The Sunday News
OUR country has begun to prepare for the commemorations and celebrations of its political and military heroes and heroines who featured prominently in the struggle against British imperialist encroachment into what we now call Zimbabwe from 1890 up to 1980 when national independence was won by the black people who selflessly sacrificed theirtime, properties, and gave their sweat, limbs and lives.
The period covered by the patriotic activities of those gallant sons and daughters of this land may be divided into three parts.
The first part was the time the imperialist force set foot on our soil up to when they attacked and ran over King Lobhengula’s territory and seized his and state assets; the second part was from the time when they spread their administrative machinery all over the country, and the third and final period was when they were challenged legally, morally and militarily, leading to their defeat.
In the first part, we see the black people being treated by the white settlers virtually like vermin that had to be eliminated from the face of the earth to make room for “the people without knees,” so-called because they wore breeches that more or less covered their knees.
Those people used technologically superior arms of war that by comparison made our traditional weapons comprising spears, shields, knobkerries, clubs, bows and arrows, look like ridiculous children’s toys.
Among their deadly weapons, they had the Gatling machine gun first produced in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. It had six barrels and could fire about 600 rounds per minute as it revolved round a central shaft.
Another lethal weapon they had was the five- barrelled .450 calibre hand cranked Gardiner machine gun which was more or less similar to the Nordenfeldt machine gun, another weapon which they used initially to kill Chief Seke’s people who were protesting against the white settlers establishing a camp at what they later called Fort Salisbury.
The attack on Chief Seke’s people occurred four or five days after the British South African Company’s Pioneer Column raised the British flag on the Harare Kopje on 12 September 1890. The Pioneer Column’s other firearms were the 1887 Lee-Metford bolt action (Mark 1) .303 caliber rifle capable of firing eight staggered rounds before reloading.
In addition, they were armed also with the 1853-66 Enfield Snider side-hinged block .557 caliber rifle, plus the 1871 Martinii-Henry single shot .450 caliber falling block rifle that had featured in the Franco-Russian War.
To crown all that arsenal which included pistols and revolvers, they had literally tons of dynamite which they used at the very slightest opportunity to blast caves into which they suspected black people to have hidden.
Those were the types of weapons faced by the residents of the region lying within a 60km or so radius following the hoisting of the Union Jack on the Harare Kopje, to show that Britain had seized that land.
The occupied land increased literally daily as armed bands of Pioneer Column surveyed and seized areas and areas of it further and further from Fort Salisbury in all directions. While the BSAC was terrorising various communities around Fort Salisbury, the person behind all that, Cecil John Rhodes, and his right-hand man, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, were plotting how to create an alibi to attack the Ndebele King Lobhengula’s territory.
An alleged theft of some telegraph wires near Fort Victoria was the alibi they needed, and the first black leader they shot dead without any provocation, and from the back, was one of King Lobhengula’s most senior military officers, Mgandane Dlodlo, who had gone to Fort Victoria to investigate the telegraph wire theft allegations in early October 1893.
Mgandane was among the first heroes of this country. It was immediately after his death that Rhodes and his chief administrator Dr. Jameson declared war on King Lobhengula’s territory.
Rhodes and Dr. Jameson sent a large force with three machine guns among other weapons, to march against King Lobhengula’s capital KoBulawayo. Bloody battles were fought along the way, at Battlefield, on the banks of the Shangana River, and at Gadadi, near Ntabayezinduna. The Ndebele army lost not because it lacked courage but because of inferior quality weapons. Heroes faced the BSAC’s fire spitting machine guns, and many were killed, some were maimed, some were captured and yet some survived and lived to tell the historic tale. It would be appropriate to remember those gallant sons who faced Rhodes’ deadly firearms and died with honour in defence of our fatherland.
Meanwhile, those that were being violently harassed, displaced and dispossessed during the BSAC ruthless armed campaign around Fort Salisbury were the Chishawasha, the Mhembere, the Mashayamombe, the Chinamhora, the Nyandoro, the Seke and, of course, the Mufakose communities, to name a few.
