The Zulus and Matabele: Warrior Nations

by Glen Lyndon Dodds

  Moffat tells us that Mzilikazi had obtained firearms from traders on the Zambezi who had made their way up the river. Of the weapons he wrote: ‘All the guns I have seen are English soldiers’ muskets, besides others, with Dutch stocks of beech-tree, manufactured in Birmingham.’

  During his period as Mzilikazi’s guest, Moffat declared that he was intent on pressing on to the upper Zambezi to obtain news of his son-in-law. He set off on 24 August, taking provisions for Livingstone. Much to his surprise, Mzilikazi accompanied him. The king travelled in Moffat’s wagon, escorted by a party of warriors. They slowly headed northwest and in due course crossed the Nata River (which flows westward into Botswana) and entered countryside which became increasingly inhospitable due to lack of water. Thus, on 11 September, Mzilikazi ordered an officer and some 20 men to carry on the provisions and a packet of letters by the quickest route, while he and the rest of the party would travel back the way they had come.

  On 23 September, after arriving back in the vicinity of Matlokotloko, Mzilikazi permitted Moffat to preach to his people, no doubt motivated by a desire to prolong the missionary’s stay in his kingdom. At Mzilikazi’s word, a sizeable assembly gathered the next day. The king himself, sat beside Moffat, who noted:

  Profound silence and the most marked attention was maintained the whole time. There was something startling to my own senses to look on a congregation of fine looking men, with intelligent countenances, from youth to old age, listening for the first time to the voice of Jehovah, the only living God, their creator and preserver, who loved them and sent his son to save them from the wrath to come.

  Moffat repeated the exercise on the following days, before returning to Matlokotloko with Mzilikazi on 2 October. Then, on the 9th, after leaving the ruler a supply of medicine, he set off for Kuruman. En route he wrote:

  On reviewing the past, nothing surprises me more than the unwavering kindness of [Mzilikazi] . . . . It may easily be supposed that I must have been extremely liberal in gifts. This however has not been the case, and of gunpowder I did not give him one grain nor a single ounce of lead.

  In late 1857 Moffat revisited Mzilikazi, intent on persuading him to accept the establishment of a permanent mission of the London Missionary Society in his territory. Mzilikazi was agreeable—some of his councillors had serious misgivings—and so Moffat returned to Kuruman to organise the venture. In October 1859, he arrived back in Matabeleland with three missionaries, including one of his own sons. In the interim, Mzilikazi had become reluctant to permit the establishment of a mission, having heard unfavourable reports of missionary activity in Tswana country. Nonetheless, on 15 December, out of gratitude to Moffat, he announced that the missionaries could settle in a pleasant upland area called Inyathi; here they would labour fruitlessly, their missionary endeavours falling on stony ground.

  Hardship, war and European involvement

  Moffat left for Kuruman on 17 June 1860. He was never to see Mzilikazi again. 1859 had been a year of drought, and Moffat left behind a land that was to experience further suffering, for drought recurred in 1860 and 1861. Matabele misfortune was also compounded in 1861 by the outbreak of lung-sickness which decimated their herds, and smallpox appeared as the following year drew to a close.

  The 1860s also witnessed further conflict. Relations with the Shona in the late 1850s were relatively peaceful, but according to David Beach, for over a decade from 1860 the Matabele ‘made what was probably their greatest concerted effort to dominate the Shona’, with Mzilikazi’s forces operating over a wide area. For example, the Matabele moved against Tohwechipi and his followers, who had moved eastwards in 1857 into hill country such as the Mavangwe range on the upper Sabi. It is said that three major attacks were launched against them, and in 1866 Tohwechipi was forced to surrender after a lengthy siege. He was taken to Mzilikazi, who spared his life and subsequently allowed him his freedom. Vestiges of Rozvi power appear to have remained, but their great days were certainly over.

  Among other Shona attacked were Hwata and his people. The distant chiefdom of Hwata was centred at the head of the Mazoe Valley, a short distance to the north of present-day Harare. Although fairly small, it was economically significant, and Hwata dominated much of the trade in ivory and gold occurring in the region. In 1864, he finally surrendered and became a tributary ruler, though in 1868 a Matabele impi was sent against him again, indicating that he had attempted to escape Matabele dominance.

