These were Zulu people, led by a great field general named Mzilikazi. Mzilikazi had been a military leader under the legendary king Shaka Zulu. But after a rift with the king in 1823, Mzilikazi led a contingent loyal to him north, across the Limpopo River, into what would later become Southern Rhodesia, and then Rhodesia, and in the current chapter of this history, the country we now call Zimbabwe. Mzilikazi and his band wandered for a number of years, conquering local clans wherever they were encountered, killing freely and burning villages to the ground. Once, when Mzilikazi got separated from his forces and was presumed dead, one of his sons took charge. When Mzilikazi unexpectedly returned, he immediately executed the son and all who had supported him.
Eventually Mzilikazi settled his people in a rugged region called the Matopos Hills, where they became known as the Matabele, and the area under their control Matabeleland. The Matabele remained warlike, measuring their wealth in the livestock they owned and the number of enemies they had killed. The displaced tribe, a group called the AmaShona, fled to the north. The conflict between these two groups continues to this day; Robert Mugabe, the longtime president of Zimbabwe and a member of the Shona tribe, is responsible for many atrocities against the Matabele.
Mzilikazi died in 1869. Kuruman, the son of his senior wife, disappeared mysteriously. Lobengula, another son by a lesser wife—Mzilikazi had two hundred wives—seized control, killing those who opposed him. It was to be a brutal reign, maintained through regular executions of anyone suspected of disloyalty. Sometimes the charge was witchcraft, though no excuse was needed. Lobengula settled himself in a cluster of huts surrounded by a stockade—a kraal—to the north of the Matopos Hills that came to be known as Gu-Bulawayo, “The Place of Slaughter.” This would one day become my home.
Toward the end of the 1800s, white ivory hunters crossed over the Limpopo River and into Lobengula’s land. They included the famous explorer and elephant hunter Frederick Courteney Selous. In 1888, a contingent representing Cecil Rhodes, the soon-to-be prime minister of the Cape Colony and head of the British South Africa Company, arrived at Lobengula’s kraal looking to negotiate a monopoly on gold and other mineral deposits. The talks stalled, as other white adventurers—Dutch Boers and the Portuguese—tried to convince Lobengula he was being swindled. As tensions escalated, it seemed that Lobengula might shortly resolve the impasse by simply killing every white man he could find.
At the eleventh hour, a Scottish physician named Leander Starr Jameson arrived on the scene. Jameson was named after an American tourist, Leander Starr, who had saved Jameson’s father from drowning. Because of poor health, Jameson had gone to South Africa in 1878 and started a medical practice at Kimberley, where he treated many influential people. He also became a close friend and confidant of Cecil Rhodes. Jameson traveled to Gu-Bulawayo at Rhodes’s behest and calmed the situation there by treating Lobengula for gout and an eye condition. Lobengula was so delighted that he made Jameson an inDuna—an adviser and ambassador. Jameson was the only white man to have undergone the initiation ceremonies for this honor.
Jameson concluded a deal with Lobengula granting exclusive mining rights to the British in exchange for money and guns. It was stipulated that Lobengula would remain the ruler of his land, and anyone coming into it to dig would have to acknowledge his authority. The agreement was signed on October 3, 1888—the starting date for British colonization of Matabeleland.
Lobengula soon regretted his concession to the British and threatened war against the white colonists. There was animosity on both sides. Even the elephant hunter Selous, who had been Lobengula’s friend and supporter, was disillusioned by the Matabele. On a visit to England in 1889, Selous was invited to a breakfast by the Anti-Slavery Society in honor of two Matabele envoys. Selous declined, explaining in a letter, “It does strike me as incomprehensible that your Society above all others should have chosen to so honor the envoys of a tribe such as the Matabele…a people who, year after year, send out their armies of pitiless, bloodthirsty savages and slaughter men, women and children indiscriminately—except for those just the ages to be slaves…” Selous was referring to the Matabele’s treatment of the Shona.
On September 12, 1890, a military volunteer force of settlers, organized by Cecil Rhodes and guided by Selous, founded Fort Salisbury, named after Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister at the time. Located about 250 miles northeast of Bulawayo, Fort Salisbury subsequently became known simply as Salisbury, the colonial capital. It is now called Harare.
