domain was successfully claimed by the Congo Free State. Stairs died soon afterwards. Rhodes never forgave either him or his memory. In fact it is doubtful whether Rhodes would have been able to hold on to Katanga even if one of his men had managed to extract a concession from Msiri. The area was almost certainly within the sphere of the Congo Free State as defined in the Berlin Treaty of 1884, ans unlikely that Salisbury would have backed a palpable breach of that agreement. The same applies to Rhodes’s other failure the bid for a port on the east coast but the belief that a golden chance was missed is so deeply embedded in Rhodesian legend that the story needs to be told in some detail. Even before the final confirmation of the charter Rhodes had been most anxious to ensure that the Foreign Office did not come to an agreement with Portugal. It was, from his point of view, all to the good that Lisbon had refused Salisbury’s offer in 1888, and that negotiations were still in a state of suspense. On September 16, 1889 Rutherfoord Harris wrote from Kimberley a letter typical of many to the Company’s Secretary in London: Mr Rhodes is of the opinion that no settlement of boundaries should be made between England and Portugal, as they (the Portuguese) are attempting to get the richest field by some artificial line. All should be left to the natural civilised development of the country when ‘beati possidentes’ will be the settlement.11 12

This theme is repeated in several letters and no doubt the crisis ofJanuary 1890 was highly welcome as far as Rhodes was concerned. But on August 20, just as the Column was reaching the last leg of its journey, a development took place which greatly annoyed him. An Anglo-Portuguese Convention was signed, which though 11 Op. cit., 245. I2NAR LO5/2/0, Harris to C. H. Weatherley.

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it recognized Matabeleland, Mashonaland, the Shiré Highlands and a large slice of northern Zambesia stretching from Lake Nyasa to the borders of the Congo Free State and Angola as being in the British sphere of influence, excluded not only Barotseland west of the Zambesi but most of Manicaland. Rhodes threatened to resign his position as Prime Minister and he sent an angry letter to Harry Johnston whom he blamed most unfairly for the agreement. ‘I trace your hand all through the Portuguese treaty. It is a disgraceful treaty and I will have nothing to do with it. You have given away the whole of the west, including | the Barotse, just ceded to me and the whole of Manika.’13 Their relations were never the same thereafter. In fact Johnston, though not quite as extreme as Rhodes, was regarded as too anti-Portuguese to be allowed any say at all in the negotiations. Salisbury changed the subject in a marked manner when Johnston alluded to it, and the terms of the treaty were as much a surprise to him as they were to Rhodes. We must now revert to Colquhoun. His written instructions from Rhodes con­ tained orders to visit ‘the chief of the Manica Country and obtain ... a treaty and concessions for mineral rights in his territory’. The letter went on - ‘You will endeavour to secure the right of communication with the seaboard, reporting on the best line of railway connexion with the littoral from Mashonaland’.14 According to his widow, who subsequently remarried as Mrs Jollie, he had secret orders to seize Beira, if the opportunity arose.

As an interesting sidelight on history it may be mentioned here that the first Administrator went up to Mashonaland with the understanding (verbal and never committed to writing) that in the not unlikely event of a conflict with the Portuguese he should make a raid on Beira, in the hope that, with a fait accompli staring them in the face, the Imperial Government would not interfere.15 Mrs Jollie goes on to say that he was reluctant to do this, and that his reluctance was the reason for his being superseded later by Jameson. Colquhoun in his own memoirs does not refer to any specific secret instructions, but he was writing in 1908 and may have felt that it would be indiscreet to spell the matter out. (Mrs Jollie wrote fifteen years later and her book is in part a polemic against the Company.) Colquhoun does, however, refer to Beira.

It was expected by the Company that the British Government would support us in any concession we might have obtained ‘even down to the sea coast’, but unfortunately the position in Beira was too well defined, or at all events ,3NAR JO1/1/1, ff. 130-3, September 22, 1890. ,4NAR CT1/1/1, Rhodes to Colquhoun, May 13, 1890. ,SE. M. Tawse-Jollie, The Real Rhodesia. 1923, Rhodesian Reprint 1971, 286.

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I thought so. Had I cared to despatch a filibustering expedition to seize Beira I might have done so, but, as I was now fully aware, with the certainty that in case of accident I should be disavowed.16 The Administrator was being somewhat disingenuous and the story of events is more complicated than he suggests. After leaving the Column on September 3, probably unaware of the Anglo-Portuguese Convention of August 20, Colquhoun’s party on September 13 reached the kraal of Umtasa, Chief of Manicaland - a mountain fastness some twenty miles north of modern Umtali. Under the con­ vention it was well within the Portuguese sphere of influence. The Chief was a slippery trimmer who survived by playing off one powerful neighbour against another. Of these, two were particularly formidable. The first was Manuel Antonio de Sousa, ruler of the province of Gorongoza, a half caste Goanese prazo-holder and adventurer who had carved out a fief for himself with the assent of the Portuguese government in the northern hinterland of Beira. He was also known as ‘Gouveia’ which was the name of his capital. He was ferocious to a degree, had a large harem and generally behaved in the style of the freebooting Arab slave traders who had for generations past been the curse of east central Africa. In spite of these characteristics he possessed a commission from the Portuguese government. He had been rewarded personally for his services by the King in Lisbon, and his children were brought up in Portugal. The second neighbour (of whom Umtasa was no less terrified) was Gungunhana, Chief of Gazaland, whose kraal (where he had recently moved) was some forty miles north of the upper Limpopo. He was the eastern analogue of Lobengula to whom he was related by marriage. His tribe, the Shangaans, were, like the Ndebele, an off-shoot of the Zulus and had moved north for the same reason. From the very start Rhodes had regarded Gazaland as a second possibility for his route to the sea and, as we saw earlier, one of the many emissaries that he sent all over Africa in the course of 1890 was Dr Aurel Schulz, whose object was to secure a concession from Gungunhana. Schulz arrived in June 1890, but he found negotiation difficult. The Chief lived largely on over-proof rum which had an even worse effect on him than brandy and champagne on Lobengula. He was scarcely ever sober. However, on October 4 after much effort and many a drunken indaba Schulz secured a concession on terms very similar to Rudd’s. As far as Manicaland was concerned, on September 4 Colquhoun obtained the usual concession from Umtasa and then returned to Salisbury. The Portuguese authorities protested on the ground that Umtasa’s kraal was on their side of the frontier, but, although this was true under the Treaty of August 20, it now looked as if the Cortes would repudiate it and all would again be fluid. Rhodes authorized Frank Johnson and Jameson to reconnoitre a route from Manicaland to the sea. They set out from Salisbury on October 4. Colquhoun was furious and wrote angry letters to Rutherfoord Harris at Kimberley, thus sealing his fate as 16 A. R. Colquhoun, Dan to Beersheba., 1908, 287.

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Administrator. Jameson was Rhodes’s alter ego and Rhodes expected his sub­ ordinates to know this without being told. On one of the letters Marshall Hole scribbled a marginal note: ‘By this letter Colquhoun signed his death warrant.’17 The two men reached Pungwe Bay after numerous adventures, returning by sea to Cape Town. Johnson’s assessment of the economic assets of the route was ridiculously optimistic - ¿10 per ton from Cape Town to Salisbury; and, since the overland journey via the Missionary Road cost ¿70 a ton, the need for an eastern port seemed greater than ever. On October 15 the Cortes dissolved without having ratified the Anglo-Portu­ guese Treaty. Colquhoun did not need Rhodes’s prompting to go ahead in the process of securing treaties from the various chiefs down the Busi River to the sea. He sent a small detachment, subsequently reinforced, to Umtasa’s kraal under the command of Major Forbes, Pennefather’s second-in-command. Forbes, on November 15, aware that Gouveia along with the two Portuguese officials was planning to reassert Portuguese authority over Umtasa, boldly entered the latter’s kraal just as that double-faced potentate was parleying the Portuguese trio. He scattered Gouveia’s forces and arrested him and his colleagues. Precisely the situation envisaged in Colquhoun’s unwritten instructions (which must have been passed on to Forbes) had now arisen. A conflict - probably engineered for the very purpose - had occurred with the Portuguese. The way to Beira was open. Two days before the arrival of reinforcements and the making of the arrests Forbes had written a letter to Colquhoun which plainly shows what he planned.

Ever since Sunday [November 9] we have been so situated that within J hour of the arrival of a reinforcement we could by a sudden coup have decided the whole question of the E. Coast route ... I shall arrest Gouveia ... and with as little delay as possible start for Pungwe Bay via Sarmentó ... I am quite confident that in arresting Gouveia we are breaking completely the Portuguese power in E. Africa ... From what I hear the Gorongoza province extends right down to the sea and as Gouveia has chosen to carry arms into our territory I think we ought to retaliate if we get him by going into his.18 Two days later he wrote, ‘I hope to leave by the 20th at latest and should be at Beira by the 30th’. He set out with only ten men, but the demoralized condition of the Portuguese colonists was such that even a tiny force of determined troopers seemed capable of success. Meanwhile on November 23 Colquhoun at Salisbury received from Kimberley the news that the British Government had signed an agreement with Portugal known as the ‘Modus Vivendi’ under which frontiers were frozen as from November 14, the day before Forbes’s coup, pending the ratification of a permanent treaty. Colquhoun may well have already been uneasy about his unwritten orders ,7NAR CT1/1/3, October 4, 1890. ,8NAR A1/6/1, Forbes to Colquhoun, November 13, 1890.

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to seize Beira. The latest news made the action even less defensible juridically than it had been before. He at once sent an urgent message to recall Forbes. In Rhodesian mythology his action has been condemned as the bureaucratic loss of a golden chance to secure access to the sea and a port on the Indian Ocean. In reality it made no difference at all. Forbes had already decided, the day before Colquhoun’s message had even been sent, that the risk of a filibustering seizure of Beira was too great. The euphoria which he displayed after the coup at Umtasa’s kraal rapidly evaporated as he and his companions rode eastwards through the burning heat of Mozambique. On November 22 he sent a message to Colquhoun that he proposed merely to secure treaties from Chiefs. ‘If I get a treaty with Sencombe on whose land Beira is ... Shall write to the Governor of Beira leaving the forcible ejection, if carried out at all, to be done later.’19 Forbes did not receive Colquhoun’s orders till November 29. These not only called off the attack on Beira (which had been cancelled anyway), but also the plan to secure a treaty from Chief Sencombe. Forbes wrote:

Your despatch caught me up here and only just in time to stop me going down the Pungwe. I hope to have got boats this afternoon and should have got to Sen'combe’s tomorrow. As you heard from my pencilled note ... we had decided not to interfere with Beira itself, but to secure a treaty with Sencombe... Under these latest instructions I shall not go to him at all ... it is a great disappointment to the men being stopped just at the last moment.20 At this juncture a comedy of errors occurred. On December 3 Rhodes and Jameson at Kimberley learned for the first time, from a telegram of Colquhoun’s sent on November 23, about the arrest of Gouveia, and Forbes’s intention to occupy strategic points in Gorongoza (Gouveia’s province), ‘Note that Gorongoza reaches to sea-board including, I am informed, Beira’. There was no mention of seizing the port. Rhodes, however, was not the man to worry about the ‘Modus Vivendi’. His orders can be deduced from Colquhoun’s reply on December 4. ‘Your wire ... instructing occupation Beira etc. arrived ... I immediately sent instructions accordingly.’ It was too late. Forbes was on his way back to Fort Salisbury when he received these new orders, only a day before his return. He told Colquhoun that they could not be carried out. The rains had set in, the swampy fever-stricken area near the port would be fatal, his troopers had no boots, and Beira was heavily reinforced. On December 17 Colquhoun wired to Rhodes for permission to abandon the attempt. The Colossus had no option but to accept. Forbes wrote a long report for Colquhoun. One passage is slightly disingenuous and probably did much to perpetuate the myth that Colquhoun lost Beira.

*’NAR A1/6/1, Forbes to Colquhoun, November 22, 1890. 20 Ibid., November 29, 1890.

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THE MAP IS DRAWN iSçO-ÇT

Although I do not think that there would have been any great difficulty in taking Beira during the dry season (and in fact I think that owing to the general panic caused by our action in Manica I could have done so, had I wished and had I not received your order of 23 November not to;) I do not think it would be practicable when once the rains have set in as they have now.

This slightly glosses over the point, one of the few on which the documents are quite clear, that Forbes had decided on November 22 not to capture Beira, although Colquhoun’s order did not arrive till November 29. If anyone is to be ‘blamed’ for failure to occupy Beira, Forbes is the man, not Colquhoun. In fact no one should be blamed. It is in the highest degree unlikely that Salisbury, even before the ‘Modus Vivendi’, let alone afterwards, would have consented to such a palpable breach of international law.

The rest of the story of the attempt to secure an eastern port can be told more briefly. Rhodes was not the man to give up till events forced him. There was still the Schulz Concession from the alcoholic Gungunhana in Gazaland. Two emis­ saries from Schulz reached Kimberley with the news on December 3. Rhodes promptly sent one of them back with the money, while he made plans to send as soon as possible what really mattered - the arms and ammunition. Meanwhile Jameson in Manicaland decided on his own initiative (not orders from Rhodes, who had more sense) to trek with two companions, Denis Doyle and Dunbar Moodie, the whole way to Gungunhana’s kraal. It was a vast journey of some seven or eight hundred miles, bold, hazardous, full of hardship - and quite unnecessary. Rutherfoord Harris had already sent the arms by sea up the Limpopo, and Gungunhana was prepared to ratify the concession on February 28, two days before the Doctor and his exhausted party arrived. The fact that Jameson personally received the concession, was arrested by the Portuguese, managed to smuggle it out through Moodie and an African courier to Lourenzo Marques and picked it up again later has masked the irrelevance of his expedition. Indeed the whole operation including the Schulz Concession was irrelevant, for there was never any chance of Salisbury claiming Gazaland as part of the British sphere, despite Gungunhana’s urgent pleas, and the final treaty with Portugal in June excluded it. Four years later in 1895 the Chief was to succumb to Portuguese arms even as Lobengula had to British arms in 1893. He was imprisoned in a fortress in the Azores, was baptized in the Cathedral as Reinaldo Frederico Gungunhana in 1899 and lived till 1906. Even before securing the Gazaland Concession Rhodes had decided on yet another attempt to obtain a route to the Indian Ocean. One of the provisos in the Anglo-Portuguese Convention of August 1890 had been the building of a railway by the Portuguese from the coast to the British sphere of influence. The general principle of freedom of transit had been confirmed in the ‘Modus Vivendi’. Although the articulate element of Portugal had been in an uproar ever since the news of the arrests at Umtasa’s kraal and although a battalion

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of ‘patriotic students’ (the words were not in those days self-contradictory) had sailed for Beira at the end of 1890, Rhodes decided while in London in February 1891 to offer even further provocation. Interpreting freedom of transit as the right to build irrespective of Portuguese consent a road from the head of the navigable Pungwe River to Manicaland, he sent to Beira early in April a ship, the Norseman, with a party of a hundred African road builders. It also contained 230 tons of food and equipment including an American stage coach. The commander of this foray was Captain Sir John Willoughby, 5th (and last) baronet, an officer in the Blues and owner of an estate in Oxfordshire. Known for his arrogant demeanour, he was well qualified to cause the sort of ‘incident’ which would by the prevailing rules of the diplomatic game oblige the British Government to intervene in support of the Company. It was recognized that Willoughby might have to risk being fired upon. He might even be killed. ‘Not a bit, not a bit,’ Rhodes squeaked in his excited falsetto, ‘they’ll only hit him in the leg, only hit him in the leg.’ In the event the baronet survived unscathed. The Governor of Mozambique forbade entry unless Willoughby promised not to incite the Africans of the interior against the Portuguese. This not unreasonable condition he refused to accept and on April 15 he ordered the Norseman with its accompany­ ing tugs to raise steam and proceed up the river. A Portuguese gunboat thereupon fired a blank shot as a warning. The Norseman promptly hove to and Willoughby amidst catcalls and hoots from the Portuguese soldiery was taken to see the Governor. Meanwhile the tugs were impounded and the flags hauled down. Willoughby was at once released and allowed to return in the Norseman to Cape Town, having thus obtained the necessary insult to the Union Jack. Privately Salisbury considered him entirely in the wrong and said so, giving short shrift to a protest made on his behalf by a friend (Lord Granby).21 But the Governor’s action could be regarded as a breach of the ‘Modus Vivendi’. Negotiations with Portugal had reached a point where a little pressure might bring the seemingly interminable proceedings to a head. It therefore suited Salis­ bury to protest to Lisbon. He was reinforced by an outbreak of indignation in Cape Town. At this juncture the Portuguese really did put themselves in the wrong. Late in April 1891 the Chartered Company, after repeated adjurations beginning as early as December 18, had at last withdrawn from Massi Kessi. Their presence had all along been a palpable breach of the ‘Modus Vivendi’. On May 4 a Portuguese detachment of two hundred white and three hundred black soldiers under command of Colonel Ferriera took possession of the fort. They were a detachment from a larger force which had been marching from the coast since February but had halted on the Pungwe riddled with malaria; the unfortunate students, who were unaccustomed to the deadly climate, had died like flies, and it was only a hardened body of regulars that reached Massi Kessi. Captain Heyman with a small force was not far away protecting Umtasa’s 21 Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury, Vol. IV, 1932, 74.

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kraal. Colonel Ferriera had orders to expel the British from Manicaland. He presented an ultimatum, but Heyman stood his ground, and, in the ensuing skirmish on May 11 at Choua Hill some five miles from the kraal, inflicted a humiliating defeat on Ferriera, although the Company’s forces consisted of only fifty men and one obsolete seven pounder gun. There is little doubt that at this juncture Heyman’s troops could have reached Beira unhindered, such was the general collapse of Portuguese morale; and, having first blown up the fort at Massi Kessi, he sent a patrol under Lieutenant Fiennes for just this purpose. Fiennes, however, after only two days encountered Bishop Knight-Bruce, the Bishop of Mashonaland, who informed him that the Military Secretary to the High Commissioner and Governor of the Cape, one Major Sapte, was close behind with orders (admittedly many weeks old) to retreat at once. Fiennes felt obliged to turn back and report to Heyman. Rhodes was indignant. It is alleged that he said either to Fiennes or Heyman later - ‘But why didn’t you put Sapte in irons and say he was drunk?’22 Their reply is not recorded, but they could perhaps fairly have asked whether in that case the same treatment would not have been necessary for the Bishop too. In reality there was no opportunity missed. Rhodes could not have got away with this last effort to seize a port on the Indian Ocean any more successfully than he had with his previous efforts through Forbes, Jameson and Willoughby. Salisbury had already initialled a new convention with the Portuguese Foreign Minister who, after the disasters of the past year, was only too anxious to come to an agreement. It was ratified by the Cortes a month later, on June 11, 1891, and Rhodes’s ambitions for an eastern outlet under his own control were finally extinguished. As Salisbury acidly pointed out, article I of the charter defined the Company’s sphere as west of the Portuguese dominions. ‘By the acceptance of that definition the company admitted the existence of Portuguese dominions between Matabeland and the sea ... If they should now attempt to deny the existence of such dominions ... they would thereby nullify their own claims to territory described as bounded by them.’23 The Anglo-Portuguese Convention which was formally ratified by both powers on July 3 finally settled the eastern and north-eastern boundaries of the British sphere of interest. The Portuguese gave up the corridor to Angola, which had been conceded to them in 1890, also the Manicaland plateau, though they retained Macequece. Southern Rhodesia thus acquired what has come to be one of its main holiday areas, including Umtali, the Vumba mountains and Melsetter, all of which would have gone to Portugal under the 1890 Treaty. In return, the Portuguese obtained a then useless area which, however, included the site where the Caborabassa dam was to be built over seventy years later and Britain renounced any claim to Gazaland. The Portuguese agreed to freedom of transit 22 Colvin, Jameson, I, 205, n. 1. 23 R. I. Lovell, The Struggle for South Africa, New York, 1934, 242 quoting C6495, No. 199 (End.).

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from the coast to the interior and to the construction of a railway, but Britain dropped the humiliating clause of the earlier Treaty which gave her the right to appoint the consultant engineer. This may have been an error. It was not till 1898 that the railway - and a very unsatisfactory one - reached Umtali. Also dropped was a clause which had caused much of the trouble in Lisbon the previous year, forbidding the Portuguese to alienate any of its African territory without British consent. Instead Britain simply had the first refusal. The only frontier which remained still uncertain was the western boundary of Barotseland with Angola. Provision was made for arbitration and eventually in 1903 the King of Italy agreed to act. His decision created the line drawn on the map today, and since it gave equal dissatisfaction to both parties, it was probably not unjust. The only remaining external threat to the company’s territory south of the Zambesi was the Transvaal. The so-called Adendorff trek has been mentioned in an earlier chapter.24 Kruger’s official discouragement did not end the matter, although no move was made during 1890. There was much unrest in the Republic at the time. Foreigners, or uit landers, to use the Afrikaans term, were buying up land on a vast scale. The Boer farmers, as so often in the past, were once again looking northwards to escape from the alien modern world and to preserve their own archaic pastoral way of life. Indeed, it is surprising that an expedition to occupy Mashonaland, or at least a part of it, had not been mounted earlier. The area on which the trekkers fixed their eyes was known as Banyailand. ‘Banai’ is a corruption of the word vanyai, the name given to the people living on the northern edge of the low veld. They were in fact a branch of the Shona. It was, however, believed at this time that they were in some way separate or distinct. Adendorff and a coadjutor, one J. du Preez, on the strength of some highly doubtful concessions, tried to raise recruits in the Transvaal for a revived trek and the creation of an independent 'Banyailand Republic’. Their activities caused much alarm to the Chartered Company in the early months of 1891. But the danger that Hofmeyr might pledge the Bond in Cape Colony to support the trek disappeared. He was soon satisfied that legally the Transvaal Government had a duty to prevent it, and, if they did not, the British Government was entitled to repel the invaders by force. The High Commissioner at Cape Town issued a strong warning. So did Kruger, although there was a good deal of sym­ pathy for the trekkers in Pretoria, and at one time it looked as if something like a thousand men with four hundred wagons were gathering for the journey. This figure fell, however, to a hard core of a hundred with thirty or forty wagons. An attempt was made by their commander, Commandant Ignatius Ferriera, to cross the Limpopo at Main Drift on June 24, 1891. He forded the river with five companions. Inevitably the ubiquitous Dr Jameson was there to meet him. Ferriera was arrested. Jameson, releasing him on parole, crossed the 24 Ch. 5, p. 69.

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THE MAP IS DRAWN

1890-91

river with him and addressed the trekkers on the south bank of the river. They were, he said, welcome on the Company’s terms, but if they tried to set up an independent republic the result would be war. A few came over on these terms. The rest melted away to the south. Their bluff had been called. Over the years a sizeable number of Afrikaners have emigrated to Rhodesia and their descendants are still there, but no further effort was made to found a new Boer republic. The frontier was closed. Jameson had brought the end to another old dream. In the same month that the Portuguese vision of a broad trans-African band from Mozambique to Angola had vanished for good and all, the no less potent Afrikaner aspiration of an endless trek to the north was Anally frustrated. The British sphere of influence in Central Africa as far as foreign states were concerned had been effectively delimited by the middle of 1891, apart from the Barotseland frontier with Angola. What had not yet been settled was the allocation of authority within that sphere. Rhodes, of course, hoped to acquire the whole of it for the Chartered Company. The difficulty was the position of the Lakes Company in Nyasaland. Efforts to absorb it or take it over had made little progress during 1889 and 1890. The directors of the Lakes Company were determined to keep control in their own hands. Harry Johnston, who des­ cribed them as a 'miserly, fanatical, uncultured set of Glasgow merchants’, was no less determined to secure it for himself. In April 1890, however, the Chartered Company agreed to allow the Lakes Company £9,000 p.a. to administer Nyasaland, pending an ultimate amalgamation under which Nyasaland would be controlled by the Glasgow Board of the Lakes Company. When Rhodes’s solicitor, Hawksley, informed the Foreign Office in November of this arrangement, Sir Percy Anderson, head of the Africa Department, pointed out that it was illegal, for the Lakes Company as yet had no charter and there­ fore no administrative powers. He suggested that the Chartered Company, instead of subsidizing a body which had no power to use the money, should subsidize the British Government which had the power, but might well be unable to extract a grant from Parliament. There was to be an important quid pro quo. Although there was a general promise to extend in the course of time the sphere of the charter to the area north of the Zambesi, Salisbury had not yet actually authorized this step and he could have delayed it as long as he pleased. He now agreed to an immediate extension. Rhodes hastened to London early in February 1891 and after much hard bargaining he and Johnston secured an agreement with the Foreign Office on February 8 or 9 under which Nyasaland, with frontiers defined much as they are today, became a Protectorate administered by the Foreign Office, while all the British territory to the west came under the Company’s charter. Johnston was not only to be Commissioner for the new Protectorate, he was also to be Administrator of the whole of the Company’s territory north of the Zambesi, a position, as Professor Oliver describes it, ‘both of extraordinary responsibility and extraordinary licence’. It was perhaps inevitable that Rhodes and Johnston would quarrel sooner or

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later. The money for the administration of Nyasaland was never enough, even though in practice a substantial amount was added by the Treasury to the Company’s subsidy. In March 1893 Johnston had to go to Cape Town and ask Rhodes for more. Rhodes agreed to raise the subsidy to £17,500 f°r ^ve Y621^ and provide £4,500 towards the cost of steamers on Lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika, in return for which all Crown land and all unalienated mineral rights were to go to the Company. This agreement was sent lo the Foreign Office for ratification. On August 24 the Foreign Office presented it to the London Office of the company with two important amendments, first that the subsidy should continue for ten years not five, secondly that the whole of it ahould be spent in Nyasaland. Rhodes, apparently at the suggestion of Rutherfoord Harris, that singularly illchosen counsellor, jumped to the conclusion that Johnston had been in secret communication with the Foreign Office behind his back. He sent an insulting message early in October to the unfortunate Commissioner, accusing him of dis­ honesty and disloyalty, and at once cancelled the extra subsidy. ‘I am not going to create with my funds an independent King Johnston over the Zambesi,’ he told Harris. Johnston had in fact been wholly guiltless. Rhodes was in the habit of hurling wild accusations at his subordinates. The vast majority of his friends, satellites and toadies were used to this sort of treatment. Whether or not they forgave it, they were ready to forget, or to pretend to forget. Johnston neither forgot nor forgave. For him it was the end of the road. He dispatched a withering letter of 4,000 words to Rhodes with copies to Lord Rosebery, who was now Foreign Secretary, and the London Office of the company, demanding investiga­ tion, retraction and apology. He never got it, but Rhodes evidently came to the conclusion that he had been misinformed, if we can judge from a relatively polite, but brief note in February 1894, suggesting a meeting. Johnston neither answered nor met him. And at that moment, just when his seemingly hopeless deficits appeared to have put him at Rhodes’s mercy, the Foreign Office, after years of ignoring every plea for funds, suddenly gave way and agreed to finance the impoverished Protectorate. Rhodes had not reckoned on this. He meant to wait till the financial position was desperate and then offer to take over the govern­ ment - rather like foreclosing on a mortgage. The official volte-face, whatever its causes - which are far from clear - wrecked this plan. Rhodes no longer paid his subsidy. ‘King’ Johnston ceased to have any say in the vast area which constitutes modern Zambia. But Nyasaland had slipped for ever out of the Company’s domain.

92

CHAPTER 7

Settlement and War 1890-93

The ceremonial hoisting of the flag in Salisbury on September 13, 1890 was fol­ lowed by champagne for the officers and chaplains. The preliminary stages of building the fort began that afternoon. Sunday was a day of rest. On Monday the work was continued in earnest. It was completed by the end of the month, and with the construction of Fort Salisbury Johnson had fulfilled the contract into which he had entered some nine months earlier. On September 30 the Pioneers, having been duly paid, paraded for the last time. In his Regimental Orders John­ son praised them for their loyalty and discipline, wished them success and trusted that none of them would ever regret his enlistment. On the morning of the parade he stood on a wagon and addressed them:

Officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the Pioneer Corps, with my next order you will be converted from a military force into a civilian population free from military discipline. Parade! Right turn! Dismiss! The Pioneers, each with three months rations, a rifle and a hundred rounds of ammunition, were now free to peg their promised fifteen gold claims and to ‘ride off their 3,000 acre farms. That evening, the sky around Salisbury was thick with the dust of the moving wagons of those who had decided to start at once on their trek. Few of them paused to reflect on the legal aspect of these exciting promises. The status of the farms was particularly questionable, for the Company was not in a position to give any valid title at all to land. But since farming was by far the less glamorous of the two forms of reward, and indeed was not to play any significant part in the settler economy until 1896 at the earliest, this perhaps did not matter. The gold claims were legally valid, but there were serious snags here too which might have made a prudent man pause. The Company had insisted on

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retaining a fifty per cent interest in all claims pegged, alternatively half the ven­ dor’s scrip in any company formed, and it reserved to itself the first right of flota­ tion. These conditions did not appear too onerous as long as everyone believed that a vast fortune was just round the corner. Later they became very unpopular. Fifty per cent was reduced to thirty and in the end replaced by a system of royal­ ties on a sliding scale. The Company’s title to allocate land appeared to be soon validated by the pur­ chase in 1891 of the Lippert Concession. Renny-Tailyour had procured on behalf of Lippert a grant from Lobengula of the right to dispose of land in the latter’s dominions for the next hundred years. Since Lobengula had promised under the Rudd Concession not to grant land without the consent of the Chartered Company, the grant to Lippert had a very dubious legal basis. Lobengula, convinced that Lippert was a deadly enemy of Rhodes, made it as a counter-move against the Company. There he understandably miscalculated. Rather than have an intermin­ able and complicated juridical dispute, Rhodes bought the Lippert Concession for £30,000, although he could have argued that it was valueless anyway - which indeed was to be the decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1918. But in the meantime for nearly three decades the purchase was regarded as bridging an important gap between the de facto and de jure powers of the Chart­ ered Company. It was formally approved by Lord Knutsford, and Lobengula, even if he had understood this strange legal transaction, could do nothing about it. The Europeans during the first months of the occupation were very thin on the ground. Marshall Hole reckons that there were at most a thousand in all Mashonaland - some 190 Pioneers, 650 police (the number was reinforced to that figure in 1891 because of the Adendorff trek) and not more than 150 who got through from the south or east before the rainy season set in. Those who had must have regretted it. The Rhodesian summer of 1890-91 was notable for one of the heaviest rainfalls ever to be recorded (fifty-four inches at Salisbury).1 Con­ ditions were highly uncomfortable. Boots rotted away and clothes fell apart. The additional supplies needed to give the men a change had been left behind at Tuli - through a muddle by the contractors. The grass-roofed huts of pole and dagga (puddled mud), which seemed an adequate shelter in the dry heat of September, leaked like sieves in the first storms of October. There was a chronic shortage of supplies of every sort including axes, spades and almost all the tools needed for building. The rains reduced the road cut by the pioneers under Selous to a river of mud. Dried-up water courses with scarcely a trickle in them when the ex­ pedition had passed across on its way to the north became raging torrents four months later. From mid-December supplies ceased entirely. The route was impassable for wagons. Before the end of January it had become impassable even for the police post-riders. The settlers were deprived of mail and newspapers as well as more 1 According to ‘Skipper’ Hoste’s diary. The average rainfall is thirty-five to forty inches and it can often be much less than that.

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SETTLEMENT AND WAR

1890-93

bulky articles. Communication with the outside world was virtually cut off until the beginning of April, when Colonel Pennefather who had been on leave in the south and had been delayed at Tuli by the Hoods on the Lundi became the first man since January to ride through. Unfortunately the news that he was ‘delayed’ at Fort Tuli, shouted across the roaring water in a colonial accent, was mis-heard as ‘died’. In due course, his effects in Salisbury were sold. The Colonel was smitten with apoplectic symptoms when he observed that the astonished officer whom he first met on his return was wearing his field boots.2 The men who experienced the first rainy season of the occupation had to under­ go much hardship. The insects were particularly odious. Termites devoured almost everything they encountered, including the poles supporting the huts. No one could move without a cloud of midges round his head. Mosquitoes multiplied in the pools of water and maddened men with their bite and their whining hum. It was not, however, realized yet that they carried a greater threat than irrita­ tion. The connexion between the anopheles mosquito and malaria was not estab­ lished until 1898, although it had long been known that there was a relationship between the disease and marshy areas, particularly in a hot climate. The settlers had no idea of the danger of leaving the countless holes and pits, which they had dug for building purposes in the dry weather, full of stagnant water. During the wet months of 1890-91 malaria was rampant. There were not many fatalities except among those who had contracted the lethal complication which can result from frequent attacks - blackwater fever. Although the cause of malaria was not known its cure was, and thanks to the enterprise of a Doctor Rand who had pro­ cured some quinine from Macequece, official supplies being as usual inadequate, the situation was not too disastrous. But the disease was debilitating, depressing and bad for morale, which was low enough already. The prospectors who hoped for gold soon discovered that, if obtainable at all, it could only be mined by expensive machinery non-existent in Mashonaland. The rains made further investigation impossible and they returned to Fort Salisbury for food, shelter, clothes and medicine. They found very little of any. By the end of November flour, sugar and salt had almost vanished. Not only was life very uncomfortable, it was also very boring. There were scarcely any candles or matches. It is true that a lighted candle had the disadvantage of at once attracting myriads of flying beetles, but even that was better than sitting or lying in the dark for ten or twelve hours. Rhodesia, being in the tropics, is almost equinoctial the whole year round, and there is a limit to the amount of time that can be spent in sleep, especially when the night is made hideous by the croaking of innumerable bull-frogs. Of the proverbial nocturnal pleasures of man only song was available. Colquhoun had, rather surprisingly in view of the contents of his own luggage, decreed that Mashonaland should be ‘dry*, and the Company had forbidden the entry of women. One notable attempt was made to break both rules. A mysterious character 2G. H. Tanser, A Scantling of Time, Salisbury, 1965, 47.

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who called himself the Vicomte de la Panouse brought out his eighteen year old mistress (a cockney maidservant whom he subsequently married in Salisbury), disguised as a boy. He arrived on Christmas Day 1890 — the last traveller to get through - with two wagons, one of which was packed with wines and spirits. But Colquhoun at once vetoed his attempts to sell whisky at ¿5 a bottle, and Fort Salisbury remained teetotal until St Patrick’s Day (March 17) 1891 when the Administrator was persuaded to relent. The ‘Count’, as he was known, lowered his price and let the organizers of the party have four cases for ¿85. A notable beano followed, at which Forbes and Colquhoun himself were the guests of honour. The Count, who claimed to have been on Marshal MacMahon’s staff in the Franco-Prussian War, also to have been a Captain in the French Navy and to have shot a hundred and three elephants in one season, became a popular figure. His name is recorded as one of founding fathers of the Salisbury Club two years later. St Patrick’s Day 1891 was an isolated celebration in a dismal period during which insects were not the only menace. Rats infested the primitive buildings. Their presence encouraged snakes which, though somewhat reducing the rat popu­ lation, added a further threat to the unhappy settlers. The rats were such a pest that in the early years of Salisbury a kitten was regarded as one of the best wed­ ding presents for the bride. Medical comforts were grossly inadequate until the arrival at the end of July 1891 of five Dominican Sisters who had volunteered to nurse the sick. This was followed by the construction of a primitive hospital with an operating theatre in which Dr Jameson himself would from time to time perform. The nursing sisters, though often ill themselves, worked indefatigably, and the fever-stricken patients of the 1891-92 season at least fared better than those of the previous year. With the arrival of the dry weather from April onwards visitors began to appear. Four are worthy of special note. The first was Theodore Bent who was financed by the BSA Company and the Royal Geographical Society in order to investigate the ruins at Zimbabwe. In the book which resulted from his expedition - The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1892) - he argued that Zimbabwe was built by Phoenicians from Arabia. It was not till 1906 that Randall McIver put forward the now accepted view that the onus of proof lay on those who postulated an outside origin, and that in fact there was no hard evidence at all of the existence of any non-Bantu (other than Bushmen) in the area until the coming of the Arabs, which occurred after Zimbabwe had already been established. The next visitor of note was Lord Randolph Churchill who made a tour of Southern Africa with a view to repairing his ill-health and shattered fortunes. Of the many ‘candid friends’ from England who have given Rhodesians the benefit of their unsolicited advice, Lord Randolph was not only the earliest but also one of the most unpopular - and that is saying something. Not that Rhodesia was the only object of his censure, for he was burned in effigy in Pretoria as a result of his remarks about the Boers. His comments appeared in a series of letters in the Daily Graphic^ for which he was paid two thousand guineas. They were pub-

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fished as a book a year later under the title of Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa. He was in an irritable state of mind, suffering as we now know from the early symptoms of the disease which was to kill him. A diet of coarse and illcooked beef washed down by tepid whisky and water did not improve his temper. Lord Randolph's observations were given wide publicity in England and carried the authority of an ex-Cabinet minister who had at one time seemed destined for the premiership. Coming just when investors were beginning to have doubts about the whole future of Mashonaland, his remarks damaged the Chartered Company and enraged the South African ‘interest* in London. He was particularly scathing about the Company's police. He was also uncomplimentary about the manners and behaviour of his hosts. He regarded the prospects of gold mining and European immigration with scepticism. None of this stopped him accepting Rhodes’s hospi­ tality at Groote Schuur. When reproached by a friend, he replied, ‘My dear fellow it’s the only place in this God-forsaken country where I can get Perrier Jouet ’74’. Percy Fitzpatrick, later author of one of the most celebrated best-sellers about South Africa, Jock oj the Bushvelt (1907), had arranged Lord Randolph’s visit, but felt obliged to repudiate some of his criticisms in a now rare book, Through Mashonaland with Pick and Pen (1892). One can perhaps guess that Lord Ran­ dolph was not in the frame of mind to do justice, even if some of his criticisms happened to be well-founded. In August occurred the first visit from a director of the company. This was not Rhodes. He had travelled to Fort Tuli in November 1890 for that purpose, but had been dissuaded from going on because of the risk of being marooned during the rainy season. The first director to make his way into Mashonaland was his partner, Alfred Beit.3 Rather oddly in view of his great posthumous generosity4 to the country, he was destined to visit it only once again before his death. He was alarmed by the chaos, inefficiency and downright fraud which prevailed at Tuli, and as a mining expert was far from confident after his arrival in Mas­ honaland that the prospects for gold were as good as they were believed to be. A great deal of his time there was spent in listening to the grievances of the settlers. There was not much that he could do. Rhodes was the key figure, and in October the Colossus arrived after a most trying journey from Beira during which he dis­ covered for himself Frank Johnson’s over-optimism about the eastern route. In view of the Portuguese hatred of him - 'homen horrivei was his soubriquet Rhodes showed a certain courage, some might say insensitivity, in going that way at all. He was met at Umtali by Jameson, spent a week at Salisbury, and then travelled the country for another week, covering over 600 miles. By the time Rhodes arrived Colquhoun had departed, ostensibly on grounds of health. In reality his position had become more and more uneasy since Dec­ ember 1890 when Rhodes made his personal lack of confidence obvious by appoint­ ing Jameson as Managing Director in Mashonaland with full control over policy. 3 Among many other inaccuracies J. G. Lockhart (op. cit., 246) says that both Beit and Churchill arrived in the rainy season. 4 See Appendix, p. 412.

