by John Wilcox
Alice sat for a moment, deep in thought. ‘What do we do?’ she asked.
‘We go back to your beloved Norfolk and give the land there the attention it deserves after our long time away, and still retain a sort of foothold here. But . . .’
‘Ah. I knew there would be a but.’
Fonthill frowned. ‘Yes. Well, we might as well be completely honest with each other. I can farm happily in Norfolk for a time, but the place runs itself pretty well, and I know that I will get bored after a time - and so will you, not to mention Jenkins.’
Alice sucked her pencil. ‘So . . . ?
‘I think - no, I am sure - that there will be trouble soon in the Transvaal. The Boers there are still cocky after beating us so completely on Majuba Hill, and the peace agreement afterwards was a cobbled-together mess. To be frank, I sense that Rhodes has got his eye on the province and wouldn’t be above stirring up trouble there with the many Britishers who have gone in to work the goldfields on the Rand to justify an invasion.’ He smiled sheepishly. ‘Jenkins and I know the territory better than most Englishmen - certainly better than most soldiers. With General Lamb as army commander in the Cape, there could be a job for us and a bit of excitement to relieve the . . . er . . . forgive me, my love, but I think the word is tedium of life in Norfolk, if and when the call comes.’ Then the smile faded and he looked at her anxiously. ‘But would you let us go?’
She stood and looked him levelly in the eye. ‘Of course, if I could come too.’
Fonthill sighed. ‘I knew you would say that. You would want to report it all for the Post?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, they say all is fair in love and war, and I don’t suppose we have run out of either yet.’
Alice stepped forward and put her arms around his neck. Somewhere a dog barked and harnesses creaked as a wagon drove past. ‘No, I am sure we haven’t,’ she whispered into his ear.
They kissed and stood together for a moment, her head on his shoulder, and then she said: ‘And I love your idea of giving the farm to Mzingeli. It seems the perfect solution. Put it to them both - for Jenkins must be party to this, as he is to everything - when they return. Now.’ She pushed him away and sat down again. ‘Go away and let me write.’
‘Very well. But go easy on Rhodes and Jameson.’
‘Of course I will. Oh . . .’ She looked up. ‘How do you spell despicable?’
Author’s Note
The Matabele War was a virtual sideshow in the great pageant of Victorian colonial wars, attracting comparatively little attention from historians and writers of biographies and autobiographies, probably because it was, on the whole, a piece of private enterprise by Cecil John Rhodes. Nevertheless, it did result in the establishment of a new nation in southern Africa, Rhodesia, and the controversy that surrounded its birth has continued to cling to it, through its split into northern and southern Rhodesia, its unification, its secession from the British Commonwealth and its present reincarnation as Zimbabwe under President Mugabe.
It was also significant in that it represented the high-water mark in the territorial gains that made the British Empire the largest the world had seen. (I discount the bits and pieces of real estate that Britain picked up as a result of the First World War.) For a novelist, however, the war’s main attraction must be the clash between its two main protagonists, Rhodes and the Matabele chief King Lobengula. They never met, like those more famous adversaries Wellington and Bonaparte, and Hitler and Churchill, but their vices and virtues stamped themselves on the encounters between Lobengula’s impis and Rhodes’s army of settlers just as surely as if the two had crossed assegai blade and bayonet personally.
In setting the adventures of Simon Fonthill against the background of the war, I have attempted to relate accurately its twists and turns and also to paint the background to what became a classic conflict between the expansionist march of a great colonial power and the struggle of a barbaric and warlike people to remain independent. The Shangani episode was a tragedy, of course, and among the last of its kind.
As always in the Fonthill novels, I must establish what was fact and what fiction. Simon, Alice, Jenkins and Mzingeli, of course, are fictional characters, as are General Lamb and those two rogues Murphy and Laxer. All of the other main characters, however, very much existed: Beit, King Khama, Fairbairn, Dr Jameson, Chief Umtasa, Captain Borrow and Majors Wilson and Forbes. I did not create Manuel de Sousa, ‘Gouela’, although I confess to painting him rather more darkly than perhaps even he deserved. De Sousa, a Portuguese agent with a reputation as a rapist and a slaver, was a regular attender at the court of King Lobengula, and he did try to persuade the king to eschew all dealings with Rhodes.