In 1893, Leander Starr Jameson, by then the administrator for Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, ordered the Matabele’s armed regiments out of the area of Gu-Bulawayo. This was a direct challenge to Lobengula, and war became inevitable. Since the whites were badly outnumbered, Jameson decided he should strike the first blow. Troops were gathered in Salisbury and in neighboring Bechuanaland, now Botswana. A third column was raised at Fort Victoria, under the command of an officer named Allan Wilson.
The three forces met at Gu-Bulawayo, but Lobengula had vanished. Dr. Jameson ordered a pursuit, and on December 3, 1893, colonial soldiers reached the banks of the Shangani River, 120 miles north of Gu-Bulawayo, at sunset. Captain Wilson took twelve men to reconnoiter the far bank, intending to return before dark. But when Wilson discovered Lobengula’s camp, a gathering of seven thousand armed Matabele, he sent back a message saying that he would remain on the far side of the river for the night and attack at first light to capture Lobengula. Twenty men were sent across to reinforce Wilson’s scouting party.
The next morning the thirty-two-man Wilson patrol found itself surrounded by thousands of Matabele. Wilson summoned three men to cross back over the river for help. One was Frederick Burnham, an American from Minnesota, who had come to Africa looking for more adventure after fighting in the Indian wars. He was joined by Pearl Ingram, known as Pete, another American, and William Gooding, an Australian. Burnham, an experienced scout, told Wilson that he thought reaching the other side was impossible, but that he and his two companions would try. Fighting their way through the Matabele, then swimming the flood-swollen Shangani River, they discovered the main force fighting for its life against a Matabele ambush. There would be no more reinforcements coming.
The Wilson patrol ringed their horses around themselves and shot them to provide a protective barricade. A fierce battle was waged until their ammunition ran out. Every man was wounded. Wilson was among the last to die. Later, the Matabele warriors told the story of Wilson’s valor. The badly wounded men had loaded their rifles and passed them to Wilson, who continued to fire. When the ammunition was spent, the men of the patrol who could stand rose and sang “God Save the Queen.” Wounded in both arms, Wilson, staggering and without a weapon, advanced toward the Matabele. Though one of the Matabele stabbed him, Wilson continued his approach. The warrior shouted, “This man is bewitched; he cannot be killed!” and threw away his spear. Wilson then fell forward on his face, dead. The Wilson patrol had been outnumbered by more than two hundred to one.
Allan Wilson’s “last stand” was one of the Rhodesian origin stories that I learned and revered as a boy. Though my parents had come from other places, I never thought of myself as anything but Rhodesian. To me, men like Selous and Jameson, Wilson, and Rhodes were heroes—founding fathers as noble and courageous as the founders of the United States, where I have lived for many years and of which I am now a citizen. Like this country’s founders, Rhodesia’s were men of their time, brave and far-sighted, but also perhaps imperfect and dependent on a class system based on race that was fraught with inequality and was ultimately unsustainable. The bones of Allan Wilson and his men were buried at the Matopos Hills, at a place Rhodes named World’s View. Rhodes was buried there in 1902, and later his friend Leander Starr Jameson was placed in a grave beside him. A monument to Wilson and his men stands there today, unmolested despite the current strife in the country.
Lobengula died two months after the destruction of the Wilson p
arty, knowing that the inexorable advance of the white men could not be resisted forever. Before his death he compared himself and his kingdom to a fly that had been eaten by a chameleon: “The chameleon gets behind the fly, remains motionless for some time, then he advances very slowly and gently, first putting forward one leg and then another. At last, when well within reach, he darts his tongue, and the fly disappears. England is the chameleon, and I am that fly.”
Although Lobengula was gone, the Matabele army had not been defeated. In March 1896, there was open rebellion once more. With first the Matabele, then the Shona three months later, the tribes erupted in violence, slaughtering hundreds of white settlers—a shocking 10 percent of the European population. The Second Matabele War, as it is now known, is celebrated in present-day Zimbabwe as its First War of Independence.