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The situation was not too bad for the next six months, since Jameson was hardly ever in the country, travelling as he did feverishly to Gungunhana’s kraal and back - ‘a seven hundred mile walking tour’, as Rhodes called this superfluous expedi­ tion. Jameson hated administration and the Adendorff trek him a further opportunity to put off the evil hour, but, having settled that with characteristic aplomb, he had no option save to take up his duties as Chief Magistrate, the new title given to the ruler of Mashonaland. Colquhoun now fades out of Rhodesian history. He has had a bad press from historians. It is true that he lacked the charm and blarney of Jameson or the thrust and energy of Johnson. It is also true that, unlike the more successful mem­ bers of Rhodes’s court, he had not the ‘antennae’ to interpret his master’s wishes as it were by instinct, nor had he the sense to see how disastrous it was to pour out his woes to Rutherfoord Harris of all people. Nevertheless he had done much to lay the rough foundations of law, order and administration in the new colony, and he displayed a scrupulosity about such matters as titles and allocation of land which Jameson was far from sharing - to the lasting detriment of African interests. Indeed it was this scrupulosity which enraged Johnson and his co-adventurers who had the ear of Rhodes. Hence the latter’s decision to push Colquhoun out. As for the charge of failing to secure Beira, we have seen that it is wholly baseless. Pompous, prickly and slightly obtuse though he may have been, Colquhoun for all his faults was an able man and deserves more credit than he has received. In Salisbury and on his travels Rhodes was bombarded with complaints which he did his best to meet, and he was generous with his purse. At times however he fell back on the argument that these hardships were the price of creating a new extension to the empire, which would be a great thing for future genera­ tions. On one of these occasions he elicited a celebrated reply from a Scottish store-keeper. ‘I would have ye know, Mr Rhodes, that we didna come here for posterity.’ There were bigger problems than settler discontent. Of the one million pounds capital raised to form the Company, only about half was left. £70,000 had gone on concessions, £90,000 to Johnson and his syndicate for the pioneer road. Another £50,000 had been spent on the telegraph line, now approaching Fort Victoria, and £200,000 on the police. There were many miscellaneous expenses too, and so far there had been virtually no profits. Rhodes and Jameson decided that the obvious economy was the police, which if continuing at the strength of 650 would cost at least £150,000 a year (Rhodes at a shareholders’ meeting in 1892 put it at £250,000). The number was accordingly to be reduced to 150 by Christmas. To meet potential emergencies a volunteer force known as the Mas­ honaland Horse was recruited from the settlers. The cost of the police was thus reduced to about £50,000 a year. There was no lack of criticism at what seemed to some a reckless decision, but the Ndebele were assumed to be quiescent, the Shona tribes to be useless as fighters and in any case well disposed because of the protection afforded by the white man against Ndebele raids - assumptions which were to prove ill-founded within a very short time.

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Rhodes and Jameson were both of them gamblers, and the Company’s tottering fortunes seemed to necessitate a gamble. Its shares had slumped as a result of stories about the hardships during the first wet season. Matters were made even worse by the revelation in December that the Chartered Company had never owned the Rudd Concession and had had to buy out the United Concessions Company which it did with a special issue of a million chartered shares.5 In March 1892 the Chartered Company’s bankers refused to honour its cheques without a guaran­ tee. This was duly given by De Beers, in effect Rhodes acting under another hat, but the situation was clearly one that could not continue. Although Marshall Hole says that, apart from a few cases of violence, ‘progress was unchecked and rapid’ during 1891-92, his optimism seems hardly warranted by the facts. It is true that substantial buildings were erected in Salisbury, that the Standard Bank began to operate, that a printed newspaper replaced the cyclo­ styled sheets of the Rhodesia Herald, that cricket matches were played (‘extras’ being often the highest score owing to the state of the wicket), that a billiard saloon was erected (in which there not only featured Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘twisted cue and elliptical billiard balls’, but a slanting table as well), that the first Mashona­ land race meeting was held on Boxing Day 1891, that in February 1892 the tele­ graph line from Mafeking reached Salisbury, that in the same year the first rugby match was played and the first red light district (somewhat thinly populated) came into being on the Kopje. These signs of civilization could not mask the existence of a general economic depression throughout the two years. Gold-mining produced negligible returns and farming none. The nearest rail­ heads were still many hundreds of miles away and, although the distances were gradually diminishing, this was no consolation for men with very little capital which they saw dwindling rapidly with the enormous cost of bringing by primi­ tive bullock cart most of the necessities of life. People were continually coming into the country buoyed up by stories of quick wealth to be gained. Others were continually leaving bored and disillusioned with a life of primitive hardship to which they saw no end. The shifting population was virtually static in numbers. Not even Jameson’s hail-fellow-well-met manner, friendly banter and genial hospi­ tality could allay the dissatisfaction. However, by the new year of 1893 there were signs of improvement. ‘I have still to keep a fair sized pauper community’, he wrote in a letter to his brother, but he thought that ‘the end of the year ought to see us in a fairly good position - bar further accidents’. It was perhaps a sign of increasing confidence that on May 20 the Salisbury Club, with Rhodes as President and Jameson as Vice-President opened its premises.

In fact 1893 was t0 see a complete transformation in the situation. To understand what happened it is necessary to examine the problem which in one form or another has dominated Rhodesian history ever since - the relationship between the Whites and the Blacks. From 1890 till the Matabele war settled the matter

5 Robert Cary, Charter Royal, 168; and see above, Chapter 5.

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

for the time being in 1893 that relationship was fundamentally ambiguous. To the Shona Paramount Chiefs, Jameson was simply another chief, head of a white tribe which did indeed possess formidable power but which would probably move on in due course and to which they owed no particular allegiance or obedience. They were glad to be relieved of the menace of Ndebele raids, or rather, to be strictly correct, those who had suffered were glad; Lobengula’s forays had never penetrated to eastern Mashonaland. But this» relief did not make them especially grateful to the white man. They were not so naive as to believe that his appear­ ance on the scene had anything to do with benevolence towards themselves. At first they were merely curious about the new arrivals and did a certain amount of friendly trade with them. Later they resented the press-gang methods of the settlers to whom cheap labour soon became essential. The juridical position was far from clear. Until May 1891 the British Govern­ ment, while conceding the Company’s right to send men into Mashonaland, would not agree that the Company possessed any judicial or administrative powers over anyone, white or black, until a further concession supplementing that gained by Rudd could be secured from Lobengula. Since the Ndebele King now bitterly regretted - indeed considered that he had repudiated - the Rudd Concession, the chances of any further grant from him were nil. Inevitably in the constantly critical circumstances of the occupation the settlers tended to take the law into their own hands vis-a-vis the Shona. Colquhoun and Pennefather suggested as an alternative a policy of treaties with those Shona Chiefs who had been clearly outside Lobengula’s sphere. There was much to be said for this, but Rhodes vetoed it on the old ground that the Company’s position depended on the Rudd Concession which in its turn depended upon acceptance of Lobengula’s sovereignty over the whole of Mashonaland.6 In May 1891 the situation was partly remedied. On April 13 the High Com­ missioner at Cape Town had proclaimed that the whole of the Company’s area of operation was a British sphere of interest where the Crown could legislate under the Foreign Jurisdiction Acts. On May 9 an Order in Council made southern Zambesia a British Protectorate in which the High Commission could exercise ‘all powers which Her Majesty had or may have ... for the peace, order and good government of all persons within the limits of this Order’, subject to the rights of native rulers and their civil law as far as these were compatible with the Crown’s jurisdiction. An accompanying letter made it clear that there was no intention to abridge the powers conferred on the Company by the charter. ‘All persons’ ob­ viously included the Shona tribes, but they themselves recognized no such juris­ diction. Nor did Lobengula, who still claimed suzerainty over the whole of Mashonaland. In 1891 he showed the reality of the claim by sending a small impi to punish Chief Lomagundi who dwelt a hundred miles west of Salisbury for failing to pay tribute. The Chief was killed, his kraal left in ashes, his women and children swept off into slavery. 6 T. O. Ranger, Revolt in Southern Rhodesia^ London, 1967, 55-6.

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The situation was therefore anything but clear and it was particularly dis­ agreeable for the Shona who were looked on as subjects both by Lobengula and the Company. To quote Mr Philip Mason, ‘to one they were a source of cattle and women, to the other a source of labour; the Mashona, reluctant to fill either role, could hardly fill both?7 Jameson was prudent and forebearing in his relations with the Ndebele, less so with the Shona. An episode which provoked much criticism was the action of a Captain Lendy whom he dispatched in March 1892 on an expedition to bring *o trial in Salisbury Chief Ngomo, who had robbed and subsequently insulted a white trader called Bennett. Ngomo refused to move and Lendy returned to Salisbury for further orders. Jameson sent him back with rein­ forcements, a seven pounder, a Maxim gun, and instruction ‘to take summary measures’. Lendy obeyed to the letter, bombarded Ngomo’s kraal at dawn on March 17, killing the Chief, his son and twenty-one others. Rhodes strongly ap­ proved and settler opinion was delighted. The Colonial Office took a different view. Under the legal fiction still in opera­ tion it was arguable that the Company had no right to punish Ngomo at all. Was he not theoretically under the jurisdiction of Lobengula? However, it was generally agreed that, whatever the theory, occupation by the Company gave de facto sov­ ereignty in the sense that the Protectorate could not survive if it was unable to keep the peace between contending tribes or preserve the rights of property; and the only people who could do this were the Company’s officers. What stuck in the throats of the High Commissioner and Lord Knutsford, the Colonial Secretary, was the severity of the action; ‘utterly disproportionate to the original offence’, declared Loch; and Knutsford in a dispatch considered that ‘Lendy acted in this matter with recklessness and undue harshness’. Philip Mason in a perceptive analysis of this episode suggests that it contains in embryo much of subsequent Rhodesian history - the enforcement of ‘the white man’s law’; the assumption (on which Lendy justified his action) that it is right to kill a large number of Blacks rather than lose a single white life; the firmness of ‘the man on the spot’ who has to consider that the very survival of a white island in a black sea may depend on resolute action now, contrasted with the doubts of the man in Whitehall ‘who has scruples ... about common humanity and liberty and forced labour, a man who “does not know the country” and has no idea how different things are in Rhodesia’.8 But as the author wisely observes, it is not a simple matter of right and wrong. All depends on the standard by which one judges. Loch and Knutsford thought in terms of the military coming to the aid of the civil power at the request of a magistrate. By that standard Lendy did indeed behave with unnecessary ruthless­ ness. But if we look at his action as the assertion of British sovereignty over and conquest of Mashonaland - and this is undoubtedly how Jameson and the settlers did look at it - then it has to be measured by a different rule; that of the Con7 Philip Mason, Birth of a Dilemma, Oxford, 1958, reprinted 1968, 163. •Op. cit., 159.

IOI

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

quistadores, of Clive in India, of Napoleon, of the American frontiersmen. By that standard it seems less harsh. Moreover the censure of Whitehall and the row created by Labouchère and others in the House of Commons had an effect. Jameson stoutly defended Lendy but he was careful to avoid a repetition. The rival claims of Lobengula and the Company upon Mashonaland were irreconcilable. Lobengula could not give up raiding. The whole economy and social structure of the Ndebele state depended upon it. But its continuance made the white development of Mashonaland impossible. Shona labour was vital, and naturally enough at the slightest rumour of the approach of an impi - and of course there were far more rumours than approaches - the Shona fled to their hilly fast­ nesses and disappeared for weeks on end. It can be fairly assumed that Rhodes and Jameson expected the matter to be settled sooner or later by war, unless Lobengula abandoned the raids. But the theory that, because of the parlous state of the Company’s finances, the depression in the country, and the lure of Ndebele gold and cattle, they were deliberately planning a war for the dry season of 1893 and provoked an ‘incident’ will not stand up. The disbanding of the police is proof enough. Professor Ranger makes the point that a campaign of this sort would not have been a police operation,9 but it defies belief that someone who was preparing for hostilities would have pared the only military force in the country to the bone or would have reduced the number of horses (deemed essential in a battle with the Ndebele) to less than a hundred. The truth would seem, rather, to be that Rhodes and Jameson were waiting upon events. They were not going to start a war. Indeed Jameson’s relations with Lobengula throughout 1891 and 1892 were marked by caution and restraint, and no desire at all to make a casus belli out of the relatively few Ndebele raids which did occur. On the other hand if something were to happen of a nature which would justify ‘defensive’ action in the eyes of the High Commissioner, above all if it could be conducted without bringing in the imperial factor, then they would not be backward in seizing the opportunity; and the decision, which would be Jameson’s, might well be sudden and unpremeditated, given that streak of impetu­ osity which was to be exemplified in the raid, two and a half years later. Lobengula for his part was no less cautious during the first three years of the Company’s occupation of Mashonaland. His prudence is shown by his attitude towards the ‘border’ between the two countries. This was regarded by Jameson as roughly the line of the Umniati and Shashi Rivers, and he told Lobengula that only Ndebele coming to work, or sent by the King as peaceful emissaries would be allowed across. By the same token he forbade Pioneers to cross the other way and accepted Lobengula’s complaint on the rare occasions when the rule was broken. It suited Lobengula to have a de facto border. There had always been such a line between the Ndebele state itself and its raiding areas, and he certainly did not want white men wandering across it without his knowledge and permission. But he could not acknowledge it openly without giving up his sovereignty over ’Ranger, op. cit., 91.

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the Shona east of the Shashi river. It is probable that he did not tell his indunas about the ‘border* at all. In correspondence with Jameson, though he never denied, he also never admitted its existence, and the Doctor probably - and not unreason­ ably - took silence as consent. Because of the charges levelled at the time by Labouchère and by other enemies of the Company from that day to this, there has been an immense amount written about the origins of the Matabele war. Yet, although there are some obscurities which will never be cleared up, the essential nature of what happened is relatively simple. In May 1893 five hundred yards of copper telegraph wire between Tuli and Fort Victoria were removed - for its value, not for sabotage - by a headman called Gomalla who owed allegiance to a petty Maholi Chief named Setoutsie living on the Company’s side of the border. Jameson exacted a fine of cattle which was paid by Gomalla with what Marshall Hole describes as ‘an alacrity which should have aroused suspicion’. In fact the cattle belonged to Lobengula and were merely on loan to Setoutsie for milking purposes. On hearing the news from Setoutsie, who gave the impression that Jameson was aware of the true ownership, Lobengula protested strongly both to Jameson and to the High Commissioner. Jameson promptly had the cattle returned - an action which in itself suggests a pacific attitude; if he had wanted to provoke an incident over the affair it would have been easy enough to do so. Meanwhile, a quite independent episode occurred. A Shona Chief called Bere also living near Fort Victoria stole some of Lobengula’s cattle in June. Lobengula despatched a small impi to deal with him, but the party was met by Captain Lendy, now Magistrate, after it had crossed the border and was persuaded to return. Here again there could have been a casus belli if Jameson had instructed Lendy to treat it as such. Early in July Lobengula sent a much larger impi across the border. Whether he meant simply to recover the cattle stolen by Bere, or to take vengeance on Gomalla and Setoutsie for double-crossing him, or to make a general example of Shona petty Chiefs who were getting above themselves, is not entirely clear. He did not intend war with the Whites or he would not have sent another impi simultaneously towards the Zambesi, and he made a particular point of informing Lendy that his men had strict orders not to molest the settlers or their property. It was unlucky but not his fault that the message only got through some days after July 9 when the Ndebele first began raiding the Victoria area. The spectacle of a Ndebele impi in full action on a primitive expedition was not a savoury one. Kraals were reduced to ashes, men assegaied and ‘mutilated’ (i.e. their genitals cut off), women disembowelled, children roasted alive. Whether all these things happened on this occasion is uncertain. There is no doubt that they all did at other times and places. What the settlers saw must have been nasty enough, with every allowance made for exaggeration. This was the first of Lobengula’s impis to raid a white-occupied area. Not surprisingly it was also to be the last. Although white lives were safe, white property, whatever Lobengula’s assurances, was not. Furniture was broken, cattle were carried away irrespective of ownership,

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and the Shona labourers, a form of ‘property* especially valuable to the settlers, indiscriminately slaughtered, save for those who fled or put themselves under protection in the fort. To the demand that the latter should be surrendered under the promise that their bodies would be left in the bush and away from the river to avoid pollution Lendy gave an uncompromising refusal, dictated alike by humanity and prestige. Moreover, as Professor Gann drily points out, if he had given them up, the wrath of the anti-Company party in London would have been even greater than it was over what actually happened. ‘They would have condemned Rhodes, Beit and their friends for upholding an unholy alliance between a blood-stained feudalism and the forces of finance capitalism - a charge that would have been hard to refute.’10 The clash symbolized the whole dispute about jurisdiction over the Shona. Lobengula and the senior induna Manyau, who represented him, were acting legitimately by their own lights. The Shona were their ‘dogs’. What business had the white men to interfere? Equally, the representatives of the company could not tolerate an incursion which made a mockery of British rule and the Pax Britannica. Nonetheless Jameson did not at first consider the matter a cause for war. He thought that the Victoria settlers had ‘got the jumps’, and he expected the Ndebele to disappear at once.11 He took a more serious view when he arrived at Fort Victoria on July 17 and saw for himself what had happened. He sent for Manyau who denied all knowledge of the ‘border’ and for his second-in-command, Umgandan - an aggressive and ‘insolent’ young induna, described by an observer as ‘the handsomest African native I have ever seen’.12 There is no authoritative account of what was said at the meeting on July 18 but Jameson, the night before, sent a telegram to Harris: ‘I intend to treat them like dogs and order the whole impi out of the country. Then if they do not go send Lendy out with fifty mounted men to fire into them.*13 There is no need to doubt that he conveyed such an ultimatum, for events followed exactly that course. What is disputed is whether he gave them an hour to get moving or an hour to be across the border - which would have been quite impossible as the distance was some thirty miles. Jameson was acquitted by F. J. (later Sir Francis) Newton in his later enquiry about the origins of the war. Though the report may be somewhat suspect, since Newton was strongly pro-Rhodes and an adverse report in the aftermath of the war and the tragedy of the Shangani Patrol would have been ill-received, there seems no reason to believe that Jameson was seeking an excuse to fire at the Ndebele. He had ample excuse to do so without holding an indaba at all. He undoubtedly meant simply to give the Ndebele an hour to show that they were really on the move. He gave them nearly two, and then sent Lendy with orders , 0L. M. Gann, A History of Southern Rhodesia to 1933, London, 1965, 112. 1 1C7171 No. 54. Enclosure. Jameson to Harris July 10,1973 cited by A. Dorey, ‘Victoria Incident and Matabele War’, Central Africa Historical Association, Local Series Number 16, 1966. 12 Lockhart and Rhodes, op. cit., 255. 13 Rhodes House Papers Mss. Air. S228, C.3B. July 17, quoted Ranger, op. cit., 93.

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that, if they were not moving off he should ‘drive them as you heard me tell Manyau I would, and, if they resist and attack you, shoot them’. Lendy set off and found that they had only gone three miles in three hours and had pillaged and burned two kraals en route. He did not bother to ‘drive’ them but opened fire, killing Umgandan and some nine others. The rest fled across the border. There can be no doubt, despite some denials, that, as Newton found, Lendy’s patrol fired first. Whether he was disobeying Jameson’s orders in not attempting previously to ‘drive’ the Ndebele it is impossible to say. Lendy died before the enquiry. Jameson’s orders were oral, not written, and we only have his word for them. But the point is not relevant to the cause of war. Even at this stage war was not inevitable. Lobengula certainly did not intend to make the episode a casus belli. Most of the evidence suggests that his subsequent troop movements were defensive not aggressive. He was not, indeed, prepared to give up his claims on the Shona, and he now repudiated all knowledge of a ‘border’. From his point of view any other action amounted to abandoning half his kingdom. He did not, however, seek a war which he knew, as he had known ever since the fate of Cetewayo fourteen years earlier, must be fatal. What the Victoria incident did was to change Jameson’s mind. He now decided that war was the best course and that this was the best moment. Whether he was swayed by the strongly pro-war sentiments of the settlers and their threats to get out unless affairs were settled with ‘Loben’, or whether he exploited those sentiments for other reasons is not clear. He seems to have been genuinely dis­ turbed at Manyau’s ignorance of the ‘border’ and at the apparent lack of control by Lobengula over his own impi, as evinced by the conduct of Umgandan. He also believed Lendy who falsely told him that the Ndebele had fired first. What is clear is that he now abruptly reversed his previous policy. The day after the incident he telegraphed to Rutherfoord Harris: Rhodes might consider the advisability of completing the thing. The cash could be found and it could be done pretty cheaply if the Macloutsie Police and the High Commissioner keep out of it. I know Ferriera’s terms are for 500 mounted Boers to hand over the show, a moderate sum in cash and ammunition supplied, each man to receive a farm and his loot ... I suggest the Ferriera trick, as we have an excuse for the row over murdered women and children now and the getting Matabeleland open would give us a tremendous lift in shares and everything else. The fact of its being shut up gives it an immense value both here and outside.

Ferriera had commanded the hard core of the Adendorff trek. After arresting him Jameson had - perhaps not very seriously - discussed with him the terms and feasibility of a coup against Bulawayo. The telegram quoted above, which has been ignored by all Rhodes’s biographers, though available in the papers at Rhodes House, was first published by Professor Ranger in 1967.14 It leaves 14 Op. cit., 94.

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no doubt about Jameson’s deliberate decision to start a war after the Victoria incident. Rhodes was hesitant at first. Later he said that he would have preferred to postpone the matter till 1894. But as usual he backed Jameson in the end. Rutherfoord Harris in Kimberley now proceeded to pour out pro-war propa­ ganda. The misery of the Shona, played down in previous years, was played up with the maximum of publicity. When Moffat denounced the Company’s bellicose intentions Harris privately circulated the leading British editors with copies of letters written during 1890 in which Moffat had declared that war was the only solution to the Ndebele problem.14 The London Board of the Company was in favour - the more so when Rhodes promised to save them expense by providing £50,000 from his private fortune. On August 14 the Victoria Agreement was promulgated offering volunteers for the campaign twenty gold claims, a 3,000 morgen (6,350 acre) farm and a share of the ‘loot’ - an expression which received adverse comment but merely meant cattle. There was much criticism of the arrangement but these were not abnormal terms for volunteers in contemporary Southern African wars. No one expected them to fight for nothing, and the Company lacked the means to provide ordinary army pay and allowances. The military experts believed that a force of 7,000 men would be needed. Jameson, a gambler as ever and once again a winner, reckoned that the job could be done with a thousand. Something further was needed to provide an excuse for war, which had to be authorized by the British Government. Lobengula played into Jameson’s hands by denying the border, asserting his sovereignty over the Shona, refusing to accept payment under the Rudd Concession and declaring that if he had known when he sent in his impi what he now knew, he would have seized as much of the white people’s property as he could. His troop movements too, though in the light of later evidence clearly defensive, were susceptible, like all troop movements, of different interpretations. Dawson, the trader, Helm, the missionary and Moffat, the ex-missionary, all of whom had long experience of affairs at Bulawayo, were convinced that the King did not mean war. But Colenbrander, the Company’s emissary at Lobengula’s court, believed that he did - and it was Colenbrander’s dispatches which went to the High Commissioner and the Colonial Office. Sir Henry Loch was in an uneasy position. Seldom had the double-hatted posture of the High Commissioner been more awkward. In theory he possessed wide powers over Mashonaland. Unlike Robinson he was very far from being a creature of Rhodes, but he had been warned by Lord Knutsford not to interfere with the administrative and fiscal arrangements of the Company - part of the tacit bargain by which Rhodes agreed to pick the imperial chestnuts from the fire. Moreover under his other hat Loch was Governor of Cape Colony which had had Responsible Government since 1872. Here his position was more analogous to that of a constitutional monarch, and he was obliged to get on as well as he could with his Prime Minister - Cecil Rhodes. Loch did his best to avoid war, 15 Ibid., 95.

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but when Lobengula sent the induna Umshete on a peace mission and yet still asserted his ownership of the Shona, he gave up. Meanwhile Jameson had massed, ostensibly for defensive purposes, two columns based on Salisbury and Fort Victoria, and a third at Tuli in the south. On October 5 Ndebele troops were reported as having fired on a patrol of the Bechuanaland Border Police. Loch authorized their commander, Colonel Goold-Adams, to anticipate a possible attack on Khama’s country by pushing forward onto the high veld. He was told to take command of Jameson's 200 volunteers as well as his own force of 220 police. At about the same time a similar clash was reported near the Shashi River with the Company’s police. Loch was now convinced that an attack, whether or not at Lobengula’s instigation, was imminent, and he authorized Jameson to push forward too. The war had begun. Little needs to be said about it. Ndebele generalship was incompetent and resist­ ance collapsed rapidly. It is true that with the machine gun the white volunteers and regulars possessed a new weapon of formidable power. The campaign in terms of the history of military technology deserves to be remembered as one of the first occasions for its extensive and effective use, and may well have inspired Belloc’s famous couplet:

Whatever happens we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not. Nevertheless different tactics in the form of a protracted defensive campaign, exploitation of the terrain and of their own immensely superior numbers - some 18,000 against 1,100 - might have prolonged the campaign into the rainy season with very serious consequences for the Company’s finances and at least the possibility of a negotiated peace. Instead the Ndebele impis did the one thing that was sure to be fatal - engage in offensive set-piece battles over open ground. Their courage was immense but so were their losses. Although as a result of the Rudd Concession they had excellent rifles, their shooting was wildly erratic, and they never came close enough to use their assegais. The Victoria and Salisbury columns, soon united under the command of Major Forbes, marched steadily towards Bulawayo destroying the Ndebele impis in two major battles. At an early stage Lobengula seems to have regarded the struggle as hopeless and to have decided to move the whole tribe north - a step he had contemplated more than once in the past. He was true to his word in protecting the few white men in his capital, and their lives were spared. He burned his kraal, blew up the ammunition which his troops could not carry, and left for the north a day or so before the advance guard of Jameson’s columns arrived. On November 4 Forbes and the main body entered the smoking ruins of old Bulawayo to the skirl of the bagpipe. Goold-Adams followed a few days later. Three episodes which, though they did not affect the war, had lasting con­ sequences on Rhodesian history must be briefly mentioned. In the middle of October Lobengula had sent an embassy to interview Loch. It was escorted by

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Dawson and consisted of two high indunas and the King’s half-brother. When they reached Tati, Goold-Adams’s HQ., Dawson went off for a drink leaving the trio to be looked after by a mine foreman, merely saying that they were ‘three natives’. He then went on to eat his dinner. Meanwhile Goold-Adams hearing that Dawson had brought three Matabele, assumed that he had escaped from Bulawayo and that they were his guides. He did not want them to return with information and ordered them to be arrested. The bewildered indunas understandably panicked. One of them stabbed a guard and in the ensuing scuffle both were killed; only the King’s half-brother who did not move survived. Their mission could have made no difference. The war had already begun. Yet inevitably the deaths seemed another item in the long and bitter saga, as the Ndebele saw it, of white duplicity and betrayal. The tragedy, however lamentable an example of insensitivity and bad manners - the indunas after all were not just ‘natives’ like the rest but, in their own world, grandees - was at least the result of accident, not crime. The second episode was much worse. Lobengula fleeing north entrusted on December 3 an induna with a bag of a thousand gold sovereigns and a message to his pursuers: ‘White men, I am conquered. Take this and go back.’ The induna gave it to two of his men who, frightened and confused, went round to the rear of the pursuing column and after handing it to two batmen of the Bechuanaland Police, Troopers Wilson and David, who were straggling behind, disappeared into the bush. There were no witnesses. The troopers divided the cash and said nothing. A year later the story leaked out. The two were brought to trial, and sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment, though their sentences were later quashed on technicalities. History is not, however, a court of law, and there is little doubt of their guilt. It was widely believed that their conduct bore some responsibility for the third and greatest tragedy of all, the fate of the Shangani Patrol on December 4. With the conquest of Bulawayo Jameson faced a. major problem. The rainy malarial season was imminent. The torrential storms which afflict Rhodesia at that time of year have to be seen to be believed. As long as Lobengula was at large the war could not be concluded, but the Company’s finances made it vital to end hostilities as soon as possible. There was a further complication. The Imperial Secretary, Graham Bower, had declared on October 23 that negotiations for a settlement with the King were to be conducted by the High Commissioner. Rhodes, now in Salisbury, received this news with great indignation, and the Company’s propaganda machine was put into operation at full blast. In fact on November 4, after the occupation of Bulawayo, the Colonial Office in a letter to the London Board partly withdrew, but Jameson, out of reach until November 18 owing to a breakdown in the telegraph line to Palapye, regarded possession of the King’s person not only as a means of ending resistance but as a vital bargaining counter in the battle with Whitehall and the imperial factor. He sent a message on November 7 calling on the King to surrender and received four days later an evasive reply. On November 14 he dispatched a mounted force under Major Forbes to capture the King.

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By December 3 Forbes with 160 men was on the bank of the Shangani River within a day’s march of Lobengula. The weather was very wet, his men were exhausted, his horses very tired. Had the message in the bag of gold been delivered as it should have been that day, he would probably have treated with the King, and the subsequent disaster might have been averted. In the event he sent a mounted patrol of fifteen men under Major Allan Wilson to reconnoitre and bring back news of Lobengula’s location before dusk. Wilson duly crossed the river, but, thinking that he might by a sudden coup seize the King, dis­ obeyed orders and, dark having already fallen, asked for reinforcements. Forbes, who had information which was incorrect but could not be discounted that the main impi had circled back to attack him, decided rightly that he could not break camp at night, but wrongly that instead of recalling Wilson he would send a second detachment of twenty-one men under Captain Borrow to reinforce the patrol. This decision made the worst of both worlds. The reinforcements were enough to encourage Wilson in his reckless course but not enough to be of any help in a crisis. The river rose during the night. At dawn and onwards on December 4 heavy firing was heard, but it was impossible to cross the Shangani. Forbes, short of food and supplies, and harassed by Ndebele attacks, had to retreat towards Bulawayo. For many weeks men hoped against hope for survivals. It was not until two months later that the scene of Wilson’s last stand was examined, and, with the aid of a captured Ndebele warrior who was an eye-witness, the disaster was reconstructed. The thirty-six men, surrounded by their enemies, fought to the last cartridge and then, so the story goes though there is some uncertainty, sang the National Anthem as they waited to be shot, clubbed or assegaied to death. A welter of recrimination ensued. The deaths of Borrow’s second patrol were deemed especially unnecessary. Forbes’s career, despite his earlier success, was wrecked and he was eventually banished to become a Deputy Administrator in the remote north east of Northern Rhodesia. The man who deserved the blame was Jameson, who ought never to have sent Forbes on such an errand in the first place. The fate of Wilson’s men moved Rhodes deeply. Their bones, at first interred near Fort Victoria where a memorial commemorates them at Zimbabwe, were later moved at his request to the Matopos and buried beneath a massive granite monument close to the graves of Jameson and Rhodes himself. The episode has come to be a symbol of Rhodesian history, a symbol of courage, heroism and endeavour, a symbol too of the civilized few among the savage multitude. The fact that it was utterly futile and affected the war in no way whatever is irrelevant. The men who died were not to know this and it does not detract from their gallantry. It is difficult to say quite why a particular episode becomes part of a nation’s folklore, legend and inspiration. The stock cliché that ‘their loss was not in vain’ cannot apply here, for it obviously was. Perhaps Philip Mason is right in suggesting that man is ‘deeply suspicious of a free gift, of anything too easily won’. The advance of the Pioneers and the Matabele war had cost scarcely a single life. It

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was almost too simple. The heroic legend of the Shangani Patrol met the deep human instinct that great gains are not made without some sacrifice. Here was that sacrifice. Whatever the reasons, no one who has been in Rhodesia for even a few days can doubt the impact of Allan Wilson's last stand. It is by far the most prominent feature in the iconography of Rhodesian history. Paintings galore, sculptures, friezes, tapestries depict it. There is scarcely a public building where one does not see in some medium or other the depiction of a scene which has now become semi-stylized - the troopers firing from behind a rampart of dead horses; Allan Wilson himself, taller than all the rest, shooting a Ndebele warrior with his revolver; the enemy in the background with assegai and gun. There is a flavour of romantic imperialism, the Boy s Own Paper, Kipling, Henty and much else which was common coin in the England of the nineties. From there it has long disappeared but in Rhodesia, along with many other pickled pieces of the English past, it still lingers on.

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CHAPTER 8

Conquest 1893-95

Lobengula perished soon after the Shangani Patrol. It is not certain how. Accord­ ing to one account he died of smallpox, according to another he committed suicide by taking poison. There are many other versions and the truth is not now likely to emerge. His body was never found by any white man but his death was not in doubt. The Ndebele indunas surrendered one by one. The war was over. It is hardly conceivable that Lobengula’s monarchy could have survived in its existing form. It might with time have gradually disintegrated, as his subjects became absorbed into the white labour system, but one can doubt whether the Ndebele military aristocracy would have allowed this to happen without a fight. Conceivably a different military outcome might have produced a compromise peace and a new treaty. Whatever happened, an Iron Age monarchy would not for long have coexisted with the Chartered Company. Yet, if it be the case that Lobengula was blown away by the gale of the world, one can neither withhold sympathy from him nor extend it to Rhodes and his agents. They cheated him over the Moffat Treaty which did not give him the protection he expected. They defrauded him over the Rudd Concession which did not mean what he believed it to mean, and when he found this out Jameson simply threatened him with a white impi. They did him down yet again over the Lippert Concession, Rhodes’s purchase of which Moffat regarded as ‘detestable whether viewed in the light of policy or morality’.1 Finally they forced a war on him which he could only have avoided at the price, as he saw it, of abandoning half his kingdom. The Ndebele state was cruel and barbarous. Its passing need cause little regret. ‘No one knowing their abominable history’, wrote Selous to his mother, ‘can pity them or lament their downfall. They have been paid back in their own coin.’1 2 But in the same letter Selous half in jest observed, ‘So you 1 R. U. Moffat, John Smith Moffat, 1921, 258. 2NAR SE1/1/1, November 15, 1893. Quoted Ranger, op. cit., 98.

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see the campaign is virtually over and the fair-haired descendants of the northern pirates are in possession of the great King’s Kraal, and the calf of the black cow has fled into the wilderness*.3 This was the reality under all the high sounding verbiage. It was a war of conquest, and conquest henceforth constituted the title deeds of the white man in both Mashonaland and Matabeleland; fpr the conquest of the latter entailed that of the former. It is true that the Shona paramounts in no way recognized this until after the rebellion. The point, rather, is that the juridical sovereignty of Britain as a country ceased to be a matter of doubt among the British them­ selves. Within the white world there might be much dispute as to the powers of the Crown, the Company and the settlers; learned lawyers far away in London a quarter of a century later were to argue many subtle points in that connexion. But the land and possessions of the Ndebele and the Shona were as much at the mercy of the white man after 1893 as those of the Saxons were at the mercy of the Normans after the battle of Hastings. The rebellions were later to produce a reaction on the part of the British government against the white excesses of the post-Matabele war period, but this did not alter the basic relationship of conquerors and conquered, nor the ultimate source of authority and power. There were many other areas of Africa north of the Limpopo where the British title to rule was in the end as much based on force majeure as in Southern Rhodesia, but there were important differences. Relations with Chiefs were frequently regulated by treaties. The Colonial Office, the effective power in all of them except the Rhodesias, felt obliged as a matter of common prudence to respect African land and other rights, not necessarily in full but at least in part, if only to avoid provoking a revolt which its meagre military forces would find hard to suppress. In these tropical and semi-tropical areas there were far fewer white men on the ground and, except in Kenya, they were not on the whole there to stay. Economic development was slower. For years the bulk of the African populations merely supplied labour to coastal settlements and were able to continue a mode of life which was challenged so gradually that there was never a drastic confrontation. Lack of money obliged the Colonial Office to adopt a system of indirect rule which preserved many features of the traditional African social system. In these areas Lord Lugard*s ‘dual mandate* was a reality. In both Mashonaland and Matabeleland the situation was quite different. Economic development backed by Rhodes's vast resources was very rapid in both countries, by contemporary colonial standards. From the first arrival of the Pioneers white prospectors spread all over Mashonaland and their impact on Shona society Was wide and disruptive. The effect of white development was even more sudden and striking in Matabeleland after 1893 when Bulawayo attracted a host of commercial enterprises. The problem of managing ‘the natives’ bothered Rhodes very little. He did not appoint Native Commissioners in the accepted sense of the term till 1894 and then principally in order to collect taxes and cattle. As 3 Op. cit., 97.

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his speeches to his shareholders show, he took it for granted that the Shona were grateful to the white man for protection against the Ndebele - an assumption widespread among the settlers whose shock when its inaccuracy was demonstrated by the rebellion of June 1896 was all the more traumatic. As for the Ndebele, Rhodes believed, along with Jameson and most white men, that they did not resent their conquest and defeat, and that they were relieved to be rid of witchcraft, superstition and arbitrary tyranny. He could scarcely have been more wrong in both cases. Rhodes was now at the apogee of his power. Prime Minister of Cape Colony which was the base for the whole Rhodesian expedition, virtually Governor of both Mashonaland and Matabeleland, but a Governor backed by financial resources such as no normal Colonial Governor ever possessed, admired in England if loathed in Portugal, he dominated the whole Southern African scene. His personal foibles and ambitions mattered more than those of a single individual normally do. So far things had gone very much his way. True, he had been foiled over Beira and Katanga, but Nyasaland still seemed about to fall into his lap, and he already had his eye on the Transvaal, the last great impediment to his enormous ambitions. He therefore viewed his newly won domain less as an area in which to build a stable colonial system than as a base for future operations - Cape to Cairo, the overthrow of Kruger. It followed from this and his confidence in the quiescence of the ‘native question" that the minimum should be spent on police and administration - the money was needed for more exciting and less humdrum purposes. Government should be left as far as possible with the pros­ pectors, traders, farmers, storekeepers who constituted a settler community to which there was no parallel north of the Zambesi. By this decision much of the future course of Rhodesian history was to be shaped. Rhodes did not intend to be harsh or brutal. He bore no ill will towards those whom he had conquered. It was indifference, negligence, omission, rather than any consciously suppressive purpose, which characterized his policy - together with a deep distaste for the officialdom and the ‘red tape" which he associated with civil and military administration and which bored him stiff, just as it did his faithful agent, Jameson. As Rhodes saw it, the important task after the Matabele war was to keep the settlers sweet and carry out his promises to the Victoria volunteers. Keeping the settlers sweet meant keeping Whitehall out. It was not difficult. The completeness of the Company’s victory had already caused the Colonial Office to back-pedal from the Imperial Secretary’s declaration that Loch should have sole charge over negotiations with Lobengula. There was now no Lobengula to negotiate with, and the campaign had owed little to the only imperial forces involved, Goold-Adams’s Bechuanaland Police. The prestige of the Company stood high in Britain and its shares were booming. Labouchère and his friends cut little ice. Early in 1894 Gladstone, whose conscience about ‘oppressed peoples’ might have made a difference, resigned and was succeeded by the Liberal imperialist, Lord Rosebery. The Government had to balance the trouble which the radicals

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could make in the House of Commons against the indignation which any assertion of the imperial factor would provoke in Cape Colony. Lord Ripon, the Colonial Secretary, decided that the latter was more dangerous and he dropped his sugges­ tion that an imperial resident should be sent to Bulawayo. The most that he and Loch were prepared to insist upon was that Ndebele land and cattle should not be expropriated and reallocated until Loch and Rhodes had agreed upon a con­ stitutional settlement of Matabeleland acceptable to the Crown. Rhodes and Jameson were quite clear what this ought to be. As Jameson put it, Matabeleland should ‘be treated as a portion of Mashonaland lately occupied by the Matabele’ - a neat inversion of Lobengula’s attitude towards Mashonaland. An agreement was executed between the Company and the Crown on May 24, 1894 and confirmed by the Matabeleland Order in Council on July 18. The gist of it was that the two territories were put under the administration of the Company as the grantee of the Crown, now sovereign by right of conquest, though the High Commissioner retained his previous largely theoretical powers. The principal officer of the Company was termed the Administrator and Jameson was to be the first holder of the post. Provision was made for a ‘Council’ to assist him and for the appointment of a Judge. The unification of Mashonaland and Matabeleland raised the question of a name to cover the two. Neither ‘Zambesia’ (Rhodes own preference) nor ‘Charter­ land’ Qameson’s suggestion) ever caught on. ‘Rhodesia’ had become the common journalistic usage by early 1891, and in 1892 the first newspaper in Salisbury called itself the Rhodesia Herald. In May 1895 the Company officially adopted the name, but it was not recognized by the British Government till the Southern Rhodesia Order in Council of 1898. It is not clear why the name should have been pronounced with the emphasis on the second rather than the first syllable, but this appears to have been the custom from the beginning and it never changed. The questions of land and cattle were to be settled by a Commission with power to allocate ‘sufficient and suitable’ land for the natives in Matabeleland. In Loch’s original draft it would have had the same powers in Mashonaland, and there would have been provision for an appeal in both territories by the natives if they thought their allocation inadequate. In the final version this appeal was removed; also a distinction was drawn between the territories. In Mashonaland the Court merely had the right to call on the Surveyor General for periodic reports about native-occupied land and then, if it thought that there was not enough, it could make a further allocation - a difference of emphasis rather than substance, but not unimportant. There is general agreement among historians that both territories were admini­ stered with a deplorable mixture of ignorance, neglect and irresponsibility during the next three years. This verdict is not a matter of applying the moral standards of a later generation. In frequently-quoted words Lord Milner, the High Com­ missioner and neither a sentimentalist, a do-gooder nor a negrophile, wrote to Asquith on November 18, 1897, ‘The blacks have been scandalously used’ and to Lord Selbome on December 29, ‘A lot of unfit people were allowed to exercise

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CONQUEST

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power, or at any rate did exercise it, especially with regard to the natives’.4 Marshall Hole, who served in the Rhodesian administration for twenty-two years beginning as Jameson’s private secretary in 1891 and who was most unwilling to criticize the Company, leaves no doubt about his views on the land settlement and the disposal of cattle in Matabeleland. ‘In both respects the decisions of the Commission were unfortunate,’ he writes, observing that one of the two reserves was ‘quite unsuitable’ - in fact both were - and that the cattle question ‘became a perpetual source of irritation and probably contributed to the unrest which culminated in the rebellion of 1896’? Hole also refers to the bullying by the newly recruited black police and to ‘cases of victimization by a few unscrupulous white men who cheated their labourers of their wages and in other ways made their work hateful to them’.6

The least defensible feature of the new regime was its treatment of land. Within a few months of the victory over Lobengula almost all the traditional grazing grounds of the Ndebele had been given away. This was not simply a matter of satisfying the claims of the Victoria volunteers to a farm of 6,350 acres each. There were 948 volunteers and so the total acreage involved cannot have been much over 6m. By 1899 15.7m acres had been alienated to Europeans. This includes grants made in Mashonaland too, but it is reasonable to assume that in the years between 1893 an^ 1896 not ^ess t^lan ^a^ f^at amount had been disposed of in Matabeleland. Sir John Willoughby alone received 600,000 acres. It would more­ over be a mistake to imagine that most or indeed many of the volunteers actually occupied their farms or personally exploited their gold claims. Like the pioneers of 1890 they usually sold them to companies or individual speculators - and not very profitably. Rhodes was indignant at the charge that men were ready to desert their families and fight for a mere £40 or ¿50. He was technically correct. They did better than that but not startlingly so. A man who sold his land, cattle-loot and gold claims at the end of March 1894 got about £85 to £95. If he held on till October he made about ¿140. By 1899 more than two-thirds of the original volunteers had sold out.7 The trouble did not stem merely from grants to the volunteers. It had always been Rhodes’s policy to gain and retain the support of the British governing class for his ventures. Politically the Chartered Company was riding high, but this might not be so always. Jameson faithfully followed what he believed to be Rhodes’s wishes by allocating vast tracts to the category described later by Sir William Milton, his successor but one, as ‘the Honourable and military elements which are rampant everywhere*. In the same letter Milton continued: ‘It is perfectly sickening to see the way in which the country has been run for the sake of 4C. Headlam (ed.), The Milner Papers, Vol I» I9315 Hole, op. cit., 335, 336. 6 Ibid., 354. 7 P. Stigger, ‘Volunteers and the Profit Motive in the Anglo-Ndebele War’, Rhodesian History, Vol. 2, 1971, 11-23.