  During the same decade there were also further clashes with the Ngwato. At the end of February 1863, a Matabele army attacked outlying Ngwato cattle posts before making for Shoshong, the enemy capital. On 6 March, a battle was fought outside Shoshong and although the Ngwato had horses and possessed muskets, they were nevertheless routed, whereupon the victors proceeded to plunder and seize captives in the neighbourhood, and additional conflict occurred during the course of the year.

  Mzilikazi also determined to strengthen his hold to the northwest, and sent regiments towards the Victoria Falls area of the Zambezi, where he was able to exploit the fact that the Kololo state had disintegrated in the early 1860s. Consequently, in 1869 (shortly after Mzilikazi’s death) a European hunter named Thomas Leask wrote, with some exaggeration, given the Zambezi’s vast length, that ‘all the people along the Zambezi are terribly afraid of the Matabele.’

  Leask was just one of an increasing number of Europeans whom Mzilikazi permitted to enter his kingdom in the 1860s either to hunt or trade—activities for which they had to obtain permits. One such was a young man called William Finaughty. In 1864 he saw Mzilikazi, whom he described as ‘a physical wreck’, whose ‘lower limbs were paralysed’, so that he had to be carried about in an armchair. Another European visitor was Henry Hartley, who had first entered Matabeleland in 1859. In 1865, after receiving permission to hunt in the territory of Shona tributaries, he came across ancient disused gold workings some 70 miles southwest of Harare and returned to his farm in the Transvaal excited by what he had found. In due course, the find greatly increased white interest in the financial prospects offered by Matabeleland.

  In 1868, Mzilikazi’s health finally collapsed entirely. For several months he lay on the verge of death, before expiring in September, surrounded by his councillors. For a month the news was kept a secret, and his wives maintained a watch over his body, which was wrapped in blankets in his hut while the nation’s senior men made preparations for the transition of power.

  Mzilikazi’s death was then announced, and the nation summoned to a homestead called Mhlahlandlela, the Matabele capital since 1863. His body was placed in a wagon, along with his possessions, and taken to the Matopos, accompanied by the regiments in all their paraphernalia. At the foot of a hill called Nthumbane the procession halted and the corpse was carried up and laid in a granite cave whose entrance was then sealed with a mass of stones. The wagon was then dismantled and placed with its former contents in another cave that was likewise sealed. So was buried Mzilikazi kaMashobane, the Great Bull Elephant of the Matabele, the father of the nation.

  As Ian Knight comments:

  Mzilikazi’s journeys were at last at an end. His history had been extraordinary. He had witnessed the rise of the great Shaka, defied him, and survived. He had seen the coming of the Boers, and survived them too. He had conquered, lost almost everything, then conquered again, and his legacy was his nation. The Ndebele mourned him: ‘Intaba seyidilike—the Mountain has fallen.’

  9. THE GATHERING STORM — THE REIGN OF LOBENGULA

  ‘Insolent Matabele swaggered through the streets of the town with their bloody spears and rattling shields.’ Melina Rorke

  Mzilikazi’s death was followed by a marked period of uncertainty in which the elderly and highly respected Mncumbathe acted as regent. The question of who would succeed Mzilikazi was strongly contested. The majority of senior izinduna supported one of Mzilikazi’s sons named Lobengula, an intelligent, shrewd and perceptive i
ndividual who had been born in the Transvaal in 1829 (his mother was the daughter of a Swazi chief) and had been high in Mzilikazi’s affections in the closing years of his father’s reign.

  But there were others, headed by Mbigo Masuku, the rather elderly chief of Zwangendaba, who favoured the claim of Lobengula’s older brother, Nkulumane, the son of Mzilikazi’s principal wife. It will be remembered that Nkulumane had been installed as king of part of the Matabele nation following their arrival in Matabeleland, only for Mzilikazi to appear on the scene and ruthlessly reassert his authority. But some of the Matabele believed that Nkulumane’s life had been spared and that he had been sent into exile. Consequently, they now championed Nkulumane’s right to the throne.

  Steps were thus taken to locate Nkulumane. According to one rumour, he had been sent back to Zululand and, using the pseudonym ‘Kanda’, was working for the Natal Administrator, Sir Theophilus Shepstone. Therefore, a mission was sent to Natal to ascertain the report’s accuracy. The man was found and identified as Nkulumane by the embassy. However, when questioned before Shepstone, he strongly denied the identification and so the emissaries returned home without him in mid 1869. A second mission, sent to corroborate the report of the first, duly returned without achieving anything concrete.

