The Zulus and Matabele: Warrior Nations

by Glen Lyndon Dodds

  Jameson spent much of the evening of the 18th in the telegraph office in Fort Victoria, communicating with both Sir Henry Loch and Rhodes, telling them what had happened and arguing in favour of war.

  The following morning found him on the wire once again, this time sending word north to Major Forbes of the BSACP in Salisbury. Jameson, according to Forbes, declared ‘that the events of the previous day had shown him clearly that if we wished to remain in Mashonaland, and not to sacrifice all that we had gained in the previous three years, we must settle the Matabele question once and for all.’ Jameson had a plan—three columns, each of 250 mounted men, were to advance respectively on Bulawayo from Salisbury, Fort Victoria and Tuli. Forbes would lead the men from Salisbury before assuming command of all the company’s combined forces.

  It is sometimes maintained that the primary motivation for deciding to wage war against the Matabele was a desire to boost the value of the Chartered Company’s shares on the Stock Exchange. The company was undoubtedly in monetary difficulties and Jameson was aware that the conquest of Matabeleland could prove financially advantageous. On 19 July, he telegraphed to a colleague in Kimberley that ‘Rhodes might consider the advisability of completing the thing . . . as we have an excuse for the row over murdered women and children now and the getting [of] Matabeleland open would give us a tremendous lift in shares and everything else.’ Nonetheless, as Glass comments, ‘If the Company had been thinking of a war to boost share prices why should Jameson need to mention it at that particular moment?’ The war, he correctly states, ‘was not brought about for this purpose—it was the result of a chain of events in Mashonaland and of Jameson’s decision of 18 July 1893.’

  True, some argue that the events which culminated in Jameson taking that decision were deliberately manufactured by Chartered Company officials anxious for war, a central facet of the plot being an invitation to Lobengula to send warriors across the ‘border’ to punish wayward Shona, such as the cattle thieves, so that Jameson would have an excuse to launch hostilities against the king guilty of ill-treating Shona. But the evidence does not warrant such a conclusion.

  On the evening of the 19th, Jameson contacted the sympathetic Loch once again, stating, ‘surely we are justified in punishing the murderers more severely—in fact, in getting rid of them altogether.’ The time was right to strike, he declared, it was the best season of the year for campaigning (which would be hindered by summer rains if delayed) and, what was more, much of Lobengula’s army was known to be absent, having departed, on 11 June, on a campaign against the Lozi in what is now western Zambia, and other members of the trans-Zambezian alliance.

  As noted, Jameson’s stance was in line with general settler sentiment. For instance, on the following day, 20 July, a public meeting in Salisbury expressed its hope that advantage would be taken ‘of the present position of affairs to settle, once and for all, the supremacy of British power and civilisation in this territory.’

  Loch was likewise keen to see this occur, but on 24 July, following further contact from Jameson, he stated: ‘I could not with the great interests at stake sanction any forward movement until preparations [which Jameson had already initiated] were sufficiently advanced so that, humanly speaking, success would be assured.’

  He continued:

  I fully appreciate the readiness expressed by the Europeans in Mashonaland to respond to the call of the Chartered Company, but a question of such paramount importance as making war upon the Matabele must be left to the decision of the authorities as to the policy to be pursued, the time to be selected, should the necessity arise, and the manner in which it is to be conducted. But they may rest assured the authorities are fully alive to the urgency of the situation and will not be backward in taking action that will secure not only the present but the future safety of the country.

  The following day, Lord Ripon, the Colonial Secretary, with whom Loch had been in contact, reminded the High Commissioner that the British government’s policy concerning developments in the Chartered Company’s area of operation had always been to leave it to fend for itself: no imperial military assistance would be forthcoming.

  Loch informed Ripon on 26 July that the company was ‘fully aware’ that it was ‘solely responsible for providing both men and money for any war’ against Lobengula. On the other hand, though, Loch declared that such a war would likely have an impact on the neighbouring Bechuanaland Protectorate. The imperial forces there, he thus maintained, needed to be strengthened, something that he had begun to do by recruiting more men to serve in the Bechuanaland Border Police—a force which, under instruction from Loch, proceeded to concentrate at Macloutsie, the northerly base of the BBP.