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hob-nobbing with Lord this and the Hon. that.’8 Milton had something of a middle class chip on his shoulder and it does not follow that he was right in regarding all army officers and sons of peers as idle dunderheads. But he was correct about the reckless way in which Jameson alienated land. Lord Grey who was Jameson’s immediate successor and who had no dislike of ‘hons’ and soldiers indeed he did his best for them himself - was quite clear about the errors that had been made. ‘Land is our great difficulty,’ he wrote to George Cawston on May 26, 1897. ‘It has all been given away. I will not give away another acre until the Native Question has been settled.’9 Unfortunately long before Grey wrote these words, there was nothing left worth giving away. The effect upon the Ndebele was calamitous. It is true that the Land Commission could in theory have reversed Jameson’s lavish concessions, as the Administrator himself realized for he took care to cover himself by declaring that all his grants were ‘provisional’.10 In practice the Land Commission merely confirmed what he had done and applied itself to finding other land for the dis­ placed Ndebele. Not surprisingly the areas chosen were wholly unsuitable. The Gwai and Shangani Reserves amounting to about 6,500 square miles were remote and waterless. As Grey admitted in a letter to Rhodes in May 1897 ‘they are regarded by the natives as cemeteries not homes’11 and the natives naturally refused to move. The result was that the Ndebele stayed where they were as squatters on what had now legally become farms in the private ownership of white individuals or syndicates. For the time being they were not much interfered with, for very few of the immense areas pegged out were actually occupied and worked, but they were well aware of their altered status, subject now to rent in cash or kind, and eviction at short notice. Nor did they even have the advantage which a feudal system might have bestowed, that of continuity under the same master. Farms were constantly being bought and sold, passing from individuals to companies or vice versa. There was no stability, and the Ndebele seldom knew whom he had to deal with. The use of land, which in an African tribal system is so closely tied up with the whole economic, religious and political order or society, became almost overnight a matter of doubt, obscurity and apparent caprice. Jameson’s lavish distribution was not even advantageous to the Company’s own financial interests. The white adventurers, whether honourable and military Englishmen or speculators from Cape Colony or the Transvaal, were no asset to the new colony. In theory land was usually granted on the assumption that it would be ‘occupied’ within a certain time, i.e. that at least a proportion of it should actually be used for crops or pasture, failing which it would be forfeited. In practice the right of forfeiture was seldom enforced. Jameson’s policy thus ®NAR ML1/1/2, Milton to his wife September 18, 1896. Quoted Ranger, op. cit., 104. 9 Rhodes House Mss Afr. Ci S77. Quoted Ranger, op. cit., 104. 10 Colvin, Jameson, I, 1922. 11 Quoted Ranger, op. cit., 105.

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resulted in absentee landlordism on an immense scale for many years to come, both in Matabeleland and Mashonaland. As Milner put it in a letter to Joseph Chamberlain, ‘They [the Company] feel what a millstone they have tied round their necks with all these syndicates holding thousands of square miles which they are doing nothing to develop’.12 It became a major problem to find respect­ able land for bona fide white immigrants. The question of cattle, the second vital element in Ndebele society, was dealt with no less irresponsibly and insensitively than that of land. Although the ‘Bantu cattle complex’, as it was called, may have been exaggerated by some observers, for it was by no means unknown for the Ndebele or the Shona to sell cattle to the Whites before 1893,13 there can be no doubt that their enormous herds were to the Ndebele an asset which had more than a purely economic significance. As Mr Philip Mason puts it, ‘the cattle were one of the strands that bound the Matabele people together, the way they were held contributing to the royal dominion, the cult of the ancestors and the stability of marriage’.14 No one knows quite how many head the Ndebele possessed before the war. Loch put the figure at 200,000, and other estimates are higher. Jameson had declared when receiving the submission of the indunas that the Company would claim the King’s cattle by right of conquest and leave the cattle in private hands untouched. This distinction was not in practice an easy one to make. Lord Ripon, alarmed at reports of confiscation on a huge scale and anxious to ensure that enough was left to the Ndebele for subsistence, expressed doubt whether any line could be drawn, ‘all cattle being in some sense King’s’.15 It was, he continued, important that enough cattle should be retained on trust for the Ndebele out of those seized, irrespective of their alleged previous ownership. In the end Ripon accepted the distinction on condition that the royal herds could be regarded as a sort of state fund for subsequent allocation if necessary, the Ndebele meanwhile keeping them at their kraals for milking. A final settlement was to be made by the Land Commission. Long before the Commission reported in October 1894, the situation had drastic­ ally changed. In the first place there was the matter of the ‘loot’. About 30,000 cattle were delivered to the loot committee and either allocated or sold at auction in satisfaction of claims between July and November. But a far greater amount than that was acquired by white traders, speculators and farmers in various ways which included raiding and other illegal methods. Moreover another 20,000 had been requisitioned by the Company as ‘police rations’. When the Commission reported, it decided that, whatever the past situation might have been, there was now no means of distinguishing between royal and private cattle, nor had they any idea of the numbers. They recommended that all cattle in Matabeleland 12 December 1897, quoted Ranger, op. cit., 104. 13 See P. Stigger, op. cit. 14 Mason, op. cit., 188. 13 Ripon to Loch, December 10, 1893. Quoted Ranger, op. cit., 107.

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not in private white possession should be treated as the Company’s by right of conquest, and that the Company should undertake to make an adequate allocation to the Ndebele. They advised the appointment of officials with the task of register­ ing every kraal, the number of its inhabitants and cattle, and the duty of ensuring that the cattle were branded with the Company’s brand. No cattle were to be slaughtered without permission. The officials thus appointed were to be the origin of the Matabeleland Native Department. By October a year later this Doomsday Book had been completed, and at the end of November 1895, Judge Vintcent, the Commission’s Chairman, announced his award. The Native Department reckoned the number of cattle in Matabeleland still in African possession at 74,500. Of these 40,930 were to go to the Ndebele, the Company retaining the balance to sell to bona fide farmers or to reserve for influential supporters (Sir John Willoughby got 8,850). If we add all these figures together along with those for ‘loot’ and ‘police rations’, the total is about 124,000. This leaves at least 76,000 unaccounted for. A large amount almost certainly were taken out of the country and, like the bulk of the loot cattle, probably sold in the well established markets of Kimberley and the Rand. But what mattered was not their destination, rather the effect of the losses upon the Africans. The Ndebele holdings were reduced to 41,000 - only a fifth, and perhaps less than that, of the figure before the war. The whole Ndebele way of life was thus thrown into jeopardy by the manner in which first the question of land and secondly that of cattle was treated by the Company. These errors were compounded by the harshness of the administrative ‘system’ - if it can be dignified with that name at all. Until the end of 1894 Matabeleland was under the arbitrary rule of a white police force which regarded one of its functions as the destruction of the Ndebele politico-military order. They behaved oppressively, tyrannically and lawlessly. The creation of a Native Department at the end of the year was a slight improvement, though not much since its main task until the eve of the rebellion was neither administration nor justice nor investigation of native grievances but the distribution of cattle, even as that of its analogue in Mashonaland was the collection of the hut tax. Moreover most of the officers were young men with little experience, who commanded little respect. In Matabeleland, as in Mashonaland, much reliance was also placed on the recruitment of black police. The usual view, though there is some difference of opinion, is that these were principally chosen from the subordinate tribes and the despised Amaholi and that this in itself created intense bitterness among the young Abezansi and Abenhla.™ Whatever their exact caste or tribal composition, they behaved in a most oppressive way and seem to have been loathed by the 16 Mason, op. cit., 193; Hole, op. cit., 354. But see Ranger, op. cit., 118, who quotes a report by Colonel Frank Rhodes that the police were ‘composed solely of Matabeles’ largely from ‘the late Lobengula’s two crack regiments’. See also E. F. Knight, Rhodesia of Today. 1895, 9-

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generality of the Ndebele. They were employed in both Matabeleland and Mashonaland largely to secure labour for mining and other purposes. Their reputation was one of cruelty and brutality, and they were unscrupulous in abusing their position with the women of the kraals on which they descended. Although contemporary observers were reluctant to discuss the matter in that intimate detail which is customary today, there are many hints that the black police were not alone in the matter of sexual exploitation. The white world was for the most part young and male. In Bulawayo in March 1895 there were 1,329 white men and 208 women. There are no statistics for Salisbury at that time, but in November 1897 the corresponding figures were 505 and 134.17 This imbalance was almost bound to cause trouble and make some Whites seek sexual satisfaction, forced or voluntary, among the indigenous population. ‘The conduct of many of the whites towards their black sisters, married or virgin, in Matabele­ land certainly contributed to the causes which have led up to this unfortunate rebellion,’ wrote F. W. Sykes.18 It produced the same consequences in Mashona­ land, and Olive Schreiner’s bitter book, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland^ published in 1897, though not of course evidence in any sense of the word, certainly reflected widespread beliefs which are unlikely to have been based on nothing at all. It is easy in retrospect to see that the Europeans in Matabeleland were sitting on a powder keg. Its ingredients consisted not only of the abuses and errors already described. It was made the more explosive because much of the military system of the Ndebele remained intact. So rapid had been the collapse at the centre in 1893 and so half-hearted had been Lobengula’s defence that many impis were never involved in fighting at all, and had contrived to hold on to most of their weapons. To this military aristocracy - especially its younger members - the new regime was bound to cause intense resentment. Even before 1893 there had been something of a generation gap in Lobengula’s kingdom, the older indunas preferring peace and a material prosperity in which they had the lion’s share, the younger longing for war. The Land Commission had, if anything, enhanced that gap by favouring ‘the more deserving indunas and headmen’ in the distribution of cattle, i.e. the ‘collaborators’ or ‘loyalists’ - according to how one looks at them. We can add to this cause of resentment among the young Abezansi the impact of the white demand for labour. The essence of this in both territories was to pull the black man into the cash economy voluntarily if possible, involuntarily if necessary. The hated police were much involved in the latter process. To the Ndebele warrior caste work of this sort was a humiliation. To the white prospector and overseer all black labour was the same. As so often in colonial history the fault of the Whites lay not in failing to treat Blacks as ,7B. A. Cosmin, ‘The Pioneer Community of Salisbury in November 1897’, Rhodesian History^ Vol. 2, 1971, 25-37. 18 With Plumer in Mashonaland^ 1897, 8-11, quoted Gann, op. cit., 126.

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equals but in failing to realize that some Blacks were more equal than others. The position in Mashonaland was not quite the same as in Matabeleland, but the grievances of the Shona Chiefs were no less bitter. From the very first they had felt the impact of the European invasion. Hundreds of prospectors all over the country, with a seemingly insatiable demand for mining labour and the deepest contempt for and ignorance of Shonç religion, economy and history, soon produced a sense of bitter grievance. The juridical position of the Company was so obscure and the need to retrench so acute that Jameson did not attempt to set up a normal colonial system of law and order backed by proper courts and a regular police force. Instead he allowed labour to be conscripted, cattle seized and white security protected by irregular punitive police patrols. Inevitably some of these abused their position commandeering men and not sparing women. According to one of the first Native Commissioners, his hardest task was to over­ come the tendency of the Shona to flee from the very sight of a white man. This was especially the case with the women. ‘The reason for this appeared afterwards to be on account of some of the police formerly stationed there making a practice of assaulting and raping any native woman they found in the veld alone.’19 That this was not an isolated case is shown by the complaint of Makoni, later to be one of the most determined of the rebel Shona Chiefs, to the Anglican missionary, Frank Edwards, that white raiders ‘had killed some of Mangwende’s people [another Shona paramount] and outraged the women’. As Edwards wrote to Jameson, ‘You will easily see from this incident how utterly futile any missionary work must be amongst the natives if white men are allowed to kill them and outrage their women with impunity’.20 The Order in Council of July 18, 1894 meant nothing to the Shona Chiefs. They had never been conquered. They still had their arms. The defeat of the Ndebele might be a welcome bonus but it did not affect their independence in the least. No treaties had ever been made with them, and their relations with the white man had not altered. The new status of the Company did, however, enable Jameson to set up a Native Department. This ought in theory to have substituted some degree of regularity for the capricious practices of the past. In fact it made little difference. The Chief Commissioner, Brabant, did contrive to collect taxes and labour with more efficiency and less publicity of a disagreeable nature than hitherto. The regular white police were kept out of the business and only summoned for emergencies. Brabant and his eleven commissioners recruited their own native messengers and ‘police boys’. Brabant himself, in the words of Commissioner Weale, ‘was a rough and ready illiterate young man with an aptitude to learn to speak primitive African languages ... a great believer in corporal punishment ... brave as a lion ... quite honest and with an unquench­ able thirst for Kaffir beer’.21 His methods do indeed seem to have been rough I9NAR M. E. Weale’s Reminiscences WE3/2/5. Quoted Ranger, op. cit., 67. 20NAR, Ai/9/1, January 17, 1892. Quoted ibid., 83. 21 Quoted Ranger, op. cit., 74.

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1893-95

- in the end too rough for the Company, whose Executive Council sacked him in November 1895. His successor H. M. Taberer endeavoured to put the Department on a more orderly basis and to do some of the things that had been neglected, for example acquire knowledge of native customs and grievances, draw maps and compile statistics. By then it was too late to avert trouble. The hut tax was in itself a source of irreconcilable hostility, and in contrast with other colonial regimes it was imposed far earlier. Professor Ranger points out that the weakness of admini­ strative machinery was not peculiar to Mashonaland. In other African colonies it was just as bad. The sharp distinction ... was that in Mashonaland administrative weakness was combined with the presence and pressure of hundreds of settlers, with relatively rapid economic development and with the demands of the over­ confident Company itself. Generally speaking other early colonial regimes were aware of their weakness and ready to avoid an assault upon the total African society of the territory; moreover they could not even if they wished to do so ignore African economic systems completely and proceed at once to build up a white economy.22

The consequence of their self-confidence, their utter lack of intelligence system and the insensitivity of the administration was to give the white population in both Mashonaland and Matabeleland an illusion of security which seems in retro­ spect scarcely credible. In 1895 there was published a short book by E. F. Knight, Times correspondent in the BSA Company’s territory. It was partly based on articles which he wrote for his paper, and is a good illustration of the prevailing euphoria: Those who were not in the country at the time can scarcely realise the extra­ ordinary rapidity with which this region of turbulent savages, this last stronghold of South African barbarism has been completely pacified. Absolute security to life and property was the immediate result of the successful campaign ... and very great credit indeed is due to the Administrator and other officers of the Chartered Company who have with such admirable tact, discretion and decision brought about this end.... The natives appeared to be unaffectedly pleased to see the white man in their country and there is no doubt that our invasion and occupation have been welcomed by the vast majority of the Matabele nation.23 The author goes on to say that the Matabele ‘will probably now be far richer in cattle than they ever were before’, that ‘of magnificent pasture on the High 22 Op. cit., 86-7. 23 Rhodesia of Today, 6, 8.

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Veldt there is practically an unlimited supply*, and that *no conquered people were ever treated with more consideration’.24 In this optimistic atmosphere Bulawayo thrived. Immigrants flooded in. Mashonaland including Salisbury became something of a backwater and the main economic activity of the country centred on Matabeleland. A new town was built three miles from the old one, with the immensely wide streets which still survive, designed for the turning of a full span of oxèn, and certainly useful for modem traffic. Superficially Rhodesia’s course seemed to be set fair. No one expected the whirlwind that was to follow.

24 Ibid., 14, 20.

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CHAPTER 9

Rebellion 1896-97

A number of unlucky events sparked off the rebellion in Matabeleland. Ever since the white victory there had been a series of disastrous droughts which suggested that the newcomers, unlike previous conquerors, either did not bother or did not know how ‘to make peace with the land*. There were incessant plagues of locusts - another clear sign of white incompetence. Finally the rinderpest or cattle sickness coming down from the north hit the remaining herds of the Ndebele (and the Shona too) with terrible effect. As Lord Grey, Jameson’s successor, wrote to his schoolboy son from Bulawayo, ‘all the plagues of Egypt have tumbled at once upon this unhappy country - drought - locusts - failure of crops - total annihilation of the cattle by the rinderpest - no milk, no beef in a few days but lots of lovely smells from dead cattle’.1 The appalling stench was indeed widely commented on. According to Selous, the disease even affected adversely the vultures which would normally have picked the bones of the dead animals, but ‘these useful birds are now as scarce as cows in Matabeleland’.2 The situation was made worse by the decision to shoot thousands of healthy cattle in order to prevent the infection spreading - an action incomprehensible to the Africans and attributed to malevolence. By 1897 there were less than 14,000 head of cattle in African possession in the whole of Rhodesia. Four years earlier there had been over 200,000 in Matabeleland alone. This is a measure of the catastrophe partly produced by, partly coincidental with the arrival of the Whites. Then, late in 1895, Rhodes and Jameson launched out on their last great gamble - this time one which did not come off. The Raid, that disastrous short cut towards the elimination of Kruger and the Transvaal, was a clear sign of deteriorating judgement on the part of Rhodes and ofJolie de grandeur on the part of Jameson. Rhodes hoped for a revolution by the unenfranchised foreigners - Uitlanders in 1 NAR GR1/1/1, Earl Grey to Viscount Howick, May 8, 1896. 2F. C. Selous, Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia, 1896, 115. This is a vivid account of the Matabele rebellion down to the beginning of Rhodes’s famous indabas.

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Dutch parlance - who had flocked into Johannesburg since the discovery of gold and who felt themselves to be oppressively treated by Kruger and the Boers. The plan was that, as soon as an uprising occurred, the Chartered Company’s troops would march in from the west to aid the rebels and overthrow Kruger’s regime. The essence of the scheme was that the uprising should be the signal for the Raid, not vice versa. Many volumes have been written about the episode, and there are aspects which remain obscure even today. Of its calamitous consequences on the relations of Boer with Briton and in the long term of both with the Africans, there can be no doubt. What concerns us here is the immediate effect on Rhodesia. Jameson had decided to make the white police the core of his force against Johannesburg. By November 1895 be had quietly moved most of them to Pitsani in Bechuanaland, his chosen jumping off place. On December 29, impetuous and impatient as ever, without orders from Rhodes, he took the plunge and marched his column with Willoughby in command across the Transvaal border. In retrospect he is supposed to have declared ‘Clive would have done it’. Disaster followed. The expected Uitlander revolution failed to materialize. The Boers proved to be a very different enemy from Lobengula’s impis. On January 2 Jameson’s force surrendered at Doornkop fourteen miles from Johannesburg. By that night Jameson, Willoughby and four hundred men were securely lodged in Pretoria gaol. Although Rhodes had not - and certainly in the circumstances never would have - authorized this piece of folly, he was up to his neck in the conspiratorial activities which preceded it. He immediately resigned the premiership of Cape Colony, losing as he did overnight the support of the Bond. He also resigned, though a good deal later, his directorship of the Company. His life’s work seemed in ruins. He would be lucky if he kept the charter. As an earnest of increased imperial vigilance the Colonial Office appointed a regular soldier, Colonel Sir Richard Martin, as Resident Commissioner and Commandant of the armed forces in Rhodesia. The difficulty was that there were scarcely any forces to be Com­ mandant of. The news of Jameson’s defeat spread rapidly through black Matabeleland. The Whites were vulnerable as never before. There were only forty-eight European mounted police in the whole country. Now was the moment to strike. On March 20, 1896 the first sign of trouble appeared when a detachment of African police was attacked at Umgorshwini near the Umzingwani River and two ‘boys’ were killed. Three days later the murder of the Whites began. According to Selous, whose first hand account is far the best, ‘there is reason to believe that by the evening of March 30 not a white man was left alive in the outlying districts of Matabeleland*.3 During March Marshall Hole reckons that 122 men, five women and three children were killed, and in April another five men, five women and three children.4 The murders were attended by every circumstance calculated to aggravate their horror. They were committed treacherously, in cold 3 F. C. Selous, op. cit., 32. 4 Hole, op. cit., 357, n. 1.

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blood, often by Africans who had appeared to be on the friendliest terms with their victims. Men, women and children were shot, clubbed or assegaied to death without scruple or mercy, and their bodies, often horribly ‘mutilated’, were left to the wild beasts. Few women or children were killed, as the above figures show, but this was only because in the outlying districts there were very few to kill. The effect of the deaths was to raise a spirit of fury among the Whites unparalleled since the Indian Mutiny. Selous, a man as humane, honourable and chivalrous as anyone who fought in those times, was deeply affected, even though he had a certain understanding for the other side. He had, he tells us, at first no ‘very bitter feeling against the Kafirs, for after all looking at it from their point of view ... why shouldn’t they try their chance of rebellion?’ But the stories he heard in Bulawayo ‘not only filled me with indignation but had excited a desire for vengeance which could only be satisfied by a personal and active participation in the killing of the murderers. I don’t defend such feelings nor deny that they are vile and brutal when viewed from a high moral standpoint...’5 Elsewhere he describes the slaughtered remains of the Fourie family, a woman and three children, ‘much pulled about by dogs or jackals, but the long fair hair of the young Dutch girls was still intact and it is needless to say that these blood stained tresses awoke the most bitter wrath in the hearts of all who looked at them, Englishman and Dutchman alike vowing a pitiless vengeance against the whole Matabele race.’6 And in his preface, he says I have given descriptions of many barbarous deeds.... I have hidden nothing and related not only how white men, women and children were lately murdered and their senseless bodies barbarously mutilated by black men, but also how black men were shot down pitilessly by the whites, no mercy being shown nor quarter given by the outraged colonists.7

These feelings were shared more vehemently by rougher characters. Rhodes’s biographers describe the blood lust which seized him as he moved in with the column from Salisbury, how he would return to the scene of action to count the African corpses, how he told a police officer to spare no one even if he threw down his arms and implored mercy. ‘You should kill all you can.’8 A. W. (later Sir Alexander) Jarvis, serving with the Gwelo Volunteers, wished ‘to wipe them all out, as far as one can - everything black’.9 Even such a responsible figure as Sir Frederick Carrington, who became commander of the forces in Rhodesia, advocated at a public dinner the extermination or deportation of the entire Ndebele ‘race’.10 The nature of the Ndebele rising has been brilliantly analysed by Professor Ranger. It was a loose coalition between two Ndebele groups who had different aims, together with their former subject tribes whose purposes were even more 5 Selous, op. cit., 30. 6 Ibid., 209. 7 Selous, op. cit., xvii.

8 Lockhart and Woodhouse, op. cit., 349. ’ NAR JA4/1/1, to his mother, July 30, 1896. 10 Ranger, op. cit., 182.

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divergent. The first of the Ndebele factions was inspired by Umlugulu, the Ndebele high priest who like the Archbishop of Canterbury was responsible for the installation of the King and - unlike the Archbishop - for the Great Dance. His candidate for a revived throne was Umfezela, a brother of Lobengula. His support was based politically on the older Ndebele establishment, geographically on the Essexvale/Filabusi area south east of Bulawayo. A Great Dance to initiate the rebellion had been fixed at the full moon on March 26, but, for whatever reason, the revolt broke out before it could take place. The second Ndebele group, led by an induna called Mpotshwana, had the support of the younger warriors and was based on the area of Inyati north east of Bulawayo. Their candidate was Nyamanda, Lobengula’s eldest son. In fact by Matabele law neither he nor Umfezela was in the line of succession, which went only to sons born after Lobengula had become King. These, however, Rhodes had prudently removed to be educated at his own expense in Cape Colony. The rebellion was surprisingly well supported by the former subjects of the Ndebele. What was little understood at the time was the role played by the priests and officers of ‘Mwari’, or ‘Mlimo’ as the Supreme Being came to be called in Matabeleland. This cult of an oracular god was one of two ancient Shona religious systems, the other being that of the spirit mediums or mhondoro. The difference was that the priests of Mwari spoke directly on his behalf whereas in the mhondoro cult the message came at one remove through spirit mediums, male or female, who when in a trance were supposed to be possessed by the spirits of important ancestral figures and to speak with their voices; the dead being regarded in many African religions as having a special power of communication with the divine creator of all things and protector of the land and its peoples. Professor Ranger considers that the cult of the mhondoro had a particular relationship with the Mutapa dynasty and hence with the eastern part of Mashonaland; the cult of ‘Mwari’ or ‘Mlimo’ on the other hand was associated with the Rozwi Mambos, and the Great Zimbabwe had been one of its shrines. But the two systems may well have stemmed from a common origin, and far from being antipathetic had many mutual connexions. The Mwari cult was the one encountered by the victorious Ndebele in the 1830s. They made no attempt to destroy it, but they kept a close eye on its officers. Although it was the religion of conquered peoples, it seems to have fulfilled in some degree a need of the conquerors. They were many hundreds of miles away from the graves of their own ancestors. They too wished ‘to be at peace with the land’ in which they now lived and to propitiate the god of fertility and good harvests. The cult was not based on the capital of the Ndebele as it had been on that of the Mambos, but it continued to flourish. There were by 1896 four shrines; two in the Matopos, one at Mangwe in the south west, and one in the north east at Taba Zi Ka Mambo, the place where the last of the Rozwi monarchs had hurled himself to his death at the feet of Zwangendaba’s impi three-quarters of a century earlier. There is some evidence that the fortunes of the Mwari cult ebbed and flowed

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in inverse ratio to those of the Ndebele monarchy. For example it flourished in the interregnum after the death of Mzilikazi but became less conspicuous during the heyday of Lobengula. However that may be, the Mwari priesthood did nothing to support Lobengula in 1893. This passivity may partly explain the apathy of the Amaholi and the tributary tribes who declined to lift a Anger in his support. On the other hand it may have been a symptom rather than a cause, for the subject peoples had good reason to detest the Ndebele aristocracy. Three years later the situation was very different. Contrary to the complacent beliefs of the Company and the settlers, white rule was almost as bitterly resented by most of the subject peoples as it was by the Ndebele. The Mwari cult rose markedly in prestige, and there is little to conñrm the contemporary view that this was because the Ndebele leaders were consciously using it as an instrument to work their will on the superstitious masses. Rather, they were themselves con­ verts. In particular the leading priest stationed at the shrine of Taba Zi Ka Mambo, a former Ndebele slave called Mkwati, acquired great prestige and influence. He was one of the principal inspirers of rebellion and demonstrated by his success that in Africa as in other continents religious superstition can offer a notable carrière ouverte aux talents. He had two formidable allies, one his ‘wife’, who was also credited with magical powers, the other, Siginyamatshe, another wonder­ worker and priest of Mwari. The Mwari cult, therefore, was a major factor in cementing an alliance between a number of different groups united only in their hatred of the Whites. By stirring up millenarian dreams and reviving atavistic memories it contributed much to the fanatical zeal which animated the revolt. It would, however, be wrong to think that the rebellion in Matabeleland any more than the later outbreak in Mashonaland had the universal support of the conquered peoples, still less that it acted as a clarion call to the Africans under white rule elsewhere. The Ndebele had long been loathed by neighbouring Chiefs and tribes. Khama of Bechuanaland sent aid to the British forces. Admittedly it was not very effective but if he had come down on the other side he could have cut part of the life line from the south to Bulawayo - the road between Mafeking and Tati - with fatal consequences. Lewanika of Barotseland was equally hostile and blocked any escape route for the Ndebele to the north after their defeat. Within Matabeleland itself there was a similar lack of unanimity, among the Ndebele military caste, the priests of Mwari and the tributary peoples. Some important indunas with their followings opposed the revolt - Gambo, Mjaan and Faku. The Kalanga and Makalaka of the south west also repudiated it, and the priests at the shrine near Mangwe opposed the rebels too. Their opposition may partly explain one of the most puzzling features of the whole campaign - the fact that no attempt was made to interrupt the main route for reinforcements to Bulawayo, running north from Old Tati through Mangwe and Figtree. The opposition of the Mwari priests in the south west makes a particular mockery of the famous fraudulent claim on the part of the American Scout, F. R. Burnham who greatly raised white morale in June by declaring that, along with

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Native Commissioner Armstrong, he had penetrated the secret shrine of this sinister religion in the Matopos, had ‘shot the Mlimo’, and had escaped hotly pursued by an impi. As some sceptics pointed out at the time, a claim to have ‘shot the Mlimo’ was strictly meaningless. It was rather like a claim to have shot the Holy Ghost. What Burnham actually seems to have done was to have penetrated a cave, not in the Matopos at all but near Mangwe, and to have killed the leading priest of the only Mwari shrine that was hostile to the revolt. By this feat he came as near as a toucher to pushing the most important ‘loyalist’ group in Matabeleland into the rebel camp - a group moreover which occupied a key strategical position. Luckily, though much upset by what had happened, the Kalanga did not change their policy. Even if the rebellion in Matabeleland had been fully supported under a unified command and even if the uprising in Mashonaland had occurred simultaneously instead of three months later, it is most unlikely that the British would have been permanently displaced, though they might well have been driven out for the time being. But the Company would certainly not have survived and the future govern­ ance of Rhodesia might have developed on very different lines - a crown colony like Kenya perhaps. In the event Company rule continued, though with little margin to spare and in a much modified form. At first the situation seemed very bad. The settlers were forced into four laagers, Bulawayo, Gwelo, Bellingwe and Mangwe. Bulawayo was of course the key and the principal effort of both attackers and defenders was concentrated there. It soon became clear that the Ndebele had learned the lesson of 1893. They had plenty of ammunition and shot far more accurately, they avoided set­ piece battles in the open, they took full advantage of thick bush and hilly or rocky country where their numerical superiority could be used most profitably. The whites were ill prepared for war. The Jameson Raid had depleted the country of white police. The African police were regarded with good reason as unreliable; many of them went over to the other side, the good training which they had received in the use of rifles proving a valuable asset to the rebels; the others were hastily disarmed to avoid risks. There was plenty of small arms ammunition in Bulawayo but there were less than six hundred modem rifles in the whole country. Of the eight assorted machine guns in the town three were out of order. Of the three seven pounders, two needed urgent repairs and the third was usable only in situ since its carriage had been eaten by white ants. There were two 2.5 inch ‘screw guns’ in good order but with only seventeen rounds of ammunition between them. There was a serious shortage of horses, and of course ox transport was greatly hampered by the rinderpest.11 The only white force available was the Rhodesia Horse Volunteers, an amateur body raised and equipped the previous year. They were far from being properly trained or ready for action, and the shortage of rifles and horses limited their 11 Selous, op. cit., 54-6.

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scope for the offensive, but some five hundred of them constituted an effective defence of Bulawayo. In general the citizens displayed notable sang-froid, though there was an unfortunate panic on the night of March 25 caused by a drunken horseman riding round the town shouting ‘The Matabele are here; the Matabele are here’.12 ‘The gallant inhabitants’, wrote a regular officer, ‘lost their heads and scrambled and fought for what rifles were left in the Government Store. It was a disgraceful scene and the less said about it the better.’13 At an early stage a formidable laager was constructed to protect the six hundred women and children in the town which was henceforth safe from direct attack, but not from being starved out. By early April Bulawayo was invested on three sides by Ndebele impis. The biggest force, led by the Mkwati-Nyanda combination, probably amounted to some 10,000 men on the Umgusa River a few miles north east of Bulawayo. Umlugulu’s forces were twenty-five miles to the south east astride the Tuli road, and another impi was some fourteen miles south of Bulawayo near Khami. It was a subject of general puzzlement at the time - and has been ever since - that the main road to Tati and the south west remained open. As we saw, the opposition of the Kalanga and the Mwari priests at the Mangwe shrine may be part of the explanation. The other reason often given is that the rebels wished to leave a route for the Whites to get out. Whatever the motive - and we know little about the working of their minds - the insurgents made a grave error of strategy. Martin had not yet arrived and so the acting Administrator, A. H. F. Duncan, who stood temporarily in Jameson’s shoes, took steps to raise as many fighting men as he could. The result was the Bulawayo Field Force which had as its core the Rhodesian Horse Volunteers. It consisted of a number of levies from all over the country and amounted to some 850 men. Although they were able to send out occasional detachments and fend off attacks on Bulawayo, they were not strong enough to suppress the rebellion. At first the Company, alarmed at the expense of bringing in imperial aid, had, to the fury of the settlers, played down the danger of the revolt and issued communiqués of Panglossian idiocy. The settlers were already in an irritable state for they considered with some justice that the Company, which they did not distinguish from Rhodes and Jameson in their personal capaci­ ties, had landed them with the whole crisis, thanks to the Raid. It was the begin­ ning of a rift that was to grow much wider over the years. They felt equal dislike for the Colonial Office. It must be admitted that here too they had good cause. Officialdom fighting, as so often, not the present battle but the last one and ever keen to shut the stable door after the horse had bolted, decided because of the Jameson Raid that arms and ammunition could only be issued with the consent of the High Commissioner. The result was a delay of twenty-four hours followed by instructions that the issue of rifles and cartridges must be limited to not more than a hundred volunteers, lest feeling might be exacerbated among the Boers. The average settler soon convinced himself that 12 Ibid., 91. 13 R. Macfarlane, Some Account of George Grey and His Work in Africa, içH*

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the rebellion could have been easily suppressed ab initio but for the delay thus imposed by the imperial factor. His desire to get rid of both the Company and Whitehall, though quiescent during the crisis, revived when it was over and be­ came a potent factor in subsequent Rhodesian politics. It was obvious that the existing forces were inadequate, but finance was the great problem which vexed the Company’s officials. At this juncture Rhodes ap­ peared unexpectedly on the scene. He had made a flying visit to England in February with the purpose of ‘squaring’ Joseph Chamberlain. He returned by the eastern sea route and stopped at Beira to visit his domain, less perhaps from solicitude for the Colony than from disinclination to be at the opening of the Cape Town Parliament where there was sure to be a fearful row about his part in Jameson’s disastrous exploit. He received the first news of the massacres on reaching Umtali on March 25. He was still Managing Director with the Company’s power of attorney - the key figure in Rhodesia to whom everyone deferred. His first instinct was as always to extrude the imperial factor and do things as eco­ nomically as possible. He promptly organized a column of local volunteers from Salisbury to advance to Bulawayo via Gwelo under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Beal. But ón March 31, just before the rebels cut the telegraph wire to Salisbury, Duncan convinced Rhodes that this was not enough and that at least five hundred more men were needed. Duncan had already been in touch with Rutherfoord Harris and suggested the raising of an irregular force in South Africa based on the Company’s police now released from Pretoria and at that moment in transit through Cape Colony to stand trial in London under the Foreign Enlistment Act. This proposal was vetoed by Chamberlain who was no doubt by now sick of the Company and all its works. On April 1 Duncan was told that two hundred regulars were en route from England, and that Colonel Plumer, Assistant Military Secretary in Cape Town (later to be one of Haig’s Army Commanders, a Field Marshal and a Viscount) would take charge of them and raise in Cape Colony the rest of the force needed. He would move north from Mafeking as soon as possible. The number, originally fixed at five hundred, was later raised to seven hundred and fifty. In the end the Matabele Relief Force, as it came to be known, mustered some eight hundred men. Plumer’s column did not reach Bulawayo in full strength till the middle of May. Long before then the senior and more experienced members of the Company’s April offered the new Administrator, Lord Grey, a further contingent of three and Duncan telegraphed to the High Commissioner for further support. These views were echoed in the London press, and the High Commissioner early in April offered the new administrator, Lord Grey, a further contingent of three hundred cavalry, two hundred mounted infantry and an artillery battery. Grey was confronted with what was for him an agonizing decision. One of the most attractive though scarcely one of the strongest figures in early Rhodesian history, this amiable Whig grandee had not been selected by Rhodes to succeed Jameson solely on his merits; perhaps it would be more accurate to say that one of his merits

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had been carefully weighed, though not in terms of qualification to rule Rhodesia. Grey’s sense of honour and honesty made it vital for Rhodes to keep him out of England during the inevitable Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry into the Jameson Raid. For Grey, 'Paladin of Empire’, as he was described by H. W. Massingham, knew far more than was good for him or Rhodes about the origins of that episode. Not that he would have dreamed of doing any deliberate harm to Rhodes, whom he regarded with an almost naïve hero worship. The danger was that he also knew too much about Chamberlain’s involvement. He would never have been capable of playing the correct part in the subtle manoeuvres by which Rhodes bargained exposure of the Colonial Secretary’s role against the preservation of the charter. Under cross-examination he would have given the game away, and it was a game Rhodes could not afford to lose. Grey had heard the news of the rebellion while on ship to Cape Town where he arrived at the beginning of April. He proceeded at once to Mafeking. He was horrified at the problem of transport created by the rinderpest. Oxen and horses were dying like flies. Mules seemed immune to the disease, but whereas a team of oxen could pull a load of up to four tons, a team of mules could only manage half as much and they tired far more easily. The distance from the railhead at Mafeking to Bulawayo was nearly six hundred miles, and the cost of transporting a ton of goods was ¿100-^120. Given the problems of transport, it was not clear that further reinforcements were the right answer, and there was the additional worry of the cost of the men’s and officers’ pay, all of which would fall on thé Company. Because of the cut telegraph line Grey could not obtain instructions from Rhodes. He had to decide on his own, and he resolved to accept the offer with the proviso that the troops should not move before Plumer’s column had arrived in Bulawayo. He was greatly relieved a couple of days later when com­ munications had been reopened with Salisbury to receive a telegram from Rhodes advising him to do what he had already done. There was to be much subsequent argument about the quality of the extra forces thus pulled in, but there can be little serious doubt that Hole’s verdict 'providential in the light of after events’14 - was correct. One immediate conse­ quence, however, was a far greater degree of imperial intervention. Chamberlain was an activist. On April 17 he announced decisions which in theory took the whole conduct of the war and the subsequent settlement out of the Company’s hands. All the forces in Rhodesia were to come under the command of General Sir Frederick Carrington, a veteran of native warfare who superseded Sir Richard Martin as far as military operations were concerned. Sir Richard, however, retained his political position as Deputy Commissioner and had sole responsibility with regard to punitive measures, acceptance of submission and the general pacification of the country. These arrangements seemed at first sight a heavy blow to the position of Rhodes and the Company, but events were to show that the Colossus could not be cut down to size easily. 14 Op. cit., 364.

