The column arduously continued making its way across the humid lowveld. Thick mopane bush rendered the going difficult and reduced visibility, thereby offering would-be Matabele assailants cover. At night the column laagered and employed the services of a 10,000 candle-power naval searchlight charged by a steam engine, capable of engendering superstitious awe among any of Lobengula’s scouts watching the column’s progress.
On 1 August, the column arrived beside the Lundi River and encamped, while Selous scouted ahead and found a narrow winding pass by which the men could ascend over a thousand feet on to the south-western portion of the high plateau of Mashonaland. Late on 13 August, the column finally reached the plateau—en route from the Lundi, Pennefather received another ultimatum from Lobengula ordering him to retrace his steps at once or risk being attacked. Captain Henry Hoste, the commander of B Company of the Pioneers, states: ‘Our relief on leaving the hot steamy low veld, where . . . we had seldom been able to see for more than two hundred yards round us, and arriving on the open veld with a cool, invigorating breeze blowing, may be imagined.’
Within days they were joined by Sir John Willoughby and a company of the BSACP, who had come up from Tuli, escorting a number of wagons and livestock. Then, from what was to soon become Fort Victoria (in 1891 a fort was built to hold the pass), the column pressed on without incident. As Selous comments: ‘on the open downs, with our force of 500 mounted men, we would most certainly have cut up any force [Lobengula] could have sent against us.’ Furthermore, he aptly notes: ‘Lobengula probably never wanted to fight, though it is the most absolute nonsense to talk of his ever having been friendly to the expedition.’ Moreover, Selous believed that the presence of the Bechuanaland Border Police besides the Macloutsie acted as a deterrent: ‘Had the Matabele attacked the pioneer force on its way to Mashonaland, they knew very well that [the BBP] would have ridden [into Matabeleland] and made things lively for their king in the neighbourhood of Bulawayo.’
On the morning of 11 September, while the column was crossing the Hunyani River, Pennefather and two other officers went ahead to find a suitable site for establishing a fort and future settlement. They found it near a small river, the Makabusi, and the following day the column was directed to the chosen location, which henceforth was to be known as Fort Salisbury—it is now part of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
At 10am on the 13th, the column paraded dismounted in full dress and witnessed the raising of the Union Flag. That afternoon, work on the fort began and by the end of the month it was completed. On 30 September, with no opposition having been encountered from the Shona, the Pioneer Corps was disbanded and the men scattered to search for gold and stake out farms.
The company had appointed an ex-Indian civil servant, Archibald Colquhoun, as its first ‘Administrator’ of Mashonaland, and he set to work forming a rudimentary administration to deal with such matters as the establishment of roads and postal communications. Moreover, on 28 September 1890, he announced that the Company’s ‘Mining Laws’ were in force in Mashonaland—a declaration that exceeded anything authorised by Lobengula. As Palley comments: ‘These went far beyond regulations for mining or for the grant of licences to persons to mine: they purported to set up courts with civil and criminal jurisdiction and laid down penalties for offenders.’ They were thus modified following the intervention of the Colonial Secretary.
On 20 November 1890, Loch, a staunch imperialist, urged the British government to assume jurisdiction in Mashonaland and to delegate it to the Chartered Company. He maintained that there were 400 miners in the country ‘not subject to any lawful authority’ and that the place would become ‘a disgrace to civilisation.’
Partly as a result of a fear of Boer encroachment beyond the Limpopo, on 9 May 1891 an Order in Council was issued by the British government. It alleged that ‘by treaty . . . sufferance [on the part of Lobengula] and other lawful means’, Queen Victoria possessed power and jurisdiction in a vast area of the African interior, including Matabeleland and Mashonaland, and declared the area to be a British protectorate. The powers previously granted to the Chartered Company were not abridged by the Order, for the imperial authorities did not wish to become involved in the administration of the area and, to quote Palley, the company was thus to act ‘as the instrument of administration under the protection of the Crown.’
