The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  Rhodes had two stone copies made for the gateposts of his house in England. The Norfolk pine staircase at Groote Schuur was refitted with newel-posts mounting carvings of the bird and ground-floor doors were fitted with protectors in the shape of the Zimbabwe birds. One cannot avoid the presence of the birds in that house even to this day. I worked in Rhodes’ library on this book and there is no doubt that they have a strange, brooding presence. Rhodes took the real bird on fund-raising trips to Europe when he was seeking backers for an organisation called the British South Africa Company, in reality the cover name for his private army of occupation.

  The British government was still refusing to have anything to do with an official colonisation of Ophir even though it appeared to be a genuine eldorado. But if Rhodes, who was now Prime Minister of South Africa, wanted to undertake this dubious work for them at his own expense that was a different matter.

  Posselt records that Rhodes later told him: ‘I take that stone bird you found in the Zimbabwe ruins; I place it on the table, and tell that where this bird came from there must be something else.’ Within a year Rhodes and the bird had attracted sufficient funds and Queen Victoria signed a Royal Charter legitimising the British South Africa Company’s invasion of Matabeleland and the occupation of Mashonaland.

  Before he left England, Rhodes also took the Zimbabwe bird to the Royal Geographical Society and suggested that they support a ‘proper scientific expedition’ to explore the lost city led by an eminent Fellow of the Society, Mr J. Theodore Bent. Rhodes offered to contribute generously to this expedition; indeed, he provided most of the funding.

  TWO

  The Conquest of Ophir

  Queen Victoria refused to grant a charter to Rhodes’ British South Africa Company until he had obtained a signed ‘concession’ from Lobengula. She had no intention of being held responsible for licensing an invasion, especially one which could easily go disastrously wrong, even if it did add a golden prize to her empire. The Queen and her ministers must, of course, have realised that the Charter would allow Rhodes to invade and occupy Mashonaland. Perhaps she thought the condition of a concession would put a stop to the whole dubious business: Lobengula was no fool and would surely recognise the risks of letting Rhodes loose in his domains?

  If that was the case then they both sorely underestimated Rhodes, who sat down to work on this problem with two of his closest friends, Leander Starr Jameson and Rutherfoord Harris. Both had practised as doctors in Kimberley which was now Rhodes’ town. Jameson would become Rhodes’ right-hand man (many have suggested that the relationship was more intimate than that) and Harris a specialist in Rhodes’ dirty work. Jameson had a mercurial temperament and he enjoyed taking huge risks for Rhodes. Many paid off but when he tried to take over the Transvaal from the Boers, only Rhodes’ intervention saved him from execution. Harris quite simply did whatever Rhodes told him. Jameson once described Rutherfoord Harris as ‘as thick as they’re made’. A more stable business associate of Rhodes from the Kimberley days, C.J. Rudd, was also involved in the plan.

  Essentially they had to work out an offer that Lobengula could not refuse. Rudd had already been dispatched to Lobengula’s court to see if he could buy a gold-prospecting concession from the Matabele king. He joined at least three other concession hunters there. The Portuguese had also finally decided to do something about their lapsed concessions in the region and sent envoys to Chief Mutasa whose land adjoined Mashonaland to the east. Lobengula was in no hurry to give concessions to anyone and kept Rudd hanging around for weeks until Rudd concluded that only one course was open to him – what might tempt Lobengula were rifles.

  The Matabele – a renegade offshoot of the Zulu – were famously disciplined under seasoned military tacticians. The aggressive young warriors were keen to rid their country of hungry white men and they begged their generals and Lobengula to provide them with the opportunity to ‘wash their spears’. For most concession-hunters, including the British emissaries at Lobengula’s court, the idea of a Matabele army armed with modern weaponry was enough to chill the blood and thus far they, the Germans, Portuguese and Boers, had baulked at the idea of giving Lobengula military ordnance even in return for Shona gold.