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Grey now proceeded by Zeederburg coach to Bulawayo. His account of one episode on the journey gives a flavour of the times. We met just north of Palla [Palapye] a coach from Bulawayo crowded with funksticks. One of them, a Mr Mordaunt, an Eton boy and a fine cricketer in Eton and Cambridge elevens, took me aside, warned me most gravely against going up to Bulawayo and told me his coach had been attacked at Tati, that two of his mules had been shot, that there had been a hot fire on the coach and that a lady had had a very narrow escape - a bullet thro’ her hat! and that he had seen one Matabele shot within ten yards of the coach. Well there wasn’t a word of truth in it. The poor fellow had lost his nerve and his fellow Passengers had been playing tricks upon him by firing their Revolvers out of the window.

Although Grey makes no criticism, such tricks seem to have been somewhat imprudent, to say the least, for he goes on to say that Mordaunt’s ‘scare’ caused alarm all along the road. One man ran trouserless for thirty miles because of one of the rumours and some waggons loaded with much wanted Provisions laagered up and prepared for the worst instead of trekking quietly along and so lost valuable time. I hope there are not many Mordaunts for I think he must be really mad poor fellow - but there is every degree of alarmism from Mordaunt downwards .. I don’t believe we have many Rotters of that sort in Bulawayo. We have a splendid body of men here.15

Grey arrived on May 2. By that time the Bulawayo Field Force had fought its first successful pitched battle. This was against the impis on the Umguza river not far from what is now Government House. Between April 16 and April 22 no less than four unsuccessful attempts had been made to dislodge them. The promise of the Mwari priests that the white man could not cross the river because his bullets would turn to water seemed partly justified, if not for that particular reason. But on April 28, led by Captain Ronald Macfarlane, an ex-officer of the Ninth Lancers, a detachment of 115 mounted volunteers and seventy ‘Colonial Natives’ inflicted serious losses on the Ndebele troops and drove them back in confusion. It was a heavy blow to rebel morale, and if the white forces had been able to follow up their success, the revolt might have been crushed there and then. Grey would gladly have pushed ahead but it was not practicable. In any case the High Commissioner’s instructions forbade a major offensive before Carrington arrived. The month of May was therefore one of consolidation on both sides. The only episode of importance was the advance of the column from Salisbury organized ,5NAR GR1/1/1 ff. 522-6, Grey to Lady, May 2, 1896.

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by Rhodes and commanded by Colonel Beal. Rhodes’s resignation had been offered to the Company in London on his behalf by his solicitor, Hawksley, on May 3, and published in the press. In spite of a demand by Chamberlain, the Company hesitated whether to accept it and cabled their doubts to Rhodes, who made his famous reply - ‘Let resignation wait - we fight Matabele to-morrow*. A strong patrol under Colonel Napier, sent to meet the Salisbury column, routed a Ndebele impi at Tabas Induna twelve miles out and effected a junction with Rhodes on the Shangani river on May 21. The combined force returned to Bulawayo on June I. The following day General Carrington, with a staff which included Colonel R. S. S. Baden-Powell, later to be the founder of the Boy Scout movement, arrived and took over from Martin who had been in temporary command since May 21. Carrington had at his disposal by now slightly more than 2,000 irregular white troops including the Bulawayo Field Force of 700 under Colonel Napier and the Matabele Relief Force of 800 under Plumer. The residue was mainly accounted for by the Gwelo Field Force of 336 under Captain Gibbs and Beal*s Salisbury Column of 150. In addition to these he had at call the 500 regulars which had been offered to Grey and were stationed at Mafeking, and 480 mounted infantry at Cape Town under the command of Lieutenant Colonel E. A. H. Alderson. Carrington resolved to take the initiative at once. It so happened that, inspired by Mkwati, the north-eastern group of the Ndebele forces set out simultaneously with the same purpose. On June 6 a routine patrol encountered a large Ndebele force at the last place expected - the scene of the battle on the Umguza river six weeks earlier. Although their presence was a surprise and although the force appears to have been the cream of the Ndebele warriors, the white column, rapidly reinforced, was able to inflict a decisive defeat on the rebels. Some 300 were killed and the Ndebele impis never again tried to take the offensive. One section, that of the induna Mpotshwana, retreated to Mkwati’s headquarters, the formidable natural stronghold of Taba Zi Ka Mambo. Umlugulu’s forces took refuge in the Matopos. There was henceforth little co-ordination between them. Something of an impasse had been reached. The Ndebele and their allies now had no prospect of winning the war or ejecting the Whites. The most they could hope for was a prolonged defensive campaign. The white forces were faced with less daunting problems, but their position too was far from satisfactory. It was not going to be at all easy to reduce the rebels to submission in the strange desolate terrain to which they had withdrawn, a world of huge granite kopjes, giant boulders, and a maze of caves and crevices which offered limitless opportunities for resistance. In time, no doubt, they could be starved out, but to the Company time was vital. At this moment something happened which no white man had expected in his worst nightmare. The Shona tribes broke out in revolt during the third week in June. The massacres of Matabeleland were re-enacted in Mashonaland. Once again the outlying settlers were slaughtered with every accompaniment of barbarity and

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treachery. About 120 Whites, including several women and children, perished in the first few days of the new rebellion. The roads from Umtali to Salisbury and Salisbury to Bulawayo were temporarily blocked. A hasty laager was formed in Salisbury and the settlers made every endeavour to bring back into safety the isolated communities now threatened. One of the most famous of these efforts - almost as much a part of Rhodesian folklore as Allan Wilson’s last stand - is the story of the Mazoe Patrol. An isolated group of fourteen including three women was cut off and besieged at Alice Mine, sixteen miles north of Salisbury. Among the party were two telegraphists, T. G. Routledge and J. L. Blakiston. The latter, whose brother later became President of Trinity College, Oxford, was something of an intellectual, quiet, bookish and a student of Macaulay. He was down on his luck and refers sadly in his correspondence to ‘my wasted life’. He disliked Rhodesia and his co-settlers. ‘Everyone in Mashonaland is either slave to Mammon or to Bacchus,’ he despondently wrote to his brother. Yet, in Pro­ fessor Gann’s words, ‘Some ironic twist of fortune destined the shy young man ... to become a martyr for the country’s hard-riding, hard-drinking white frontier community’.16 He and Routledge, at the risk of almost certain death, reached the telegraph office a mile away and sent a message to Salisbury. They were both killed on their way back to the laager, but a couple of patrols rode out to Alice Mine and under heavy fire throughout both journeys brought back the be­ leaguered garrison. One of the two commanders, Inspector Nesbitt of the com­ pany’s police, received the VC for his gallantry. The revolt had begun on June 18 in the Hartley area of west Mashonaland, led by a Shona paramount Chief called Mashiangombi. The first to rise, he was also one of the last to be defeated. He was strongly supported by Chief Mashanganyika in the same area, who also acquired great influence in the later course of the rebellion. Mashanganyika’s son-in-law, Gumporeshumba, purported to be the medium of a Shona spirit known as Kagubi. The Kagubi medium played the same revolutionary and charismatic role in the Shona rebellion as Mkwati in Mata­ beleland. He inspired the same fervour and fanaticism, and he made the same promises to the faithful of invulnerability and immortality. Although his precise role, and that of his principal coadjutor, the woman spirit medium Nehanda who operated in the Mazoe area, have never been fully cleared up by historians, there seems no doubt about its importance. The evidence suggests that in April Mkwati urged Mashiangombi to initiate a slaughter of white men on the lines of the Mata­ beleland massacres. The Shona Chief sent for the Kagubi medium who set the process of rebellion in motion with sacred injunctions to the paramounts to kill all white men. It may be significant that his link with Mkwati occurred, and plans were made, before the decisive defeat of the Ndebele impis on June 6. Whatever the exact chain of command and sequence of events, revolt took place simultan­ eously in western and central Mashonaland. In central Mashonaland the leading rebel chiefs were Kunzi-Nyandoro about thirty miles north-east of Salisbury, 16 Gann, op. cit., 136-7.

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Mangwende near Marandellas, and - most formidable of all - Makoni near Rusape. Only the far north, the south and the south west remained immune. Of course it would be wrong to attribute the rebellion of the Shona paramounts solely to the power of spirit mediums. They had plenty of grievances, and they had the opportunity; the rebellion in Matabeleland had done for Mashonaland what the Jameson Raid had done for Matabeleland - denuded the country of white troops. But if there was no major grievance there was usually no revolt; for ex­ ample Mtoko’s country due east of Salisbury where there had been no forced labour; Melsetter which had escaped the rinderpest; or Fort Victoria where recent experience may well have made the Shona regard a Ndebele impi as worse than anything the Whites could do. Carrington did not allow this new threat to divert him from his main objective. He sent back the Salisbury column together with a detachment of 100 men from the MRF and ordered Alderson with his mounted infantry regulars to proceed to Salisbury via Beira. To supply the gap in Matabeleland he sent for the regulars stationed at Mafeking. Without waiting for their arrival he launched a major assault on the headquarters of Mkwati and the north-eastern group of the Ndebele at Taba Zi Ka Mambo. The column of 750 men was commanded by Plumer. It left Bulawayo on June 30 and arrived at Inyati some twenty miles from the stronghold on July 3. The Tembu scout, John Grootboom, who spoke English and Sindebele reported next day that their presence was known and an attack expected. The defenders intended to dispatch their cattle and other loot north­ wards on July 5 anticipating an assault some time later that day. They did not however bargain with Plumer's decision to make a night march and attack at dawn. The fortress was formidable and the fighting fierce, but after a battle lasting from six till noon the Ndebele were completely defeated, all their booty falling into the hands of the victors. Rhodes was prominent in spurring on the assault, riding unarmed with only a switch in his hand. About a hundred Ndebele were killed. White deaths amounted to only nine. But those few casualties and their burial on the spot wrapped in the hides of cattle shot for food moved Rhodes deeply. It was his first experience of hard fighting, and there was something about the deaths of these young men in a wild barbaric country far from home which touched a chord in him that did not often sound. There is no reason to doubt the well known account by Vere Stent, the Times correspondent who was present with him, that the battle at Taba Zi Ka Mambo brought home to Rhodes as never before something of the bloodiness and futility of war and turned his mind towards a compromise peace. The military situation was far from promising, despite this resounding victory. It is true that the north-east group, the largest and most formidable, was now finally broken. Mpotshwana and some of its leaders went north hoping to set up a new Ndebele state across the Zambesi: Others including Siginyamatshe fled south to the Matopos. But Mkwati was not captured. He and his close supporters had departed eastwards a few days before the assault. He had never been at heart committed to the resuscitation of the Ndebele kingdom; Mwari was a Shona not a

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Ndebele creed. With a Shona bodyguard he moved gradually into Mashonaland where his presence was to be a potent factor in prolonging the resistance of the rebel paramounts. Apart from the failure to capture ‘the Mlimo’, there were other snags. The area of the Matopos was even more difficult to assault and lent itself even better to a prolonged defensive battle than Taba Zi Ka Mambo. Moreover it was defended not merely by demoralized refugees but by the fresh impis of Umlugulu and Umfesela, who had so far seen relatively little fighting. A series of inconclusive engagements during the rest of July convinced Carrington that the war could not be ended militarily without a second campaign in the next dry season requiring another 2,500 white troops plus appropriate support. The same experience convinced Rhodes that this was too high a price, in every sense of the word, to pay for military victory. The Company could not survive a second campaign. There was the problem of Mashonaland where the rebellion was still in full swing, and already voices were being raised in favour of imperial rule. Nor could he rely on the settlers who by now both in Bulawayo and Salisbury were in a state of seeth­ ing discontent. The tale of how Rhodes negotiated successfully with the Ndebele indunas in the Matopos is too famous to need detailed repetition. This period of his life has been called his ‘finest hour’, and there is no reason to quarrel with the words. The most vivid and reliable published account by a contemporary of a story which later became much overlaid with myth and legend is that of Vere Stent17 who was actually present at what he described, unlike many other chroniclers. The best modern narrative is by Professor Ranger18 who co-ordinated early accounts with a source not tapped before - the letters of Lady Grey. These were written at the time to her daughter, and were not written up in retrospect. She was present herself at the third indaba* her husband took part in that and others, and she was living in Rhodes’s camp in the Matopos for much of the time. Although some of the later versions exaggerate Rhodes’s personal part, almost giving the impression that it was a solo performance, there can be no doubt that, but for him, the campaign in Matabeleland would not have ended when it did. This judgment in no way involves playing down the work done by John Grootboom who made the first contacts, Richardson the Native Commissioner for the Matopos, Colenbrandcr the Company’s ex-envoy at Lobengula’s court, and others who ran even greater physical risks than Rhodes. But Rhodes was the only person with the moral courage to initiate peace talks at all, and the eloquence, the person­ ality and the shrewdness to bring them to a successful conclusion. He did it, more­ over, against all the odds as far as his own side was concerned. The settlers bitterly opposed the talks as soon as they heard about them, and for once found 17 Vere Stent, A Personal Record ofsome Incidents in the Life of Cecil Rhodes* Cape Town, 27-62. Other first hand descriptions are by Hans Sauer, Ex Africa ..., 309-42; and J. W. Colenbrander in South Africa* Vol. 33, 1897. 18 Op. cit., 237-67.

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themselves in alliance with the imperial Government personified by Sir Richard Martin who also strongly objected to the negotiations. Not that the settlers approved of the imperial Government’s own efforts to bring the war to an end. A Proclamation issued by General Goodenough, the acting High Commissioner, on July 4 offering a conditional amnesty to the Ndebele rank and file but excluding their leaders had provoked equal wrath - not of course because of the exclusion but because clem­ ency was promised to anyone. To Rhodes this offer, however much it accorded with ‘British justice’, was an inversion of the right approach. He believed in ‘leadership’ and he knew that the only way of bringing the war to an end was to ‘square’ the indunas and not worry about the rest. Theoretically he had no right to take any initiative. Chamberlain had specifically given Martin the task of making the peace settlement and deciding on punitive measures. Moreover Rhodes now held no position in the Company. His resignation had been accepted on June 26. Formally he was just a private person. But his wealth was still vast, his prestige immense in spite of all his late vicissitudes of fortune. He sensed with his strange intuitive power that the Ndebele indunas were willing to negotiate. If the state of the Company’s finances was parlous and that of the forces under Carrington none too good, the prospects for the rebels were even less inviting. White patrols had for many weeks been systematically burning kraals and destroying crops. Starvation faced the whole nation if the struggle was prolonged through the rainy season, and in fact, despite the con­ clusion of peace, a great many did starve to death. Lady Grey wrote to her son from Bulawayo after the indabas were over.

We passed several natives cutting the best pieces off the bodies of dead rinder­ pest oxen which have been lying there decaying for months} now that they have no grain left they boil down these hides and eat them. Isn’t it too horrible! Mr Colenbrander told Father that he should not be surprised if at least some of the natives were reduced to cannibalism, that the natives would be driven to eat their little ones, but most people seem to think it nonsense; for the Matabele have never been Cannibals and they are very fond of their children.19 The first successful approach after several abortive efforts was made when Campbell and Grootboom discovered a very old lady in a deserted kraal, who turned out to have been one of Mzilikazi’s wives and the mother of an important induna called Inyanda. Precisely what followed is not clear, but a good many pre­ liminary moves were made on both sides and Rhodes himself along with Colen­ brander contacted some of the rebel leaders on August 14. This led to a further meeting of the indunas with Grootboom two days later; the first of the great indabas, like all the best diplomatic conferences, had thus been well prepared be­ forehand. It took place on August 21, Rhodes, Colenbrander, Hans Sauer, Vere Stent, Grootboom and an African interpreter called Makunga being present. It ,9NAR GR1/1/1, Lady Grey to Viscount Howick, October 23, 1896.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

is not true, as is often claimed, that they went unarmed; they had their revolvers with them, but they had no guards. If anything had gone wrong they could easily have been dispatched. Rhodes’s party arrived first, and then the indunas came down with a white flag. Thousands of Ndebele watched the scene from the neighbouring hills. Proceedings began with the history of tribal grievances. As recounted by Stent the words of their spokesman, Somabulana, have something of the ring of the heroic literature of long ago - Homer or a Norse saga. He related the story of their wanderings since the day when Mzilikazi fled from the wrath of Shaka. He described their sojourn in Matabeleland, their heyday of prosperity, the fall of Lobengula and the oppression of the Whites; his words made it clear that all sense of solidarity with the Shona had now vanished: The Maholi and the Mashona ... what are they? Dogs! Sneaking cattle thieves! Slaves! But we the Amandabili, the sons of Kumalo, the Izulu, Children of the Stars; we are no dogs! You came, you conquered. The strongest takes the land. We accepted your rule. We lived under you. But not as dogs! If we are to be dogs it is better to be dead. You can never make the Amandabili dogs. You may wipe them out ... but the Children of the Stars can never be dogs. This and other speeches profoundly affected Rhodes. The complaints rang only too true, but Rhodes himself had never consciously intended these abuses. He had merely failed to prevent them. The indaba ended at night fall. It was certainly not an unconditional surrender, but the outlook for peace seemed much brighter: Sauer and Stent promptly telegraphed their brokers and bought ‘Chartered’. There were three more indabas - on August 28, September 9 and October 13. The meeting of August 28 was the most tempestuous and Rhodes had all his work cut out to keep the peace. The indunas proved to be very capable negotiators and displayed a disconcerting knowledge of white politics, including the fact that an inquiry into the Company’s administration was on the cards. At the first indaba on August 21 Rhodes had in effect promised to disband the black police, to reform the administration, put an end to cattle collecting and guarantee the lives of the senior indunas. At the second he felt obliged to go further and he promised to make an adequate land settlement. The indunas had demanded that the Queen’s representatives should be present at this indaba but Sir Richard Martin refused to go without an escort. Martin had not even been informed in advance about Rhodes’s plan to meet the rebels on August 21. Nor did Rhodes see fit to tell him the whole truth about his promise to the indunas. After the second indaba Martin made a strong pro­ test to the acting High Commissioner who agreed with his proposal to take the negotiations out of Rhodes’s hands and proceed himself on the lines of the Pro­ clamation of July 4. Both of them banked on the support of the Colonial Secretary, but Rhodes knew his Chamberlain and he had two cards up his sleeve. One might

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have been guessed by Martin. An important reason for having an imperial resident at Bulawayo at all was to prevent the Company behaving too harshly. Chamberlain would be very ill-placed if on Martin’s advice he found himself advocating a less lenient policy than Rhodes and Grey. The second card was less obvious. It never had to be played, but the knowledge that it might be shaped the whole future of Rhodesia. Chamberlain, for motives known only to Rhodes and one or two others, was determined not to withdraw the Company’s charter and abolish Company rule if he could avoid it. He knew that Rhodes knew things about Chamberlain’s own knowledge of the preliminaries to the Jameson raid which would be very damaging if made public; Rhodes knew that Chamberlain was aware of the information which Rhodes possessed. Nothing was ever said directly. No explicit threat or bargain was made. 'Blackmail’ though often used is not quite the right word. Chamberlain after all had reputable reasons for preserving the Company subject to a modification of its powers. Rhodes on his side was not the man to reveal at all readily facts which would have given encourage­ ment to enemies of the imperial cause everywhere and forced the resignation of Chamberlain. Nevertheless this tacit unspoken agreement conditioned the whole course of events during the nineteen months between the Raid and the debate on the Report of the Select Committee on July 27, 1897, when Chamberlain, himself a member of that Committee, not only refused to withdraw the charter or deprive Rhodes of his privy councillorship, but declared to an astonished House that Rhodes had done nothing which reflected on his 'personal position as a man of honour’. Not surprisingly Martin and acting High Commissioner Goodenough got short shrift from the Colonial Office. The Resident Commissioner was told that Rhodes could continue negotiations subject to his 'advice’ and that Martin should pay close attention to the views of the Administrator. Since Grey, perhaps unkindly but not incorrectly, was once described by Milton as ‘Rhodes’s clerk’, it was unlikely that Martin would get a different view from that quarter. In this way Martin and the imperial establishment were effectively by-passed and, despite strong support from the indignant settlers, their opinion had only a marginal effect on events. On September 9 the third indaba was held. There were present, besides Rhodes and some of the previous participants, Grey, Lady Grey and Martin who lectured the indunas in a somewhat tactless style, but confirmed the previous pro­ mises, ‘even if*, as Professor Ranger drily observes, ‘Martin had very little idea what those were’.20 Everything now depended on whether the Ndebele leaders would literally deliver the goods and give up their arms. At first there was a pause. On September 18 Rhodes delivered an ultimatum - war or surrender - to the minor indunas who were the element least willing to give way. His threat was successful and peace became a reality. A factor which may have influenced the senior indunas was the knowledge that they would themselves be incorporated as salaried officials into a 20 Op. cit., 255.

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reformed native administration. This idea was apparently Grey’s. Lady Grey wrote to her daughter Albert also naturally wishes it to be thoroughly understood by the English people how Mr Rhodes is the one man out here in everyone’s estimation and absolutely essential to the country; everyone believes in him and looks to him, and he has done wonderfully good work in bringing this war to an end ... All the same (between ourselves) I daresay it will appear to the world in general that he has initiated all this policy about the natives as to paying the chiefs a small monthly salary as long as they conduct themselves loyally to the Govt, etc. It is really the initiative of your father who drew up the scheme and inaugu­ rated it.21

At the fourth and final indaba on October 13 the leading ‘loyalists’, Gambo, Faku and Mjaan were also present and were rewarded by salaried posts. At the same time the senior rebel indunas, among them Umlugulu himself, were promised similar positions on proof of good behaviour. The Ndebele nation had been at last in some measure restored and by the end of the year a large number of them were back on their old lands. At least a promise had been made to meet their principal overt grievances and Rhodes had undertaken to return in due course in order to ensure personally that justice was done. At the same time a great effort was made to meet the impending famine by the large scale import of grain (some five million pounds) and seed. Nothing at this stage could prevent a large number of deaths but the situation would have been far worse if the war had gone on. It did not entirely end even in Matabeleland with the surrender in the Matopos. Mkwati tried to keep resistance alive in the Somabula and Shangani area, but his control over the Ndebele was waning, and his policy was beginning to be interpreted as pro-Rozwi anti-Ndebele plot. Late in September Baden-Powell cap­ tured Mkwati’s father-in-law Uwini and had him court-martialled and shot on the spot. Nyamanda, Lobengula’s son, now took advantage of the amnesty and so did other members of the royal family in the north-eastern area. Mkwati himself with his Shona adherents escaped to Mashiangombi’s kraal in west Mashonaland. As for Mpotshwana’s venture to the north, it was equally unsuccessful. Those who crossed the Zambesi were arrested by Lewanika and handed over to the Whites. Mpotshwana himself was not captured till July 1897. He died in gaol before he could be hanged for murder. The rebellion in Mashonaland proved more difficult to subdue than that of the Ndebele and far more difficult than anyone expected. At first matters went well for the Whites. The Salisbury laager was never threatened as Bulawayo had been. Beal’s column cleared the road from Bulawayo via Gwelo and Hartley. Aiderson’s mounted infantry coming up from Beira soon re-established the vital route 21 NAR GR1/1/1, to Lady Sybil Grey, Bulawayo, October 23, 1896.

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from the sea via Umtali. But the Shona rebel Chiefs who had never been through the Ndebele experience of 1893 seem at first to have thought that the Whites, if they would not go away, would at least leave them alone. Separate and uncoordi­ nated, they adopted a defensive role, and there was no centralized command to deal with. The granite kopjes of Mashonaland and the labyrinthine caves whose ramifications were known only to the denizens were readily converted into formid­ able strong points almost as difficult for white men to capture as the Matopos. Why was no attempt made, comparable to Rhodes’s in Matabeleland, to secure a compromise peace? Partly this was due to lost opportunity and the fact that even the Colossus could not bestride two places so far apart. The point of no return may have been the treatment of Makoni, one of the most formidable Shona paramounts, whose kraal was at Gwindingwe near Rusape.22 He was attacked unsuccessfully by Alderson en route for Salisbury early on August 3, but his losses were so heavy that on August 18 he offered to surrender in return for an amnesty. Judge Vintcent, acting Administrator at Salisbury, favoured acceptance and so did Rhodes when consulted. But Rhodes had not yet begun his indabas with the Ndebele. Goodenough, Martin and the imperial Government were in the ascend­ ancy. Fearing as they did in Matabeleland a deal between the Company and the Chiefs at the expense of their respective subjects white and black, they insisted on unconditional surrender - Makoni to take his trial without any promise. Natur­ ally the Chief refused. A subsequent expedition on August 30-September 3 over­ came his defences largely by the terrible technique which was later adopted as the normal form in the reduction of Shona strongholds - dropping sticks of dyna­ mite into the caves where they took refuge; these were seldom completely blocked off from the upper air, and it was usually possible to find some crevice. Makoni was either captured, or surrendered on promise of his life being spared; the facts are not entirely clear. He was, however, at once court-martialled and condemned to death. After some hesitation Major Watts, commanding the patrol, had him shot forthwith at the edge of his own kraal - an action which was illegal even if there had been no promise to spare his life. Whatever chance there might have been of a series of indabas with the Shona paramounts now vanished. Perhaps there was little chance anyway. They were actuated by deeper superstition and greater fanaticism than the Ndebele. Mkwati now joined forces with the Kagubi medium, and even tried in a last despairing throw to revive the Rozwi Mamboship early in 1897. The attempt failed because the ‘Jacobite’ candidate was - luckily for him - accidentally detained by a Native Commissioner before he could commit himself. The Shona were not so well armed as the Ndebele, but they possessed, thanks to generations of trading with the Arabs and the Portuguese, a great number of old muzzle-loading muskets. With home-made powder and ammunition consisting of nails, glass balls from soda-water bottles, and small bits of telegraph wire, they could inflict at short range hidden in their concealed crannies the most horrible wounds, while the

22 See Ranger, op. cit., 274 et sq.

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uselessness of these antique weapons at long distance did not greatly matter. Rhodes and Grey came to Salisbury late in November. They persuaded Martin to send back the imperial forces under Alderson - Carrington’s had already left Matabeleland - although Martin did not share their optimism about finishing the war before the end of the year, and Chamberlain warned Grey that a disaster in the field really would mean the revocation of the Company’s charter. Luckily for Rhodes this did not occur. The forces left Kproved sufficient for the grim but effective dynamiting of the Shona strongholds. The process occupied most of the ensuing year despite some humanitarian protests in England. The later stages in the suppression of the Shona rebellion were little reported and form one of the obscurer pages of Rhodesian history. Martin himself dealt a heavy blow by capturing the kraal of Mashiangombi near Hartley. He had been one of the main supporters of Mkwati and ‘Kagubi’. After a fierce struggle on July 25 and 26 his defences were overcome and he was killed in the battle. This ended the rebellion in western Mashonaland. In the centre the defeat of Kunzi-Nyandoro a month earlier had the same effect. The Shona Chiefs surrendered in increasing numbers. Mkwati, now on the run, vanishes from the scene. He is said to have been chopped up alive into pieces at the order of disillusioned Chiefs who thought he had made enough trouble in his life time and wished to avoid any risk of his bodily reincarnation. His principal followers were caught and executed, though his consort Tenkela, to the astonishment of many Africans, was acquitted for lack of evidence. The Kagubi medium surrendered in October, and Nehanda was captured in December. Both were tried for murder and hanged in Salisbury; ‘Kagubi’ receiving the last rites of the Catholic Church, having been converted by Father Richartz; Nehanda gibbering, screaming and struggling even on the scaffold. Their bodies were buried in a secret grave. And so it was all over. No one knows how many Africans perished. The total white death roll including the settlers was 450 with another 189 wounded. For settlers in the country when the rebellion began the figures (including women and children) were 372 dead and 129 wounded - nearly ten per cent of the whole population and, as Professor Gann points out, a far higher proportion than any­ thing experienced by European minorities in modem times, for example in Kenya or Algeria. But the white men of those days never lost confidence. They knew where they stood and they had, apart from a few dissentients, the solid backing of both Cape Colony and the home country. Even the missionaries were ‘sound’. There was no nagging guilt about race relations, no uneasy doubt about the white man’s civilizing mission. And for those who had not suffered personal bereavement there was something not unattractive - almost exhilarating in a campaign on the high veld, despite its dangers and hardships. There are occasions when a single contem­ porary letter tells us more than much laborious historical reconstruction. Lady Grey is writing to her daughter about an encounter near Enkledoorn on her way across to Salisbury in the hot dry season of 1896:

Vera and I strolled away from the camp for a little walk towards the sunset

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and suddenly saw outlined against a glowing sky a long column of dark horse­ men coming from the hills (which were from fifteen to twenty miles off) towards our road. We recognised them at once as the Patrol of the Seventh Hussars and Mounted Infantry ... I suppose about 200 men commanded by Colonel Paget ... They had burned a large number of Kraals a day or two before we met them and killed about thirty natives ... I suppose as white people had been murdered in that district it was necessary to punish them in this way, but as far as I could make out they made little or no resistance at all so that it all sounded rather horrible ... It was a picturesque sight coming upon them (the Hussars) on the Veldt marching across it on their way from fighting, with a few waggons carrying their cooking things and forage etc. We had a little chat with the Officers ... We saw them all march past and file away along the road lead­ ing to Gwelo on their way back to Bulawayo 170 miles away. It was an interest­ ing break in our trek and quite excited us. They faded away from sight very soon in a golden glow of dust through which the setting sun shot its red and gold rays and we went off to our dinner feeling quite enlivened by the meet­ ing.23

Much of the atmosphere of the time and place is there: the romance, the glamour, the sense of adventure, and also the sadness of that cruel clash between two alien worlds.

23NAR GR1/1/1, to Lady Sybil Grey, November 22, 1896.

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The Aftermath 1897-1902

The crushing of the rebellions reaffirmed the white man's conquest. Juridically conquest had been his title deeds since 1893, but title deeds are nothing if they cannot be enforced; and at moments during 1896 there must have been some doubt whether they could. That danger vanished with the suppression of the revolt. Although there continued to be occasional scares for many years to come, there was no real chance of a recrudescence in either territory. The Ndebele had now been beaten twice and a settlement had been made which at least conceded some­ thing to their traditional institutions. The Shona were potentially a greater threat. They had links with the Shona-speaking peoples in Mozambique where white rule was more precarious than in Mashonaland. The religious creed which in­ spired the rebellion was essentially theirs and was held by them with far greater tenacity than by the Ndebele. ‘The Shona have been rebels at heart ever since,’ I was told by one of the most eminent living authorities on their beliefs and customs. But the process of reducing them to submission, which took four times as long as the campaign in Matabeleland, left them correspondingly more exhausted and demoralized for many years to come. Apart from these considerations, a revolution in communications was imminent, which would make an uprising far more difficult. Grey’s correspondence both in Mafeking and Bulawayo is full of his anxiety to speed up the railway. Its con­ struction was indeed one of the original conditions of the charter, and, after a notable effort had been made, the first train steamed into Bulawayo on October 19, 1897, making the long, slow, expensive and dreary haul by ox waggon along the ‘missionary road’ a thing of the past. The Ndebele rebellion would have been crushed with ease had this occurred a couple of years earlier than it did. In 1898 the line from the Indian Ocean reached Umtali, the old town having been resited by Rhodes to suit the convenience of the railway engineers. Its construction was only achieved at the cost of heavy losses from malaria and blackwater fever.

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THE AFTERMATH

1897-I902

A year later Umtali was joined with Salisbury, and in 1902 the link with Bulawayo was completed so that Salisbury too was accessible from the south as well as the east by rail. Rhodes had not forgotten his plan of ‘Cape to Cairo’. It was never to be achieved, but he drove on to the north. The discovery of coal in the Wankie area made him change the original route which would have crossed the Zambesi near Chirundu. Instead the line went via Victoria Falls. The bridge was built in 1904, but Rhodes did not live to see the reality of his dream that the carriages should cross under the spray. Railways were to be the greatest single cause of social and economic change in Central Africa during the early years of the twentieth century, even as they had been in England and Europe during the second quarter of the nineteenth. For nearly forty years, until first the tarmac road and then the aeroplane pro­ vided alternatives and substitutes, they were the life blood of the Rhodesian econ­ omy. They also added something new and conspicuous to the Rhodesian scene. There are comparatively few cuttings and tunnels, and the routes keep to the high veldt with its great vistas, where the long sinuous caterpillar of carriages and trucks, hauled - till very recently - by old-fashioned steam locomotives puffing and mournfully hooting, can be seen miles away, for all the world like children’s toys as they chug slowly across the rolling landscape. The effect of the railroad on transport charges and hence on the whole Rhodesian economy need not be spelled out except to observe that it was essentially a mining system and the fact that it ran near to the best European farming areas was more by chance than design. Its strategic importance is less obvious but there can be no doubt that it greatly reduced the chances of a successful revolt. The Rhodesian railway system was remarkably cheap in relative terms - under £7,000 per mile, compared with over £10,000 in South Africa, over £11,000 in Uganda and over £16,000 in the Gold Coast (Ghana).1 This was partly due to the favourable terrain and deliberate economy, partly to the ability of the Com­ pany, for which it got precious little thanks, to raise cheap loans on the London market. The trouble was that, though cheap by comparison with other African colonies, it was extremely expensive in terms of the tiny European population in Rhodesia. Complaints about high freight rates were endemic till at least the 1930s. If the repression of the rebellion left the Africans stunned and exhausted, the fact that a rebellion had occurred at all was a profound shock to the Whites. Neither the Colonial Office nor the Company was prepared to act on the sim­ plistic settler view that it all came from being ‘too soft to the Kaffirs’. At the top level Rhodes ended his indabas with a respect for the Ndebele, whom he believed to have been wronged; and Grey firmly rejected the gloomy view of the Shona held even by the Roman Catholic missionary Father Bieler who considered ‘that the only chance for the future of their race is to exterminate the whole people both male and female over the age of fourteen’. Grey went on to say in his letter to his wife who had now gone back to England:

1 Gann, op. cit., 157, n. 1.

US

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

This pessimistic conclusion I find difficult to accept. It must be remembered that the Mashonas have been governed and controlled entirely thro* the in­ fluence of fear. They have the habits of a whipped cur and not infrequently bite through terror the hand stretched out to help them. If I were to stay out here longer I sometimes think I might do something to alter this state of things. So long as I remain here my endeavour will be to teach the natives that my Govt, is strong enough both to punish them when they do wrong and to protect them when they do right, and the White Population that the employer who ill treats his native dependents and deprives them of their just rights is a scoundrel who deserves to be treated by his fellows as the I.D.B. [Illicit Diamond Buyer] is treated by White Society in Kimberley.2 Although his heart was on the right side, Grey had little chance to put these resolutions into effect. He retired from the Administratorship in June 18973 and his hands were full with the rebellion which had by no means ended when he left. Nor is it likely that even in peace time he would have shown the talents needed to put Rhodesia on to a basis of law and order. There is indeed something engaging about him, and one likes to think of him riding to Government House on his red bicycle with solid tyres and a ‘G’ and a coronet engraved in gold on the rear mudguard. But he was too impulsive, too enthusiastic, too easily distracted. And there was so much to distract him, as the same letter - a typical sample - shows. There was ‘my Ball ... in every way a great success ... I believe we drank five cases of claret, five cases of whisky and twenty dozen of mineral waters’. But there were complicated problems of whom to invite and whom to exclude and much time was consumed - as well as drink. Then there was the cost of living. ‘This place is ruinous ... My hotel bill at Umtali amounted to £193!!! - a big price to pay for small civilities to people one does not care a damn about.’ And other things vexed him:

William is in hospital with fever and the cook has been vomiting blood - and Hubert is running the show! You can imagine what this means ... Pauling is coming to stay with me and is bringing his wife too! I have not recovered [sc. from] the ill temper into which this news has put me. Besides costing me over £200 a month, for this lady will always have a full dinner table for wh: I as her host will have to pay, I shall have no more peace and quiet. I am too annoyed. Grey had arrived in Salisbury along with Rhodes in November 1896. Having successfully ‘squared’ the Ndebele indunas Rhodes now directed his attention to 2NAR GR1/1/1 Salisbury, January 23, 1897,t0 Lady Grey. 3 That is to say he left Rhodesia for London then. He remained formally Administrator for the purpose of negotiating on Rhodes’s behalf with the Colonial Office till December when he finally resigned, being replaced by Milton who had been acting Administrator since his departure.

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THE AFTERMATH 1897-1902

the angry settlers. Salisbury was even more discontented than Bulawayo where, despite initial settler criticism, it was hard to dispute that the rebellion had been successfully ended. This was far from being the case in Mashonaland; the demand for settler representation in the running of the colony was vociferous as a result of a strong feeling that the Company’s protection had proved wholly inadequate. There were two reasons why Rhodes was ready to concede a part of the settlers’ case. First he had always envisaged that Rhodesia would in the end develop into a self-governing colony, like Natal, and then become, as he hoped Natal would, part of a South African Federation under the British flag. Secondly, although he knew that Joseph Chamberlain would not readily abrogate the charter, he also knew that events might be too much for the Colonial Secretary; it was therefore vital to avoid any general demand for imperial rule; indeed the Company, if it agreed to a certain amount of power-sharing with the settlers, would be much better placed to resist pressure from above for the abrogation of the charter and the substitution of the Colonial Office. It would be harder for Whitehall to bully a representative council than a Chartered Company. On November 10, though by no means disclosing the whole of his thinking, Rhodes made a speech to an audience of leading settlers in which he told them that he favoured a semi-elective system as a forerunner to self-government. Rhodes had the measure of the settlers. As in Bulawayo, he promised and paid lavish compensation from his own purse to those who claimed that they had been finan­ cially damaged by the rebellions. His enormous wealth was an omnipresent element in the politics of the day. The Company paid out £250,000 to the settlers in Mata«beleland and £100,000 in Mashonaland.4 If the numerous private payments are added in and the subsidization of food supplies reckoned too, it can be seen that the settlers were very generously treated. Some idea of the size of the cost of the Jameson Raid and its repercussions emerges from a note in Lord Rosebery’s betting book. He records that in May 1898 Rhodes told him that it had cost him and Beit nearly £400,000 each. Rhodes now departed to England for the great Parliamentary Enquiry - ‘the Lying in State at Westminister’, as it came to be cynically known. Before he left he had brought into Rhodesian affairs a man who made a more lasting imprint on the country’s early history than anyone, apart from Rhodes himself. This was William (later Sir William) Milton who was to govern the country for seventeen years and to create an administrative and judicial system which outlasted Company rule itself. Dr Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets, Lord Campbell the Lives of the Lord Chancellors, Samuel Smiles the Lives of the Engineers, but no one has ever tried to write the ‘Lives of the Civil Servants’. Yet these important functionaries, such as Sir Robert Morant, Sir Warren Fisher, Lord Bridges, have probably done more to shape events than almost any other category of person. The trouble is that their work is to most of us dull, and that a convention of anonymity makes it 4 Report on the Native Disturbances in Rhodesia 1896-7, 21-2.