At this date, of course, the company was only in effective occupation of Shona territory, over which Lobengula still claimed sovereignty. Moreover, this claim remained in force after November 1891, when Lobengula granted land and legal rights to a German named Edward Lippert who, unbeknown to him, had agreed to sell the so-called Lippert Concession to the Chartered Company. Hence a clash of interests was inevitable, with both Matabele monarch and British company viewing the Shona as their subjects.
The problem was demonstrated in late 1891. On 1 December, Jameson received word that a party of Lobengula’s warriors had killed a Shona chief called Nemakonde or Lomaghundi, whose homesteads were located some 70 miles or so northwest of Salisbury. Emboldened by the presence of the whites in Mashonaland, the chief, one of Lobengula’s tributaries, had sent Lobengula word that he was no longer the king’s ‘slave’; an act that had led the Matabele monarch to demonstrate that as far as he was concerned nothing had changed: rightful sovereignty over Mashonaland belonged to him and no one else. Jameson responded by informing Lobengula that ‘in the event of any subsidiary chief not paying his tribute as formerly’, the king should ‘appeal to the white man in Mashonaland’ whose laws were ‘framed for black as well as white.’
Subsequently, both Jameson and Lobengula trod carefully. The latter certainly did not wish to go to war with the Europeans (he was well aware of Cetshwayo’s downfall in 1879), whilst Jameson, despite accusations sometimes levelled to the contrary, had no wish to precipitate a conflict. For instance, on 22 May 1893, he wrote as follows to the Civil Commissioner at Fort Victoria: ‘make the residents of your district understand that they are not to go into Matabeleland; if people persist in doing so and get into trouble, the Company will take no steps whatsoever to assist them, but will severely punish anyone caught on the border.’ According to Jameson, the supposed ‘border’ to which he referred, between Matabeleland and Mashonaland, lay roughly on the line of the Umniati and Shashe Rivers.
In addition, Jameson does not appear to have been hell-bent on eventual war. Glass comments that control of ‘Matabeleland was the goal of the Company.’ This is of course true; but as he also notes, Jameson appears to have entertained the possibility that this could perhaps be achieved peacefully. Matabele were already coming to work in Mashonaland, and in a letter to his brother of 4 October 1893, Jameson was to write that he had thought it possible that ‘a policy of gradual absorption of the Matabele amongst our black labourers . . . would have been better’ than war. But instead of Lobengula’s kingdom being gradually undermined, it was to meet its end in bloodshed.
Descent into war
1893 was to witness a major transformation in relations between the Matabele on the one hand, and the Chartered Company and the settlers, whom Jameson described at the commencement of that year as a ‘fair sized pauper community.’
Tension had begun to mount the previous year and worsened in 1893. A number of incidents contributed to the road to war. The most notable occurred in June 1893 after a Shona chief named Bere, resident near Fort Victoria, a modest town 165 miles due east of Bulawayo in whose vicinity many whites had settled, stole some of Lobengula’s cattle. In response, the king sent a small punitive impi across Jameson’s ‘border’ between Matabeleland and Mashonaland. However, the warriors were met by a young officer, Captain Lendy, who had been appointed Magistrate of Fort Victoria in March, and were persuaded to return. But as June drew to an end, Lobengula decided to send a much larger force across the ‘border’, perhaps to recover the stolen cattle and bring errant Shona chiefs such as Bere back into line. Whites were not to b
e molested and Lobengula sent word to Jameson and Lendy (respectively at Salisbury and Fort Victoria) to this effect.
On Sunday, 9 July, the impi set to work in the Fort Victoria area without warning, for it struck before Lobengula’s correspondence had been delivered. Of the day’s events John Meikle, a resident of Fort Victoria, recalled years later: ‘I was lying in bed with a bad attack of fever. From early morning I seemed to hear what appeared to be a hum of many voices and I could not think what it meant. It turned out that the noise was caused by hundreds of Mashonas coming in from outside for protection.’
Meikle subsequently saw Matabele warriors coming down on either side of the town, and closing in at the lower end of Fort Victoria, killing any Shona unfortunate enough to be within stabbing reach. Another eyewitness, an Anglican minister, Reverend A.D. Sylvester, wrote within weeks of the raid: ‘about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, whilst I was holding my Sunday school, I found my church and parsonage surrounded by . . . Matabele, who were on all sides massacring the Mashonas without mercy, simply out of thirst for blood.’ Melina Rorke, a Portuguese woman who was likewise present in Fort Victoria, comments that ‘insolent Matabele swaggered through the streets of the town with their bloody spears and rattling shields.’