  And what of Lobengula? On 27 July runners arrived at Bulawayo to report the clash on the 18th that had resulted in Umgandan’s death. The king reacted angrily to the news that Lendy’s men had opened fire first. On Lobengula’s behalf, a European at his court, Johann Colenbrander, wrote a letter to Loch complaining about the fact that the Matabele had been attacked and that wayward Shona had been afforded protection in Fort Victoria. Furthermore, while anxious to avoid war, the king began an acrimonious correspondence with Jameson, for he was determined not to relinquish his claims over the Shona and rejected the existence of the Umniati-Shashe border, to which he had never conceded.

  In August, Lobengula sent envoys on a peace mission (the most senior of whom, Umshete, had visited England on diplomatic business in 1889), first to see Loch at the Cape, then to travel on to visit Queen Victoria. Upon hearing of the embassy, Jameson and other Chartered Company officials threw a spanner in the works, informing Loch that Lobengula was not really interested in peace: he was trying to buy time to prepare for war. Umshete’s party arrived in Cape Town on 23 September and a number of futile interviews followed with Loch, in which Lobengula’s representatives refused to discuss the issues of the border and the Shona: the country, and the Shona, belonged to the Matabele king. It was as simple as that.

  By the time of Umshete’s arrival at the Cape, Jameson’s military preparations were well advanced. For example, in July, he had sent Pieter Raaff, Resident Magistrate of Tuli since March 1892 and a veteran of the Zulu War of 1879 (in which he commanded Raaff’s Transvaal Rangers and had been awarded the CMG), south to Johannesburg to procure 750 horses and recruit soldiers, though Jameson did not inform Loch of the recruitment campaign.

  Jameson intended Lendy to lead one of the columns—the one that would set out from Fort Victoria—but Lendy declined to take charge and so, on 31 August, Major Allan Wilson, a Scotsman by birth, was confirmed as commander of the Victoria Column, which was still being prepared for action.

  By this date it had been decided that Forbes, who had been able to arm and equip 250 men from the company’s stores in Salisbury, should move south to Fort Charter (55 miles closer to Fort Victoria than Salisbury) and await the arrival of mounts. By 10 September, Forbes’ men were at Charter and some horses had already arrived—others were to do so as the month progressed.

  Furthermore, by late September Raaff was back at Tuli—he arrived on the 23rd—after successfully recruiting men in the Transvaal and procuring horses for them and members of the other columns. They, and the other men who had volunteered to serve on behalf of the company, would not receive regular pay. Upon the campaign’s successful conclusion there would be rewards in Matabeleland: loot, land and gold claims.

  Late August and September also witnessed a strong anti-Matabele propaganda campaign by the Chartered Company, which falsely reported that swarms of Lobengula’s warriors were menacing Europeans in both Mashonaland and Tati (the latter had come under the direct administration of Loch the previous year). As Glass comments: ‘It was necessary to create a war atmosphere, to establish a picture of Matabele aggressiveness, so that when the columns were ready to advance the request for them to do so would not be without strong support.’

  Finally, on the mo
rning of 5 October, things came to a head when Loch authorised Jameson to proceed against Lobengula. He did so after hearing that on 30 September Matabele warriors had fired at members of one of the Chartered Company’s patrols, and that thousands of Matabele warriors were massing on the Mashonaland border. Later on the 5th, Loch received a report that a patrol of Bechuanaland Border Police had been fired on that very morning.

  Contrary to the wishes of the British government, the High Commissioner had long wanted to commit imperial forces to the impending conflict. He was not motivated by a spirit of altruistic support for the Chartered Company. Rather he hoped that imperial troops would play the dominant role in the conflict, thereby paving the way for him to exercise a greater say in the company’s administration of Mashonaland and Lobengula’s soon-to-be conquered domain.