H?

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

difficult to discover exactly what they did and how they did it. Rhodes belatedly realized that what the colony needed was a systematic and orderly mode of government. He may half-consciously have known that he had no talent himself for this sort of thing. He certainly knew that he found it tedious. He had a high respect for Milton who had been his civil service private secretary at £ape Town, and later head of the Prime Minister’s Department. In August 1896 Rhodes persuaded him to come up to^Rhodesia on temporary secondment as Chief Secretary and Secretary of Native Affairs with a seat on the Advisory Council. We have seen Milton’s distaste for the set-up at Bulawayo. At one moment he almost threw in his hand, but he found Salisbury slightly less odious though ‘a god-forsaken place to spend one’s life in’. In November Rhodes offered him the succession to Grey. The matter was not entirely simple, for Grey with the consent of the London Board had offered it to one of those ‘honourable and military’ figures of whom Milton so much dis­ approved. This was Grey’s former private secretary, Captain Arthur Lawley, a son of Lord Wenlock, who had been deputizing for Grey at Bulawayo. A complicated series of misunderstandings, withdrawals, acceptances and general muddles ensued. Rhodes was anxious not to offend Grey who, though back in London from June 1897 onwards, was still Administrator till December and, now that the Enquiry was over, could be safely entrusted to negotiate with the Colonial Office on behalf of the Company, Rhodes himself having returned to the colony. On the other hand he was determined that the real power should go to Milton, not Lawley. The result was one of those curious constitutions which are incomprehensible without knowledge of the personalities involved. The Southern Rhodesia Order in Council 1898, duly confirmed by Milner and Chamberlain, provided for two Administrators, one at Bulawayo (Lawley), the other at Salisbury (Milton). All communications, however, whether with the London Board or the Secretary of State went through Salisbury as the capital of the senior province. Likewise the Council met there, not at Bulawayo. The Administrator of Matabeleland was a member of the Council whenever he could get to Salisbury - which was not often since there was as yet no railway line - and it was the Council, not the Administrator of Mashonaland, from whom he took his in­ structions. On constitutional and administrative grounds this arrangement was absurd, but it saved several faces and it did not last long. In 1901 Lawley re­ signed to become Governor of Western Australia. He was not replaced and Milton became sole Administrator. He had retained his position, throughout, as Chief Secretary and Secretary of the Native Department, and he now held all the strings of power in his hands. The 1898 Order in Council remained the governing instrument of Southern Rhodesia until Responsible Government a quarter of a century later. It represented a «compromise between the imperial and the Company attitude. In many respects the Company lost. But Rhodes and the London Board were in no position to complain. Much could easily have gone wrong. For one thing it was sheer luck that the Select Committee of the House of Commons, having reported on the Jameson

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THE AFTERMATH 1897-1902

Raid, never took up the second item of its term of reference - the conduct of the Company in the administration of Southern Rhodesia. The verdict on the Jameson Raid had been highly unfavourable but thanks to Chamberlain the charter had not been withdrawn. It could scarcely have survived a serious investigation into the malpractices of the Jameson era. Fortunately for Rhodes, in the mysterious way in which these things happen - the exigencies of the parliamentary time table, loss of public interest, sheer exhaustion of the Committee - the second item just vanished. It was never heard of again; but at the time there could be no certainty that some radical trouble-maker might not resuscitate the whole affair, and so it behoved Rhodes to move cautiously. Moreover in the new High Commissioner, Lord Milner he had to deal with a man of very different calibre from any of his predecessors. Loch had been un­ friendly but only half-heartedly backed by Whitehall. Robinson had been a crony. It was lucky that he, like Grey, did not give evidence either at the Cape Town or the London Enquiry, Chamberlain having skilfully arranged vital engagements for him in England during the former and in Cape Colony during the latter. Milner, who arrived at Cape Town on May 5, 1897, was not only an admini­ strator of proven capacity, he was also a public figure. He had been sent out with a purpose. The attempt to solve the South African problem through the colonial factor had ended in the fiasco of the Jameson raid, but Chamberlain had no in­ tention of abandoning the attempt to solve it. He now resolved to assert the imperial factor, dormant since the days of Lord Carnarvon, and force Kruger into com­ promise for preference, war if compromise failed. That part of Milner’s career lies outside the scope of this book, but as a by­ product it fell to him to settle the new status of Rhodesia. He admired Rhodes but he knew his limitations: ‘a great developer ... but not a good administrator’. We have seen how shocked he was by what he discovered about the Jameson era. It was an important imperial interest in South Africa that the new colony should not cost money and not give trouble. If the Company was to go on ruling - and considerations of expense favoured its continuation - then it must be closely controlled. Accordingly the new constitution formalized imperial vigilance in the shape of a Resident Commissioner appointed and paid by the Colonial Office and respon­ sible to the High Commissioner. He was an ex officio member of both the Executive Council, which was a body of officials, and of the newly created Legislative Council, on both of which he had a voice but not a vote. He had no executive power but he could call for reports through the Administrator, and the information he sent to the High Commissioner at Cape Town helped the latter to decide whether or not to disallow ordinances. These which had been made hitherto by the board of the Company were now made by the Administrator in Council and required the assent of the High Commissioner before they had validity. He had particular instructions to veto any legislation which discriminated against Africans, except in respect of liquor and fire arms. The Administrator also had the power to make regulations under existing legislation. The command of the military and

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

the police came under the High Commissioner through an officer called the Com­ mandant General. This latter post was often held in conjunction with that of Resident Commissioner, and the two posts were formally merged between 1909 and 1913. The Colonial Office further insisted that there must be some supervision of the Company’s internal activities. The South African office under Rutherfoord Harris had been at Kimberley in 1889-91 bqt was then transferred to Cape Town. With the resignation in 1896 of both Rhodes and Harris it became less important, most of the business now being transacted from London directly to and from Salisbury. The Company’s minutes and resolutions under the new order had to be sent to the Colonial Office insofar as they concerned administration and not com­ merce. The Secretary of State could cancel or amend them. He also had the right to remove the Company’s directors or officials. These imperial powers were not mere window-dressing, but they meant less in practice than in theory. The Resident Commissioner, especially if he was also in command of the police and the army, had little time to deal with more general questions, nor did he possess an executive staff of his own. Much depended on the individual holder of the post, and the examples of vigilance cited in a well known study5 are largely confined to the period in office of a particular Resident Commissioner, Sir Marshall Clarke who was far from typical. His successors were mediocrities who did little. The High Commissioner was Governor of Cape Colony and after the Boer War of the Transvaal too. He finally became Governor General of the Union of South Africa, and he was too busy to deal with a colony which soon became a back water. As for the provision about the minutes of the London Board, it was easy enough for the directors to avoid it by communicating privately among themselves and with the Administrator. More significant than the arrangements for imperial control were those for settler representation. The new Legislative Council was to have ten members, the Administrator, five nominated by the Company with the Colonial Secretary’s approval, and four elected on a property-cum-literacy qualification by resident British subjects. There was no colour bar but in practice only a handful of Africans qualified.6 The purpose of the franchise was not so much to exclude Blacks (whom no one thought of seriously in that capacity anyway) as to cut out poor Whites coming up from the Transvaal. There were conflicting opinions about the wisdom of a partly elected Council. Joseph Chamberlain believed it would serve as a check on Rhodes. Moreover ever since his days in the municipal politics of Birmingham he had had a strong penchant for local government. Rhodes and Milner thought it would have the opposite effect - which' was why Rhodes supported it and Milner had misgivings. Milner saw that the elected representatives of the settlers were certain to be illiberal 5 Claire Palley, The Constitutional History and Law of Southern Rhodesia 1888-1965, Oxford, 1966, 173 et sq. ‘There were fifty-one on the first electoral roll. The number was 500 on the eve of Federation in 1953. No black man became a member of the Legislative Assembly.

150

THE AFTERMATH

1897-1902

on the native question, but he saw too that Chamberlain and Rhodes would have British opinion on their side, and that opposition to a representative element would - ironically as it may seem in the light of later events - appear hostile to the principles of liberty and progress. No great difficulty arose, therefore, in drafting the new constitution. The system that emerged gave the Administrator much power. He presided over both the Executive and the Legislative Councils. Even when he lost his built-in majority on the latter - parity came in 1903 and an elected majority four years later - his position remained very strong. No financial measure could be introduced except on his initiative, and in practice it was difficult for the elected members to dictate policy since almost any change that they wanted involved extra expenditure. As for the other potential constriction on his freedom of manoeuvre, the High Commissioner, there was little interference except occasionally on native affairs. The Executive Council carefully discussed every ordinance before it went to the Legislative Council, and most of its members also sat on that body too. The ad­ vantage which a well briefed and informed group, even if in a minority, possesses in such conditions needs no emphasis. Milton was both head of the Civil Service and Secretary for Native Affairs. He was therefore responsible for two separate administrative systems which cor­ responded with the division of the country into ‘two nations* - a dichotomy which has remained from that day to this. The Chief Native Commissioners of Mata­ beleland and Mashonaland7 reported direct to him, heading in their respective provinces a hierarchy of Native and Assistant Native Commissioners whose task was to collect revenue and administer justice. The Administrator also controlled the magistrates and civil commissioners who were responsible for the white popu­ lation. Constitutionally his position was in many respects like that of a Colonial Governor but with two important differences; first he was responsible to the Chartered Company and only indirectly to the Crown; secondly he had an indefinite tenure, unlike the customary four years or so of the typical Governor. There were in fact only two Administrators between 1898 and the ending of Company rule twenty-five years later. The result was that he became much more identified with local white sentiment than the Governor of, for example, Kenya. This tendency was enhanced by the character of the Company’s officials. Milton naturally tended to recruit from South Africa, and so the tradition in Salisbury came to be that of Cape Town rather than Whitehall. This was appropriate in a country which was in so many respects - franchise, law, and white population a northern extension of Cape Colony, but it led to an important contrast with the other non self-governing territories under the Colonial Office. In most of them the officials were based on London; they moved from one colony to another and to Whitehall in the course of a career which usually ended with retirement in Britain. In Southern Rhodesia the official corps like the Administrator was an integrated 7 In 1913 this division was abolished and Sir Herbert Taylor, Chief Commissioner for Matabeleland, became Chief Commissioner for the whole colony.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

part of the country’s white population and had close ties with it. The situation was perpetuated under Responsible Government, for in practice the Company’s offi­ cials became the Civil Service of the new self-governing colony which incorporated many of the Company’s traditions and procedures. Southern Rhodesian officials tended to be the products of South African - later of Rhodesian - schools and of South African universities. They did not have the English upper middle­ class accent or the education at a public school and at Oxford or Cambridge, characteristic of the colonial officials in the territories north of the Zambesi. This perhaps is the reason for a certain element of‘chip-on-the-shoulder’ resent­ ment shown by some of the Southern Rhodesian officials when they had to nego­ tiate with their Colonial Office opposite numbers, and it was not helped by an irritating air of unconscious superiority on the part of the latter. Moreover from the very start the Company had a bad name and few friends in the Colonial Office, especially after the death in 1897 of Edward Fairfield who had been its strongest supporter. If the officials had had their way the charter would probably not have survived at all. What saved it were the links on the top level between the politicians and the directors. The divergent traditions and social differences in the world of officialdom are more important than the historian always appreciates. It is by no means fanciful to see in them one important reason, though not the only one, why the attempt in the 1950s to create a Central African Federa­ tion ended in failure. One cause of Colonial Office dislike for the Company had been a well founded distrust of the quality of its servants. Milton’s great success was that he soon re­ moved this cause of criticism. Colquhoun had been a prickly pedant insistent on his ‘rights’. Jameson had been an erratic adventurer prepared to gamble on the turn of a card. Grey had been an engaging idealist tilting vaguely at windmills. Milton was the first Administrator whose abilities actually warranted his title. He reorganized the whole system, firmly refused to employ the down and out job­ seekers thronging Salisbury during and after the rebellion, and brought in his new men from the south. A criticism levelled at his appointees was that cricket, to which he was devoted, often seemed their principal qualification. However they appear to have been none the worse for that, and they helped to uphold the honour of the colony in its first match with the MCC; a Rhodesia XI against Lord Hawke’s XI at Bulawayo in 1899. Milton was not devoid of defects. He was an engrosser of power and reluctant to delegate. He was criticized with some justice for becoming too much absorbed in detail. He was also criticized for his unwillingness to visit Bulawayo. At this time and long after the capital of Matabeleland was commercially much more im­ portant than Salisbury, and after the rail link had been completed in 1902, there was no difficulty about the journey. Probably Milton’s reluctance stemmed from his original distaste for the place when he arrived in 1896. These were venial faults. The country’s debt to him is great and indisputable. Just as peace seemed to be settling on the Rhodesian scene hostilities erupted nearby, which were bound to effect the colony. It is unnecessary to discuss the pre­

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THE AFTERMATH 1897-1902

cise responsibility for the South African War. One can, however, safely say that the clash between Afrikaner nationalism and British imperial strategy made war highly probable, and that the likelihood was enhanced both by the Jameson Raid and by the personalities who held the key posts, Kruger, Milner, Chamberlain. (Not, for once, Rhodes, who played no significant part in events in South Africa after 1895.) War broke out on October 11 1899. Some 1,700 men out of a total white population of about 11,000 volunteered to fight. This is a remarkably high figure, but one has to remember that the Rhodesia of that day contained a large number of young men who knew how to ride and shoot and were familiar with the veld. They also had a great dislike for the Transvaalers and regarded the British cause as entirely righteous. The Rhodesia Regi­ ment under Plumer played an important part in the relief of Mafeking. The British South Africa Police was also active in the war and the Chartered Company did all it could to co-operate in the dispatch of the Rhodesia Field Force which con­ sisted of some 5,000 men from Britain and many parts of the Empire, who were transported via Beira into Rhodesia to attack the Transvaal from the north. Naturally enough some hardship accrued to the settlers. The Boers cut the railway from the south to Bulawayo and the cost of necessities soared. On the other hand Salisbury, which was now the only town of importance with a railway link to the outside world, flourished, enjoying a short boom which soon collapsed after the war. Before the war was over Rhodes was dead. His malady had been gaining on him during the last few years. His death came as no surprise to Jameson and the few who knew how ill he was, but the outside world did not expect it. He visited England in the summer of 1901 and learned of the seriousness of his condition from an eminent heart specialist. He put the final touches to his will, entertained a large party including Grey and Winston Churchill at his shooting lodge in Scot­ land, travelled by motor car on the continent with Jameson and Beit, sailed from Brindisi to Egypt where he was able to observe that the Cairo end of his dream railway was advancing southwards, and returned to Cape Town, already a dying man. His remaining weeks were made miserable by the scandal of Princess Radziwill who had forged his name to numerous cheques and against whom he had to give evidence in court. By late February it was clear to all around him that the end was near. Indeed his friends must have wished that it was nearer, as they saw him struggling for breath in the midsummer heat at his seaside cottage at Muizenberg. He died on March 26, some three months short of his forty-ninth birthday. He had packed much into those years. His body lay in state at Groote Schuur, and then in the Parliament Building in Cape Town. After the service at the Cathedral, the body was conveyed in Rhodes’s own private train on the long journey through Kimberley, Vryburg, Mafeking to Bulawayo where a second funeral service was held. On April 10 the coffin was drawn on a gun carriage up into the Matopos to be buried at the place he had chosen - ‘The View of the World’. The route was lined by thousands of Ndebele who gave to their dead conqueror the royal salute reserved for Ndebele Kings.

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At the side of the grave Rudyard Kipling read the famous lines which he had composed as an epitaph and which are inscribed on Rhodes’s memorial at Cape Town.8 But the granite slab beneath which he is buried bears merely the plain inscription ‘Here lie the remains of Cecil John Rhodes’. He had wished his funeral to be ‘big and simple, barbaric if you like’, and his wish had been granted. The year of Rhodes’s death coincided with a profound change in the purpose and prospects of the country that bore his name. In May the peace of Vereeniging brought the Boer War to an end, and with it an important chapter in the history of Britain’s foreign policy. The route to India via the Cape now seemed secure for the foreseeable future. Indeed it was to be secure for as long as it was needed - through two world wars until India achieved independence and the British dis­ covered to their surprise that they could get along quite well without the brightest jewel in the imperial crown. There had been three principal driving forces behind the creation of Southern Rhodesia. Cecil Rhodes himself regarded it as a base for future extension of British power to the north - ‘Cape to Cairo*. The Pioneers, and the Victoria Volunteers - the men on the ground who worked and who fought when they had to - went in search of gold above all else, with cattle as a consolation prize. Finally there was the motive which prompted Lord Salisbury to grant the original charter; the need to safeguard British paramountcy in the Cape, its hinterland and shifting frontier, to block the ambitions of the Transvaal, placate the Cape Parliament and create a counterpoise to Kruger. Yet by 1902 all these motives had vanished. ‘Cape to Cairo’ had ceased to be a reality, however much Rhodes may have deluded himself, when in 1895 the Foreign Office accepted German objections to a corridor between the Congo and German East Africa. Lord Salisbury had never believed in it. One can see now that he was right. A railway line running from south to north was not the way to open up Africa. The development of sea ports and lateral lines running into the interior on an east-west axis made far better sense and was in fact what happened. 8 The last verse reads:

There, till the vision he foresaw Splendid and whole arise, And unimagined Empires draw To council ’neath his skies, The immense and brooding spirit still Shall quicken and control. Living he was the land, and dead, His soul shall be her soul.

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CHAPTER

h

The Rule of the Company 1902-18

Whoever were going to determine the way Rhodesia was to go, they would not be black. With remarkable speed after the rebellions the Africans ceased to count politically. This was the penalty of a conquest as complete and apparently con­ clusive as any in history. Of course the Whites had to take some account of their subject peoples in terms of economics, but politically the Africans became liter­ ally a silent majority for more than half a century. As Mr A. J. Wills points out, a commission of ‘chartered’ directors visiting the country only ten years after a black rebellion which had threatened the very existence of white rule could make a lengthy report in which the only reference to the Africans was in relation to shortage of labour for the mines.1 Perhaps this is not too surprising. Even today it is extraordinary how easily in this highly-segregated social system one can forget that Africans exist, save as cooks, servants, gardeners and waiters, although they outnumber the Whites by twenty-five to one and everybody is now aware of their political aspirations. Even jostling in the streets of Salisbury and Bulawayo where the races mingle freely the visitor soon finds himself almost unconsciously noticing only Whites. Seventy years ago when the rebellions had been crushed and before the Africans became articulate, how much easier it must have been to ignore them. The impact of European conquest on the African way of life, whether that of the Ndebele or the Shona, was far greater than almost any white man of the time appreciated. It was a complete revolution. To say this is not at all to say that their way of life had been idyllic. On the contrary it had been in many respects nasty and brutish, and it certainly tended to be short. But it was to them an ordered and predictable system - even witchcraft, so fiercely denounced by mis­ sionaries and officials, had an accepted and recognized place. It was above all 1 A. J. Wills, An Introduction to the History of Central Africa, 3rd ed., Oxford, 1973,225.

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freedom - freedom to live in accordance with customs and usages, superstitions and rituals handed down from immemorial antiquity; and freedom not to live in accordance with the overt and tacit rules of a European cash economy. No belief was more deeply cherished by the white settler than the conviction that the ‘Kaffir’ male was incurably idle, and that in his pre-conquest state - apart from occasional raiding and slaughtering - his only occupations were drink and sex. As late as the 1970s a research student enquiring about the African policy of the Federation was told by an elderly ex-Federal politician of Scots origin: ‘Dinna ye ken, Laddie, that all a native needs is a pot o’ beer and a woman’. This view of African society was - and is now recognized to be - quite erroneous. The man had his tasks both of labour and ritual to perform, just as much as the woman. He was certainly not a drone. Even if we set aside the sexual aspect, his removal for months on end to work for a wage made necessary by the imposition of the hut tax for just that purpose was bound to disrupt the whole traditional, time-honoured order of tribal society. These consequences were little understood at the time. The white man brought up in the Victorian creed of thrift, individualism, self-help and hard work saw nothing immoral - indeed quite the contrary - in compelling the African to enter the labour market. There was, after all, no question of slavery, and the Company now had to watch its step in the matter of forced labour. The Jameson days were over. But Rhodesia had to be developed, and as with all new countries - Australia, Canada, the American west - shortage of labour was the chronic problem. Mining was labour-intensive and very disagreeable - who would ever mine for fun? and the same need for labour dominated the country’s only other industry, agri­ culture, although this was at any rate more familiar and less unpleasant. The African did not in the least want to work for the white man. He, therefore, had to be compelled indirectly by fiscal pressure. It was hoped that, having thus entered, if unwillingly, the advanced wage economy of his conquerors, he would discover new needs, aspire to new luxuries and so be happy to become, as Wilson Fox, the Company’s General Manager put it in an important memorandum, one of ‘the privates of the industrial army in every department of work’. Wilson Fox’s Memorandum on Problems of Development and Policy (1910) is a clear statement of the official policy of the Company’s directors in the Edwardian period. In effect it was the doctrine of assimilation. The Africans’ role would be that of a black proletariat and the sooner tribalism, chieftainship and the other ossified institutions of the past vanished altogether, the better it would be for the Africans themselves and their white rulers. The fortunes of both were bound up with the development of the new colony. The same principle applied to the reserves. These were a temporary expedient to shield the natives from the first harsh impact of the white man’s economy. They too would wither away with the process of assimilation. As Mr Philip Mason puts it

The Africans of Rhodesia would gradually become a working class, and would grow more and more like the British working class - and perhaps though this

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was not stated in so many words, there would be men in Rhodesia as in Britain who would rise from the ranks of the working class to positions of wealth and power.

But this latter possibility was precisely where the rub lay. It was one thing for the Administrator, the London Directors and the top officials of the Company to take an Olympian view of the desirable progress of a black working class. It was quite another for the less affluent settlers to accept it. The professional men, doctors, lawyers, accountants could look after themselves in an integrated society. The white artisan, who drew a high wage just because he was white, could not. He saw integration as a threat to his standards, and he and his like constituted the electoral majority which came to control the Legislative Council and to which after 1923 the Rhodesian government was responsible. Even before 1923, when the Company ruled, it had been ill-placed to resist the strongly felt sentiments of the elected members who could rely on radical support at Westminster and on all those vague ideas which since the days of the Durham Report linked the cause of white colonial self-government with that of ‘progress’. The settler majority had a further point on their side. Whatever ideas had actuated the settlement after the rebellion, integration was not one of them. It was a later concept produced by the logic of the economic situation confronting the Company. The original settlement was intended to be one of separation between the two races, with all power in the hands of the victorious one. This did not mean ruthless exploitation of the vanquished. On the contrary, most of the victors genuinely believed that the Blacks would now be happier and more prosperous than they had been under their old rulers. But the settlers could justifiably argue that, although maltreatment of the natives should be deplored and prevented, a policy leading however distantly to racial integration, as in Brazil or the West Indies, was not a part of their bargain. Separation, except in so far as labour on a temporary basis was required for mines, farms and domestic service, was the only safe system if a twentieth century white minority ruling class was to dwell in the same land as a conquered black majority barely emerged from the Iron Age. This attitude was reinforced by fear and hate - the twin legacies of the rebellion to both sides. White Rhodesians of that era would no doubt have vigorously denied such feelings. Black Rhodesians were still inarticulate. It so happens that in 1912 an intelligent Belgian lawyer, Henri Rolin, visited Rhodesia at some length and wrote an account of the social, legal, and constitutional system of the country.2 In a minor way his book is like De Tocqueville’s Démocratie en Amérique, a classic work of shrewd observation by an unprejudiced, realistic and far from unsympathetic foreigner. This is what he wrote about racial attitudes:

The white man will not take his meals at the same table as the black; he will 2 Henri Rolin, Les Lois et I'Administration de la Rhodesie, Brussels and Paris, i9!3-

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not meet him on the footpath of the streets;3 he travels by rail in separate wagons; he forbids him in principle, though with certain exceptions, access to private property; he relegates him at night to ‘locations’ outside the urban centres. The farmer sees him as a pilferer [déprédateur] and cattle-thief and fears his neighbourhood. Those who know the natives add besides that the antipathy of black for white is not less, and that is easily to be understood in view of the brusqueness, the complete lack of consideration with which the European often treats the native.4 Rolin noticed too that this contempt for the Africans in or out of their presence was more freely expressed the lower one went down in the white social scale. ‘The petit commerçant will not hesitate to tell you that the black is a “stupid animal” ... Educated men are naturally more prudent “more discreet” in their language.’ This is no less true today. One does not often hear crudities in the Salisbury or Bulawayo Clubs. Spend half an hour at the Long Bar at Meikle’s, and it is a different story. Rolin recognized that there were white men with a genuinely different attitude. ‘Missionaries, officials of the department of Native Affairs, occasional philanthropists display a sympathy for the blacks which is sometimes very effective.’ But his general picture is only slightly modified. ‘... two castes ... below the whites the blacks ... One has only to see them in their sordid villages, half-naked ... to appreciate the immense difference which divides the victors from the vanquished.’5 Nowhere was this difference, this hate and fear more vividly displayed than in regard to that touchstone of race relations - sex. To understand it one has to remember the tradition of Cape Colony whence most of the early settlers came. There had been fleeting and illicit unions between the early Dutch settlers and the Hottentots or with the Malay slaves imported to supply the latter’s deficiencies as workers. Such episodes, the result of the imbalance of the sexes within the white population, came to be disapproved of and their offspring stigmatized as time went on and as that imbalance was remedied. The white man under many influences, religion, guilt, remorse, white women, began to regard such intercourse with shame,6 but above all to consider marriage with the inferior race as an act of much deeper degradation than a casual affair. What, however, seemed the deepest degradation of all was any relationship between a white woman and a black man. For this there could be no excuse whatever and it was taken for granted that it could only occur as a result offorce majeure by the black man, or criminal immorality on the part of the white woman. These social and sexual attitudes led to legislation some of which even on paper 3 Plenty of White Rhodesians can still remember - a few with nostalgia - the days when an African had to get off the footpath if he met a white man. 4 Quoted in Birth of a Dilemma^ 270. 5 Quoted, Mason, op. cit., 245. 6 It is one reason why African servants were and still are almost always men, so as to keep the young white male free from temptation.

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1902-18

- and more of it in practice - discriminated openly against the Blacks. In 1903 two important measures went through the Legislative Council and were duly ratified. One was the Immorality Suppression Ordinance which made extra-marital intercourse between a black man and a white woman illegal, the maximum penalty for the man being five years hard labour, the woman two. There was however no corresponding penalty for a white man engaging in relations with a black woman, and the frequent efforts made by various women’s organizations e.g. the Rhodesia Women’s League to ‘equalize’ the law ended in failure.7 The truth is that Rhodesia was a white male-dominated society. Affairs with black women might be censured - mentioned with ‘a shrug of the shoulders or at most a smile of contempt’8 but there were too many going on for white men to feel inclined to make them illegal; and there was also the awkward problem of the non-discriminatory services tendered by black prostitutes. The reaction of Africans to this differentiation might be expected to be one of resentment and the evidence that we have suggests that it was. In the same year there was passed an ordinance which imposed the death penalty, at judicial discretion, for attempted rape. Actual rape was already a capital offence. The new measure did not discriminate between black and white, but in practice neither rape nor attempted rape involved the death penalty if the offence was proved against a white man or against a black man assaulting a black woman. It was only where a black man was convicted of raping or trying to rape a white woman that judges felt obliged to impose capital punishment. The arguments used for the 1903 measure are interesting. One was that a white woman who admitted to having been actually raped by a black man would find social life in the white community impossible thereafter, but she could give evidence of an unsuccessful attempt without this stigma, and therefore the attempt ought to merit the death sentence too. Another was that the severity of the law would be a prophylactic against lynching. In fact Rhodesian Whites were not addicted to lynch law, unlike other frontier communities. Only two attempts are recorded - the earlier one in 1893 being stopped by Dr Jameson with the characteristic and effective argument that Mashonaland was expecting a boom which would be wrecked if the world saw that it had no respect for law and order. He then stood drinks all round to the ring leaders.9 Whether or not the severity of the law discouraged lynching - and it may have done so - the discrimination involved must have been resented by the Africans; and their feelings cannot have been assuaged by a series of notorious verdicts from white juries. There were some remarkable acquittals of white men accused on the strongest evidence of murdering black men and some equally astonishing con­ 7 See Chapter 21 for the difficulties created by this problem for Garfield Todd in 1957. 8 Mason, op. cit., 242, quoting the Rhodesia Herald, June 20, 1913. It would be wrong to regard the practice as widespread or normal, simply not highly abnormal. ’ The case was not one of rape but of a particularly brutal quadruple murder of two white men, a white woman and her child. The offender, ‘Zulu Jim\ was publicly hanged after a proper trial six weeks later.

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victions of black men charged on the thinnest evidence with rape or attempted rape of white women. Until 1899 cases involving both races were tried by a judge and assessors. But in 1899 trial by jury was introduced and since the jury was em­ panelled from the voters, no black man ever served. The change was one of the first fruits of settler representation, but in 1911 even Sir Charles Coghlan, the leader of the elected members and hitherto a staunch supporter of the jury system, changed his mind as a result of a peculiarly perverse verdict and supported the appointment of ‘special juries’ of five persons selected as suitable for dealing with cases where Africans and Europeans were involved. Since 1927 criminal cases in­ volving an African defendant have been tried by a judge and assessors, just as all criminal cases were before 1899. There can be no doubt that the ordinary white jury could not always be relied upon to play fair in cases where both Africans and Europeans were concerned. Prejudice was too deep, the sense of white solid­ arity too strong; and how could justice, even if it was done, be seen to be done to a member of the conquered race by a jury composed exclusively of his con­ querors?

Economic development pointed towards assimilation. The legacy of fear and hate left by the rebellion pointed towards segregation. Other forces were at work sometimes reinforcing one trend, sometimes the other. The influence of the Colonial Office was in practice on the side of segregation though for creditable reasons - the paternalistic tradition of kindly treatment of Africans by Native Commissioners alert to prevent exploitation. The influence of missionaries on the other hand was bound to work at least to some extent on the side of assimila­ tion. It is not easy for the exponents of a religion which preaches that all men are equal in the sight of God to support physical segregation on earth, although some Christian denominations, for example the Dutch Reformed Church, have contrived to do so. Moreover it was an essential part of the inculcation of Christianity that the falsity of the old tribal beliefs should be exposed and the teaching of the Old and New Testaments - Africans like Afrikaners found the Old the easier to understand - should be put in their place. In other words the white man’s values would replace the superstitions of the black man. But if he was to become a part of the long heritage of European civilization, how could the black man be expected to remain cut off from white society in a moral and physical enclave of his own? The attitude of the missionaries to the Blacks and of the settlers to the mis­ sionaries was ambivalent. The whole matter became important after 1897, for the defeat of the rebellions brought with it the longed-for Christian breakthrough. The early missionaries had predicted that the gospel could only penetrate these benighted parts if it was preceded by the sword - and they were right. The gods and spirits of the Africans had failed them. The God of the conqueror had pre­ vailed, and as so often in past history, the conquered, hesitantly and with many reservations scarcely recognized by those who had ‘converted’ them, accepted the creed of the conqueror. The immemorial resistance of the Shona and Ndebele

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to Christianity began to melt. The success of the missionaries should not be exag­ gerated. By 1928 it was reckoned that of a population of about a million Africans some 86,000 were Christians. But the missionary influence was greater than this figure suggests. Their approach was via education, and African education - no doubt for the most part of a highly elementary nature - was their exclusive preserve until 1920. It was administered by them and financed too, apart from a few meagre grants made by the Company. Education was the way to modest advancement in the new African society and the missionaries controlled it. They became, as a Native Commissioner observed, the real rulers of large areas of rural Mashonaland. The missionaries were uneasily placed in relation to both races. To the Blacks they were part of the white establishment. With their substantial grants of land and their control over its use they were like white chiefs, only possessing much more power than any black chief under the new dispensation. It was difficult not to behave in a semi-authoritarian way when operating within the framework of white ascendancy, and at heart most missionaries probably would not have wished it otherwise. To the white settlers, however, they were suspect precisely because of the long-term implications of their work. Individual missionaries might in the early days become, like Native Commissioners, preservers rather than assimilators, anxious to keep their black ‘children’ from the moral evils of the ‘locations’, but nothing could alter the ultimate effect of Christianizing the Africans. It was bound to ‘Europeanize’ them; and this seemed fraught with many perils. The settlers could not overtly object to the conversion of the Africans, whatever they privately said over their whiskies at sun down, but they could and did express doubts about African education as conducted by missionaries. The missionary thus became a faintly suspect figure within the white community, especially if he took any part in politics - witness the prejudices which even a man with the charisma of Mr Garfield Todd did not quite surmount. There was never a clear-cut distinction in practice between the partisans of assimilation and of segregation. The relations between the races developed as a result of haphazard pressures, ambiguous doctrines, unexpected events. The keenest assimilationists, Wilson Fox or the members of the 1914 Commission on Native Reserves, realized that some land had to be kept as a reserve to cushion the impact of the white economy on black tribal society. The supporters of segre­ gation wanted black labour for their mines and farms, and needed Africans with some smattering of education to do the work. Policy thus proceeded by a series of compromises. Rhodesia did not become, as the logic of one argument entailed, a country divided into great ranches and farms interspersed with mines and a few urban centres - the whole system operated by white landowners and business men supported by a geographically and socially mobile black proletariat. Nor did it become, as the logic of the other entailed, a gigantic native reserve. These compromises can be seen in many spheres. In 1903 there arose the ques­ tion of substituting a poll tax for the hut tax. The Chamber of Mines, the Legis­ lative Council and the Administrator wanted to fix it at ¿2. Father Richartz, a leading spokesman of the missions, thought this excessive. He was backed by the

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Resident Commissioner, and the Secretary of State vetoed the ordinance. In the end the figure was fixed at ¿1. The imperial Government had defeated the assimilationists. Then there was the problem of land where the reverse occurred. In Mashonaland grants had never been made to Europeans on the lavish scale which prevailed in Matabeleland, and it was not too difficult to allocate what seemed at the time adequate reserves as guaranteed by the 1898 Order in Council. In Matabeleland it was another matter. The original reserves were now recognized to be quite unsuitable. Rhodes had negotiated the surrender of the indunas on the basis that they could return to their old grazing grounds, but he had only done this by per­ suading the white owners, most of whom had not even occupied their farms, to allow the Ndebele undisturbed possession for the next two years. How far this was understood by the indunas is not clear. Certainly they made it a cause of complaint that at the end of two years they found themselves liable to pay rent to a white landlord. Grey had hoped to implement Rhodes's promises by large scale purchase, but the Company lacked the money. It did not even have the strength to recover some of the land which the grantees of the Jameson era ought to have forfeited through non-compliance with the conditions of grant. When Milton attempted to do this there was an uproar on the Legislative Council some of the elected members had connexions with the absentee companies - and little or nothing was done. The result, in spite of the efforts of the Native Commissioners entrusted with the task of demarcating the reserves, was highly unsatisfactory. There was no land worth having to allocate. In any case it was the policy of the Company as far as possible to keep the Ndebele on European farms, where their labour was badly needed. Since there had been no adequate survey, boundaries were anything but clear, and the Commissioners were further handicapped by lack of any definite criteria to adopt. It has to be remembered however that at this time and for another two decades the reserves were meant to be only temporary expedients - a refuge for Africans who could not cope with the white economy and were not yet able to become individual tenants of land or willing to become landless labourers. The doctrine of assimilation was still in the ascendancy and the reserves were expected to wither away in due course. But when in the early 1920s the rival concept of segregation began to gain the day and the reserves, delimited with a very different purpose, came to be regarded as the permanent African share of the land, their inadequacy ought to have been obvious. The same conflict of purposes affected the treatment of non-rural land. We have seen how desperate was the white need for labour and how reluctantly the Africans supplied it. Efforts were made to import labour from overseas, but India, one potential source, was vetoed by the Viceroy who made it clear that Indians must not be treated like Africans or for that matter like the Chinese; and China, another possibility, was ruled out after the so-called ‘Chinese slavery’ scandal on the Rand. The West Indies, Abyssinia, Somaliland and Aden were also considered but with­ out result. It was just as well, for one can only echo Professor Gann that suc­

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1902-18

cess ‘would have turned the country into a sociologist’s paradise and a statesman’s hell’.10 Local labour was the only solution. The logic of the assimilationist case ought to have led to the creation of an African urban and mining proletariat displaced altogether from the rural areas, somewhat as occurred in England in the course of the Industrial Revolution. That process of course was responsible also for great hardship. It is not to the discredit of the early settlers that a system came into being which in the short term mitigated the hardship, although it was a victory for segregationism and has had lasting consequences for race relations. African labourers were put into ‘locations’ - the urban version of a reserve, where they either rented or built their own huts. The assumption was that they would live there temporarily, apart from wife and family, while they earned enough to pay their hut or poll tax and return to their permanent homes in the rural reserves. The ‘locations’ being all male - or at least wifeless-communities - were inevit­ ably places of immorality, drink and rowdiness, for the inhabitants were deprived of most of their rural recreations; they could not hunt, or make the ritual animal sacrifices required by their religion, or even brew ‘Kaffir’ beer which also had a ritual significance but now had to be sold and drunk under license and must not contain more than three per cent alcohol. When one remembers too that the sanitary habits of people accustomed to living in small communities surrounded by limitless land are not likely to conduce to good health in a semi-urban environ­ ment, it is hardly surprising that the ‘locations’ were kept as far away as possible from European habitation and that Africans were strictly forbidden to live out­ side them. It may be true that the system at least obviated the terrible urban slums which resulted from the unchecked influx of country dwellers into the cities and towns of England and Europe a century earlier. But it did so at a price - the price of assuming that separation was the norm and that the ‘natural’ state of affairs was for Africans to lead a primitive life on the land reserved for them by law, with occasional interruptions strictly controlled, when they worked for white employers in the vicinity of towns. Moreover the system presupposed other checks on freedom. One of the features of Southern Africa which must strike any modern visitor is the elaborate network of regulations about passes and registration certificates which apply to Africans. Even before the rebellion passes had been required for Rhodesian Africans. By 1910 every male African was obliged to carry a registration certificate and produce it when asked. If he went outside his own district he had to have a visiting pass. It lasted twenty-one days and thereafter had to be renewed. If he sought work in an urban area he had to have a special pass for the purpose. There were many arguments in favour of these rules. They helped to prevent urban over-crowding and other evils. The fact remains that in England identity cards were only intro­ duced as a reluctant necessity of total war, were required universally not select­ ively^ and were abolished as soon as possible after war had ended. 10 Gann, op. cit., 177.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

A final illustration of the clash of the two principles comes from the Department of Native Affairs. The Native Commissioner had a more direct control over his district than in most of British Colonial Africa. Rhodes and Grey had never in­ tended the Ndebele Chiefs to be more than relatively minor paid officials with a certain delegated duty of notifying deaths, epidemics and crimes, collecting taxes and catching criminals. The same applied to those Mashona Chiefs who were regarded as trustworthy after 1897. Juridically, authority came downwards through Native Commissioners from the Administrator who could appoint and dismiss Chiefs, as long as the High Commissioner agreed, and even divide or amalgamate tribes. District headmen to assist the Chiefs were appointed by the Secretary for Native Affairs who, throughout Milton’s time, was the Administrator under a different hat. It was direct rule on the model of Natal, not indirect rule as in North Western Rhodesia or Nyasaland, where important Chiefs had rights under treaties which could not be disregarded. The Ndebele monarchy had been smashed, the Rozwi Mamboship was only a memory, but in Barotseland, to take an example, Lewanika’s kingdom was a reality. This power in the hands of the Native Department really meant that the Com­ missioners did not so much guide and rule through as replace the Chiefs in their districts. But if they were in this respect more powerful than their northern counterparts, they were in other respects more restricted. North of the Zambesi the District Officer or Native Commissioner had the backing of authority, ulti­ mately the Colonial Office, behind him and was part of a single official corps, an administrative hierarchy the apex of which was the Governor to whose post he could himself aspire as the summit of a successful career. In Southern Rhodesia he was part of an administrative system which was quite separate from the ordinary Civil Service. Its apex was the Chief Native Commissioner, who was responsible to the Secretary for Native Affairs, i.e. the Administrator. The young official could not go higher than that, and there was little or no interchange with the officials of other departments. The Native Department thus became a sort of imperium in imperio with its own traditions, rules and esprit de corps, detached from the rest of the Civil Service and never quite trusted by it. It also inspired the suspicion of non-official opinion, a factor far more powerful than in the northern territories.11 To European miners and farmers, the Native Commissioner was a brake on their freedom to recruit African workers. He had to steer an awkward line between the disapprobation of the Colonial Office, expressed through the Resident Commissioner, of anything that looked like forced labour, and the pressure of the assimilationists, both the officials of the Company and the settlers who needed African labour in order to develop the country. Wilson Fox expressed the official Company view in its most uncompromising form writing, in the Memorandum already quoted, that the Native Commissioner could not but become ‘a retrograde factor in the corporate life of the country’ and he 11 In 1910 there were only 1,500 Europeans in Northern Rhodesia and 700 in Nyasaland. In Southern Rhodesia there were 20,000.

