The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (14 page)

The real cause of this enmity was gold, not territory.

The Portuguese regarded all this land as theirs. What had begun as Vasco da Gama's search for Ophir and the discovery of those two dhows loaded down with gold of unknown origin, had ended with their occupation of Sofala port near Beira. They were the colonial presence and the hinterland was their sphere of influence. Theodore Bent would have been well aware of the importance of an east coast port to Rhodes, and he also took his mapmaker, Swan, along with him.

Beira sits on the estuary of the Pungwe river. A few miles south is the estuary of the Sabi river down which Bent believed ancient Shona gold was shipped. Midway between the two is Sofala.

Rhodes commonly used gentleman-spies; in fact, it was almost a condition of working for him. The most notable was Frederick Courtenay Selous, the hunter and animal-specimen collector who explored behind Matabele lines for Rhodes, then made the seamless transition to military scout and led Rhodes' Pioneer Column unerringly to Mashonaland. It was Selous, moreover, who suggested to Rhodes that time was of the essence if he wanted to control King Solomon's mines, because the Portuguese also had their eyes on this inland eldorado.

Was Theodore Bent enlisted in these intelligence operations? The Shona school is convinced he was, hence Rhodes' generous financing of the Bent expedition. Bent arrived in Mashonaland in 1891 when relations between Rhodes and the Portuguese had lapsed into an ugly stalemate. Six months previously a force of about 200 armed natives led by a noted Portuguese explorer, Colonel Paiva d'Andrade, had marched inland to occupy the kraal of the senior chief of the Manicas, Umtasa. Manicaland was situated directly inland from Sofala and the Portuguese claimed it had been their ‘sphere of influence' for 300 years. In fact the Portuguese had never formalised a colonial claim on this part of Africa and had no formal treaties with Umtasa as, say, Rhodes had with Lobengula.

Selous, accompanied by A.R. Colquhoun, Rhodes' first Administrator in Mashonaland, had broken away from the Pioneer Column as it moved up-country and made a dash for the east to see Umtasa. Somehow these two returned with a ‘treaty', granting Rhodes the mineral rights to Manicaland. The Portuguese moved in on Umtasa in response to this. Colquhoun immediately dispatched a patrol of well-armed white police and pioneers to ‘protect' Umtasa, arriving just after the Portuguese flying column.

The British commander, Major Patrick Forbes, entered Umtasa's kraal with a few of his white mercenaries, took the Portuguese by surprise and ‘arrested' them. Forbes then decided to try and take the land all the way to the coast. A small Portuguese fort at Macequece was overrun without much resistance and Forbes decided to push on and see if he could take Beira for Rhodes as well. A major political row had erupted in Portugal over the arrest of Colonel d'Andrade, however, and Rhodes, already in some trouble with Queen Victoria over the cavalier way he had obtained treaties from Lobengula, had Major Forbes recalled.

The Portuguese were not to be mollified. They launched what would be the first of many brutal East African colonial skirmishes with a hastily raised white force from the motherland who bravely battled their way back into Macequece fort via Beira, many dying of malaria. Rhodes' men had, meantime, taken up positions that blocked any further advance into the Shona hinterland and the gold fields. The much-depleted Portuguese militia attacked their position but were driven back by the fire of the seasoned shooters of the British South Africa Company Police and the Pioneers, most of whom had been professional hunters. When the British – there were only fifty of them – advanced the next morning they found that the Portuguese had retreated and abandoned the fort.

When Theodore Bent arrived here a few months later the guns captured from the Portuguese were still on display in the British compound. Bent then reveals: ‘Mr Swan had constructed a map of the route from observations and bearings taken at every possible opportunity by day and by night. And at the same time we had formed opinions on the country from our own point of view.' He adds, sounding as though he was party to the whole plot:

Umtali [the BSAC frontier post] is the natural land terminus of this route and the British South Africa Company hope to call it Manica and to make it the capital of that portion of Manicaland which they so dextrously, to use an Africander word, ‘jumped' from the Portuguese.

There is a legend still told that the defenders of this fort of Massi Kessi were obliged to cast bullets out of gold nuggets when cheaper material came to an end. After this the inland country was practically abandoned to the savages. Old treaties existed but were not renewed; lethargy seemed to have taken entire possession of the few remaining Portuguese who were left here, a lethargy from which they were rudely awakened by the advent of the Chartered Company.