The Mufakose are people of the Mhofu totem (Shava) whose origin dates back to the distant historical horizons when they were still agnetically one with the Nyashanu, Mapanzure, Zingoni and other clans of the Vahera extraction.
The Mufakose lived predominately in an area called “Gomba” which stretches roughly from Christon Bank up to the Mazoe Citrus Estates. It was in that area, Gomba, that Charwe, who was the embodiment of the Mbuya Neyanda spirit lived. She was a descendent of the Mufakose Mhofu clan.
In the Mhondoro region lived Chief Mashayamombe among whose subjects was Sekuru Kaguvi, also a spirit medium.
These two were to liaise closely with Mkwati, a Mwali/Ngwali/Mwari intermediary originally based in the Dome Hill (Ntabayezinduna) area but later sent to liaise with Kaguvi and Mbuya Nehanda after the defeat of King Lobhengula’s forces by the BSAC in 1893. The three in consultation with a number of chiefs in Mashonaland decided to launch a guerilla warfare to kick the white settlers out of the country.
The most suitable terrain for the type of guerilla military operations the three had in mind was the Gomba, an area in which Mbuya Nehanda ruled supreme as a source of inspiration, spiritual intercessor, moral and cultural guide and guard to the community, as well as an acknowledged link with both the past and the future. The three were the politico-cultural leadership for the military campaigns they envisaged. What was lacking were militarily suitable personnel to operate modern firearms to match those of the settler white forces.
That personnel was to be recruited and trained by Mhasvi Nyandoro, a former member of the BSAC black police force generally referred to as “the Black Watchers”.
In Matabeleland the BSAC forces had won the day in November 1893 because of machine guns and King Lobhengula had fled across the Zambezi River to his cousin, Mphezeni Jele, where he died years later.
An armed contingent commanded by Major Allan Wilson was sent to follow and capture the King, but was ambushed and wiped out virtually to a man by the king’s rear guard commanded by Mtshana Khumalo, a man who has not been recognised at all as one of the sterling heroes of Zimbabwe.
Incidentally, King Lobhengula died some years later and was buried near the town of Lundazi, off the Zambia-Malawi Road, and in 1980 his grave was being well looked after by a small Ndebele community living in that area of Zambia’s Eastern Province.
Let us go back to Matabeleland at the beginning of 1896, a month or two before the Ndebele Rebellion began to see what was taking place.
The BSAC administration had in 1894-95 ordered members of its “Black Watchers” to seize livestock, particularly cattle from any (black) male adult who was in poll tax arrears. That order followed the confiscation of several hundreds of thousands of cattle from black people by the BSAC after the 1893 Ndebele-British War. The explanation given for the livestock seizure was that it belonged to King Lobhengula.
In January 1896, the BSAC administrator, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, had secretly taken a well-armed force through Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) to Johannesburg to topple Paul Kruger’s Boer regime allegedly because it was oppressing Britons especially on the Reef (Rand).
The Ndebele leadership realised that in the administrator’s absence, and with him such a large number of the company’s security forces, they could successfully rise against the white oppressors.
One of their complaints was that a large number of their cattle were dying of an unknown disease. It was, in fact, rinderpest which had first been reported in the Middle East in 1889 and had swept down the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts and hit Matabeleland on 3 March 1896. Black people had never experienced such a bovine plague before, and blamed the white settlers for it.
Yet another complaint was that the BSAC administration recruited Black Watchers mostly from the then socially lower ethnic classes, and least from the Nguni ethnic group, and that those socially lower people were using their newly acquired authority to harass and victimise people of formerly higher social standing.
It is of interest, however, to point out that the BSAC administration did not care much at all about a recruit’s ethnic origin but looked at his physical build and general appearance. The bigger the recruit’s size and the uglier, the better because the best Black Watcher was one whose appearance created fear among the black people, and not his social status.