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THE RULE OF THE COMPANY 1902-18

added, perhaps cynically but not untruly, ‘he consciously or sub-consciously realises that when there is no native district there will be no Native Commissioner’. The Native Department might seem to the Company’s theoreticians and the labour-hungry settlers an over-fussy, zealous, paternalistic protector of Africans, but it did not follow that it seemed like that to the Africans. On the contrary, in spite of various efforts to set up separate institutions for the recruitment of labour, the Native Commissioner could not avoid being involved in the process. He was after all paid by the Company, not by the Colonial Office, and he had to do something to carry out Company policy. To the Africans he probably appeared no less of an agent for white exploitation than to the settlers he appeared a pre­ server of reactionary tribalism. In fact the influence of the Native Department tended to be in favour of segregation and against assimilation. Its effect on the development of Southern Rhodesia was in one sense preservationist and Wilson Fox was right, but what was being preserved was not as in other colonial territories the old Chiefly powers and the traditional tribal system through the technique of indirect rule which could have helped to ease the transition from the Iron Age to the twentieth century. What was becoming crystallized was a system invented by the Department itself which substituted white Chiefs for black Chiefs and endowed the Commissioner himself with quasi-despotic though benevolent powers in the settling of disputes, allocation of lands, building of huts, location of kraals - in fact almost all the non­ religious ordering of tribal society. It is difficult to believe that any of the in­ terested parties, the Company, the Colonial Office, the settlers, the Africans or their Chiefs actually wanted this particular solution. It was one of those things that somehow just happen and having happened take on a quality of ineradicable permanence. The political future of Southern Rhodesia, after twelve years of exploration, war, rebellion and war again, revolved around two main questions, both of which were matters for white not black determination. First there was the system of gov­ ernment within the territory. Was it to be by the Chartered Company? Or was Southern Rhodesia to become an orthodox British Colony? And if the latter, was it to be a Crown Colony like Kenya or was it to have responsible government on the lines of Natal and Cape Colony before the formation of the Union of South Africa. The second great question was whether Southern Rhodesia was viable on its own; not merely in economic terms, though this was important, but in social, moral and political terms too. And here there were two broad possibilities. The country might become a part of the Union of South Africa, its fifth province; the possi­ bility of this was deliberately left open under the Act constituting the Union, passed by the British Parliament in 1910 - and there was no requirement of Southern Rhodesian consent. Alternatively Southern Rhodesia might look north­ wards and join with its namesake over the Zambesi. The former solution was known at the time and subsequently as ‘union’, the latter as ‘amalgamation’, and these expressions will be used hereafter.

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Cecil Rhodes had never envisaged the indefinite prolongation of Company rule. The charter gave it twenty-five years in the first instance, subject to renewal. Rhodes saw the future as union, with Cape Colony and Natal as a counterpoise to the Transvaal, but only after Responsible Government had been given to the settlers first. He probably took it for granted that some union would then be their choice. The question must have seemed largely academic while he lived. After his death in 1902, the situation in the çountry changed for the worse. With his charm and his vast private fortune he had been able to do much to smooth the increasingly prickly sentiments of the settlers. At the same time his prestige with the Ndebele indunas blurred, at least in some degree, the acerbities of racial confrontation. It was Matabeleland which in those days mattered; Mashonaland, largely ignored by Rhodes, was a backwater. His death led at once to an in­ tensification of settler feeling against the Company. Later in 1902 when Jameson, who - such were the strange vicissitudes of Southern African politics - had become ‘respectable’, toured the country along with Alfred Beit, the two men were assailed with bitter complaints about the remoteness of the London Board and the difficulty of obtaining a hearing. Mining royalties, railway rates and the land question all figured prominently, and there was no longer a Cecil Rhodes to mediate between distant directors and the bored, irritable, struggling, impoverished local white inhabitants. To meet some of the difficulty a new Order-in-Council in 1903 provided for parity between official and elected members on the Legislative Council with the Administrator having a cast­ ing vote, and concessions were made over royalties and railway rates, but not on two vital matters; the Company insisted that the colony if and when it became self-governing must accept responsibility for the Company’s past administrative (as opposed to any commercial) deficits, and that the unalienated land, i.e. land not granted either to individuals or companies or allocated as native reserves, belonged to the Chartered Company and not to anyone else. There was never to be agreement between the Company and the settlers on either of these issues which were only determined by a judgment from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1918. The country remained chronically short of capital. In 1905 the Legislative Council with full support from the Company passed an ordinance which would have allowed the territory to contract its own public debt. The Colonial Office firmly vetoed any such measure as long as the Company remained responsible for the administration of the country and owner of all its assets. In 1907 the Directors sent out another deputation to enquire into the state of Southern Rhodesia. It recommended some changes. Land titles were to be simplified, the Civil Service reformed, royalties revised. More important, mining should no longer have its previous top-priority in the development programme. European settlement must be accelerated. At 14,000 the white population was far too low. Only a programme of encouraging European farmers could reduce the country’s dependence on imports and raise the value of the Company’s own assets, in the form of both land and railways. These decisions were to have far-reaching

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consequences on the land question, which will be considered in a later chapter. Theÿ also had a significant demographic effect. Among other things the white population rose by nearly 10,000 between 1907 and 1911 compared with less than 2,000 between 1904 and 1907. Politically it seemed wise to make further concessions to the pressure for settler representation. There had been requests the previous year, when Lord Selborne, the High Commissioner, toured the country, for the abrogation of the charter and the substitution of representative government under the Crown. He was not prepared to recommend it nor would the imperial Government have agreed, but the Company wished to allay discontent. The Legislative Council was now given a clear majority of elected members by the Company’s decision to reduce the ‘Officials* from seven to five. Subsequent concessions increased this majority and from 1913 to the end of the Company’s rule the balance was twelve to six. The fact remained, however, that the ‘Unofficials’ could not propose any fiscal measures, nor, under an Order in Council of 1911, could they discuss without the Administrator’s leave any ‘ordinances interfering with the land and other rights of the Company’. Since finance and the Company’s rights were just what the elected members most wanted to discuss, their majority meant a good deal less in practice than it appeared to do on paper. The increased settler representation, thus informally brought in during 1907, prompted the candidature of a man whose career was to effect the future of the country. Charles (later Sir Charles) Coghlan, a Bulawayo lawyer who had made his career largely in litigation against the Chartered Company, entered the Legis­ lative Council in 1908 and soon became leader of the ‘Unofficials’. He was a re­ doubtable foe of ‘chartered’ rule and later a strong supporter of Responsible Government as opposed to union with South Africa. The latter question came up very soon after Coghlan’s election. A National Convention was held at Durban in October 1908 to consider the unification of the colonies south of the Limpopo. Southern Rhodesia was invited to send delegates to this important assembly with the right to speak but not vote. Coghlan represented the Unofficials, the other delegates being Milton and Sir Lewis Michell. The circumstances were by no means those envisaged by Rhodes. It was union not federation which was going to carry the day, and in the bargaining over seats in the Parliament and their relation to population the Transvaal and Orange Free State gained a dispropor­ tionate advantage. Rhodesia, staunchly British, might be inundated by poor Whites from the Transvaal and her native labour interests subordinated to the demands of the Rand. The delegates were all agreed that entry, though not precluded at some future date, was out of the question for the time being. When therefore the expiry of the charter came up for discussion in 1914, there was little opposition to the grant of a Supplemental Charter for ten years expiring in 1925. This provided that, if the Legislative Council wanted Responsible Government at an earlier date and could show that the country could pay for it, the Crown might set up a new constitution on those lines. Meanwhile, despite the usual grumbles, the Company’s rule seemed better than any alternative. As for

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the vexed question of the land, Whitehall referred it to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council which took four years to answer. There matters stood when in August from a seemingly cloudless international sky the cataclysm of world war descended.

There is no need to discuss at any length Southern Rhodesia’s military role. As in the case of the Boer War the contribution of an intensely patriotic people was remarkable in the light of its slender resources. Some 5,500 white men, out of a population of 27,000, and 2,700 Africans served in the armed forces. Of the Whites 1,720 held commissions, and there can be no question that young Rhodesians were excellent ‘officer material’. The First Rhodesia Regiment took part in the early and successful seizure of German South West Africa. It was then disbanded; some of its members left for England to offer their services in the European theatre; others joined the newly formed Second Rhodesia Regiment which embarked at Beira for Mombasa in 1915 to participate in one of the least known campaigns of the war - in German East Africa. The German commander, General von Lettow-Vorbeck, was a soldier of formidable ability; his instructions were to pin down as many enemy troops as he could, and he proved to be a singularly elusive opponent. After 1915 General Smuts commanded the Allied forces which comprised Indians, Africans, West Indians, British and South Africans as well as Rhodesians. Tsetse fly, fever, dysentry and lack of supplies produced more casualties than shells and bullets. The Second Rhodesia Regiment at one time fell to only 126 men. After experienc­ ing great hardship and discomfort it returned via Beira in April 1917 in a state of depletion and exhaustion to a hero’s welcome. There were not enough men in the country for it to be kept going as a unit, and some of the survivors left for Europe where they became absorbed in the South African infantry. Unlike Nyasaland and Mozambique, the Rhodesias, despite a drain on white manpower reminiscent of the Jameson raid, were not threatened by even a sign of an African uprising. Indeed in sharp contrast to South Africa the Rhodesian authorities en­ listed African troops, and the First and Second Rhodesian Native Regiments with white officers and a core of white NCOs acquitted themselves well in the German East African campaign. Although von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force was broken late in 1917, he himself at the head of some fifteen hundred men escaped and continued the struggle till the end. Owing to telegraphic difficulties the news of the German surrender in Europe did not reach the area of African hostilities till November 13 and the shots fired that day are supposed to be the last fired in the Great War. The Rhodesian forces were not in on the final scene. The German commander surrendered formally to General Edwards of the King’s African Rifles at Abercorn on November 18. The war did not have a great impact on African society. The number involved in the armed services was only a tiny fraction of the population. That strange disease, ‘Spanish’ influenza - the last of the great plagues - caused far more deaths than the war itself, especially in Africa where its effects were particularly lethal.

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Economically the rising cost of living which a war always brings was counter­ balanced by increased income from the agricultural products of the African farmer. The impact of the war in white society was far greater. Primary producing countries usually do well in war. The demand for munitions caused a world shortage of base metals. The price of Rhodesian ores, such as copper, tungsten, chrome, zinc, antimony and asbestos, shot up. Gold mining also boomed and Wankie coal found a ready market. The Rhodesian economy, stagnant before 1914, received a welcome boost. War gave it an impetus which, in spite of later depres­ sions, never died away; the effect on the development of the country was profound and lasting.

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PART TWO

A Self-Governing Colony

CHAPTER i2

Responsible Government 1914-23

No major decision about the country’s political future could be made during the war, although the matter was not forgotten and positions began to be taken against the day when Company rule would end. The outbreak of hostilities virtually co­ incided with the advent of a new administration. Milton had reached the retiring age, and he was succeeded in October 1914 by Sir Drummond Chaplin. With a grandfather who had refused a baronetcy and the background of Harrow, Oxford and the Bar, Chaplin ranked rather higher in the subtle English social hierarchy of the day than Milton, son of a parson and educated at Marlborough. Like Milton he was a protégé of Rhodes. Politically he stood well to the right. He was much influenced by Milner and a close friend of Jameson. He had sat in the Transvaal and Union Assemblies as a ‘Progressive’, but in Southern Africa as elsewhere these labels need to be translated, and a ‘pro-England conservative’ is the correct version. Drummond fully shared his predecessor’s orthodox outlook on imperial affairs, but his experience in business, journalism and politics gave him more of a flair for public relations. He quickly spotted the umbrage caused by Milton’s neglect of Bulawayo, and made a point of entering his new domain by that route. He revisited it three months later, held an indaba in the Matopos and toured the south west which Milton had not visited for many years. He was slightly cynical, rather shy and aloof and far from ‘hail fellow well met’, but he was devoted to sport and games - always a passport to popularity in Southern Africa - and he and his wife enter­ tained lavishly, although they found Government House somewhat odd: This house is most curious - all glass and windows. It is not conveniently planned ... For the money spent they might have had a vastly better house, but that can’t be helped now. The worst part of it is that there is no entrance hall at all. You go straight

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

into the main sitting room off the stoep - nowhere to put hats and coats: a most stupid arrangement. Generally it feels rather as if one were living in the open air and I should be sorry to go through a Johannesburg winter in it.

Anyone who has been to Government House, Salisbury, can see Chaplin’s point, but living accommodation was to be the least of his difficulties. Conditions were never ‘normal’ during his nine years in office. War, its aftermath, and the approaching end of Company rule overshadowed them throughout. Nor was his original appointment devoid of controversy. The Treasurer, Francis Newton, who was an older man, was deemed to have a prior claim by some including himself. Relations were smooth for the time being, but after his retirement in 1919 Sir Francis (as he had now become) was a most effective opponent of the Company’s and Chaplin’s policy of union with the south. Then there was the perpetual problem of the Colonial Office. After the end of the Company’s rule Chaplin wrote a reply to a courteous letter from Sir John Chancellor, the first Governor. After suitable thanks he went on:

Certainly it was a difficult job: so many people to consider - High Commissioner, Board of Directors, Secretary of State, to say nothing of local politicians with a majority in the Council. Looking back on the last nine years the thing which has perhaps left the clearest impression on my mind is the antagonism, some­ times active, sometimes passive, of the Colonial Office and its officials. The only time we got any sort of assistance was when Milner was Colonial Sec­ retary ... Harcourt was actively hostile; the average Secretary of State, Milner excepted, seemed usually content to leave matters to the officials who seem to have continued this Harcourt tradition.1 Harcourt may have inherited something of a family feud from his father, Sir William, one of Rhodes’s strongest critics. ‘Gott straff Harcourt’ was a customary greeting among the Company’s executives at London Wall, after the war began. But the antagonism of the Colonial Office ante-dated his tenure. There is no reason to suppose that personalities much affected the matter. The Colonial offi­ cials disliked the Company partly because it was an anomaly which did not fit into the established colonial categories - they were to dislike the successor regime for the same reason throughout its existence - and partly because they believed that a commercial company, even one which paid no dividend, was bound to be pulled two ways in its governing role. This was precisely the point so often made by the settlers, and they had the ear of the section of the House of Commons most likely to ask awkward questions. Radicals at that time regarded the Company as ‘bad’ and the settlers as ‘good’. It was not till well after the grant of Responsible 1 NAR CH8/2/1, Muizenberg, November 1, 1923, Chaplin to Sir John Chancellor, the relevant Colonial Secretaries in Chaplin’s time were Lewis Harcourt 1910-15, Bonar Law 1915-16, Walter Long 1916-18, Lord Milner 1918-21, Winston Churchill 1921-22, the Duke of Devonshire 1922-24.

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Government that a new syndrome replaced the old; the settlers became ‘bad’ and the Africans whom few people had hitherto bothered about became ‘good’. Wilson Fox, now an MP, wrote to Chaplin on January 3, 1918:

We did our utmost with Walter Long [the Colonial Secretary] but it was no use. He is absolutely under the thumb of Fiddes [Sir George Fiddes, the Permanent Under-Secretary] and although we should now have on form a friendly Colonial Office, so far the running has not been up to our expectations.... Walter Long has the greatest friendship and admiration for you personally ... but he has not the strength to impose his will on his officials. He is frightened to death of questions in the House and gives to our local politicians an importance far beyond their value, mainly because they are able to become vocal through the Radical gang in our deplorable House.2 The episode which prompted this outburst is typical of the relationship be­ tween the Company, the settlers and the Colonial Office. Jameson and D. O. (later Sir Dougal) Malcolm, a subsequent president of the Company, favoured amalgamation with the north. Chaplin strongly supported them. The case was based partly on economy, partly on a better Civil Service career structure, partly on the wider argument that a single Rhodesia would be better placed to stake its claim at the peace settlement. An even more important consideration - and it was to colour discussion about. the future of the Rhodesia for the next fifty years - was the possibility of creat­ ing an English counterpoise to Afrikanerdom. A greater Rhodesia, perhaps incor­ porating much of East Africa, might play such a part. It was this notion which converted a section of the liberal/left in England to support of Central African Federation in the late 1940s. Chaplin, regarding the Boers as irreconcilable foes, naturally favoured amalgamation. Later, when it was clearly not ‘on’, he plumped for union partly because Smuts’s terms for the expropriation of the Company were much better than the British Government’s, but also because Southern Rhodesia as a fifth province of South Africa could do much to stop the advance of the nationalists - the counterpoise argument in a different form. The settlers in both territories were hostile. In the north they constituted a mere handful, little over 3,000 who believed that they would be swamped, that Livingstone would become a backwater and that their proposed representation on an enlarged Legislative Council would be no compensation. The southern settlers who might have paused, had they even dreamt of the enormous mineral wealth hidden below the surface of what is now called the Copper Belt, feared that the great addition of Africans would make it even harder than it would be anyway to extract Responsible Government from London. In Southern Rhodesia the ratio of black to white was 27 to 1. If the north came in it would be nearly 60 to 1. Amalgamation was carried in the Legislative Council, but the elected members 2NAR CH8/2/1, 2027-31, Fox to Chaplin.

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were against it by eight to four. Jameson and Chaplin decided, therefore, to drop it, but they proposed as a compromise a few weeks later that the territories should come under a single Administrator. Although this was a very different proposal from amalgamation Coghlan strongly objected. After the usual delay Long turned it down, to the annoyance of Wilson Fox whose letter has been quoted. Henry Lambert of the Colonial Office wrote a letter to Long which deserves quotation since so much of Rhodesian history is implicit in it: Mr Long would not willingly do anything to injure the position of the Admini­ stration. At the same time he feels that he must constantly bear in mind the peculiar constitution of Southern Rhodesia. Under this constitution, which was set up with the Company’s concurrence while the Executive consists exclusively of the Company’s officials, the Legislative contains a large elective majority. This majority, though it does not, as under responsible government, in effect appoint administrations, has in its power to produce administrative deadlock and therefore necessarily possesses an influence over administrations much greater than in the Crown Colony type of administration ... The elected members for whom Sir Charles Coghlan speaks have protested against the Company’s proposal on the ground that the Company is engaged in an endeavour to carry into effect a Constitutional change without any reference to the people or their representatives?

The question of a single Administrator for the two protectorates was not in itself very important. In 1921 Chaplin doubled the two offices and no one minded, but by then Company rule was clearly on its way out. What mattered in 1917 and afterwards was the power of the settlers to block an arrangement they disliked. That power stemmed from the very nature of the original occupation, when Rhodes pulled the imperial Government’s chestnuts out of the fire. It might have been lost - indeed it nearly was - after the Jameson Raid and the rebellions. Rhodes recovered it. From then onwards the dictum of a Victorian Chancellor of the Exchequer applies. ‘We can never govern from Downing Street any part of [Southern] Africa in which the whites are strong enough to defend themselves.’4 The colonists in Southern Rhodesia were not strong enough in 1896 and had to be reinforced. Hence the narrowness of the margin by which they retained auto­ nomy. Indeed they would have lost it but for Rhodes’s peculiar relationship with Joseph Chamberlain. Thereafter, however, they clearly could defend themselves and they have been able to do so from that day to this, although one can only guess how long the situation will last. The most important event in Chaplin’s Administratorship was the Privy Council’s decision on the ownership of the unalienated land. The Legislative 3NAR CH8/2/1, 1989-90, to BSA Company (copy) December 17, 1917. The Com­ pany’s memorandum is in CH8/2/1, 1977-83 n.d. 4 Quoted Peter Joyce, Anatomy of a Rebel, Smith of Rhodesia, a Biography, Salisbury, 1974» 243-

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Council’s claim that it never belonged to the Company had been referred by Har­ court to the Judicial Committee on July 14, 1914. Jameson who was President assured the Company’s shareholders that he was not worried, that the Company was confident about its title and that the action was a friendly one to settle once and for all a technical point which could not seriously be disputed. He hoped that there would not be undue delay. In all these matters, as so often in his ebullient past, the Doctor was overoptimistic. The issue which had begun as a duel between the Company and the settlers soon became a four-cornered contest. The Colonial Office, after a silence of a quarter of a century during which no hint of its claim had ever been uttered, argued that the ownership vested in the Crown. At the same time yet another claim was put forward. The Aborigines Protection Society, supported by some mission­ aries and by a group of Ndebele, led by Nyamanda, eldest son of Lobengula, made a case for ‘native’ ownership. Matters henceforth proceeded at the brisk pace of Jamdyce v. Jamdyce in Bleak House. Four elaborate claims had to be made and then had to be met by four no less elaborate rebuttals. The Company’s solicitor, Hawksley, inopportunely expired, and his successor had to get up the whole com­ plicated case de novo. The original leading counsel for all four parties either died, were made judges or became ministers of the Crown before the statements had been filed, and new counsel had to master the old briefs. Jameson died at the end of 1917 before judgement was given. He would have had a disagreeable shock if he had lived. The Judicial Committee did not challenge the title of those to whom the Com­ pany had granted land, nor did it dispute the Company’s right to reimburse itself from the sales of land for proper administrative costs as long as it was running the country. But the Committee dismissed all claims to the ownership of the un­ alienated land other than that of the Crown. The ‘natives’ had lost by conquest whatever title they possessed. The Company had no claim independent of the Crown, the Lippert Concession being legally worthless, if historically interesting. The Company had conquered the country as the Crown’s agent under its charter and had acted as agent ever since. Nor had it acquired a title by lapse of time. Be­ cause the Crown had not annexed the territory at once it did not follow that the Crown had renounced the right to do so at a future date. As for the settlers, their only possible claim was on the basis that ownership vested in the Crown. This was indeed correct, but the corollary argued by their counsel that the Crown was bound to hand the land on to a settler government did not follow at all. The Crown could not be bound in any way whatever. The Judicial Committee, while feeling obliged to find for the Crown, gave a rap on the knuckles of the Colonial Office: It may be a matter of regret that on a subject so important, it should have been thought fit to leave the rights of the parties to be ascertained by a legal enquiry... In 1894 a single sentence either in an Order-in-Council or a simple agreement would have resolved the questions which have for so many years

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given rise to conflicting opinions in Southern Rhodesia ... Matabeleland and Mashonaland were rich in promise; the right to enjoy the fruition might well have been determined before and not after the field was tilled and the harvest began to ripen.

The Privy Council further declared that the Company when it ceased to rule could claim against the Crown for the recovery of its accumulated administrative deficit, (i.e. that incurred in its governmental capacity). The Judges, however, did not regard it as part of their duty to quantify the figure - ‘with items or details, with the amounts or the book-keeping of such expenditure, and with the terms of reimbursement, their Lordships have nothing to do’. These ‘items and details’ were, of course, crucial. However, the Company had no serious cause for complaint at this stage. Its land rights in Northern Rhodesia, its mineral, railway and commercial rights in both territories were unaffected. If anyone ought to have regretted the decision it was the Legislative Council which started the proceedings. Evidently, there was no point in the Chartered Company continuing to administer the country. The proceeds of sales of land could now never be transferred to the commercial side for the benefit of the shareholders, and the administrative deficit was the Crown’s liability. The duty of the board to its shareholders was to pitch this as high as possible. They put in, without undue modesty, a claim for £7,866,000. The Government appointed a high powered Commission to assess the figure. Lord Cave, a Lord of Appeal and later Lord Chancellor, was Chairman. Lord Chalmers, former head of the Treasury and Sir William Peat, a distinguished chartered accountant were the other members. The Commission, appointed in July 1919, did not report till February 1921. The delay was not its fault. The Colonial Office displayed a well proven power of procrastination to the full, and Lord Cave felt obliged to deliver a public snub to the Attorney General when he asked for yet further delay on behalf of the Crown. The Cave Commission’s report was a disappointment to the Company. It not only fixed the Crown’s liability for administrative deficits at £4,435,000, with no addition for interest, but it ruled that from this there should be deducted ‘the value as at dates of appropriation of areas of Crown land appropriated for the Company’s farming and ranching undertakings and in respect of the value of grants of land made to other persons for considerations other than cash’ - the last clause being a palpable hit at the shadier transactions of the Jameson era. But it referred the determination of these deductions to an independent valuation and left in the air the whole question of the Company’s counterclaim for the value of public build­ ings and works. A further lengthy vista of negotiation and litigation was thus opened up. The Colonial Officials, hard liners to the end, now pressed their battle on three fronts: first, they pitched the deductions as high as possible; second, they argued that the balance, after the Company’s rule ended, should be paid gradually by sales of land rather than at once in cash down; third they claimed, two million pounds in respect of governmental advances to the Company for expenses incurred in the war.

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1914-23

Meanwhile important political developments occurred in Southern Rhodesia. The alternatives when Company rule ended had narrowed down to two: Respon­ sible Government or union with South Africa. In 1917 the Responsible Government Association was founded; it was in part based on the Rhodesia Agricultural Union, an organization of farmers who feared union on grounds of competition for black labour on the Rand. Coghlan joined it in 1919. His prestige as leader of the ‘Unofficials*, his tenacity, integrity, political skill, and his cogent if ponderous ora­ tory made him a notable accession. He was quickly elected President, to the chagrin of some of those in on the act from the start. The ideologue of the party was Colquhoun’s widow, Mrs Tawse-Jollie. She had remarried a farmer ‘of no account’, according to Chaplin, and too fond of the bottle according to others. She was good looking, clever and articulate, the first woman to enter a colonial legislature. Her book, The Real Rhodesia (1924), contains a vivid, though highly partisan, account of the Responsible Government campaign. Coghlan did not like her. Smuts succeeded Botha as Prime Minister of South Africa in 1919. His political position was too precarious (and became even worse in 1920) for him to say much, but he was known to favour union. The Rhodesia Unionist Association was founded in the same year. Its chairman, Herbert Longden, was a Bulawayo lawyer like Coghlan. Union had the support of the mining companies, the senior civil servants and the better off professional men, although there were many back eddies in the stream. It was not a straight case of ‘haves’ against ‘have-nots’. Afrikaners, who constituted a fifth of the European population of 33,000 ‘had not’, but were unionists. In general, however, farmers (not a well-heeled group then), artisans, railwaymen, small workers, minor civil servants, and trade unionists favoured Responsible Government, while the ‘establishment’ was for union. The Responsible Government cause made all the running in 1919 and 1920. It is true that Milner returned in 1919 a dusty answer to a request from the Legis­ lative Council for the criteria by which he would judge the territory fit for selfgovernment. He replied that he did not think it yet fit and suggested that the temporary continuation of Charter rule might be best. He had been privately in favour of union, but Smuts dwelt on the difficulties in South Africa - surpris­ ingly in view of his preference. Milner was uncertain what to do. He was less hostile to Responsible Government than he seemed. By the end of 1920 he saw no alter­ native. Milner was influenced by Earl Buxton, High Commissioner and Governor General of South Africa 1916-20, who early became convinced of the case for Responsible Government. He in his turn was influenced by Sir Herbert Stanley, his Imperial Secretary who had previously been Resident Commissioner in Salis­ bury. Stanley may have converted Newton, to whom he was related by marriage, although the latter’s failure to succeed Milton and an acrimonious dispute with the Company in 1919 about his pension may have made him ready to take up a cause which by 1921 was anathema to his old employers. He was notoriously tight­ fisted, which was no doubt why he left a substantial sum when he died. Whatever

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the reason, he became one of the most effective advocates of a cause which in 1920 he had denounced as ‘a wild-cat scheme’. His and Stanley’s work behind the scenes was an important element in the success of Responsible Government. The Legislative Council elections of April 1920 gave it a further push. Twelve out of thirteen elected members were in favour, the odd men out supporting a Crown Colony variant. Of 11,000 electors only 6,765 voted, but the supporters of union (814) and the status quo (868) were heavjly defeated. In May the Council sent another resolution to Milner and requested Responsible Government. It was many months before he answered - the Colonial Office did not believe in undue haste - but when he did so in October he conceded the basic point. Responsible Government would be granted and put into effect not later than October 1924, provided that the Legislative Council elections of 1923 showed that the settlers still wanted it. This answer did not satisfy Coghlan, and the Council replied with a request for Respon­ sible Government forthwith. During the 1920 session of the Legislative Council there was an interlude in politics. Dr Jameson had died in 1917. It had been agreed that he should be buried in the Matopos near Rhodes. A multitude of difficulties had hitherto prevented this being done. Now it was at last possible. In the third week in May the Council suspended its sittings and a funeral almost as impressive as Rhodes’s own took place at World’s View on May 22. Bishop Gaul, a close friend, conducted the service, and Chaplin pronounced the address. And there the impetuous boon com­ panion, the political and medical counsellor of the country’s founder was laid to rest. He was, wrote Smuts, who could not attend, to Chaplin, ‘a great Doer and one thinks little of the errors that marked the course of his real creative life’. Over half a century later, with the wisdom of hindsight, we may perhaps see these errors looming larger than they did in 1920, but Jameson’s career, for good or ill, was scarcely less remarkable than that of Rhodes himself. In February 1921, shortly after the Cave Commission had reported, Milner resigned. His successor as Colonial Secretary was Winston Churchill. By this time the officials, after a good deal of uncertainty, had come down definitely in favour of Responsible Government. Milner, with reluctance, concurred. Churchill, though little interested in the subject - the Middle East dominated his thoughts - was not wholly convinced. But he came at once under strong pressure from Coghlan. On the verge of departure for Egypt he adopted the time-honoured delaying tactic of setting up a committee to advise him on both Rhodesias. This would postpone an immediate decision, and in any case there were complicated problems to be disentangled, some of them arising from the Cave Report. Both the personnel of the ‘Rhodesia Committee’ and its terms of reference, however, show how far the cause of Responsible Government had advanced. The Chairman, Earl Buxton, by whose name the Committee is known to history, was as we saw a strong supporter of Responsible Government. So was Sir Henry Lambert of the Colonial Office, another prominent member. Moreover the terms of reference as regards Southern Rhodesia gave little choice: to recommend when and under what safeguards Responsible Government should be granted; to advise on the pro­

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cedure for drafting a new constitution; to suggest interim measures for phasing out Company rule. There was no hint of any alternative. Union was not even mentioned. If Churchill had really hoped for delay he must have been disappointed. The Buxton Committee worked with remarkable speed. Set up on March 7 it sent its recommendations on Southern Rhodesia to the Colonial Secretary on April 12, and on Northern Rhodesia seventeen days later. The latter does not directly concern this story. On Southern Rhodesia the Committee’s recommendations were clear enough. The opinion of the electorate should be taken by a referendum as soon as possible. First, however, a draft constitution should be drawn up by the Colonial Office and if possible agreed with a delegation from the elected members of the Legislative Council visiting London for that purpose, so that the electorate would know clearly what it was voting about. The Committee’s terms of reference did not include the drafting of the constitution, but it recommended in broad terms the model of Natal before the South Africa Act with similar safeguards for the unrepresented Africans. So far all had gone swimmingly for Coghlan and his cause, but at this juncture two adverse influences began to operate. The chartered board and the Administra­ tor, though resigned since 1918 to the loss of Company rule, had never been easy about the prospect of settler government. The Cave award turned uneasiness into downright hostility. There had been sporadic correspondence with Smuts ever since he came into power. The day after the award was announced the board telegraphed Chaplin that union would henceforth be the Company’s policy. The terms that Smuts would offer could not fail to be better than anything now obtainable from the British Government. Simultaneously Smuts’s own political position was transformed. He had been governing on a shoestring majority since the general election of 1920, but during the ensuing year he did a deal with the ‘unionist’ (ex-‘Progressive’) party headed by Sir Thomas Smartt. A combination of the unionists with Smuts’s ‘South African’ party gained a conclusive victory in February 1921 over the ‘nationalists’ (the party of Afrikanerdom headed by J. B. M. Herzog). The incorporation of Southern, and ultimately Northern Rhodesia had long been the objective of the anti-nationalist forces, for obvious reasons connected with the balance of ‘racial’ i.e. Boer versus English - power in the Union. Lord Selborne, High Com­ missioner at the time of the South Africa Act of 1909, had pressed the case strongly. Botha and Smuts always had their eyes fixed on this possibility. Smuts at last had the majorities in both Houses needed to carry Addresses to the Crown request­ ing the incorporation of new territory into the Union. Any political offer from him would now have to be taken seriously both by the British Government and the Southern Rhodesian electorate. The difficulty for the supporters of union was that their opportunity came so late in the day. Smuts, unwell and preoccupied by his own electoral campaign and its aftermath, did not immediately appreciate how damaging the terms of reference

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of the Buxton Committee were to his policy. As soon as he did he was quick to urge on April 2 that the Committee should be asked to delay its report, and even wait to confer with the Rhodesian representatives before finalizing it. In his new and greatly strengthened political position he meant to use the Imperial Con­ ference due in London that summer both to enlist Churchill’s aid, and to over­ persuade the Rhodesian delegation which he hoped would be there at the same time. Like all charismatic politicians - Disraeli, Cecil Rhodes, Lloyd George, Churchill himself - Smuts attached great importance to ‘the personal’. Coghlan was well aware of the danger. He knew that Churchill’s attitude was uncertain and he feared the persuasiveness and the prestige of the South African Prime Minister. He prudently delayed the departure of the Rhodesian delegation till the end of August when Smuts was safely back in Cape Town. Churchill’s attitude was by no means clear. He refused in May to rebuff Smuts and to that extent might be regarded as moving against Coghlan. He requested Coghlan’s delegation to call on Smuts while en route for London - which again perhaps implied a penchant for the unionist solution. (Smuts when they met offered to reveal his terms, but Coghlan replied that his delegation had no mandate to discuss the matter.) The truth seems to be that Churchill was being pulled two ways by two rival exponents of imperial ideals. He was to be impressed by Coghlan’s loyalty to the flag - something particularly welcome from an Irish Catholic when the ‘troubles’ were at their height. He was also impressed by Smuts’s powerful arguments about the future of South Africa. But he knew that, whatever the letter of the law, there could be no question of imposing union on unwilling settlers. The most he could do was to insist to the Rhodesian delegation which was in London for the whole autumn of 1921 that the referendum suggested by the Buxton Committee must contain union as an option and therefore must await Smuts’s terms. Coghlan protested that the Legislative Council elections had already settled the matter, but his hand was weakened when a petition got up by the unionists and signed by over 8,000 Rhodesian electors was sent to the Colonial Office asking for postponement of any decision till Smuts’s terms were known. The rest of the delegation’s time was spent on the draft constitution which was agreed at the end of the year. It was, as expected, similar to that of Natal but since its details were virtually the same as those in the Letters Patent issued in 1923, it will be discussed in the next chapter. Coghlan and his colleagues returned in January 1922. The next step was to talk with Smuts who arranged to see a Rhodesian delegation at the beginning of April. Smuts had by this stage become very keen indeed on securing Rhodesia. Party politics played their part. His long-term as opposed to his immediate political posi­ tion was none too safe. His advances in the 1921 election had been at the cost of the Labour party. His real enemies, the nationalists, actually gained one seat and obtained 6,000 more votes than in 1920. A bloc of Rhodesian seats bound to vote on his side would be a great help, as his opponents naturally pointed out. Yet this was not the only consideration. Sir Keith Hancock in his great biography of Smuts writes:

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From the start of the war to its finish they [Botha and Smuts] held constantly in view two paramount objectives: national security, national status. From Kruger and Rhodes and even from their former British conquerors they had inherited an expansionist concept of security - wide frontiers for the Union and an economic and political hegemony extending beyond those frontiers far into equatorial Africa.5 Something of the grand, perhaps grandiose, sweep of Cecil Rhodes's imagina­ tion seemed to have descended to the Afrikaner philospher king who ruled in Pretoria and Cape Town. If he could incorporate Southern Rhodesia would he not have a jumping off place for the line of rail to Katanga, and - who knows? - a route to East Africa where he had fought such a hard and hazardous campaign, and thence to Kenya? Might Cape to Cairo become a reality after all? And would not Southern Rhodesia give him that long-coveted hold over Mozambique, in particular Delagoa Bay and Beira. The fluidity of frontiers which so often follows a war made these dreams by no means absurd. As Smuts wrote in a state paper on the League of Nations, 'The very foundations have been shaken and loosened, and things are again fluid. The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is once more on the march.’ After all even the boundaries of Europe, far more firmly fixed than those of Africa, had been re-drawn during 1919-20 in a scarcely less radical fashion, and Smuts had played a major part in the process. He was never over-sanguine, but he enjoyed what a character in one of Disraeli’s novels calls 'real politics’, i.e. foreign affairs; and there is a touch of Disraeli in a letter of April 27, 1922 to his friend Arthur Gillett.

I am rushed almost beyond endurance... I have just finished with the Rhodesian Delegation who came to see me on the question of incorporation into the Union. I am now busy with the Chartered Company in order to see whether we can arrive at an agreement on the expropriation of their assets. The work really means a financial review of the history of Rhodesia. And over and above all this, the Portuguese Delegation have arrived from Lisbon to negotiate a new Mozam­ bique Treaty. I am now like an Oriental Despot giving audience to suitors from the ends of two continents. All very interesting but very exacting. It does not look like achieving success - either the Rhodesian or the Mozambique busi­ ness. But I am going to try very hard. It would be a great thing to round off the South African state with borders far flung into the heart of the continent. But I fear I am moving too fast, and patience will be necessary.6 Smuts had much going for him. His prestige was immense. He was by far the most famous statesman of the Empire. He had the good will of Lloyd George, 5 Keith Hancock, The Fields of Force, Vol. II of Smuts, 1968, 4. •Quoted Hancock, op. cit., 151-2.