What better argument do we want for the reoccupation of this country by a more enterprising race than these forts abandoned and in ruins, and the treaties with savage chiefs long since neglected – consigned to national archives?

Here we see a secondary use being put to the research Rhodes had paid Dr Theal to do. It was not ‘pure' research to feed Rhodes' interest in Ophir. He was checking on the validity of old Portuguese treaties! And we should also remember that Theodore Bent's brief from the Royal Geographical Society certainly did not extend to scouting rail routes for Rhodes or evaluating Portuguese treaties.

But if Bent was a spy or an agent for Rhodes it was all about to go very wrong. Queen Victoria was not pleased with any of this and she ordered her government to set aside all Rhodes' most recent ‘treaties', although not the original one with Lobengula, and agreed a demarcation of territory with the Portuguese. It created Portuguese East Africa and left Rhodesia landlocked for all time.

Theodore Bent thereafter travels not to Great Zimbabwe, where there is still much work to be done, but to Fort Salisbury where he is welcomed and entertained by the administrators of the British South Africa Company who are now operating to all intents and purposes as the government of Mashonaland.

‘The same motives, namely the thirst for gold,' Bent comments philosophically ‘which created the hoary walls of Zimbabwe and the daub huts of Fort Salisbury, probably the oldest and the youngest buildings erected for the purpose by mankind, ever keen after that precious metal which has had so remarkable an influence on generation after generation of human atoms.'

But behind the philosophising lurk unpalatable home truths about Shona gold. So little of it is left, the whole occupation is turning into a costly farce. Bent attends a depressing first anniversary party:

A grand dinner was given to about eighty individuals at the hotel to celebrate the event: representatives of the military, civil, and business communities were bidden; gold prospectors, mining experts, men of established and questionable reputation – all were there, and the promoters underwent superhuman difficulties in catering for so many guests, and gave fabulous prices for a sufficiency of wine, spirits and victuals properly to celebrate the occasion.

It was ostensibly a social occasion to celebrate an ostensibly auspicious occasion; but one after-dinner speech became more intemperate than the other: the authorities were loudly abused for faults committed by them, real or imaginary; well-known names, when pronounced, were hooted and hissed; and the social gathering developed as the evening went on, into a wild demonstration of discontent.

Finally, Bent goes back to work. From contacts made at this party he learns that the prospectors are mostly not prospecting at all but simply looking for abandoned native workings and then burrowing down in the hope of finding the reef. In the process they have discovered dozens of
zimbabwes
. Almost the only recreation for a prospector is to loot ruins. The Bents mount a new expedition on horseback to the pretty Mazoe valley 25 miles from Fort Salisbury, where in the company of a gold prospector, Mr Fleming, they inspect a row of vertical mine shafts clogged with debris which Bent presumes are connected underground. He also concludes from the debris and large trees growing in the blocked shafts that they have not been worked for years.

On the hill slopes a mile and a half away they come upon a shaft which Fleming had cleared to a depth of 55 feet into which, with some difficulty, they are able to climb and there find ancient horizontal shafts connecting a maze of holes bored into the gold-bearing quartz. Shafts in the nearby Hartley hills go as deep as 80 feet. Bent concludes that these ancient workers had followed reefs with all the skill of European miners: ‘All about here the ground is honeycombed with old shafts of a similar nature, indicated now by the same round depressions in straight lines along the reef where different shafts have been sunk; in fact the output of gold in centuries long gone by must have been enormous.'

Returning to Fort Salisbury, and talking to prospectors whenever he can, Bent concludes that these old workings extend up and down the country wherever there is gold-bearing quartz. Very often they are associated with
zimbabwes
– miles and miles of them up the Mazoe valley, all along the Nswezewe river, in the Tati district, Hartley and Fort Victoria areas: ‘Everywhere in short where the pioneer prospectors have as yet penetrated, overwhelming proof of the extent of the ancient industry is brought to light.'