  Indeed, later in the month, he was to suggest to Ripon that political control of the company’s territories should be taken away, albeit temporarily, and vested in government officials responsible to himself and to the home authorities. Hence the report that members of the BBP had been fired on gave him an excuse to involve imperial forces in the war—Loch had been authorised by the Colonial Secretary on 23 September to sanction prompt action if circumstances required.

  Therefore, on 5 October, with the Matabele ‘taking the offensive’, the High Commissioner ordered the Bechuanaland Border Police massed at Macloutsie to act in concert with the forces of the Chartered Company against Lobengula. Although there is good reason to reject the veracity of the reports received by Loch, upon the basis of which he authorised the commencement of hostilities, the Matabele War had begun.

  10. ‘THEIR STORY IS IMMORTAL’ — THE MATABELE WAR

  ‘I believe that no civilised army could have withstood the terrific fire they did for at most half as long.’ Sir John Willoughby

  On 5 October, when Jameson received authorisation from Loch to move against Lobengula, Forbes and the Salisbury Column had already begun edging closer to Matabeleland from Charter. Indeed, they commenced doing so on the 2nd. Then, on the morning of 7 October, the order to advance was received and the column began moving in earnest. The following day it crossed the ‘border’, the Umniati River, and headed southwest to a small kopje covered with old mine workings, Iron Mine Hill, 25 miles east of present-day Gweru. Forbes arrived on the 14th and awaited the Victoria Column, with whose commander he had agreed to rendezvous at the site.

  Allan Wilson and the Victoria Column had set off on the 4th. After initially moving north towards Charter, they headed west upon reaching an old post station at Makori. After travelling in that direction for eight miles, they halted and remained stationary for three days. On the 9th they were joined by Jameson and Sir John Willoughby (who was acting as Jameson’s military adviser), who rode up from Fort Victoria. The following day, Lendy appeared on the scene with an Artillery Troop and 56 dismounted men from Tuli. Likely, on the 11th, the strengthened column crossed the Shashe River, bound for Iron Mine Hill.

  On the morning of the 16th, the Victoria Column rendezvoused with Forbes. It also met up with Jameson and Willoughby, for they had pressed on ahead of the column to see Forbes. As Glass pertinently comments: ‘One doubts whether they would have been quite so intrepid—even foolhardy—had Jameson himself credited any of the hair-raising reports with which the High Commissioner had [recently] been assailed.’

  So far no major Matabele forces had been encountered. Contact had, however, been made the previous day with small parties of Matabele. On the 15th, Forbes and some of his command had rounded up cattle and while doing so, one of his men, Captain John Campbell, an ex-Artillery officer, was shot and wounded by a warrior sheltering behind a rock. Moreover, Forbes and some of his men came across about twelve warriors, with whose young leader Forbes parleyed before deeming it wise to retire. More significantly, on the 15th, members of the Victoria Column briefly clashed with a number of Matabele, members of the Insuga regiment.

  Within hours of the arrival of the Victoria Column at Iron Mine Hill, Campbell died of his injuries. He was buried at dusk that evening with full military honours. ‘All the Salisbury and a great many of the Victoria Column attended the funeral,’ states Forbes in one of the chapters he contributed to W.A. Wills’s and L.T. Collingridge’s book, The Downfall of Lobengula. ‘I think there were a good many standing round the grave that evening who realised for the first time that what we had undertaken was no child’s play, but stern reality, and that poor Campbell’s fate might at any time be the fate of one or all of us.’

  At 5.30am on 17 October, the combined force left Iron Mine Hill, heading south-westward towards Bulawayo, 135 miles away. They did so in two columns parallel to each other and, where the ground permitted, approximately 300 yards apart and were guided by a Matabele defector called Mnyenyezi Khumalo.