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Churchill and many other wartime ministers. He was on excellent terms with King George V. He was familiar with Whitehall. He was in a curious way almost a part of the British ‘establishment’. But there was one snag; he had to win the votes of the Rhodesians. To do so would mean a remarkable reversal of the verdict of 1920. He tried every trick. He even offered Coghlan, through Sir Abe Bailey and in suitably cautious terms, a post in the South African Cabinet, but Coghlan was not to be bought off.7 The truth was that Coghlan really did believe in Responsible Government. It may be true, as Sir Ernest Guest, a unionist and a partner in Coghlan’s law firm, told the author, that Coghlan ‘said in public on more than one occasion: “As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow Rhodesia’s inevitable destiny is amalga­ mation with the Union - but we must get Responsible Government first and I do not trust the BSA Company to negotiate on our behalf” ’.In reality this was only a long-term prediction. J. G. McDonald, deputy leader of the unionists, hit the nail on the head when he wrote to Chaplin, ‘Warn him [Smuts] against believing that Coghlan only wants Resp. Govt, to negotiate terms. If he swallows that he’ll never cease regretting his error. Coghlan wants Respon. Govt, to the last. Make no mistake about that.’8 McDonald was right. The terms that Smuts eventually offered hardly could have been more generous, but the offer made not the slight­ est difference to Coghlan and his campaign. It is safe to say that Smuts was under no delusions on this score. He never under­ estimated Coghlan’s tenacity and ability. But events moved against him throughout 1922. From within a few months of the general election of the previous year South African affairs were marked by violent episodes which might well have made anyone pause at the prospect of joining such a turbulent country. There was the bloody suppression in May 1921 of some five hundred ‘black Israelites’ who defied the law at Bulhoek in the Western Cape. The dead numbered 167, and Smuts was christened by his enemies ‘the Butcher of Bulhoek’. Early in 1922 there was a strike followed by a rising on the Rand. The strikers, largely Afrikaners, were protesting against the attempt of the mining companies to cut costs by modifying the conventional colour bar and job reservation. On March 10 Smuts declared martial law, took personal command and crushed the rebellion with heavy casualties - 157 dead and 687 wounded. Eighteen ring leaders were condemned to death and four were executed. Then in May and June came the so-called ‘massacre of the Bondelzwarts’, when 115 out of 600 men from this South West African tribe were killed in a punitive expedition. Of these episodes the most damaging was the rebellion on the Rand. It aroused the worst apprehensions among organized labour in Rhodesia, and the fury of the nationalists in South Africa. By a stroke of ill fortune the Rhodesian delegation, newly arrived in Cape Town on March 31, was taken to the Strangers Gallery to see how the House of Assembly comported itself. It was the first day of the 7 J. P. R. Wallis, One man's hand: the story of Sir Charles Coghlan ... 1950, 176-8. 8NAR CH8/2/2, 913-4, June 30, 1921.

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debate on the Rand uprising. Language of the most virulent nature was used, and Herzog declared that Smuts’s ‘footsteps dripped with blood’. The spectacle of this sort of rancour was not likely to encourage Rhodesians to join the Union. The delegation, moreover, got nothing out of Smuts. This was not his fault. He could not make a political offer till he had settled financial terms with the Company. Neither he nor the Company trusted each other an inch and Smuts guessed that, if he reversed the process and committed himself politically first, the Company would screw up its terms accordingly. But the negotiations with the Company’s embassy proved to be enormously complicated, and were even protracted beyond the end of the session. His opponents in South Africa accused him of by-passing Parliament, though constitutionally he was in the right. More serious, the delay inspired deep suspicion in Rhodesia, for it was an article of faith with the unionists that time was on their side, and the Responsible Government party was correspond­ ingly anxious for speed. On May 25 Coghlan forced Smuts’s hand by carrying, strongly against the will of the Colonial Office and the Company, an ordinance in the Legislative Council fixing June 30 as the latest day for publication of Smuts’s terms and October 27 as the date of the referendum. Smuts asked for the publication day to be postponed till July 30. Coghlan agreed since this was tantamount to a promise that there would be no further delay, and the referendum would in any case be held on the appointed day. The terms were generous, ten members of the House of Assembly (the total at the time was 134) and five of the Senate, rising to seven­ teen and ten respectively with a named rise in population. There was to be a Provincial Council of twenty. There were generous financial provisions for development, and compensation for loss of tariffs. The Civil Services would be amalgamated, but vested rights of Rhodesians would be guaranteed by law. There would be no recruitment of Rhodesian native labour to other parts of the Union. Two other provisos, however inevitable, were bound to be less popular. Dutch must become a co-equal official language, and there would be no restriction on the movement of white men between provinces. Smuts could scarcely ask for less if he was to get the deal through his own Parliament. His terms for the Company were equally generous - ¿6,836,500 in cash for the unalienated land, public works and railways, the Company to retain all its other assets, including its mineral, commercial and ranching rights. As a further encour­ agement the British Government agreed to drop its claim, which was widely regarded as outrageous anyway, to the return of two million pounds advanced for war expenses. To the Company, now more deeply embroiled than ever in its battle with the Colonial Office, the offer came as a godsend. The board, angry at the Cave and Buxton reports, was even more dismayed by the draft constitution for Responsible Government. This denied two of its key claims: that payment should be in cash down, not by a leisurely sale of land; and that interest, if not payable before March 31, 1918, was at least due thereafter. They decided to file a petition for a Declaration of Right, in effect an action against the Crown, if the draft constitution was promulgated. A depressing prospect of protracted

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litigation lay ahead. The shareholders and board understandably accepted Smuts’s offer with alacrity at the end of July. Everything now depended on the referendum. Although he badly wanted the unionists to win, Chaplin could not as Administrator take an active part in the campaign. The unionists were not very effective. They had the money but they lacked oratory and organization. Coghlan and his friends were more colourful literally, for they opened the battle with banners of red and green. These were popularly assumed to be based on the initials of the party’s name. In fact they were the King’s racing colours - Coghlan was a devotee of the turf - and the unionists riposted by renting a window on the corner of Maria Road and Second Street in Salisbury where they displayed a notice: ‘The Colours of the Unionist Association are Red, White and Blue’, with a Union Jack below.9 Thus both sides beat the patriotic drum. It is hard to believe that passions were as violent in this conflict as they seem to be in modern politics. Sir Ernest Guest claims that ‘feelings ran very high*, but Godfrey Huggins (later Lord Malvern, and at that time a young surgeon), who was also a unionist, says ‘there was no deep moral division on grounds of prin­ ciple’. His wife, who was producing their first baby on the very day of the refer­ endum, supported Coghlan, but could not vote: her husband honourably declined to take advantage of an incapacity for which he had some responsibility and ‘paired’ with her. The campaign was fought with vigour. ‘Rhodesia for the Rhodesians, Rhodesia for the Empire’ was Coghlan’s slogan. He seemed to have all the big guns against him, the press, apart from Umtali Advertiser (not an organ which counted for much), most of the establishment, the financial resources of the mining companies, and the British Government which, while ostensibly neutral, had given a clear hint by its waiver of war costs in connexion with Smuts’s offer to the Chartered Company. Because of these hostile forces historians have expressed surprise at the result. They forget that only two and a half years earlier Responsible Govern­ ment had won an overwhelming victory in the Legislative Council elections, and that since then almost every development had worked in its favour. The surprise is not that Responsible Government won, rather that the unionists fared as well as they did. In August Smuts himself made an ostensibly ‘non-political’ visit to the country to open an agricultural show. No one took the excuse seriously and the visit may have been counter-productive. Smuts was none too sanguine. He wrote to a friend:

I hope they will vote to come into the Union, but I am told that the great current of opinion is still the other way. They are afraid of our bilingualism, our nationalism, my views of the British Empire. In fact they are little Jingoes and the sooner they are assimilated by the Union the better for them and for us. His fears were justified. Despite an eve of poll message from him, which much

9 Rex Reynolds, Discussions with Lord Malvern, 4, comment by Sir Ernest Lucas Guest.

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annoyed Coghlan, the verdict was decisive. Out of a European population of 35,000 some 20,000 were on the register. (The black population was nearly 900,000 with sixty on the register.) The vote for Responsible Government was 8,774, for union 5,989. Nearly 26 per cent of those who were in theory eligible did not vote, but the register was unreliable and contained as Gann puts it ‘both dead and dud votes’. Many electors in the more remote areas of the backveld found it difficult to get to the polling booth. In the circumstances the turn-out was high. It is in­ teresting to note that of the thirteen districts into which the country was divided for electoral purposes, twelve voted for Responsible Government. Marandellas was the only one against it, as in 1920; and, again as in 1920, by the narrowest of margins. The thirty months that had elapsed since the Legislative Council elections had seen no real shift at all in Rhodesian attitudes. Coghlan had been fully vindicated by events. The Rhodesians remained staunch patriots or ‘little Jingoes’, according to taste. The final result, because of the difficulties of the count with such a scattered electorate, was not announced till November 6 at the Bula­ wayo Court House. Coghlan made a speech ending with the words, ‘For King and Empire that is our motto’. But Herbert Longdon declared, ‘I have no doubt that Union will in the fullness of time be realized. I feel that Nature intended it.’ Before the announcement, but after the result had become obvious, Chaplin wrote at some length to Smuts analysing the causes of their defeat.10 Like most unionists he believed that time was on their side and that ‘the real mistake was made by Churchill when he appointed the Buxton Committee and altered Mil­ ner’s plan of leaving the question of Responsible Government to be voted upon at the general election for the Legislative Council, which would have taken place in the ordinary course next year.’ As for the victory of the Responsible Govern­ ment party its main causes were: ‘anti-Dutch feeling especially among the women’; ‘the belief of the trade union element ... that they will be in a position to dic­ tate to the government’; a feeling in the same quarter that, if ‘most of the better­ class people ... were for Union, their proper course was to vote the other way’; and finally the satisfactory state of the Administration’s finances ‘which has blinded people to difficulties in the future’. As for the actual campaign he considered that, although the Unionists had the money, they were ineffective and too defensive. ‘If they had hit harder they would have had more success.’ Analysing the vote in rather more detail, he thought that the majority of farmers and nearly all senior civil servants were for union, but that the Public Services Association and the Posts and Telegraphs Association ‘were captured by Respon­ sible Government extremists’, and pressed all sorts of unreasonable demands to which Coghlan agreed whereas Smuts refused. The Indian and Coloured voters - not that there were many - opposed union. Teachers and clergymen (apart from the Dutch Reformed Church) were also hostile, along with ‘most of the Labour people’. 10 The letter appears in full in Jean van der Poel (ed.), Selections from the Smuts Papers^ Vol. V, 1973, 144-7-

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One can perhaps put one or two glosses on this account. The farmers are sup­ posed by most contemporaries to have been anti-union for reasons given earlier. Then, Chaplin could hardly be expected in writing to Smuts to mention the un­ fortunate effect of certain recent episodes in South Africa. Nor would he have wished to dwell on the unpopularity of the Company. A good many people were voting for Responsible Government precisely because the Company was against it. But on the whole his assessment seems a reasonable one. The vote was in part an anti-establishment vote, and in part a racialist vote - a vote against the Afrikaners. This hostility was not only an echo of the Boer war, it was also bom of fear; fear of poor Whites who nearly all were Afrikaners migrating to the north and undercutting the standards of living of English-speaking artisans, and railway workers. Nor should one underestimate the dislike felt by minor civil servants - and in a newly developed country their numerical proportion tends to be very high - for South African bilingualism. Finally, there was loyalty to ‘the flag - loyalty to a Britain and a British way of life that was already fast vanishing’ - in Mr Frank Clements’ words, an attachment to ‘an ever further receding past till it was completely divorced from the realities of the present’. It is fully in keeping and in no way inconsistent that very similar social and emotional forces should produce the Declaration of Independence in 1965. Then, too, the Establishment was in the minority. Then, too, there was a revolt against the people who had for so many years been ruling the country. Then, too, there was racialism - dislike of a different race, it is true, for the Afrikaners were in favour of UDI - but the basic ingredient was similar, fear of an alien people whose advancement would in the end threaten the security and standards of the white artisans. The same forces which in 1922 propelled a majority of white Rhodesians to proclaim their loyalty to a Britain still believed to be on the side of the settlers, forty-three years later propelled them into breaking with a Britain which palpably was not. The Chartered Company thus ceased to rule the Rhodesias. Its board of directors and its officials were often criticized and sometimes abused, but its contribution to the building of the country was a notable one, and Southern Rhodesia owes it a debt too often forgotten. It continued to be by far the most important com­ mercial concern in the area even when its rights over minerals had been bought out in 1933 and over railways after the Second World War. Its resident director was a person of much influence and in the 1950s when Lord Robins held office, June Hill, his official abode in Salisbury, became under Lady Robins a rival social magnet to Government House itself. The Company was eventually taken over on a friendly basis by the giant Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa with which it long had had close relations.

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CHAPTER 13

The New Order 1923-31

The referendum result was a decisive episode in the history of Southern Africa. It cannot be called a 'turning point’. Responsible Government, given the tradition of the Colonial Office and the character of the settler community, was on the straight line of constitutional development. But a decision not to turn can be just as important. Smuts and his policies received a set-back from which they never recovered. By-elections were already going against him, and the referendum was a heavy blow to his prestige. Now a mirror image of the alliance with which he had dished Herzog in 1921 was created in 1923 by an electoral pact between the nationalists and the Labour party. The new coalition won the general election of 1924 by a majority of twenty-seven, and Smuts not only lost his office, but his seat as well. The objective of a greater South Africa ‘with borders far flung into the heart of the continent’ was never to be attained. It all depended on the acquisition of Rhodesia. The referendum finally dispelled the dream of Cape to Cairo. No wonder Smuts could write to a friend a fortnight after the result was announced: ‘I get scores of letters from all sorts of people who say that it is indeed a para­ dox that Rhodes’ country should have stood in the way of Rhodes’ ideal being accomplished.’ Belgium and Portugal, both of which had displayed a not entirely disinterested solicitude for the cause of Responsible Government, could now slumber on in the Congo, Angola and Mozambique until black nationalism blew up in their faces a generation later. It may be that Smuts could not have suc­ ceeded in his wider ambitions even if he had acquired Southern Rhodesia. What is certain is that even the possibility vanished after November 6, 1922. Within Southern Rhodesia the result was equally decisive. Although people might talk about financial difficulties forcing the country to join the Union, there was never any serious question of it. The nationalist victory of 1924 was one reason, and financial difficulties are nearly always exaggerated in these arguments. The same

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was claimed at various times about Ulster, Palestine and Pakistan but it never proved to be very important. Moreover, once established, Responsible Government created its own set of vested interests. Membership of the Legislative Council of a self-governing colony was grander than being a Provincial Councillor, and to be its premier was a cut above being a minister in a South African cabinet. Wil­ liam Pitt could overcome analogous difficulties with the Irish Parliament in 1801 by the lavish distribution of honours and bribes. Such means were not open to South African Prime Ministers. In the immediate aftermath, however, Smuts and many unionists believed that the result of the referendum was only a temporary set-back to the unionist cause. By coincidence there had been at the same time a convulsion in British politics. The Lloyd George coalition had fallen on October 19, and on November 15 Bonar Law, leading a purely Conservative administration, won the general election with a majority of eighty-eight over all other parties combined. The Duke of Devonshire, with William Ormsby-Gore as his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, replaced Churchill at the Colonial Office. The new Government was deeply pledged to fiscal retrenchment. Displaying perhaps more tenacity than tact, Smuts wrote at some length to Bonar Law on November 29 suggesting that he might abandon any promise to Coghlan and revert to Milner’s policy of awaiting the Legislative Council elections in 1923 and postponing the grant of Responsible Government till he had seen the results. He cleverly dwelt on the financial questions involved in the Chartered Company’s Petition of Right. If, after the Letters Patent for the new constitution had actually been promulgated, the Company subsequently won its case against the Crown, the British taxpayer might be liable for as much as five million pounds. Would it not be wiser to wait for the Privy Council’s judgement on a lawsuit which, as Smuts no doubt hoped, was likely to be slow and protracted? He ended by urging Bonar Law to extend no financial favours whatever to Southern Rhodesia, since financial embarrassment was the strongest reason for the country joining the union. He wrote on similar lines to Ormsby-Gore and Churchill.1 One may doubt whether these tactics, presupposing as they did the early rever­ sal of a verdict already twice pronounced by the Southern Rhodesian electorate, could ever have worked, but in any case matters had now gone too far. OrmsbyGore does appear to have hankered somewhat after Smuts’s greater South Africa policy, and there was a delay in promulgating the new constitution, which prompted Coghlan to write at one stage to Newton in London ‘I have never trusted Ormsby-Gore and I don’t do so now’.1 2 But the delay was caused rather by the in­ herent procrastination of the Colonial Office, and even more by the slow financial negotiations with the Chartered Company, than by any attempt to revert to Milner’s programme. 1 For these letters see Smuts Papers V, 149-54. 2NAR NE1/1/1, May 28, 1923.

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On July 10, 1923 the Colonial Office abruptly announced with the minimum notice its terms for the expropriation of the Company. The shareholders had to decide whether to accept within a fortnight so that the necessary supple­ mentary vote could be introduced in the House of Commons on July 25. The Colonial Office, possibly influenced by Ormsby-Gore who was related by marriage to Malcolm, behaved slightly less rigidly and parsimoniously than hitherto. The Company was offered three and three-quarter million pounds in settlement of the balance of its claims and the Crown’s counter-claim, which had been left undetermined after the award of the Cave Commission. It would also receive till 1965 a half share of the proceeds of land sales in North-Western Rhodesia. In return it had to surrender the unalienated land, the administrative buildings and other administrative assets in both territories. The Crown would recognize and guarantee the Company’s railway and mineral rights and leave its other commercial assets undisturbed. The Crown would drop any claim regard­ ing the liability of the Company for land appropriated for the Company’s own commercial undertakings, or granted, for whatever consideration, to other parties. Finally the Crown consented to forgo its claim for two million pounds war costs. As this had been already agreed in the event of the bargain with Smuts going through, it would have been awkward to do otherwise now, although Smuts himself in a letter to Ormsby-Gore argued strongly to the contrary. As a corollary of this settlement, the Chartered Company would cease to admin­ ister either of the Rhodesias. The new government, under Letters Patent, would take over Southern Rhodesia on October 1, 1923, when the territory would be formally annexed to the Crown as a colony. The Crown would take over Northern Rhodesia in April, 1924. Sir John Chancellor, a distinguished soldier and colonial administrator, was appointed as the first Governor of Southern Rhodesia - Chaplin, who was an obvious candidate, being regarded by Coghlan and Newton as too much committed to unionism. Sir Herbert Stanley was appointed as the first Governor of Northern Rhodesia. The settlement, thus achieved after so much litigation, intrigue and acrimony, was finally confirmed on September 29 and is known as the Devonshire Agreement. It was not accepted in any spirit of good will or gratitude by the chartered board or its shareholders. The most that could be said for it, as far as they were concerned, was that it put an end to litigation and uncertainty, and was a rather less adverse financial deal than that contemplated by the previous government. Their general sentiments were probably well expressed by Sir Henry Birchenough (President 1925—37), writing to Chaplin two days after the offer was announced: ‘I doubt whether any Government has ever made a shabbier bargain with a great Corpora­ tion which has performed undoubted and striking services’.3 The Letters Patent promulgating the terms of the Responsible Government constitution were published on September 24, 1923. Since a good deal of sub­ sequent Rhodesian history has revolved either around disputes about its meaning 3NAR CH8/2/2, if. 162-4, July 12, 1923.

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or efforts at amendment, it has to be examined in some detail. As with all con­ stitutions one must distinguish between outward form and the inner reality which developed over the years. Formally the executive and legislative power in Southern Rhodesia was sub­ ordinated to that of the United Kingdom. Not only did the imperial Government retain the right to legislate, to appoint the Governor and give him orders, and to remit legal appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; but it also imposed substantial limitations on the power of the new Legislative Assembly to make laws. The Assembly could by a simple majority pass measures for ‘the peace, order and good government’ of the country, but any bill required the assent of the Crown for whom the Governor normally acted, and the amendment of certain clauses in the Letters Patent required a two-thirds majority of the Assembly. Moreover, there were some areas of great importance in Southern Rhodesian affairs in which the Assembly could not legislate at all. In particular, it could not touch the Native Department, whose staffing, salaries and conditions of service were thus in theory safeguarded from local interference. Nor could it deal with native re­ serves, the rights of Africans to purchase land, or the establishment of native councils. All these matters came under the High Commissioner, who was also Governor General in South Africa. These were not the only restrictions on the Assembly’s legislative power. Although, in the case of most bills, the Governor’s assent was a formality, being given on the advice of his Executive Council, which was simply the Cabinet under a different hat, there was a whole category which came under another procedure. Measures requiring a two-thirds majority, bills concerning the Company’s mineral or railway rights, bills imposing differential tariffs or affecting the currency, and measures which discriminated against the Africans (except in respect of arms and liquor) could not receive the Governor’s assent unless they contained a clause suspending their operation until the King had signified his intention not to disallow them. The King in this context meant the British Government which thus had in certain areas a veto power over and above that of the Governor. The Letters Patent created a Legislative Assembly of thirty members. The franchise was based on property qualification (real property or mining claims worth £150, or an income of £100 p.a.) together with a literacy test. Electors had to be over twenty-one and British subjects. There was formally no racial discrimi­ nation, but in practice the electorate was almost exclusively white, with a few Indian shopkeepers and a handful of prosperous African farmers. The Governor could appoint up to six ministers, each with particular departmental responsibilities. One of them would be designated ‘Premier’ - a title with a slightly inferior con­ notation to that of ‘Prime Minister’ which was not conferred till 1933. The six ministers constituted the Governor’s Executive Council. The word ‘Cabinet’ was not mentioned in the Letters Patent, but it was assumed that they would also sit separately as such under the chairmanship of the Premier. The Premier was to be Minister of Native Affairs, and since he was, like the rest of the Cabinet, ‘re­ sponsible’ to the legislature, there existed to that extent an overlap between the

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1923-31

governmental system dealing with Europeans and the one that dealt with Africans. The system formally was, therefore, not self-government at all, although often so described. The Letters Patent were more accurate when they termed it ‘respon­ sible government subject to certain limitations'. In the words of Mr D. J. Murray:

It provided for self-government for only approximately 19,000 electors in a total population which was reckoned at that time as being approximately 864,000. Self-government covered approximately 2 per cent of the population, and the vast majority of the remainder were supposedly provided with a distinct system such as was expected to safeguard their interests.4

In practice, the limitations meant less than they did in theory. From the very beginning the Legislative Assembly behaved, and was treated by the UK Govern­ ment, as the competent body to pass laws for the whole population, not simply for the minority who had the vote. The Parliament at Westminster never exercised its right to legislate, nor did the British Government use its power to issue ordersin-council or proclamations, even in areas from which the Southern Rhodesian Assembly was excluded from legislating. If it was deemed desirable to encroach on those areas, the procedure was to amend the Letters Patent so that the Legis­ lative Assembly could pass an acceptable local measure. The British Government could, of course, block anything that it did not consider ‘acceptable', and the fact that it never used its power to disallow laws enacted in Salisbury did not mean that Salisbury could get away with anything. The power was not used be­ cause it became the custom for the Southern Rhodesian Government to submit measures to Whitehall before introducing them in the Assembly and to drop them or amend them if the UK Government objected. The important point was that the initiative always originated from Southern Rhodesia, and a convention, so strong and so important that it came to be known as ‘The Convention’, was established, under which the British Parliament never legislated for Southern Rhodesia except by agreement with, or at the request of the Southern Rhodesian Government. The existence of this convention was one of several features which made Southern Rhodesia’s status far closer to that of a self-governing Dominion than even a Crown Colony with Representative Government. No British Government would have dreamed of initiating a bill dealing with Australian or Canadian affairs. It was symbolically appropriate that when the Dominions Office was set up in 1925, Southern Rhodesia should have come under it rather than remain in the sphere of the Colonial Office. Time only hardened ‘The Convention’. One of the more ridiculous canards spread by the Rhodesia Front in the run-up to UDI was that Harold Wilson intended to pass an Act of Parliament imposing majority rule on Southern Rhodesia. It was, of course, inconceivable that he or any other British Prime Mini­ ster would have done anything of the sort. The credulity of those who believed 4 D. J. Murray, The Governmental System in Southern Rhodesia, 1970, 5-6.

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the story is only matched by the disingenuousness of those who spread it. As soon as he took office the new Governor appointed Sir Charles Coghlan as Premier and head of an interim Government pending the elections for the Legis­ lative Assembly. Coghlan’s Cabinet consisted of P. D. Fynn, Treasurer; Sir Francis Newton, Colonial Secretary (i.e. Minister of Internal Affairs); Robert Hudson, Attorney General and Minister of Defence; W. M. Leggate, Minister of Agricul­ ture; H. U. Moffat, Minister of Mines and Public Works. The Premier, anything but radical in his views, wished to conciliate the establishment, so many of whom had been unionists, and he had little use for some of his own supporters; in par­ ticular, he meant to keep out Mrs Tawse-Jollie, come what might. He changed the party’s name to that of Rhodesian Party. The unionists were no less anxious to forget past battles, and their mainstay, the Chartered Company, had every interest in establishing good relations with the new regime. The unionist party was dissolved. The only other organized party was Labour which had supported the Respon­ sible Government campaign. Coghlan was prepared to concede them five seats, i.e. not to run Rhodesian Party candidates there. Jack Keller, the Labour leader, assuming that there would be single member constituencies, stuck out for eight. The deaf, therefore, collapsed. In fact Labour support was concentrated in a number of geographically small areas, and when the Governor used his power under the Letters Patent to divide the country into fifteen two-member constitu­ encies,5 the Labour vote was effectively swamped. At the 1924 election, the Rhodesian Party won twenty-six seats, and Labour none. The opposition consisted of four Independents. There was thus set a political pattern destined to last without much change for over thirty years. Of eight general elections down to and including Garfield Todd’s victory in 1954 (by exactly the same margin as Coghlan’s), the Government party under whatever name won six with a majority of not less than fourteen in the Legislative Assembly i.e. not less than twenty-two seats or 73 per cent of the total. Only once did the opposition actually win. Calling itself at that time the Reform Party it obtained sixteen seats in the 1933 election under the lead of Godfrey Huggins, himself an ex-Rhodesian Party man. But the basic reality was emphasized when he jettisoned the Reform Party, concluded an alliance under the title of United Party with his former friends, dissolved the Legislative Assembly and won the election of 1934 with twenty-four seats. On only one occasion was he seriously challenged thereafter when the 1946 election gave the opposition, now calling itself the Liberal Party, twelve seats; Huggins with only thirteen had to conduct a minority Government for two years, but the election of 1948 restored 5 The Legislative Assembly had the power to change this, and in 1928 split the country into twenty-two single-member constituencies, leaving four two-member constituencies for Bulawayo and Salisbury. In 1938 these were abolished and thirty single-member constitu­ encies became the pattern till the enlargement of the Legislative Assembly in 1961 under the ‘Whitehead Constitution’.

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THE NEW ORDER 1923-31

the old balance. Rhodesia had in effect throughout these years a one-party system similar in some respects to the British political pattern under the first two Georges; and Huggins was its Walpole. The politics of Southern Rhodesia were thus profoundly different from those of the contemporary Britain which Southern Rhodesians so nostalgically admired. It was not merely that no single party governed Britain for those thirty years, although the Conservatives came near to doing so. Nor was it because Parliamen­ tary majorities were not as overwhelming in percentage terms, although in 1924, *935 and 1945 they came little short of the typical Rhodesian figures, and in 1931 far surpassed them. The real difference was not in terms of percentages, but of absolute numbers. The British system depends on parties which, even though they do not literally alternate in power, base their assumptions when in opposition on the likelihood of soon returning. Hence the concept of the ‘shadow cabinet’ - an alternative government with an alternative programme ready to take office, if the electoral pendulum swings the right way. But this presupposes a reasonable num­ ber of persons involved. The Southern Rhodesian Legislature outnumbered less than one-twentieth of the British House of Commons, but the Rhodesian Cabinet of six was nearly a third of the size of its average British counterpart. Since the entire opposition elected in six out of the eight Rhodesian elections during the period consisted of not more than eight members and twice fell as low as four, the notion of a shadow cabinet would have been absurd. The numbers simply did not exist. Coghlan was anything but a radical. He left the administrative framework much as it was under the Company. The same civil servants did much the same things. True, they soon had grievances. The new political ministers behaved as if they were permanent administrative heads of departments, the Civil Service felt that there was excessive political interference in the management of personnel matters, and the new Government, under pressure for economy and lower taxation, seemed less sympathetic than the Company. Nevertheless there was nothing in the nature of a drastic change, and many of the complaints were rectified by Huggins ten years later. Nor was Coghlan in a position to interfere, had he wished, with one vital part of the administration. The Native Affairs Department remained as it was under the Company, a state within a state. The Chief Native Commissioner was almost as hard to remove as a judge. Appointments and promotions were made by the Governor in Executive Council, but needed the approval of the High Commissioner (who was also the Governor General) in South Africa. The ‘reserved powers’ in the Letters Patent gave the British Government a veto on any legis­ lation detrimental to the African population, although there was no corresponding power to do anything positive. Coghlan, relatively liberal in racial matters by the very different standards of that day, far from resenting the reservéd powers, regarded them as a necessary safeguard and told the Governor that he would not advise their removal. He was conscious of the risk that a settler legislature would be indifferent to the needs of the voteless majority or worse still, would improperly exploit their helplessness.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

He strongly opposed attempts by white fanners in the remoter districts to con­ script labour in order to exploit the tobacco boom. He obtained the British Govern­ ment’s assent in 1926 to a Native Juveniles Act which was welcomed by native parents (though possibly not by native juveniles) since it empowered Native Com­ missioners to send truant children home, to terminate labour contracts which they considered undesirable, and to make contracts for juveniles who had no parents or guardians, the latter provision being enforceable by summary whipping. The measures which in fact did much to remove the worst abuses of child labour provoked, because of the whipping clause, an uproar in England led by the Rev. Arthur Shirley Cripps, an unworldly, left-wing Puseyite priest-cum-poet who spent most of his life on his mission station, ‘Maronda Mashanu’, near Enkeldoom, but had a cure of souls in his home country from 1926 to 1930. He was the quintessential figure of the dissentient Englishman prepared to believe almost any evil of his compatriots settled in the far flung empire. These figures are less familiar today now that the empire has vanished - a disappearance to which they made their own by no means negligible contribution. Cripps himself had been in Southern Rhodesia since 1901, except for an inter­ lude as a wartime chaplain in East Africa. He had formed an idyllic picture of the African past and had been agitating for years about the alleged abuses of Company and settler rule. The significance of the juvenile natives issue was in kindling for the first time a spark which lighted a fairly widespread fire of humani­ tarian and negrophile indignation among the liberal/left in Britain. In this particu­ lar case their opposition was largely misplaced. The coercive part of the Act soon became a dead letter, and the Native Commissioners’ powers to disallow certain types of juvenile labour contract proved to be an important safeguard. The episode was, however, symptomatic of a change in the climate of ‘enlightened’ opinion. The sympathy felt for the settlers when they were fighting the Company was rapidly evaporating. Now that they ruled they were seen as oppressors rather than oppressed, and every measure proposed in the field of native affairs was scrutinized with mounting suspicion and distrust. There was, however, one measure enacted shortly before Coghlan died which humanitarians should have welcomed. This was the Criminal Trials Act of 1927. Coghlan’s earlier perturbation at the perverse verdicts returned by juries in cases of violence between black and white has already been mentioned, but the ‘special juries’ (i.e. juries selected by the Attorney General) introduced in 1911 did not really meet the problem. These too were all-white, they might be prejudiced and would not necessarily have any understanding of the African mentality. The new Act provided that anyone'charged upon indictment before the High Court could opt to be tried before a Judge and two Assessors who must be experienced Native Commissioners of long standing. Given the then social structure of Southern Rhodesia, this was about as far as reform could be expected to go. The African voice in the country, dumb since the rebellions, began in the early 1920s to become audible, but the sound was faint and far away, the message con­ fusing and obscure. The earliest and most articulate came from Matabeleland, as

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THE NEW ORDER 1923-31

one would expect, for the Ndebele aristocracy had not been utterly crushed like the Shona Chiefs. Nyamanda and his supporters, defeated in their claim before the Privy Council, pressed for a sort of Ndebele home rule within Matabeleland. They aspired to Protectorate status under the direct supervision of the British Crown. This was what Khama had obtained in Bechuanaland, Lewanika in Barotseland, Mosheshwe in Basutoland. Lobengula might well have settled for it, given the chance. Nyamanda and his movement were realistic enough not to claim all of Matabeleland and they ignored Mashonaland entirely; they were supported by the South African Congress and in Britain by the Aborigines Protection Society. In March 1919 he petitioned the Crown for the return of ‘the so-called un­ alienated land to the family of the late King Lobengula in trust for the tribe according to Bantu custom’. It was, of course, far too late. The question of settler rule had in reality been determined when the settlers secured a majority of elected members on the Legislative Council as long ago as 1907. However, it still remained for formal decision, and, as Professor Ranger points out, Nyamanda’s movement, though it achieved none of its objects ‘was the only African voice to make itself heard at a key moment in Rhodesian politics - the achievement by the white settlers of political control’.6 Nyamanda was protesting against the creation of the new regime. Another quite separate movement tried to operate within it. At Gwelo in January 1923 Abraham Twala, an African from South Africa who had migrated to Southern Rhodesia, formed in conjunction with a handful of educated Shona and Ndebele allies the Rhodesian Bantu Voters Association. It was modelled on the Association operating in the Cape, and the object was to get the Africans on the electoral register to bargain votes for Responsible Government in return for limited concessions to African demands. Nothing came of it. Whereas in the Cape there were sufficient Bantu voters to make a difference in closely fought elections, in Southern Rhodesia there were reckoned to be only sixty on the entire register. The European leaders of Responsible Government showed no interest. Other bodies came into existence: the Gwelo Native Welfare Association, the Rhodesia Native Association, etc. They had little effect. It was significant that their leadership was largely in the hands of immigrants, Fingos and Sothos from the south, and Nyasas from what is now Malawi - countries where native educational standards were at that time superior to those of Southern Rhodesia. These were not the only collective manifestations of African conscious­ ness. There were various Christian independent churches with millennial dreams of the Whites being blown away in a ‘big wind’. In 1927 the South African Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), headed by a Nyasa, Clemens Kadalie, sent a compatriot, Robert Sambo, to start similar trade union activities in Southern Rhodesia, but it never developed into the mass organization that it was south of the Limpopo. The Shamva mine strike of the same year, the first serious instance of African workers* strike action in Southern Rhodesia, owed nothing to 6T. O. Ranger, Aspects of Central African History, 1968, 222.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

the ICU. Significantly it occurred in a mine where less than five per cent of the Africans employed were Southern Rhodesians.7

By far the most important event in Coghlan’s premiership was the report in 1925 of the Land Commission over which Sir Morris Carter, an ex-Chief Justice of Uganda and Tanganyika presided. The land question in Southern Rhodesia is so strange (to non-colonial eyes), so complicated and so widely misunderstood that a discussion of the problem may be appropriate here, even at the risk of going both backwards as well as forwards in time. It is important to distinguish two aspects of what is basically the same issue: the allocation of native reserves and the allocation of native purchase areas. The latter only came into existence as a consequence of the Carter report. The former constituted a part of the original settlement after the conquest of Matabeleland in 1893. We have seen how the inadequacy, remoteness, dryness and infertility of the reserves allocated by Jameson contributed to the Ndebele rebellion in 1896. When it was over Sir Richard Martin, the first Resident Commissioner, condemned the allocation most severely in a devastating report in 1897. As a result some 5.3 million acres were added to the original 4.1 million in Matabeleland, and a further 7 million were allocated in Mashonaland. Subsequent grants made the figure up to 20.5 million in 1914 for the two provinces, out of a total Southern Rhodesian acreage of 96 million. The Company’s policy of European agricultural settlement from 1908 onwards meant that further land was needed, and this entailed an attack on either the European absentee landlords or else on the reserves. An attack on the latter seemed easier, but it was effectively repulsed by the Native Department in Mashonaland where most of the demands were made. The Company accordingly argued for a general settlement of the whole question, Maguire observing: ‘Do not consider that in any other way we have any chance of reclaiming areas set apart for native reserves, but not required’.8 Under this pressure the British Government in 1914 set up a Native Reserves Commission headed by Sir Robert Coryndon, formerly Rhodes’s private secretary and Administrator of North Western Rhodesia; the Commission was charged with the task of making a final delimitation of the reserves and reporting to the High Commissioner. Coryndon, as a former Company employee, was not the ideal choice for a post which required detachment from Company interests. The Commission operated in close co-operation with F. W. Inskipp, Acting Director of the Company’s Land Settlement Department, who pushed his cause almost beyond the call of duty. The Commission operated, more­ over, at a time when, because of war, some vigilant Native Commissioners and missionaries were away and only half aware of what was happening. It recommended 7 See I. R. Phimister, ‘The Shamva Mine Strike of 1927: An Emerging African Pro­ letariat1, Rhodesian History 2, 1971, 65-88, for an interesting analysis of this episode. “Quoted R. H. Palmer, ‘Aspects of Rhodesian Land Policy 1890-1936’, Central Africa Historical Association Local Series 22, Salisbury, 1968, 21.

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THE NEW ORDER 1923-31

a net deduction in the reserves of about i million acres (5.6 million were added and 6.6 million were deducted). This was not as bad as some historians have claimed,9 and at the end of it all Southern Rhodesia could be said to come out better than South Africa, although that standard of comparison is low. The point is not so much the net reduction as the exchange of good land for bad, and it was only the forceful intervention of Herbert Stanley, the Resident Commissioner, which prevented the Africans being even worse treated. The Colonial Office approved the report in February 1917 and it was confirmed with certain amendments by Order-in-Council in November 1920, despite strong protests from the Aborigines Protection Society, Arthur Cripps, and others. The reserves were vested in the High Commissioner and the new allocation was, in the words of the Order-in-Council, to ‘be taken to be a final assignment to the natives inhabiting Southern Rhodesia*. That the Commission was heavily biased in favour of the Company’s and settlers’ interests which in this matter happened to coincide cannot be seriously doubted. It is perhaps surprising that the Colonial Office agreed, and the explanation may be the impression now shown to be erroneous that the Native Department acquiesced in the recommendations. In fact individual Commissioners were highly critical, but they only saw the detailed proposals after the report had been endorsed by the imperial Government.10 The report was, however, supported by rational arguments - or, rather, argu­ ments that seemed rational at the time - and it is in that respect an archetypal warning against all those social and economic investigations which extrapolate alleged present trends into an uncertain future, and base policy recommendations upon these dubious predictions. The Coryndon Commission believed that the rate of increase in the African population would be slow, that tribalism was disappear­ ing, that water supplies would increase the carrying capacity of the reserves, that cattle would soon have only a commercial purpose, that native cultivation would become intensive, and that little future conflict would soon arise between the races. Almost all these prophesies were belied by events. The African population of 870,000 in 1921 was 1,080,000 in 1931, 1,430,000 in 1941 and had passed the 2 million mark by 1951. The European population did, it is true, increase pro­ portionately at a higher rate, being at the respective dates, 33,800; 50,100; 69,300; and 138,000. But they remained numerically a small white island in a black sea. The carrying capacity of the reserves did not meet the rise in population or stock. Important areas of Matabeleland began to dry up. Cattle retained their traditional role, and attempts at destocking in order to prevent the deterioration of the soil met with silent but effective resistance. Africans continued to practise extensive 9 Colin Leys, European Politics in Southern Rhodesia, 1959, 10, puts the deduction at ‘over six million acres’, and the figure has been repeated elsewhere. Presumably he took the gross deduction figure, and forgot the additions. ,e Palmer, op. cit., 29.