One of these hunter-prospectors, Mr E.A. Maund, attends the Royal Geographical Society to give a report on the Mswezwe district: ‘On all sides there was testimony of the enormous amount of work that had been done by the ancients for the production of gold. Here, as on the Mazoe and at Umtali, tens of thousands of slaves must have been at work taking out the softer parts of the casings of the reefs and millions of tons have been overturned in their search for gold.' This reference to slaves stems from the discovery of long lines of ‘crushing stones' placed at regular intervals around the workings. Bent observes that there are depictions on Egyptian monuments of gangs of slaves at work chained together in rows. The practice is also described by Diodorus.

The Mining Commissioner in the Mazoe district takes Bent's party to see the perfect model of an ancient
zimbabwe
-protected mining enclave. In a high valley they meet and dine on eland steaks with the white prospectors working the new ‘Yellow Jacket' mine on the site of extensive ancient workings. Overlooking the site they climb a kopje to a ruin where the remaining walls are constructed with a ‘wonderful regularity' to rival Great Zimbabwe. Enough remain standing to show that this gem of a fort had been almost 20 feet in diameter.

Already, however, creeping doubts are setting in that all this might be a literal ‘flash in the pan' at least so far as large-scale modern mining is concerned. ‘Strictures,' Bent reports, ‘have been passed by experts that the gold reefs in the Mazoe valley “pinched out” and did other disagreeable things which they ought not to do.' With rare foresight he also goes beyond this and forecasts: ‘The Mazoe valley is one of the pet places in Mashonaland: the views in every direction are exquisite, water is abundant everywhere, and verdure rich; and if the prospectors are disappointed in their search for gold, and find that the ancient have exhausted the place, they will have at any rate, valuable properties from an agricultural point of view.' Which ignores, of course, the fact that the Rudd concession was restricted to mineral exploitation.

Rhodesia did go on to build quite a healthy little gold industry but it was never eldorado. By the time I arrived in the Mazoe valley it was famous for its irrigated citrus and wonderful orange squash.

Theodore Bent did, however, decide that the prolific ancient gold workings in the Mazoe valley (to the extent that he was prepared to go along with such romantic descriptions) were probably the King Solomon's mines of ancient legend. Bent points out that this was also the opinion of the Portuguese writer, Couto: ‘The richest mines are those of Massapa, where they show the Abyssinian mine from which the Queen of Sheba took the greater part of the gold which she went to offer to the temple of Solomon. It is Ophir, for the Kaffirs call it
Fur
and the Moors
Afur
. The veins of gold are so big . . . they expand with such force . . . they raise the roots of trees two feet.' These riches, says Couto, are traded at three Portuguese markets: ‘Luanhe, thirty-five leagues from Tete south between two small rivers which join and are called Masouvo [Mazoe]; Bacoto, forty leagues from Tete [on the Zambesi river]; and Massapa, fifty leagues from Tete up the said river Masouvo.'

Bent calls this a ‘quaint legend' but concedes that there is ample evidence of ancient alien influence to be found in the old shafts. At the new Jumbo mine in the Mazoe valley he is given fragments of delft pottery recovered when the shaft was cleared. Scraps of Nankin pottery are found in the same spoil. Bent is able to successfully barter for some large Venetian glass beads ‘centuries old; the ancient trade goods given by traders to the subjects of the Monomotapa'.

And then he appears to promote a rumour of his own. I think I know Bent's mind well enough by now, his checks and balances, his prejudices and his strengths (both of which he possesses in potent measure) to make this judgement. He has never previously engaged in fiction – he is frankly too much of a Victorian for that and he knows a book comes next, a book he hopes will earn him scientific and intellectual credibility. So what is this story? ‘It is rumoured amongst the inhabitants of the Mazoe and the Manica that long ago, in the days of their ancestors, white men worked gold and built themselves houses here.' Bent immediately tries to avoid this getting him lodged with the Romantics. ‘The rumour most probably refers to the Portuguese, who at the three above-mentioned places had churches and forts, faint traces of which are still to be found in the district.'

But it doesn't really suggest that, and he knows it. If anyone ever worked gold hereabouts it was ancient Moors, not Portuguese. Bent is resurrecting the idea that there were Semites here once, people who would have looked white to the negroid natives; stone-city-raised Semites from Arabia who engaged ‘thousands of slaves' in the mining of Mazoe gold.