The Ndebele leaders decided to launch their guerilla military operations before Dr. Jameson and his force had returned. He and his force had, in any case, been intercepted and arrested by Paul Kruger’s security personnel and were in jail.
The first casualties of the Ndebele Rebellion were a Dr. Langford and his brother-in-law, a Mr. Leman, who fell to the spears and knobkerries of Ndebele revolutionaries on 25 March 1896 near the Macici River in the Fort Rixon locality.
The roaming guerilla fighters did not touch Mrs. Langford and her suckling baby. But both were said to have died of natural causes some days later, and had left the party’s wagon where Dr. Langford and Leman had fallen.
The guerilla campaign covered most of the Matabeleland region, and several hundreds of white settler were killed. The senior commanders of that campaign had decided to keep the routes to and from South Africa open because they believed that most white people would desert the country for fear of their lives.
Indeed, a few did, especially women, children and missionaries including the Rev David Carnegie of the London Missionary Society whose station, Centenary Mission, was to the south-east of where the Figtree railway siding was sited in 1897. He returned shortly after the ceasefire. However, more white poured into the country and they were soldiers, dispatched by the British government. Their commander was General Sir Fredrick Carrington. Another British military officer who got involved was Colonel Baden-Powell who later founded the Boy Scouts movement, originally called “the pathfinders.”
White military volunteers from South Africa, notably from the then British colonies of Natal and the Cape, came in large numbers to support the BSAC. Rhodes came to his troops in Matabeleland, having joined a mounted column in Salisbury under the command of Lt Col. Robert Beal sent to releave the fear-ridden whites in Bulawayo.
While the situation was quite fluid in Matabeleland, the situation in Mashonaland gave a very false impression that all was well.
On 15 April 1896 a government gazette stated: “As is well known, a rising amongst the natives in Matabeleland has taken place, and although His Honour, the Acting Administrator and the council have no reason to believe that there is any probability of a similar rising of natives in Mashonaland, yet they consider it advisable to point out that should the natives in Mashonaland take advantage of the present crisis and attack and loot isolated stores, mining camps and farms, it is important to impress upon such persons as are in outlying and isolated positions the necessity for vigilance . . .”
As the BSAC administrators and most white settlers were deeply concerned about the Matabeleland security situation, the Mazoe region (the Gomba area) was not so certain that the white settlers there were safe as was shown by a message from that area’s Justice of the Peace, James Dickson, to Salisbury on about 24 April 1896.
“Would it be too much to ask that we — here in Mazoe — be notified by wire when anything startling occurs; it would appease our anxieties.”
We find, however, that on about 26 April the BSAC officials in Salisbury were uneasy about the situation in the Lomagundi District after reports had reached the administrators that Ndebele battalions had been seen in the Gwelo, Hartley and Iron Mine Hill regions.
The BSAC secretary in Salisbury wrote to the district’s mining commissioner, a Mr. Jameson, advising that the white people scattered in his area had better consider retiring to Salisbury for their own security. Mr. Jameson replied that all was quiet in Lomagundi District.
At the end of May, Mr. Jameson (the Lomagundi district mining commissioner) wrote to the Salisbury-based Chief Native Commissioner, a Mr. Taberer, and enclosed a list of 14 names of white people in his area requesting the administration to supply them with Martini-Henry rifle ammunition.
The BSAC administrators immediately dispatched a runner carrying 1 000 MH rifle rounds. The situation was changing fast, much faster than the white land grabbers had anticipated.
Black heroes were actively organising on the fields, and visible as well as audible evidence was there on the ground, and, by the way, Mr Taberer, the Chief Native commissioner, had infiltrated the countryside with black detectives whose intelligence and information indicated that an uprising was surely being prepared for in Mashonaland, and would occur sooner than later. (To be continued)
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo- based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. [email protected]