On the morning of the following day (and not the 14th, as is often said), the commander of the impi, Manyao, entered the town with a dozen or so followers and handed over a letter to the senior figure present—Lendy was out conducting a patrol—written on Lobengula’s behalf on 28 June by a European called James Dawson, whom the king had known since 1884. Among other things, the letter declared that Shona who took shelter with the whites were to be handed over for punishment. At 4pm, Lendy appeared on the scene and was asked by Manyao to hand over the Shona men, women and children huddled in the town who, he said considerately, would be taken off and killed in the bush away from the vicinity of Fort Victoria. Lendy refused and the induna and his attendants withdrew.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the 10th, Manyao’s warriors had moved against homesteads in the neighbourhood that had escaped their attention the previous day, killing Shona and seizing livestock. The days that followed witnessed more of the same. Meikle comments: ‘For fifty miles the country was laid waste and not a kraal left standing. The inmates for the most part took refuge with their flocks and herds in inaccessible places. Their greatest loss was their granaries.’ Just how many Shona perished is uncertain. Selous put the figure at over 400, while the Reverend Sylvester said that hundreds were ‘murdered wholesale.’ Both are perhaps exaggerations.
As Robert Blake comments, the raid:
symbolized the whole dispute about jurisdiction over the Shona. Lobengula and the senior induna . . . 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 that made a mockery of British rule and the Pax Britannica.
In the meantime, on the 9th, Jameson had received a telegram from Lendy reporting the raid, and word from Lobengula that the impi would not harm whites. He was not unduly perturbed. Indeed, on the following day, he sent a telegram to Rutherford Harris, the Company’s secretary in South Africa, stating that ‘really this little trouble might be quoted by you as proof of Loben’s friendliness vide his wire [from Palapye] on the trouble he takes to prevent raiding parties interfering with whites.’
On the 13th, Jameson set out to cover the 188 miles from Salisbury to Fort Victoria. He arrived on the 17th and found the settlers in militant mood, and that the raid had been a more serious affair than he had thought. It had not only resulted in the deaths of Shona, but had also alarmed whites in the district and brought economic activity such as mining to a standstill. Moreover, he discovered that in the preceding days Lendy and the settlers of the district, who had gathered for safety, had hurriedly turned Fort Victoria into an armed camp. A laager had been formed under the south wall of the fort to accommodate those unable to enjoy its security. Lendy had overseen matters, and was busy training a force of 400 settlers for action.
Hence, in such circumstances, Jameson telegraphed Cape Town, giving the plight of the Shona as a reason for driving the impi off, and received the following reply: ‘Yours just received. Mr Rhodes understands that you may find it necessary in the interests of the Mashonas . . . to drive the Matabele away . . . but he says if you do strike, strike hard.’
At about midday on the 18th, Jameson met with Manyao and other important Matabele, one of whom, Manyao’s second-in-command Umgandan, was a cocksure young man of striking appearance, ‘the handsomest African native I have ever seen,’ recalled Hans Sauer, one of the Europeans present. The indaba (meeting) took place just outside the gates of the fort and Jameson treated the Matabele in a blunt manner, ordering them out of the country. ‘I told them I would give them an hour to retire,’ reported Jameson to Loch later the same day, no doubt meaning that the impi had to start heading towards what Jameson claimed was the border (some 30 miles away) rather than cross it within that time period, as is sometimes maintained.
The following May, Lord Henry Paulet, one of those present at the indaba, told a Commission of Inquiry headed by Francis Newton CMG: ‘I did not conceive that he meant [Manyao] to cross the border in an hour, because it was an impossibility.’ Others said the same thing, and it was a view accepted by the commission. Nevertheless, as Glass comments:
While clearly an hour was given, the argument becomes somewhat academic when we realise . . . that the Matabele had no such measurement of time. They would not have understood what was meant by an ‘hour’, and all [the interpreter] could do was to point at the sun, and then lower down in the western sky.