  Rhodes, as was his wont, called for an expert analysis of the problem and upon receipt of an assessment by British-trained military advisers decided on perhaps his greatest gamble. Rhodes was told that without expert weapons instruction and target practice Lobengula’s army would, quite literally, shoot itself in the foot. Issuing warriors trained in the use of the spear with modern rifles would reduce their efficiency rather than enhance it, at least in the early stages of any war. Armed with this intelligence Rhodes sent Rudd back to Lobengula with orders to offer the Matabele king 1,000 Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles, 100,000 rounds of cartridges, a gunboat on the Zambesi (or £500 in cash) and £100 a month. Rudd took £5,000 in gold coins in his saddlebag as a down payment. In those days it was a king’s ransom and it was enough. This king, who by then was weary of badgering concession hunters and worried that the Boers might just ride in and take his kingdom, accepted. Better to give Rhodes a gold-mining concession than risk all that.

  That left just one problem for Rhodes, albeit a major one. Trading guns to the natives was highly illegal under South African law, especially for a member, as Rhodes was, of the Cape parliament. The mere removal or conveyance of such articles across the Cape borders was similarly prohibited. Rhodes arranged for the rifles to be moved secretly, admitting in a letter to a member of Rudd’s group: ‘With great difficulty I have managed to get them through the Colony and Bechuanaland.’

  These rifles are pivotal to our story. Without them Rhodes would not have got his concession and his charter. Without the presence of Rhodes and his money in Mashonaland none of the three scientific investigations, which would subject the Zimbabwe culture to minute scrutiny, would ever have happened. He and the Rhodes Trust subsidised all three.

  Rutherfoord Harris, now a Cape Town merchant, applied for a licence from the resident magistrate to send a shipment of rifles to Kimberley. The licence was issued because no borders would be crossed. Once in the vast De Beers sidings – Rhodes’ very private bailiwick – they vanished, just as an even larger illicit arms shipment would vanish a few years later when the same team tried to provide supportive ordnance for Jameson’s abortive raid on the Transvaal.

  Two clandestine teams were used to take packets of 500 rifles apiece across the border under permits issued by a Bechuanaland official. This smuggling did not quite go unnoticed but another official, Sir Gordon Sprigg, who made enquiries about the shipments was urged to look the other way, or more precisely not to look ‘into matters which do not affect the Cape Colony’. The correspondence actually reached the Colonial Office in London but there they looked the other way too. A note in the file observes: ‘Sir Gordon Sprigg evidently thinks that the rifles … were meant for Lobengula (hinc illae lacrymae) and I dare-say he isn’t far wrong.’ They were already well on their way to Lobengula. Jameson and Harris crossed into Bechuanaland ostensibly as hunters, picked up the cached rifles, and eventually arrived at the Matabele border post where they were met by one of Rudd’s partners, J.R. Macquire, a British barrister and friend of Rhodes from Oxford who was there to see that the Lobengula concession was couched in the right legal terms.

  In December 1888 Lobengula fixed his mark to a document, the key paragraph of which read:

  Unto the said grantees their heirs, representatives and assigns jointly and severally the complete and exclusive charge over all metals and mineral situated and contained in my Kingdoms, Principalities and dominions together with full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to win and procure the same and to hold, collect and enjoy the profits and revenue if any derivable from the said metals and mineral subject to the aforesaid payment and Whereas I have been much molested of late by divers persons seeking and desiring to obtain grants and concessions of Land and Mining rights in
my territories I do hereby authorize the said grantees, their representatives and assigns to take all necessary and lawful steps to exclude from my Kingdoms, Principalities and Dominions all persons seeking land metals, mineral or mining rights therein and I do hereby undertake to render them such needful assistance as may from time to time require for the exclusion of such persons and to grant no concessions of land or mining rights from and after this date without their consent and concurrence.

  Rudd immediately took the road for Cape Town, leaving the lawyer, Macquire, at the court to defend the concession against the attacks Rudd was sure would come. And come they did but first there was the most extraordinary incident that could well have ended in the concession which paved the road to Ophir never seeing the light of day.

