The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (6 page)

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 imperialist. 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.

The charter received its royal assent at the end of September 1889, unbeknown, of course, to Lobengula. Rhodes moved immediately. He sent F.R. Thompson back to Lobengula to insist that the King – who still hadn't actually accepted the rifles – recognise the Rudd concession in front of witnesses and withdraw previous opposition. Remember, in Lobengula's mind, we are here still only talking a mining concession.

Reminiscent of the outcome of Rhodes' all-night session with Barney Barnato for control of De Beers, Lobengula found himself faced by a united phalanx of white men, the majority of whom had done deals with Rhodes. Lobengula studied them and observed: ‘Tomoson has rubbed fat on your mouths. All you white men are liars, but Tomoson you have lied the least.' Lobengula gave the acknowledged concession into the safekeeping of the one man in this company whom he trusted, the missionary Robert Moffat, who immediately ‘yielded to Dr Jameson's earnest importunity and gave it to him, to take away with him'.

Queen Victoria broke the news in some style to Lobengula that Rhodes was now her chosen man. A party of five officers and men of the Royal Horse Guards in full regalia pitched up in Bulawayo on 15 November carrying a letter which advised the King:

The wisest and safest course for him to adopt and one which will give least trouble to himself and his tribe, is to agree, not with one or two white men separately, but with one approved body of white men, who will consult Lobengula's wishes and arrange where white people are to dig . . . the Queen therefore approves of the concession made by Lo Bengula to some white men who were represented in his country by Messrs. Rudd, Macquire and Thompson.

Finally, the Queen, overriding Lobengula's dismissive response to her suggestion of a British representative at his court, nominated Moffat to the post. Moffat had received an advance copy of the letter which he had had time to digest before the guardsmen arrived. He and Jameson decided to doctor it. Rhodes' name was substituted for some ‘white men', Jameson not Thompson was named as Rhodes' principal representative and the reference to the Queen's representative was simply left out. Moffat himself translated this laundered version to the King. Lobengula was not actually fooled. When the Guardsmen left he told them ‘that the Queen's letter had been dictated by Rhodes and that she, the Queen, must not write any more letters like that one to him again'. Unfortunately he was so impressed with the Guards' glittering accoutrements he did not see through to their true colours. The officers commanding the unit had been secretly sizing up Lobengula's army and advised Jameson that ‘the fighting strength of the Matabele had been underestimated, and that it cannot be reckoned at less than from 15,000 to 20,000 men' – most of whom were now spoiling for a fight.

Rhodes was not concerned. He sent the famous scout, Selous, behind the lines to make his own assessment and speeded up his plans for the occupation of Ophir. Selous also arranged some insurance for himself. In an article in the British
Fortnightly Review
Selous all but named the Mazoe valley in Mashonaland as Ophir, calling it ‘the fairest and perhaps the richest country in all South Africa . . . an utterly deserted country roamed over at will by herds of eland and other antelope'. What he did not mention was that in September 1889 he had obtained a dubious Mazoe concession from two headmen of the Korekore tribe, the chief, Negomo, having refused him. The paper they signed said they had also never paid tribute, directly or indirectly, to the Portuguese. Let us also not forget that it was Selous who had previously recognised Mashonaland and its gold as a Portuguese sphere of influence.

When Selous returned to Cape Town in December he offered to sell his concession to Rhodes. The terms were never publicised but one version is that Rhodes gave Selous 100 square miles of Mashonaland under the protective umbrella of the charter and its police force and £2,000 in cash. Selous was thereafter Rhodes' man and led the Pioneer Column to Ophir, having persuaded Rhodes to follow a route which cleverly bypassed sensitive Matabele kraals.

Deliberate confrontation with the Matabele – ‘to get it over and done with' – had been actively considered. In October 1889, E.A. Maund discussed with Jameson the difficulties of occupying Ophir, and concluded that they should employ a kommando of 500 Boers who would be given farms as compensation, ‘and a police of 1,500 to protect the diggers'. Rhodes was obviously behind such a final solution as is revealed in a letter Maund had written to Rutherfoord Harris: ‘I have spoken freely to Helm [another missionary confidant in Lobengula's court] and Carnegie, and they with Moffat are convinced that Rhodes is right in his decision that we will never be able to work peaceably alongside the natives, and the sooner the brush is over, the better. There is a general idea here that if this advance is not made in the coming winter, the Boer filibusters will make it then, and that will be an additional incubus.'

On 6 January 1890, Selous independently added his weight to these time constraints in a long letter to the
Cape Times
. ‘Now or never is the time to act,' he said to his principals.

On 7 December, Frank Johnson and an American with experience of the Indian wars, Maurice Heany, signed an agreement with Rhodes to ‘raise in South Africa an auxiliary European force of about 500 men for service under the British South Africa Company.' With this pocket army they undertook ‘to carry by sudden assault all the principal strongholds of the Matabele nation and generally so as to break up the power of the Amandebele as to render their raids on surrounding tribes impossible, to effect the emancipation of all their slaves and further, to reduce the country to such a condition as to enable the prospecting, mining and commercial staff of the British South Africa Company to conduct their operations in Matabeleland in safety and peace.' Lobengula was either to be killed or, preferably, taken hostage. This licence to kill had a life of one year and it commanded a suitable reward for its two principals – £150,000 and 50,000 morgen of land. Rutherfoord Harris was the only witness to the agreement.

Thankfully it was never carried out but the circumstances of its cancellation are shrouded in mystery. Johnson later claimed Heany got drunk and talked to an official who in turn leaked it to the High Commissioner in Cape Town. Rhodes backed away from the plan, called Selous in Kimberley, and agreed the course of non-confrontation. Jameson went personally to Lobengula's court with a cover story. He told the King that under the terms of the Rudd Concession, a party of miners were coming to dig primarily in the old Tati field on the Missionaries Road. Jameson knew that this well-trodden field would not overly concern Lobengula and he added a codicil that if there was insufficient gold at Tati he wanted permission to move the column of miners to a more promising area.

Two months later, on 31 January, this transparent ruse worked. Lobengula said a mining caravan could move on to Mashonaland – he even offered labour to help clear the road – and Jameson sped south to make the arrangements. Rhodes had anticipated Jameson's successful diplomacy. On 10 January he presented the British High Commissioner with the details of the mining party, to be led by Selous: ‘some 80 wagons, accompanied by 125 miners [white] and about 150 [black men] for clearing and making a road for wagons; these with the men for the wagons, would represent all together a body of between 400 and 500; besides these a certain number of mounted police to act as scouts.' The commander of the Bechuanaland Border Police would provide 200 of his own men and 250 British South Africa Company police would be committed to the protection of the column. The former would remain in Bechuanaland, the latter would stay with the column. After crossing into Matabeleland, the BSAC police would be under the command of its own officers. Military considerations were the responsibility of a close friend of Rhodes, Sir John Willoughby, Bt.