During the Second Matabele War, the Gu-Bulawayo morphed into Bulawayo. It was besieged by the Matabele forces, and a defensive encampment was established there. The situation was grim—each evening nearly a thousand women and children slept on the ground within an inner defensive wall of wagons. Rather than wait for attack, the settlers mounted patrols, called the Bulawayo Field Force. Their leaders included Selous and also Frederick Burnham, one of the Wilson patrol’s three survivors. These quick-strike parties patrolled the countryside, rescuing settlers as they could. Although outnumbered, they soon attacked the Matabele directly. Twenty men of the Bulawayo Field Force were killed and another fifty wounded within the first week of fighting.
Relief forces arrived in late May 1896 to break the siege. An estimated fifty thousand Matabele retreated to their stronghold in the Matopos Hills south of Bulawayo. The turning point came when Burnham and a young scout named Bonar Armstrong made their way through to the Matopos Hills looking for the spiritual leader of the Matabele, Mlimo, who claimed to be invulnerable to the white man’s bullets. Burnham and Armstrong tethered their horses near the mouth of a cave where Mlimo lived, a sacred place to the Matabele. When Mlimo returned, he started his dance of invincibility with the Matabele looking on in awe from outside. Burnham shot Mlimo through the chest. He and Armstrong then fled on horseback just ahead of a thousand stunned Matabele warriors in pursuit. The two men outran their pursuers all the way back to safety at Bulawayo.
That autumn, Cecil Rhodes, accompanied by Burnham, went unarmed into the Matabele camp in the Matopos Hills and persuaded the warriors to lay down their arms, ending the Second Matabele War in October 1896. Within a year white colonists had successfully settled in much of the territory known as Southern Rhodesia. In 1953 Southern Rhodesia joined with Northern Rhodesia, across the Zambezi River to the north, and with Nyasaland, to form the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The Federation lasted ten years, until Nyasaland broke away and became Malawi and Northern Rhodesia became Zambia. Alone again, Southern Rhodesia became just Rhodesia in 1965. That same year, in an attempt to quell a rising call for integration of the government, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith issued the Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom. This would lead to years of unrest and ultimately civil war.
Frederick Selous had been wounded during the siege of Bulawayo. Afterward, he returned to his ranch not far from Bulawayo and rebuilt his house at Essexvale, which had been burned by the Matabele, who also stole all of his cattle. The house, where Selous watched elephants from his veranda, was situated on a bend in the Lunga River, near where I went to school. My stepfather later owned this ranch. The epic saga of imperialism and conquest that was Rhodesia mingled in me with a deep love of that place and its native people. Friends today say, usually with suspicion, that I am a colonial.
But how could I not be?
And so I was born in wild Africa, in Bulawayo, less than a lifespan after the Second Matabele War. The Matopos was one of my favorite haunts. I loved to visit the cave where Frederick Burnham shot Mlimo, where I lived with ghosts past, and where the history of Rhodesia felt alive to me. The cemetery at Rhodes’s World View stood atop a granite hill. I climbed there often, to sit among the graves and the Wilson memorial, and to look out over the valleys below. We used to pick the small “resurrection plants” from between the rocks. To all appearances the plants were brittle and dead. When taken home and put in water, they turned green again.
This was my heritage, the story of my country. The places from which my family had come were abstractions to me—remote and alien. My English grandfather had emigrated to Australia in 1893, where he taught chemistry at Scotch College in Melbourne and authored several widely used science textbooks. Grandpa, a tall, elegant figure, always wore a three-piece suit with a hat. He carried a walking stick or rolled-up umbrella at all times, regardless of the weather. He smoked, always using a cigarette holder, and carried his cigarettes in a silver case. I only met him once. He came to stay with us for six months during the African winter, from March until August 1952, when I was five. I remember him as mysterious and aloof.
My father, George Arthur Jamieson, was born on Palm Sunday, March 23, 1902, in Gawler, South Australia. I don’t know much about his early life, though it was apparently colorful. He became a doctor, earned enough to invest in racing horses and gold mines, and was on one occasion thrown out of Raffles, the famous Singapore hotel, for being drunk and disorderly. Later in life he was reserved. I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice. He was thin, just over six feet tall, and had a mustache. He wore a suit and waistcoat most of the time, and smoked Old Navy cigarettes. Strangely, he sounded English. Apparently his father would not permit him to speak in an Australian accent.