  A pond called the Lemoen pan upon which all travellers relied for their water was found to be dry. A note fixed to a thorn tree told Rudd there was water 2 miles away but in searching for it he became hopelessly lost in the bush. Rudd dropped the concession, his money bag and a farewell letter to his wife down an ant bear hole, convinced he would not last the night. Wandering around in the dark, Rudd eventually heard the barking of dogs and found their Tswana owners camped nearby. They gave him water and, amazingly, he was quickly able to recover his possessions.

  Thereafter, to make up lost time, he made a gruelling dash in a mule-drawn wagon: ‘We drove on through the night in stretches of two hours with one and a half hour intervals.’ Two days later he drove in to Kimberley and handed the concession to Rhodes, a record for the distance that would not be broken until the railhead was extended to Bulawayo. They travelled on to Cape Town and presented the document to High Commissioner Robinson who, as Rhodes commented, ‘raised no difficulties as to the guns’. Rhodes, of course, interpreted this as a deed of occupation, which it is not. The powers to protect finds of ‘metals and minerals’ are somewhat ambiguous but it remains a mining concession, nothing more. The other concession-hunters immediately claimed the Rudd Concession was a fake and Portugal rejected it outright.

  The Consul for Portugal in Cape Town, Eduardo A. de Carvalho, published a denial of Lobengula’s claim to Shona territory:

  Whereas a notice signed by order of LO BENGULA, king of the Matabeles, has lately been published in the Newspapers giving notice that the mining rights in Matabeleland, Mashonaland and adjoining territories have already been disposed of, and soliciting the assistance of all neighboring Chiefs and States in excluding all persons entering these territories hereafter, I EDUARDO A. DE CARVALHO, Consul for Portugal, having received instructions, make it known that His Most Faithful Majesty’s Government does not recognise the pretended rights of LO BENGULA to Mashonaland and adjacent territories, over which the Crown of Portugal claims Sovereignty, and that therefore, all Concessions of Land or Mining Rights granted, or that may be granted, in future in the said territories of Mashonaland and adjacent are null and void, as the Government of Portugal does not, and will not, acknowledge any such concessions.

  Lobengula, a clever and ruthless man in his own right, suddenly saw the full tidal wave of colonialism building on his borders. Press reports from Cape Town were read to him, no doubt with a little imparted tarnish from Rudd’s competitors, which said that the King had sold his country and the grantees could if they wished bring an armed force into the country, depose him and put another chief in his place, ‘to dig anywhere, in his kraals, gardens and towns’. Lobengula arranged to have the following notice published in the Bechuanaland News:

  I hear it is published in the newspapers that I have granted a Concession of the minerals in all my country to CHARLES DUNNELL RUDD … As there is a great misunderstanding about this, all action in respect of said Concession is hereby suspended pending an investigation by me and my country.

  Signed, Lobengula

  British lawyers quickly advised Rhodes that this did not actually revoke the concession; indeed, while suspended, it confirmed that Lobengula had signed it.

  Lobengula then asks a competing concession-seeker, E.A. Maund, to take two of his indunas to London to intercede with Queen Victoria, but he is too late. The lion at his gate is the inexorable Cecil John Rhodes. Lobengula’s appeal to the Queen is that Rhodes is trying to ‘eat’ his country. True, but Rhodes has by then already consumed much more sophisticated adversaries – Barney Barnato for one – than this Matabele potentate.

  The British fête the indunas, turn out the Guards, show them the Zoo, the Bank of England, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s. The indunas speak to each other on the new ‘telephone’, and are taken to the first big field-day military tattoo at Aldershot.

  There is psychological double-dealing even at this level.

  Macquire suggests to F.R. Thompson, the third member of Rudd’s party, that when Lobengula heard from his emissaries that ‘he was not strong enough for the white people, [he] will trek [north]. There is I think always a possibility of this and we should be prepared to buy all his rights from him if he shows the least sign of making a move.’