  The strength of the combined force is uncertain—sources are far from unanimous on this point. Nonetheless, it totalled under 700 Europeans, about 155 Cape boys and other non-white ancillaries, as well as around 400 Shona recruited in the vicinity of Fort Victoria. Weaponry included five Maxim guns hoisted on to cavalry carriages. The Maxim was a machine gun that had been introduced to the British Army in 1889, and had first been employed in action in Uganda. It was fed with cartridges from belts, had a range of up to 2,730 yards, and was capable of firing 600 rounds a minute.

  On 22 October, the columns entered the southern fringe of the vast Somabula Forest. Forbes states:

  we found that we had to go through a narrow strip of thick bush with a good deal of cutting to be done. To make things worse a fog came on, and it was a very anxious time. We got through the bush safely however, and after crossing a nasty little stream, got up into the high open ground again.

  The forest was an ideal place for the Matabele to conduct an ambush. Lobengula had heard his first reports of the invasion on the morning of 12 October, and an impi was indeed present in the forest, but failed to make contact.

  It is believed that the number of Matabele warriors in 1893 probably numbered about 15,000, some of whom had just returned from the trans-Zambezian campaign and had been placed in isolation after contracting smallpox while they were away. Summers and Pagden have estimated that about 12,500 warriors were at the king’s disposal to defend his kingdom against the invaders, and this is likely more or less correct. His principal regiment was Imbizo (sometimes spelt Imbezu) which had been formed in 1871, numbered about a thousand warriors—making it stronger than most or all of the other amabutho—and contained a high proportion of Zansi. It had a fearsome reputation. Zansi were also found in other regiments, but the majority of Lobengula’s warriors were either Enhla or Holi. Indeed, some regiments were entirely composed of Matabele of Shona descent.

  Lobengula’s warriors were armed with traditional weapons, including battleaxes of Shona origin. Some also carried multi-barbed Tonga fish spears from the banks of the Zambezi. Firearms were also employed. In March, for instance, Lobengula had finally distributed the Rudd Concession rifles.

  The dress of Matabele warriors at this date differed somewhat from previous attire, for over the decades a transformation had occurred. New types of headdress had come into vogue, and headbands had almost entirely disappeared. Headdresses were normally made of black ostrich or guinea fowl feathers stitched to a string net. They differed in style (although members of the same regiment reportedly wore the same type) and were normally worn in conjunction with capes made from black ostrich feathers or the tails of jackals.

  By 24 October, the Salisbury and Victoria Columns, were approaching the east bank of the Shangani River, having burnt homesteads and seized livestock and grain en route. On the far bank could be seen a line of high bushy hills or kopjes pierced by a pass. While work on preparing drifts was underway, Forbes and Wilson crossed the river to seek a suitable place to laager and found an open ridge about 1,000 yards from the river. By 3pm two drifts had been prepared and the colum
ns proceeded to cross (covered by men Forbes had sent forward on to the west bank) and made their way on to the ridge where two laagers were formed about 1,000 yards from the nearest hills.

  The laagers were approximately 150 yards apart and connected by thick fences of thorn which enclosed the majority of the draught oxen. Around 80 yards or more to their rear, another enclosure was formed to hold at least 1,000 captured cattle; and other seized cattle were further away on a slight rise some 600 yards or so behind the Salisbury laager, and thus between it and the river, at a point where the native levies were encamped. In an account written just over a year later, Willoughby comments that with the exception of ‘isolated patches of bush, the ground in the vicinity of the laagers was fairly open to a radius varying from 300 to 600 yards.’

  The Battle of Shangani

  A Matabele impi under Mjaan Khumalo, a cousin of Lobengula, was close at hand—it was the force that had failed to make contact in the Somabula Forest—and the following morning it moved in for the kill.

  According to the accounts of Willoughby and Forbes, the impi numbered approximately 5000-6000 men, but Summers and Pagden favour a more conservative figure: ‘It is unlikely that more than 3,500 Matabele were present.’ Ntabeni Khumalo (a grandson of Lobengula who served in Imbizo and recorded his recollections of the war in 1940) declared that the force consisted of three regiments, Insuga (also known as Insukamini), Induba and Inqobo, although other sources also mention Ihlati, Amaveni and Isiziba.