At about 2.15pm, approximately an hour and three-quarters after the indaba had ended, Jameson sent Lendy with orders to drive the Matabele off if they had not commenced withdrawing. Lendy thus rode off at the head of a patrol almost entirely consisting of volunteers—only a handful of the men were policemen. Its strength is uncertain, but about 50 men seems the most probable figure.
The patrol cantered very briefly before continuing at walking pace, heading a little west of north. After riding a short distance a small advance guard was sent 600 yards or so ahead, while flanking parties were likewise detached.
Before long, the advance guard caught sight of about 70 Matabele ‘moving slowly, in disjointed lots and groups’, states the Newton Report, ‘from the S.W to the N.E. in the direction of Magomoli’s kraal’, i.e., a homestead belonging to a Shona chief ten miles due north of Fort Victoria which Manyao had made his headquarters. They were carrying grain and driving stolen cattle.
The Matabele in question were led by Umgandan, who had quarrelled with Manyao as the impi had headed towards Magomoli’s homestead after the indaba. While Manyao and most of the warriors were intent on withdrawal in accord with Jameson’s ultimatum, Umgandan and some of the young men were in defiant mood. Newton was to record that all the witnesses at the subsequent inquiry agreed that the young induna had been ‘insolent in voice and manner’ at the indaba, giving the impression that he meant to defy Jameson. Hence, instead of pressing on towards Magomoli’s homestead to prepare for departure, Umgandan and his followers had broken off to attack one west of Fort Victoria, while a second wayward party proceeded to invest another Shona settlement, Makoombi’s, roughly halfway between Fort Victoria and Magomoli’s homestead.
Upon receiving word that Umgandan’s party had been sighted, Lendy and the rest of the patrol rode up—it was about an hour after the patrol had left Fort Victoria—and he gave the order to open fire. The surprised warriors fled and were pursued by the patrol, now in extended formation. From time to time the pursuers dismounted, fired and then continued what, to use Newton’s words, ‘became a mere chase’, for ‘the Matabele practically offered no resistance.’ After about ten minutes, Lendy gave orders to cease firing. But some membe
rs of the patrol pressed on and in so doing came across the Matabele force threatening Makoombi’s homestead. They fired a few shots at long range, whereupon the warriors ran off.
In all, little execution was done by the patrol. Lendy, upon his return to Fort Victoria later in the afternoon, told Jameson that about 30 Matabele had been killed, but the subsequent Newton Report did not accept this figure, stating, ‘The Induna Manyao and his colleague Umgengwan say—and they should know best—that 11 men were missing of whom 9 are believed to have been killed, and two to have run away.’ Newton thus concluded ‘that in the pursuit of the Matabele there was no wholesale slaughter of the natives nor deliberate shooting of men already shot.’
Umgandan was among the Matabele who died, having been ‘shot at by several men’, reported Newton. An account of his death is to be found in Meikle’s Reminiscences. He states that upon moving against the induna’s party, the patrol dismounted ‘and began firing at the fleeing Matabele.’ He continues:
One of the first to fall was the king’s nephew [Umgandan] . . . . He was a fine, big specimen of a Zulu who was too proud to run [Newton concluded that he was suffering from the after-effects of an attack of colic] and he followed the others until he fell. He was on my right front about one hundred and fifty yards away. Somehow I could not bring myself to open fire on him although he was nearest to me.
‘I hereby declare war on the Matabele!’
As has been noted, the victorious patrol returned to Fort Victoria late on the afternoon of the 18th and Lendy reported what had happened to Jameson, falsely maintaining that the Matabele had been the first to open fire. No doubt encouraged by the fact that the patrol had routed the Matabele without loss to themselves, Jameson became determined to prosecute matters to a finish, a stance in line with general settler opinion in Fort Victoria. One of those present, Ivon Fry, tells us that upon hearing Lendy, Jameson turned to people lining the fort’s walls and announced: ‘I hereby declare war on the Matabele!’
The Zulus and Matabele: Warrior Nations Page 26