  It is highly unlikely that Nkulumane was still alive. Julian Cobbing has highlighted that ‘there is no single contemporary reference to his existence’ between Mzilikazi’s reestablishment of his authority and the events following the king’s death, and concludes: ‘The evidence that Kanda was not Nkulumane is circumstantial but overwhelming.’

  Consequently, in early 1870, Lobengula was installed as king by his supporters at the Matabele capital, Mhlahlandlela. Subsequently, in a letter written on his behalf on 19 August 1871, he informed the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal: ‘In February of 1870, I was installed in the place of my father as chief and king of the Matabele nation . . . . 10,000 warriors were present . . . and many more had paid their homage and departed.’

  The installation ceremonies lasted until 17 March. On that date, states Thomas Morgan Thomas, following a final ceremony, Lobengula was told by the ‘high priest’ Umtamjana: ‘There is the country of your father, his cattle, and his people—take them, and be careful of them. Those who sin, punish; but those who obey, reward.’

  The most notable sinners were adherents of Nkulumane who, unlike the majority of the Matabele, refused to acknowledge Lobengula as king. Matters came to a head in June 1870, by which time work on a new capital (soon to be called Bulawayo) was underway two miles east of Mhlahlandlela. Battle was joined on Sunday, 5 June, after Lobengula moved against the base of his principal opponent, Mbigo of Zwangendaba, located beside the Bembesi River. Lobengula is said to have attempted to parley, hoping to draw Mbigo into a debate, but his overtures met with contempt. He was fired upon, and William Sykes, a missionary at Inyathi, tells us that ‘even the girls and women of the rebels . . . insulted him with gross and indecent gestures.’

  Armed with muskets and traditional weapons, Lobengula’s warriors thus moved to the attack. The first two assaults against the rebels, who were deployed in the base, were repelled by heavy musket fire from behind the palisades, but on the third assault the perimeter was breached and hand-to-hand fighting raged, in which Mbigo was among those who perished. In all, hostilities lasted about two and a half hours before the surviving rebels surrendered, while others fled, some of them southwest to Ngwato territory.

  Two years after the battle, a young English hunter, Frederick Courtney Selous, arrived in Matabeleland and heard about the engagement from two Europeans who had tended many of the wounded. One of them was Sykes. The other was a hunter and trader called Philips, who told Selous that ‘although [Lobengula’s warriors] had many guns, nearly all the killed had been stabbed at close quarters with assegais’, and that in ‘many instances he [had] found two men lying dead together, each with the other’s assegai through his heart.’

  In connection with the Battle of Zwangendaba, Lobengula declared in the letter of 19 August 1871, referred to above, that as soon as victory had been attained he ordered that no one else should be killed because his ‘heart was not for blood.’ Furthermore, he stated that he freely forgave the survivors and incorporated them into other regiments. Selous says much the same thing, declaring that Lobengula acted very magnanimously towards the vanquished, allowing all those who had escaped to return home and become his subjects.

  Lobengula also had trouble during this period with the Ngwato king, an interesting character named Macheng. He had spent much of his life in Matabeleland, after being seized as a youth by a raiding party, but in 1857 Mzilikazi had allowed him to return home, hoping that he would supplant Sekgoma and prove a loyal client of the Matabele state. Macheng did indeed become the Ngwato king, but as Mzilikazi lay dying he had begun to flex his muscles, for Ngwato strength had increased significantly over the years. As a result of the growth of inland trade, Shoshong had become the largest, most prosperous and best-armed town in the interior. Macheng had thus claimed sovereignty over the Tati Valley on the edge of Matabeleland, where gold had recently been discovered. Then, during the subsequent Matabele interregnum, he began issuing permits to Europeans to work the goldfields.

  Lobengula by Ralph Peacock and based on a sketch by E.A. Maund. ©National Archives of Zimbabwe

  Lobengula regarded the Tati area as within greater Matabeleland and in April 1870 he granted the right to mine the goldfields to the London and Limpopo Mining Company. On 2 May 1870 (a month prior to the Battle of Zwangendaba), he sent a warning to the troublesome Ngwato ruler, whom he reminded of his tributary status. Among other things, he declared:

  whilst I open my roads and my country to all traders, travellers and hunters, you on the contrary endeavour to levy tax on wagons and on gold-seekers who pass through your district, the district that you held from my father, Moselikatze, and which you now hold from me . . . . It is then my wish, that you desist from levying any such Taxes whereby you hinder people from coming into the Matabele and increase the prices of goods to my injury and the injury of my people.