My grandfather and grandmother in 1908. My father is on the left.
During the Second World War, by then a middle-aged bachelor, he went to Britain and joined the Royal Air Force, rising to the rank of wing commander. His primary duties were medical, but he also flew missions over France. Posted in Scotland, he became aware of a young woman who worked on the base as a plotter in the fighter operations room, moving small placards around on a map with a long stick to track the locations of planes aloft. Janet Winifred Pascall was eighteen, twenty years younger than my father. She was almost six feet tall, pretty and sure of herself. And she was used to the attentions of the men on the base. One day my father came up to her and announced that he owned a yacht and planned to go sailing later that day. If she cared to join him, he said, she should be at the dock at three in the afternoon. She was.
They married in 1945.
My parents told me little about the war, but my mother once mentioned the distress she experienced at hearing over the radio the screams of pilots shot down in their burning planes. She had been drinking and laughing with many of them the previous night in the pub. After the end of the war, my father’s adventurous nature took over. They moved to Southern Rhodesia, where he set up practice as an ophthalmologist and ear, nose, and throat doctor. My mother and my brother, who was then a small baby, came out in late 1946 on a troop ship under appalling conditions. When she arrived at the docks in Cape Town, all of their luggage had been lost. They were delayed a few days before embarking on the three-day train trip through southern Africa to Bulawayo. My mother received a warm welcome from my father at the train station in Bulawayo. I was born eight months and two weeks later.
My mother’s parents eventually came to live with us at Raigmore. I remember their first visit when I must have been a few years old. They flew out from London in a civilized fashion, before jet aircraft were in commercial use. They came in a flying boat that landed on a series of large rivers as it progressed southward. They would anchor at nightfall and dine and sleep on the plane. I suppose they must have landed on the Nile, and the Congo, and the great lakes of Africa. Their final water landing was on the Zambezi River above the Victoria Falls at Livingstone. They then took another airplane to Bulawayo.
For several weeks my parents had been telling me that I was finally to meet Granny and Grandpa. I was excited, even though I was not sure who Granny and Grandpa were. Since the
re was no municipal airport at Bulawayo, commercial planes landed at the military airbase, where my father, who had served in the RAF reserve, was always welcome. After I met my grandparents at the airport, I continued to ask, “Yes, but where are Granny and Grandpa?” The concept of extended family was new to me, because we lived so far away. During this trip, my mother’s parents decided to move to Africa to live with us.
I am not sure my father was entirely happy about this, but he built them a house seventy-five yards from ours. My grandfather became my great friend and confidant. When I was confined to bed for three months with brucellosis at about the age of ten, he used to play draughts (checkers) with me. I got to know him well during that time. Grandpa liked to play bowls at the Bulawayo bowling club. Twice a week he would come out of the cottage wearing a green striped blazer and white trousers, with special bowling shoes. He carried his bowls in a little case, inscribed “WWP.” These were his initials, Walter Wilfred Pascall, but he said it stood for “World’s Worst Player.” That couldn’t have been true, because he represented Southern Rhodesia in the Empire Games in Australia.
Life at Raigmore had a comfortable colonial rhythm and formality that I found agreeable. Our parents did not coddle us in any way. On the contrary, they were physically remote from us, loving but not demonstrative about it. The children were to be seen and not heard, and were certainly not allowed to be an inconvenience. We dressed for dinner every evening without exception, my father in black tie and Chris and I in jackets and ties. The meal was attended by our houseboy, Simon, who was of course black and I thought handsome in his starched white uniform and red fez. We had a nanny, Emily, a soft, round Matabele woman, who wore a blue dress with a starched white apron and white cap. I loved the smell of her skin, always scented with the Palmolive soap she used. She had trouble pronouncing Palmolive and called the soap “Plumleaf insopi,” insopi being Zulu for soap, a European invention. When we sat outside on the sunny afternoons, I would trace patterns and do drawings on her skin with a twig. I loved Emily and spent a lot more time with her than my parents. We would sing the English nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin” in Zulu. I spoke Zulu better than I spoke English until I went off to boarding school. Emily was part of the family and lived in a house at the back of the garden.
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