  The British government, still wary of Rhodes’ unbridled expansionism, hand the indunas, through Lord Knutsford, Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, the following bizarre reply to take home to their king:

  Lo Bengula is the ruler of his country, and the Queen does not interfere in the government of that country, but as Lo Bengula desires her advice, Her Majesty is ready to give it, and having therefore, consulted Her Principal Secretary of State holding the Seals of the Colonial Department, now replies as follows:

  In the first place, the Queen wishes Lo Bengula to understand distinctly that Englishmen who have gone out to Matabeleland to ask leave to dig for stones have not gone with the Queen’s authority, and should not believe any statements made by them or any of them to that effect.

  The Queen advises Lo Bengula not to grant hastily concessions of land, or leave to dig, but to consider all applications very carefully.

  It is not wise to put too much power into the hands of 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 arriving have to eat?

  Umsheti and Babaan (the indunas) say that Lo Bengula asks that the Queen will send him someone from herself. To this request the King is advised that Her Majesty may be pleased to accede.

  This is the most extraordinary reply. It suggests that Queen Victoria has realised that she has been deceived by Rhodes and senior British cabinet ministers and is now seeking to reverse these wrongs by sending a personal negotiator to sort it all out. Lobengula, delivered of this conciliatory message, points out that, ‘I have not asked the Queen to send anyone to me.’ This may have been a considerable mistake because nothing more is heard of royal intercession and within weeks Rhodes is granted his Charter.

  Chartered companies had their prototypes in the seventeenth century with the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company but by Rhodes’ era of empire the charter system – essentially the licensing of commercial colonialism – had been reduced to the British North Borneo Company, the Royal Niger Company, and the Imperial British East Africa Company. For the British government the advantage of these charter companies was that they fell short of full colonial responsibility, leaving the host country under no great obligation to intervene should the enterprise founder. Everyone knew that a war between the militant Matabele and Rhodes’ Charter Company was a real possibility and they were right. In fact there would be two wars.

  The British premier, Lord Salisbury, was at this time presiding over a British Empire at the apogee of its power but with all of Europe probing its weak spots. Salisbury was personally less than enthusiastic about more colonial expansion but he was certainly not prepared to compromise Britain’s lead, least of all to the Portuguese.

  But the factor which tipped the balance in favour of Rhodes was, paradoxically, David Livingstone, whom history has shown to have been as inexorable as Rhodes and almost as great a British imperia
list. Livingstone’s wife had died after he insisted she and other Church of Scotland missionaries join him on the malaria-infested Zambesi. When many of these missionaries died too, Livingstone opened a new string of missions in the healthier Shire highlands of Nyasaland. Livingstone was by now the great hero of African exploration and everyone’s favourite missionary for his unswerving assault on the slave trade.

  For the Portuguese, however, this little crop of Celtic religious institutions stood square in the way of their proposed trans-African linkage of Angola and Mozambique which would also secure them Ophir. Lord Salisbury at first attempted to stop the Portuguese by doing a deal on the disputed land, and the Portuguese initially agreed on condition that they got the Shire highlands. All of Scotland was up in arms when this deal leaked, with 11,000 ministers and elders of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland petitioning against it.

  Lord Salisbury then decided that Britain might strengthen its own claims to the hinterland by making new treaties with tribal chiefs, superseding the ancient claims of the Portuguese. A young African expert from the Colonial Office, Harry Johnston, who was fluent in Portuguese, was chosen for this assignment, but Salisbury’s Treasury baulked at the costs. Rhodes stepped in and offered to pay, actually sending Johnston a cheque for £2,000 – a huge sum in those days – along with the suggestion that he widen his sphere of operations with the money. Lord Salisbury, who knew little of Rhodes at this time, asked Lord Rothschild about him and was told that Rhodes was already ‘good for a million or more’. Salisbury saw the chance to bring down a number of birds with one stone. He could clip the wings of the Portuguese, earn the righteous thanks of the Scots, stop Lobengula making life difficult for him with the Queen, and have Rhodes pay for it. Under a charter, Ophir would remain firmly within the British sphere of influence and with luck there was money to be made. If it all went wrong the upstart, Rhodes, would be blamed.