  Nevertheless, Macheng was to remain a thorn in Lobengula’s side, and in June 1871 Matabele warriors attacked Ngwato who were stationed near Tati to block Matabele trade travelling southward along the Tati road. In addition, Macheng subsequently gave succour to Lobengula’s enemies.

  Lobengula’s letter of 19 August 1871 was just one of many he sent to British officials during this period in an attempt to obtain their recognition of his legitimacy as Matabele king. One of the recipients was Shepstone, who nonetheless gave limited support to ‘Nkulumane’, for Kanda had begun singing a different tune and was readily being used by Shepstone to undermine the Matabele king. For instance, Shepstone provided him with a wagon and sent him north with an escort to Macheng, from whom he received sanctuary late in 1871.

  To add to Lobengula’s problems, one of his own brothers, Mangwane (who had fled Matabeleland following Mzilikazi’s death), was likewise in Ngwato territory and had designs on the Matabele throne. In January 1872, he moved against Lobengula, accompanied not only by fellow Matabele dissidents but by Kanda—whom he was using as a front for his own ends—and a force of Ngwato placed at Mangwane’s disposal by Macheng. The Ngwato soon deserted, but Mangwane pressed on and set up camp in Matabeleland where messengers were sent far and wide, calling for people to rebel. The summons did not fall entirely on deaf ears. Indeed, a significant number of people responded positively throughout the kingdom, but the majority of the chiefs who had previously aligned themselves with Lobengula stood firm, and he was thus able to crush the revolt. For instance, a force of warriors en route to join Mangwane was intercepted and defeated. When Mangwane and Kanda realised that the cause was lost, they withdrew.

  Kanda was later granted asylum in the Transvaal by President Kruger and his base there became a haven for fugitives and malcontents from Matabel
eland. Moreover, in 1876, he unsuccessfully attempted to gain the support of a party of disgruntled Transvaal Boers by offering them ‘land to their hearts’ content’ if they would render him military assistance. ‘Kuruman [another name by which he was known] is assured,’ he told them, ‘that if, by your aid he could reach his friends, such a number of them would immediately rally round him as to render further service from you unnecessary.’ Lobengula duly received word of this proposal and one of his closest and most influential white friends, Thomas Morgan Thomas, noted in his diary on 23 August 1876, that he ‘wept tears . . . and said he had not yet turned his back from fear of Kuruman.’

  The following year, Shepstone became the British Administrator of the Transvaal. As such, on 2 April 1878, he wrote to the British High Commissioner at Cape Town, Sir Bartle Frere, stating, ‘the possession of the person of Kuruman gives Her Majesty’s Government the means of exercising great influence over the reigning Matabele king.’ Shepstone wished Lobengula to allow a British Resident to be stationed in his kingdom. The monarch was not inclined to do so. Thomas Morgan Thomas acted as interpreter and recorded in his journal:

  But ultimately, when it had been suggested to his Majesty that in view of the possibility of the Transvaal Boers leaving their country for these parts and bringing with them the supposed uKurumana it would be well for him to be on friendly terms with his next-door neighbour . . . Shepstone he seemed to approve of the idea of a British Consul’s being placed at Gubulawayo, [being motivated by fear rather than] any good principle.

  In the event, the diplomatic presence proved short-lived. The British Resident, Captain R.R. Patterson, arrived at Bulawayo in late August 1878 and soon set off on a trip to the Victoria Falls accompanied by a colleague, Lieutenant T. G. Sergeaunt, two servants, twenty bearers and one of Thomas’ sons to act as an interpreter. At the end of September, most of the party, including Patterson and the two other Europeans, met a fatal end, reputedly after drinking the poisoned water of a pool. Rumours spread that Lobengula had ordered their deaths. Some historians have doubted this, partly influenced by Thomas’ view that Lobengula was induced by fear into accepting a British Resident, but the balance of the evidence does indeed indicate that the king had Patterson and his party murdered. No doubt Lobengula felt anxious in the wake of what had happened, fearing British retribution, but events elsewhere, such as the commencement of the Zulu War in January 1879, diverted attention away from Matabeleland.