Lobengula did indeed send a bag of golden sovereigns in a pathetic attempt to divert his pursuers, and the two troopers who accepted them from the inDunas did try to keep them and were court-martialled. Three men, all scouts, were sent back by Major Wilson to cross the Shangani in an attempt to get Major Forbes to bring aid, and for those who may think that Simon’s crossing of the river by holding on to the horse’s tail is a little fanciful, then I must refer them to Lieutenant Horace Smith-Dorrien, who escaped the Zulus after Isandlwana by crossing the Buffalo river in the same way.
Alice’s treatment of Lobengula’s gout is based on fact, in that Dr Jameson did earn the king’s friendship by so treating his ailment in Bulawayo - as well as, it is said, because he could make the king laugh. Rhodes’s pursuit of Simon to recruit him to take the gold and arms to the king and to prospect to the east is quite logical, in that he did, in fact, employ many young British adventurers for such tasks - particularly in exploring towards the Portuguese borders to establish contact with the tribes there and to persuade them to sign treaties with his company.
Wherever possible, I have based important conversations on the writings of the participants or those who were present at the time. Rhodes’s eulogy to the strengths of British character and his vision of the map of Africa to the north ‘covered in red’, expressed so forcefully to Fonthill in Cape Town, are taken from his writings. Similarly, Lobengula’s colourful analogy of the chameleon (England) and the fly (Matabeleland) was remembered by those who were in his kraal at the time.
Cecil John Rhodes, of course, was a highly complex and controversial character. As I have tried to reflect in the novel, the British Government, the press, the bankers of London, the public of the day - none of them could ever quite make up their mind about him. Was he a capitalistic charlatan or a great man of empire? Amazingly, well over a hundred years later, the jury is still out.
Rhodes attracted opprobrium when - as Fonthill feared - he plotted to send a party of armed men into Kruger’s Transvaal under the command of the faithful Dr Jameson to stimulate a rising against the Boer government. This abortive mini-invasion became known as the Jameson Raid, and the good doctor went to jail for leading it. Somehow Rhodes wriggled out of accepting the blame, although he sturdily supported the doctor throughout, and Jameson later became reinstated in society and died an honoured man and servant of empire. He was interred in Rhodesia’s Matopo Hills, near to the body of Cecil John Rhodes, the man he had served so well.
The cause of Lobengula’s death was never established - he could well have been poisoned, the fate of many African despots. His people wrapped his body in the hides of two newly flayed oxen and buried it in a cave. Rhodes took charge of three of Lobengula’s sons, and of their sons, and took them to his home in Cape Town, to be educated and brought up there. One of the boys survived to become one of Rhodes’s chief mourners when the great man died in 1902.
The fate of the Shangani Patrol became a cause célèbre back in England. As with Rorke’s Drift after the British defeat by the Zulus at Isandlwana, the heroism of the little band - their singing of the national anthem, the formal shaking of hands before they faced the last charge of the Matabele warriors - distracted the public’s attention from all that had gone before: the slaughter of the nat
ives by machine guns, modern rifles and cannon. It thrilled the readers of the Victorian newspapers and was what they expected of their heroes. The only things lacking were white pith helmets and red coats.
A memorial to Wilson and his men was erected where they fell, and the remains of their bodies were removed to consecrated ground, to be reinterred later near their memorial in the Matopo Hills, where Rhodes and Jameson were to lie. If the Anglo-Matabele war is little remembered now, the Shangani Patrol lives on in the minds of those lovers of history who respect extreme bravery - particularly when its last moments are acted out with a sense of drama and pathos that even Hollywood would consider too unbelievable to put on the screen.
J. W.
Chilmark
August 2009
The Shangani Patrol
JOHN WILCOX
www.headline.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Author’s Note