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A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

agriculture, fearing inter alia that a change would merely give the Government the excuse to reduce the reserves. Far from becoming detribalized the vast majority clung to their surviving ancestral lands, and, despite the advance of the Christian missions, to a large part of their ancestral beliefs. Far from being a period of relaxation of racial conflict, the next three decades saw its acute intensification. The Commission was not unaware that an actual reduction in the area of the reserves would be open to criticism. Their rêply was logical, given certain pre­ suppositions. In their interim report they pointed out that the various increases made since 1894 had been interpreted in some quarters to mean that every in­ dividual in a tribe had an ‘indefeasible* right to enough land upon which to sub­ sist. If this interpretation was correct and if, as was likely, the prevention of disease led to a gradual increase in the African population, ‘there can be no limit to the extension of the native reserves; and if the argument is pursued to its logical con­ clusion the whole of Southern Rhodesia will, in course of time, be required for this purpose*. The Commission reasonably enough concluded that an ‘indefeasible’ right could not be conceded to every unborn native ‘to live on the soil and by the primitive and wasteful methods of cultivation practised by his forefathers*. These words are much quoted but, as Mr Rifkind points out, the argument depends on ‘two other observations often overlooked by the quoters of the above*.11 The first was that, tribal subsistence being incompatible with economic progress, it must be assumed that the European economy would obtain its labour force from the African population; an increasing proportion would, therefore, become an urban proletariat permanently uprooted from the land, as had occurred during the Industrial Revolution in England. The prediction that more and more Africans would be employed in the European economy was quite correct, but successive Southern Rhodesian Governments have refused to accept the corollary that the urban African worker should have a permanent home in the cities and towns. On the contrary he was and still is regarded as a migrant whose ultimate destiny was to go back to the reserves. Thus a vital premise to the whole of the Coryndon Commission’s argument was in the event disregarded. The second point is equally important. The Interim Report made it clear that the reserves were intended to provide only for those natives ‘who are not ready for the new order’ an area where they could ‘continue to live under their old conditions’. This presupposed that the Africans who had left or would leave the tribal system in increasing numbers would have the same legal rights as any other Rhodesian citizen. At the time of the publication of the report that was indeed the case. An African had in law - the practice was another matter - as good a right as any European to purchase land in the remaining 75 million acres of the country including the urban areas. When the Responsible Government constitution was promulgated in 1923 this right was specifically spelt out, but within eight years, largely as a result of the Morris Carter Report, the whole situation had changed. The African right of purchase had become highly restricted, and another 11 Malcolm Rifkind, The Politics of Land, University of Edinburgh Thesis, 1968, 29.

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vital premise to the Coryndon Commission’s recommendations had disappeared. The Carter Commission originated from an undertaking by the Colonial Office when the draft constitution was published in January 1922. If an impartial enquiry showed that there was a need to amend the law of land tenure, the Colonial Secretary promised to act accordingly. The pressure for amendment which, of course, meant a restriction on African rights came from diverse quarters, but there can be no serious doubt that the principal motive was the deep dislike felt by European farmers at Africans buying land in their midst. From 1908 onwards rural members of the Legislative Council had carried motions for repeal of the existing law. The reason was not solely colour prejudice, although it played a big part. African farmers were in many ways bad neighbours, and they would be competing at cut prices with access to markets which Europeans regarded as their own. The reports of the Chief Native Commissioner in 1919 and 1920 had recommended that land near the reserves should be kept for native purchase only, and commented on the 'inevitable friction’ with European neighbours, which would arise if Africans could buy land anywhere. From quite another quarter there was the argument of Cripps and some missionaries that segregation would prevent the Africans being corrupted by European influences. There was also, again from negrophile quarters, the fear that Europeans with their superior wealth would buy up all the land worth having and that Africans would find, as they had in the Eastern Cape, that there was nothing left. These fears or hopes mainly concerned future events. The Company, aware of the intense unpopularity that it would acquire with the settlers if it sold land to Africans, had in practice refused such offers to purchase, and most private owners had acted similarly. By 1925 only nineteen farms amounting to 47,000 acres had been sold to Africans, whereas some 31,000,000 acres were in European possession. Of the European-owned land only half could be described as ‘occupied’ and even less as being actually farmed or cultivated - every allowance being made for the areas which could not be expected to produce anything. The danger of either major infiltration by African peasant farmers or at the other extreme of Europeans buy­ ing up everything was not imminent. Nonetheless, the problem generated a con­ siderable head of steam. The Carter Commission took evidence all over Southern Rhodesia from most of the interests concerned. The initiative for change was mainly European. There is little to suggest any African pressure. In spite of subsequent mythology repeated in book after book, there can be no doubt that the idea of land segregation stemmed from the Whites, not the Blacks; the object was to dispel European fears rather than to protect African interests. It is less clear how the Africans reacted to this European initiative. On the whole the evidence suggests a division between urban and rural society, the former being opposed, the latter favourable in principle, as the Carter Commission strongly maintained - and at that time tribalized rural Africans far out-numbered the rest. It is another matter when one departs from the principle to the actual physical division on the ground. This was bitterly opposed - and with good reason - by

201

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

articulate Africans of every background. The Carter Commission recommended that out of the 75 million acres outside the native reserves just over 48 million should be purchasable only by Europeans and just under 7 million only by Afri­ cans. Of the remainder, 17.8 million acres was unassigned land which could, accord­ ing to circumstances, be allocated to either race. The rest was forest land and game reserves, including the enormous Wankie Game Reserve, and came under the control of the Government. The European purchase area was not only far larger than the native area, it also included all the urban centres, and all the best agri­ cultural land. Nevertheless, after much discussion and scrutiny the Dominions Office agreed. Although Ramsay MacDonald’s Government was in power, there was little opposition in the British Parliament, except in the House of Lords from Lord Olivier. Lord Passheld (Sidney Webb), the Dominions Secretary, raised no objection. After the Land Apportionment Bill had been passed by the Legislative Assembly the lawyers discovered that it was ultra vires the Constitution. In accord­ ance with now established usage Parliament amended the Letters Patent. The bill was reintroduced and became law on April 1, 1931. With a few minor changes (the native area went up from 6.8 million to 7.4 million acres and the European to 49 million) the Carter Commission’s proposals were enacted. The Land Apportionment Act has been defended on many grounds - most of them dubious. It is important to remember that it had nothing to do with the native reserves (or, as they are now called, tribal trust lands). These were en­ shrined in the Constitution. Defence of the Act on the ground that it prevented European encroachment on the reserves is irrelevant. It could have been repealed at any time without affecting them in the least. Nor can it be argued that the Act was needed in order to save the Africans from an Eastern Cape situation. The native purchase area and the reserves could have been kept for them while those who did not feel the need for protection could have been allowed to take their chance in competition with the Europeans for the rest. Although it is true that 7 million acres was probably a reasonable allocation for the number of Africans likely to seek individual tenure in the then foreseeable future, and although it is also true that the right to purchase land anywhere had never been a practical reality, nevertheless it is hard to justify an apportionment of 28 million acres (including the reserves) to 1 million Blacks and 48 million acres to 50,000 Whites. The white allocation becomes even more remarkable if we remember that of the 31 million acres which white owners had acquired by 1925 half was still unoccupied and that even as late as 1965, by which time there had been a vast extension of European farming, only 36 million acres were occupied, and nearly all the development had occurred on the 31 million acres already in European ownership forty years earlier. The feature of the Land Apportionment Act which is the least defensible of all was the inclusion of virtually every town and city in the European purchase area. This meant that no African could buy or rent a house in Salisbury, Bulawayo or any urban area. The Carter Commission recognized that African labour had become an integral part of the urban economy and that a category of Africans had or

202

THE NEW ORDER 1923-31

would come into being which no longer wished for rural life; but it assumed that the urban labourer was employed on a ‘temporary1 basis - although this could mean his whole working life - and that he would on retirement go to exclusively African townships which the Governor-in-Council would be empowered to create in African purchase areas. The native labourer had, of course, to live somewhere while he was working. The Act empowered but did not compel municipalities to create areas for the exclusive occupation by Africans. It was many years before all local authorities took advantage of this power, but even when they did there was no question of the Africans having any right to permanent occupation. It is probably not conscious hypocrisy which has caused so many Rhodesians to maintain that the purpose of the Land Apportionment Act was to protect the African. Political human nature is such that men cannot easily accept naked self­ interest as their own conditioning motive, even though they are quick enough to see it in others. In politics people need the justification of an altruistic purpose, and there were some sections of the Act which could be fairly regarded as beneficial to Africans as well as Europeans. After all, even such an arch-enemy of the settlers as Cripps supported it. Nevertheless, no one who studies the contemporary argu­ ment used at the time of the passing of the Act can be left in any serious doubt that the purpose was at least as much to protect Europeans against Africans as vice versa, and to protect, moreover, those were already in an highly advantageous position. In what is one of the most illuminating books ever written about the country, Sir Robert Tredgold comments thus:

It has become a feature of Government propaganda in Rhodesia to claim that the Land Apportionment Acts and other supporting legislation were passed primarily in the interests of the Africans. This is simply untrue, as anyone must bear witness who watched the growth of the ideas behind the legislation and saw its passage through the House. If anyone has doubt on the subject, let him refer to the Hansards of the debates. I would concede that the legislation was intended to be in the interests of all the inhabitants, black or white, of the Colony, but the Europeans had much more to gain from it than the Africans.12 Sir Robert goes on to point out that the pressure for repeal has nearly all come from Africans, that the measure has been repeatedly described by its supporters as the ‘White Man’s Magna Carta’ and that pressure for retention is of almost exclusively European origin. He could have added that the only Rhodesian Govern­ ment which has ever proposed its abolition, Sir Edgar Whitehead’s, crashed to disaster at the general election of 1962 largely for that reason. The Morris Carter Report and the resultant legislation has profoundly affected race relations from that day to this. No doubt a large degree of possessary and social segregation already existed, but, as Mr Rifkind says, ‘this had been of a 12 The Rhodesia that was my Life, 1968, 154-5.

203

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

pragmatic rather than an ideological nature*; it was *a social fact rather than a delib­ erate policy*. There is a great difference between a de facto situation which may change with changing economic and moral concepts, and a de jure segregation sanctified by the authority of an impartial commission and the sovereignty of Westminster itself. Nor should one forget the hardship and uncertainty entailed for Africans who had been living under rent agreements on what had become the European area and whose tenure was now scheduled to expire by 1937. It is true that practical considerations - among them the inadequacy of the reserves - made this policy impossible to enforce to the letter of the law. The fact remains that under the first Land Apportionment Act, and its successors which tended to be even more rigid and meticulous, many thousands of Africans were compulsorily moved from land which they had occupied for generations. No wonder that the measure became the very symbol and embodiment of everything most resented in European domination.

204

CHAPTER 14

The Decline of the Rhodesian Party 1927—33

Although the Land Apportionment Act was a measure with far reaching con­ sequences for Southern Rhodesia's future, it would be wrong to think that ‘native affairs’ were a part of the European political debate in Coghlan’s time or in the earlier years of his successor’s premiership. There was a convention that these matters should be treated as technical and ‘non-party’, and the entrenched posi­ tion of the Native Department with its responsibility not only to the Premier but also in some degree to the South African High Commissioner emphasized the point. Coghlan was primarily concerned with the economic problems of a poor colony which was badly under-capitalized. Railway rates, the Company’s mineral rights, the powers reserved to Whitehall, European land settlement, rela­ tions with South Africa and Portugal - these were the stuff of political debate and action. Coghlan established good relations both with Herzog, who was from his view point a much easier opposite number than Smuts, and with the Portuguese Govern­ ment. He managed to meet the grievances about railway rates by a Railways Bill in 1927 which set up an inter-territorial Commission representing the two Rhodesias and Bechuanaland, and specified minimum and maximum earnings.1 He came to a satisfactory customs agreement with South Africa. Newton as High Commissioner in London managed to negotiate satisfactory terms for a loan from the Bank of England. This was useful because the colony, which operated on a small budget, began life with a debt of ¿2,300,000 to the British Treasury. Of this sum ¿300,000 represented advances made in 1921 and 1922, and the obligation could not be disputed. The liability for the rest was more controversial, though Coghlan felt 1 It also marked a constitutional advance from the Rhodesian standpoint, for railway legislation no longer had to be ‘reserved’ pending approval from London.

205

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

that he had to accept it. When the British Government bought out the Chartered Company for £3,750,000 it regarded £2,000,000 as payment for the unalienated land plus the buildings and public works constructed by the Company in its govern­ mental capacity. The residue was the accumulated administrative deficit. Having forgone what was - no doubt coincidentally - exactly the same sum in respect of wartime advances, the Colonial Office was all the more determined to extract the £2,000,000 for the public works and land rights. The matter can be looked at in two ways. The settlers felt a grievance, repeated in many books about Rhodesia, that they were the only British colony which in effect had to pay for the privilege of Responsible Government. On the other hand it could well be argued that they were liable for the accumulated deficit as well as the land and public works. On that view, the British Government was paying nearly half the colony’s equivalent of the national debt - and a much higher proportion if one includes the waiver of war costs. The case is, therefore, not as clear cut as many of the colonists liked to believe. Nevertheless, £2,000,000 was a lot at that time, and the public finances of the country both then and some years to come were not easy to manage. The administrative system was top heavy, for the Government in order to persuade immigrants had to provide the services expected by an English community without at first being able to use them to capacity. The same was broadly true of railways, banks and businesses. Sir Henry Clay, an eminent economist invited in 1930 to report on the colony, compared it to a firm with heavy overheads and an inadequate turnover.2 More capital, more immigrants, greater African purchasing power were needed, but world economic conditions from 1931 onwards did not help. Moreover, Southern Rhodesia’s was not a diversified economy. Gold, maize, tobacco and cattle were the main products, and there was little else to fall back on if those went wrong. Grievances about railway rates, insufficient immigration, and the Company’s mineral rights had stirred up a certain amount of opposition to the ruling party by 1926-27. It crystallized around the flamboyant personality of Colonel Frank Johnson who after a long interval once again makes a fleeting appearance on the Rhodesian stage. Elected at a by-election for Salisbury South in 1927 he cam­ paigned for a ‘whiter Rhodesia’, the buying out of the Chartered Company’s mineral rights and the acquisition of a western port at Wal vis Bay. A new group known as the Progressive Party was formed. This mixture of radicalism and racialism cut substantially into the Labour Party’s support and it also secured some defectors from the Rhodesian Party. In that same year Coghlan died. His health had for some time been deteriorating because of drink and worry about his finances; he had no money and in his will asked for a pension for his wife and daughter.3 He was buried along with Rhodes and Jameson at World’s View - the last person to have received this honour. 2 Quoted Gann, Southern Rhodesiay 283. 3 Wallis, op. cit., 244.

206

THE DECLINE OF THE RHODESIAN PARTY

1927-33

His death removed the only personality in the ruling party. He had always looked upon Moffat as his successor and during his recent illness had treated him as his deputy. The Governor, Sir John Chancellor, who found time heavy on his hands as a ‘constitutional monarch", had other views.4 He had been accustomed to being a ‘real* Governor and had not appreciated how little latitude he was to have in Southern Rhodesia. There were, however, two discre­ tionary powers which were unquestionably vested in him under the constitution: the right to choose a new premier, and the right to grant or refuse a dissolution. Chancellor decided to exercise the former. He had no very high opinion of Moffat whom he believed to be incapable of holding together an apparently divided Rhodesian Party, nor did he favour any one else in the Cabinet or the Assembly. His candidate was Murray Bisset, the Senior Judge who had, in accordance with the Constitutional rules, deputized as Governor in Chancellors absence from February to September 1926. Bisset was a distinguished South African lawyer, but he knew little about Southern Rhodesia and had no chance of commanding any general support. Chancellor consulted the Cabinet. With the exception of Moffat who said he would gladly serve under Bisset, they strongly disapproved of the Governor's suggestion. In such circumstances a constitutional monarch has no choice. Chancellor reluctantly appointed Moffat. Moffat was not a very strong figure, and he perhaps inherited from his mis­ sionary forebears rather too tender a conscience for a politician, but Chancellor's misgivings about his ability to hold his party together proved to be quite un­ founded. In reality he had been de facto Premier for the last four months and had by now acquired the full confidence of his supporters. At the general election of 1928 the Rhodesian Party lost four seats, but the opposition was hopelessly divided between Progressives (four) and Labour (three) with one Independent. In any case twenty-two out of thirty was quite enough, and Moffat was in a strong position. Frank Johnson lost his seat (he returned to England in 193°) an74 and "» 179-80 Milton, Sir William, 115-16, 146«, 147-8, 151» 152, 162, 167, 173, 179 Ministerial Titles Act (1933)» 2I4 missionaries, 18, 20, 21-3, 40, 44, 160-1 Mitchell, George, first ‘Prime Minister’, 214,216 425

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Mkwati (Mwari priest): and Matabele rebellion, 127, *33» !34i !4°i and Shona rebellion, 134, US, MO 'Modus Vivendi’ agreement (1890), 85,86,87,88 Moffat, H. U., 194, 207, 209, 211-14, 216, 221 Moffat, John, 22, 23, 44, 106; envoy to Loben­ gula, 39, 58, 59, 60, 61 Moffat, Dr Robert, 20, 21-2 Moffat Treaty (1888), 39, 42, 44, 49, 111 Moir, J. W., 81 Mombasa, 11, 12 Monckton Commission (i960), 326-7, 331, 335, 345 Monclaro, Father, 12 Monomatapa kingdom, 8-13, 14, 20 Moodie, Dunbar, 87 Moore, Leopold, 224 Morier, Victor, 67 Mount Hampden, 65, 67, 71, 74 Moyo, J. Z., 352/1 Mozambique, 11, 14, 30, 62, 76, 77, 78, 88, 183, 189, 289, 362, 393, 406, 409, 410 MPLA, 406 Mpotshwana (induna), 126, 133, 135, 140 Mshete (induna)., 50 Msika, Joseph, 352» Msiri, Katanga Chief, 81-2 Mthethwa tribe, 14-15 Muchache, Clement, 352» Mugabe, Robert, 352, 408, 409, 410 Murray, D. J., 193 Mutasa, Dr E. C., 370 Mutota, King of the Karanga, 8 Muzorewa, Bishop, 408 Mwari cult, 6,10,14,19; and Matabele rebellion, 126-8, 129, 132 Mzilikazi, 16, 19, 20-3, 24 Mzingeli, Charles, 240 Napier, Colonel, 133 Natal, ii, 14-15, 38, 147, 164, 165, 166, 181 National Democratic Party (NDP), 330,333,335, 336, 340-1 Native Affairs Department, 195 Native Commissioners, 151, 160, 164, 195, 196 Native Courts Act, 230 Native Department, 118, 120-1, 164-5, 227, 292 Native Development Department, 209 Native Juveniles Act (1926), 196 Native Purchase Areas, 198, 200-1, 202 Native Registration Act (1946), 220 Native Reserves, 156,163,198,199-200,202,230, 281,323,324; Commission on (1914), 161,198200 Native Townships, 230, 323, 324, 367 'native trusteeship’, 210 Native (Urban Areas) Accommodation and Regis­ tration Act (1946), 238 Ndebele, 4, 7, 16-28, 45-6, 59, 73, 76, 98, 101426

no, m-13, 115» 116-20, 123, 125-8, 132-3, 134-8, 139-40, 144, «45, >62, 196-7 Nehanda medium, 134, 142 Nesbitt, Inspector, 134 Neto, Agostinho, 406 Newton, Sir Francis, 104, 174, 179, 191, 194 Ngoni people, 14, 15-16 Ngomo, Chief, 101 Nicolle, Hostes, 400 ‘NIBMAR’, 395, 400 Nigeria, 224, 322 Nkomo, Joshua, 227,263,265,305,309,313,323, 325, 333, 334, 335, 340-1, 344, 352~3, 357, 368, 378, 408, 409, 410 Nkuiabula, Harry, 248, 261, 350, 353 Nogomo, King of the Karanga, 12 Norseman (ship), 88 Northern Rhodesia: Buxton Committee and, 181; question of union with South Africa, 181; becomes pro­ tectorate, 191 ; question of amalgamation with Southern Rhodesia, 209-11, 224, 237, 247; copper mines, 210, 222, 244; mineral rights, 210, 214; Huggins’s scheme to make 'black’, 219; and union with Nyasaland, 225, 226; industrial trouble, 236; and Second World War, 236, 237; African representa­ tion, 240; racial balance, 243; economy, 244; constitutional status, 244-5, 25°; *94$ e^ec" tion, 247; amalgamation rejected, 247, 248; move to federation, 247-54; reaction to Officials’ Conference, 255; African and Asian opposition to federation, 261, 268, 322, 323; and Lancaster House Conference, 262-5; proposed Constitution, 263-5, *67, 284; 1954 election, 288; African earnings, 291; franchise, 296; ANC banned, 325; battles over Constitution, 332, 335—7; fears of coup (Tétat, 335; secession, 345, 346-7 Nyamanda, son of Lobengula, 126, 140, 177, 197 Nyandoro, George, 323 Nyasaland, 40, 62, 113, 164, 209; acquisition of, 77-80; becomes protectorate, 91-2; and federa­ tion, 225, 226, 248, 253, 255, 257, 263, 288, 296; racial balance, 243, 244; economy, 244, 324; constitutional status, 245, 249, 263, 296; African opposition to federation, 255,261,288, 327; disorder in, 324-5; new Constitution, 331; secession, 332, 345-fi Officials’ Conference (1950), 249-54, 255, 258, 259, 264 oil sanctions, 391-3, 394 Oldham, Dr J. H., 209 Ophir, 7, 8, 12 Oppenheimer, Sir Ernest, 210, 225 Oppenheimer, Harry, 380 Orange Free State, 25, 38, 167 Orange River Sovereignty, 21 Ormsby-Gore, William, 190, 191

INDEX

Ossevabrandwag, 235 Owen, Dr David, 410

Palley, Dr Ahrn, 345, 373 Palmer, E. D., 309 Palmer, R. D., 309 'parallel development', 228, 238 ‘paramountcy’, 210-11, 247 Passfield, Sidney Webb, Lord, 202, 210 Pater, Walter, 79 ‘Patriotic Front’, 408, 409 Patterson, Captain R. R., 26 Pearce Commission (1972), 389, 404-5, 408 Pearson, Lester, 371 Peat, Sir William, 178 Pennefather, Lieut .-Colonel E. G., 69, 70, 71,73, 74, 75, 95, too People’s Caretaker Council (PCC), 352 Perham, Dame Margery, 226, 261 Phillips, L. C., 44 Pickering, Neville, 36, 56 Pinto, Serpa, 77, 79-80 Pioneer Column, 61, 64-75, 76, 93-4 Pitsani, 124 Plagis, John, 234 Plewman Commission (1957), 292, 338 Plumer, Colonel (later Field-Marshal Lord), 130, Ui» !33» US, 153» 208 poll tax, 161 population: African, 199, 221, 223, 243; European 166-7, 199, 221, 223, 235, 243, 273, 274 Portugal, 7, 8, 15, 63; arrival and expulsion of, 10-13, 14; British dilemma over, 39, 40, 53; territorial claims, 49, 50, 77; surrender over Nyasaland, 79-80; Convention and later Treaty with Britain, 82-3, 84,87-9; ‘Modus Vivendi’, 85, 86, 87, 88; and UDI, 376, 392-3; >974 revolution, 405-6 Potgieter, Hendrick, 19, 21 Pretoria Convention ( 1881), 31, 38 Progressive Party, 206, 207, 212 Providential Pass, 74 Public Services Economy Bill (1931), 212 Putterill, Brigadier (GOC), 367 Quinton, J. G., 309, 338 Quinton Report (1960)* 33&“9

racialism, 156-65, 282; integration of Africans, 156-7, 160, 161-5; segregation, 157-8» 160, 161-5, 215, 228, 229-30, 281; sexual attitude, 158-60,279-80,301-2; and vote against union (1922), 188; apartheid, 212,240,247,251,254; ‘twin pyramid’ policy, 212, 215; ‘parallel development’, 228, 238; Federal relaxation of, 290-2 railways, 40,41, 54,90* 99» >44-5» 209* 213, 215, 239, 244, 289 Railways Bill (1927), 20 5

Ramsey, Dr Michael, Archbishop of Canterbury, 379 Rand - see Witwatersrand Ranger, T. O., 121, 125, 136, 139, 197, 340 Ransford, Oliver, 23 Rawlinson, Sir Peter, 403 Reedman, Harry, 376 Reform Party, 194, 212, 214-16, 219, 220-1, 223, 224, 231 religion, 9-10, 126-8 Renders, Adam, 7 Rennie, Sir Gilbert, 263 Renny-Tailyour, E. A., 44, 49, 58, 94 Resident Commissioner, 149-50, 164 Responsible Government, 166-8, 175, 179-88; referendum, 185, 186-8, 189, 190; grant of 190-1; Constitution, 191-5, 200 Responsible Government Association, 179 Reynolds, Rex, 212,213, 223, 226, 235, 238, 239, 264, 320 Rhodes, Cecil, 4,6,30,31,77,97-9,116,145,162, 176, 244; tomb of, 7, 154; early life, 32; septal defect and general ill-health, 32-3; at Kimber­ ley, 34; partnership with Rudd, 34; at Oxford, 34-5; influenced by Ruskin’s ‘racial hierarchy’, 35» 37; wealth, 35; personality, 35-7; as ‘colonialist’, 37-8; option on Matabeleland, 38-9; and Chartered Company, 41,42,43,4760; plan to occupy Mashonaland, 62,63-4,6570, 76; and Johnson’s idea of military coup> 63-4; Premier of Cape Colony, 72, 113; and Johnston, 78, 79, 83, 91-2; failure to take Katanga, 81-2; attempts to obtain route to Indian Ocean, 87-9; buys Lippert Concession, 94, 111; expects Matabele war, 102, 106, 108; at apogee of power, 113-14; and Jameson Raid, 123-4, >3°» >3L H9i resigns premiership, 124; and rebellions, 130-1, 135-40, 142; negotia­ tions, with indunas in Matopos, 136-40, 146; and settlers’ discontents, 146-7; and new Constitution, 148, 150; death, 153; foresees union, 166 Rhodes, Rev. Francis William, 32 Rhodes, Frank, 32, 1 i8n Rhodes, Herbert, 32, 33, 34 ‘Rhodesia’: choice of name, 114 Rhodesia Agricultural Union, 179 Rhodesia Field Force, 153 Rhodesia Horse Volunteers, 128, 129 Rhodesia-Mozambique Oil Pipeline Company, 394 Rhodesia National Party (RNP), 353, 354, 364 Rhodesia Native Association, 197 Rhodesia and Nyasaland Federation Act (1953), 269 Rhodesia Party, 194, 220, 288; decline of, 206, 207, 211-12, 214-16, 219; extinction, 221, 231 Rhodesia Party (new), 364, 366, 372, 373 Rhodesia Reform Party, 342 Rhodesia Regiment, 153 427

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

Rhodesia Unionist Association, 179, 184, 185, 186, 194 Rhodesia Women's League, 159 Rhodesian African Rifles, 235 Rhodesian Anglo-American Corporation, 210, 276 Rhodesian Bantu Voters Association, 197 Rhodesian Constitutional Association, 373 Rhodesian Front Party, 237, 251, 315, 363, 397; creation of, 342; 1962 election victory, 342-4; Field's Cabinet, 347; and claim for indepen­ dence, 349-50, 354-5, 357, 358-6*, 364, 366373, 376-^83; fall of Field, 358-60; Smith as leader, 360; 1965 election victory, 372-3, 374; ideology of, 374-5; and apartheid, 384; and 1968 proposals, 401; 1970 election success, 402; and provisional settlement, 404 Rhodesian Selection Trust, 210, 276, 293 Richard, Ivor, 407-8 Richartz, Father, 142, 161 Riebeeck, Jan van, 16 Rifkind, Malcolm, 200, 203, 229 rinderpest, 123, 128, 131 Ripon, Lord, 55, 116, 117 Robinson, Sir Albert, 349 Robinson, Sir Hercules, 39, 43, 48, 50, 149 Robinson, Ronald, 17» Robinson, Sir Victor, 378, 379 rock paintings, 6 Rolin, Henri, 157-8 Rosebery, Lord, 92, 113, 147 Routledge, T. C., 134 Royal Air Force, 234 Rozwi Mambo, 9, 14-16, 19, 126, 141 Rudd, Charles, 34, 39, 42-3, 44-5, 55, 57 Rudd, Frank, 43, 48 Rudd, Thomas, 55 Rudd Concession, 46-61, 67, 94, 99, 100, 106, in, 213 Rudland, George, 359 Ruo River, 79-80 Ruskin, John, 35 Russell, Sir Fraser, 220, 221, 231 Ryan, J. F., 374

Salazar, Dr Antonio, 393 Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne Cecil, 3rd Marquis of, 30, 36, 39» 40-1» 53~4i 68, 77-80, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 154 Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne Cecil, 5th Marquis of, 263, 267, 335-6 Salisbury: settlement of, 74-5, 93-9; racial imbalance, 119; rail links, 145, 289; compared with Bulawayo, 222,223; population growth, 223; development and character, 276, 289; as Federal capital, 292; riots, 330, 352 Sambo, Robert, 197 Samkange, Standlake, 323 Samkange, Rev. Thompson, 227 428

Sand River Convention (1852), 21 Sandys, Duncan (now Lord Duncan-Sandys), 33». 333. 334. 345. 35>. 355. 356-8, 364, 363, 368 Sauer, Hans, 137, 138 Savanhu, Jasper, 263, 290 Savory, Alan, 362 Schreiner, Olive, 119 Schreuder, Derek, 17 Schulz, Aurel, 81, 84, 87 Sebastian, King of Portugal, 12 Second Rhodesia Regiment, 168, 233 Second World War, 231-8 Sedition Act (1936), 228 segregation, 157-8,160, 161-5,215,228, 229-30, 281 Selbome, Lord, 167, 181 Selous, Frederick C., 23, 52, 81, in, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129; and Pioneer Column, 61, 67,71, 72, 73-4, 76; and Johnson, 63, 64-5, 66; concessions in Mashonaland, 63; plans to occupy Mashonaland, 63-6, 67; and Loben­ gula, 70 Selous Exploration Syndicate, 63, 65 Setoutsie, Maholi Chief, 103 Shabani, 312 sexual attitudes, 158-60, 279-80, 301-2 Shaka, Mthethwa Chief, 15, 16 Shamuyarira, Nathan, 312 Shamva mine strike (1927), 197, 212 Shangani patrol, 7, 104, 108-10 Shangani Reserve, 116 Sharpe, Alfred, 79, 82 Shaw, Flora, 52, 57 Shee, Dr Charles, 33, 36 Shepstone, Sir Theophilus, 26 Shepstone, Captain, 75 Shiloh Mission, 23 Shippard, Sir Sidney, 27, 39, 46, 60, 64 Shirè River, 77, 79 Shona tribes and Chiefs, 7, 19, 100-1, 102-4, 106-7, ”2, 120,123,133-6,140-2,144,145-6 Siginyamatshe (Mwari priest), 127, 135 Silveira, Goncala da, 11-12 Sithole, Edson, 323 Sithole, Rev. Ndabaningi, 305, 309, 313, 333, 34 b 352"3> 357» 368, 378 Skeen, Brigadier Andrew, 376 Smartt, Sir Thomas, 181 Smit, Jacob, 212, 214, 219, 232, 240, 241 Smith, Arthur, 399» Smith, Ian: resigns from UFP, 335; forms Rhodesian Front, 342; claim to have been promised independence by Butler, 350, 363; Prime Minister, 353, 360, 363; clamps down on nationalists, 353, 363; fruitless London talks (79» «80, 181-3, 185-8, 189-90, 223, 247; violent episodes, 184; end of 'greater South Africa*, 189, 223; and Second World War, 234; 1948 election, 247; racialism, 247, 251, 254; expansionism danger, 254; immigration to Southern Rhodesia, 274,279; relations with Southern Rhodesia, 279; and UDI, 393, 406, 407-9; pressure on Smith, 407-10 South Africa Committee, 51, 52 South African Goldfields Exploration Company, 25 Southern Rhodesia Order in Council (1898), 148 Stairs, Captain, 82 Stanley, Sir Herbert, 179, 191, 199, 224 Stanley, Oliver, 248 Stead, W. T., 52 Stent, Vere, 135, 136, 137, 138 Stevenson, Sir Edward, 36 Stirling, Colonel David, 262 Stockhill, Raymond, 255, 257, 265 Stonehouse, John, 325 Strachan, Sir Andrew, 250, 252 Strijdom, J. G., 251 Stumbier, A. R. W., 301, 303, 305, 309, 364 Suez Canal, 17; 1956 crisis, 295, 321 Suzman, Helen, 354, 364 Swinburne, Sir John, 43 Swinton, Lord, 258, 267, 346 Sykes, F. W., 119 Sykes, Rev. William, 22, 23 Taba Zi Ka Mambo, 126, 127, 133, 135, 136 Tabas Induna, 133

Taberer, H. M., 121 Tain ton, W. S., 44 Takawira, Leopold, 334, 352» Tanganyika, 209, 322 Tanganyika Concessions, 335 Tanzania, 352 Tati gold discovery, 25 Tati Concession, 25, 43, 47 Tawse-Jollie, E. M., 83, 179, 194 Taylor, Sir Herbert, 151 n Territorial Legislatures, 253, 254, 264, 265, 268, 297 Tete, 12, 13, 14, 23, 69, 70 Thomas, J. H., 213 Thomas, Sir Miles, 248 Thomas, Rev. Morgan, 22, 23 Thompson, George (now Lord Thompson), 400 Thompson, Joseph, 81 Thompson, Leonard, 29 Thompson, 'Matabele*, 43, 46, 48, 57, 59-61, 73 Tiger talks (1966), 396-9, 402 tobacco, 223, 275 Todd, Garfield, 161,194,280,320, 324,335,339; Prime Minister, 286-8; his aim of African advancement, 287, 290, 300, 305, 317; leads United Rhodesia Party (URP), 288; wins 1954 election, 288; liberal measures, 290, 292-4; attempt to break up Native Department, 292; tough line on law and order, 294; ascendancy, 300-1; African confidence in, 300; White misgivings over, 301-5; Cabinet rebellion, 305306; new rebellion, 307-8; forms new Cabinet, 308-9; repudiated by caucus and Congress, 309-10; succeeded as Prime Minister by Whitehead, 310—11; revives URP, 311; loses every seat in 1958 election, 312; his defeat as turning-point, 313; reasons for fall, 313-18; his 'liberalism*, 315-16; his view of crisis, 317-18; opposes UDI, 387; opposes pro­ visional agreement, 404 Transvaal, 16, 21, 23, 25-8, 29-32, 38, 39, 90-1, 113, 123-4, >53» >66» >67 Tredgold, Sir Robert, 203, 212, 218, 227, 233, 236, 269, 298, 309, 314, 361, 378, 384; Minister ofJustice and Defence, 231-3; objects to federation, 256,257,258; urges unitary state, 257; resigns as Chief Justice, 330; alliance with Field, 335; opposes UDI, 367, 388 Tredgold Report, 297-9, 302-3 Trend, Sir Burke (now Lord Trend), 365, 397 Tshombe, Moise, 330 Twala, Abraham, 197 ‘two pyramids’ policy, 212, 215

UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence), 188, 237, 334; contingency plans for, 358; Rhodesian Front’s determination on, 359, 360, 362, 364, 366, 369-73; Smith withdraws threat of, 365; his growing pressure for, 366-73; attitude of media, Civil Service and armed 429

A HISTORY OF RHODESIA

UDI—coni. forces, 366-7, 387, 389; Smith committed to, 375-6; talks on, 376-81; declaration of, 381; reasons behind, 381-4; legal and constitutional measures, 385-6; opposition to, 387-8, 391; relative quiescence, 389-90; force not to be used against, 390, 392; sanctions against, 391392, 393, 394, 395, 400; economic and fiscal matters, 394-5; judicial battles, 400; Republic proclaimed, 402 Uganda, 209, 322 Ulundi, 26 Umfezda, brother of Lobengula, 126 Umfuli River, 25 Umgandan (induna), 104, 105 Umguza River, 132, 133 Umgorshwini, 124 Umlugulu, Ndebele high priest, 126, 133, 140 Umtali, 89, 90, 144-5, 146, 274* 394 Umtasa, Manicaland Chief, 84-5 union, 165, 175, 179, 180, 181-3, 185-8, 194, 247. See also Central African Federation Union Minière, 335 UNITA, 406 United Central Africa Association, 255, 286 United Concessions Company, 55, 99 United Federal Party (UFP), 286, 294, 295, 304, 305,309-11,312, 323> 331,335,336, 339,341344, 345, 347, 353 United Nations, 330, 341, 355; and UDI, 390, 392-3, 394, 395. 400 United Party, 220-1, 231, 236-7, 239, 240-1, 286-7, 288 United Peoples Party (UPP), 373 United Rhodesia Party (URP), 288, 300-1, 303, 304-6, 309, 311, 312 University College, Salisbury, 279, 290, 354 Unsworth, E. I. G., 264 urbanization, 275-6 Usher, William, 44 Van der Byl, P. K., 366, 371, 407 Victoria, Queen, 49, 50, 58, 61 Victoria Falls, 5-6, 21 Victoria Falls Conferences: (1951), 258-9, 260; (1963), 347, 348-51 Vintcent, Judge, 141 Voortrekkers, 21, 27 Vorster, B. J., 406, 408, 410

Walker, E. A., 226 Walker, Colonel (Labour leader), 237 Wankie, 19, 145, 222, 293, 294, 391 Wankie Game Reserve, 202 Ware Concession, 81 Warren, Sir Charles, 31 Watch Tower Church, 227-8 Weale, M. E., 120

430

Welensky, Sir Roy, 218, 246, 297, 325, 350-1, 372, 378; leads ‘Unoflicials’, 237, 238, 246, 263; career and character, 246; and federation, 247-9, 258, 268; lobbies London, 258, 266; at Lancaster House Conference, 263, 264; Federal Minister of Transport, 285,290; forms UFP, 285, 295; becomes Prime Minister, 295; and Constitution, 298-9; and UFP/URP " fusion, 305; and Todd’s defeat, 314-15; and Suez, 321; bad relations with Whitehall, 324, 326-8, 331-2, 335; symbol of reaction, 330; objects to Monckton Report, 331; conflict on Northern Rhodesia Constitution, 335, 337; contemplates UDI, 337; 1962 election victory, 344; and end of Federation, 346-7, 349; and fall of Field, 360; tries to return to politics, 364; by-election defeat, 366; opposes UDI, 388 Welsh, Allan, 214 Whaley, W. R., 401 Wheare, Sir Kenneth, 249, 250 Whitehead, Sir Edgar, 203, 231, 242, 300, 302, 318, 327, 352, 364, 373, 378; Minister of Finance, 239; compared with Todd, 292; suc­ ceeds Todd as Prime Minister, 310-12, 314; career and character, 319-20; declares state of emergency, 330-1, 341, 363; and new Consti­ tution, 334,336; repressive measures, 330-1,341, 363; concern with African advancement, 3379; defeat in 1962 election, 342-4; ineffec­ tive opposition leader, 353; opposes UDI, 388 Wightwick (MP), 304, 305, 307 Willoughby, Captain Sir John, 69, 74, 75, 88, 115, 118, 124 Wills, A. J., 155 Wilson, Major Allan, 109, 110 Wilson, Benjamin, 44 Wilson, Harold, 193; talks with Smith, 357, 368371. 377-8i> 382» 389, 390-1» 392-3, 396-402 Wilson, N. H., 215, 219, 220 Witwatersrand (‘the Rand’): gold discovery, 28, 29, 32; rebellion (1922), 184 World’s View, 7, 57, 153, 180, 206 Wrathall, John, 393-4» 399« Yates, Domford, 274 Young, Dendy, 286 Young, Sir Hilton, 209 Young, Sir Hubert, 224, 225 Young, Kenneth, 350, 369, 375, 390

Zambesi River, 4, 5-6, 12, 16, 77, 79, 412 Zambesia, 21, 38, 39-41, 52, 100 Zambia, 91, 362, 368, 390-1, 409 Zimbabwe, 6-7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 74, 96, 109, 126, 409; ZANU, 352-3» 409; ZAPU, 341, 352-3, 409 Zwangendaba, 15-16 Zwimba, Matthew, 227