House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe. Christina Lamb
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the time the cows would be moving.
She knew they were lucky to have cows and not just a small hoe to plough with manually like many of the villagers, but the mombes were obdurate creatures and she hated the boys laughing at her as she tried over and over again to yoke them. All the villages ploughed down the hills rather than across like the white man because it was easier. No land was ever left fallow as it was all needed for the cattle and growing maize, particularly in those years when the maize grew no higher than her waist.
She had never been to Chivhu where the whites had their farms but she had heard villagers say that the fields there had special machines for spraying water for times when the rains did not come, and long golden corn, not at all like the stunted brown stalks that grew in their fields and often withered away. They told of cows fatter than huts and chickens that laid giant eggs. My father said that the hones of our ancestors and cattle were under those fields and one day we would get them hack from the whites.
Land had not been the main aim of the first white settlers when they left Cape Town for Mafeking in April 1890 to gather in a long line of ox-wagons behind a Union Jack and head off across the Limpopo or Crocodile River for Mashonaland. Stories of hills of gold, even more dazzling than the Rand, the great gold ridge of Johannesburg then making many fortunes, had spread through the Cape Colony and Europe. It was known that there had been gold mines in Mashonaland in the time of the kings of Mono-matapa, the African rulers who had traded with the Portuguese who settled on the Mozambique coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the kingdom had mysteriously collapsed, leaving nothing but the ruins of a vast granite fortress at Great Zimbabwe. Rumours abounded that Mashonaland was the site of King Solomon's mines or the fabled land of Ophir referred to in the Bible, and the 200 members of Cecil Rhodes's Pioneer Column had each been promised fifteen gold claims.
Mashonaland was located on the Great Central African plateau between two mighty rivers, the Limpopo to the south and the Zambezi to the north. It was next to Matabeleland, which was ruled over by Lobengula, King of the Ndebele, whose father Mzilikazi had led his people north to escape the spears of Shaka Zulu and the guns of the Boers. Almost as warlike as their Zulu cousins, the Ndebele considered the Mashona their subjects and sent frequent raiding parties to steal their cows.
Aqui, like all Mashona children, knew that Lobengula had been tricked by Rhodes into granting British rights for mining and colonization of these lands. Rhodes was already fabulously wealthy from his control of the diamond mining industry in Kimberley and gold mines in Johannesburg but believed that even greater riches lay further north. He also dreamed of one day extending Anglo-Saxon control to all the land from the Cape to Cairo. He saw that Bismarck's Germany and the Portuguese throne which controlled territory to the west and east were already casting covetous eyes the same way, as were the Boers to the south. So, in 1888, he sent three emissaries led by Charles Rudd to King Lobengula's kraal in Matabeleland to request a monopoly on prospecting rights.
The Ndebele king must have presented a bizarre sight. Six feet tall and weighing perhaps twenty stone, he was naked apart from a modest loincloth and spread his massive bulk on a throne made of packing cases for condensed milk tins. On the wall hung a painting of Queen Victoria of whom he was a great admirer. But the name of his kraal was Gu-Bulawayo, which meant ‘Place of slaughter’, and behind its high palisade of wood he maintained one of the most powerful armies of any African kingdom.
Lobengula was illiterate but highly intelligent and wavered over Rudd's request. He was finally persuaded by the arrival of Rhodes's special emissary, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who had alleviated the king's gout with morphine injections. Encouraged by Dr Jim, as he was known, Lobengula put his mark to the so-called Rudd Concession in return for a pension of £100 a month, 10,000 rifles, 100,000 rounds of ammunition and a gunboat on the Zambezi. Similar deals were made with chiefs further north in what would become Zambia and Malawi.
The king later claimed the document had been deliberately mistranslated. The missionary who read it to him had assured him that the British would not bring more than ten white men and ‘would abide by his laws and be as his people’. Even so the story made Aqui angry. Lobengula was given sugar and he gave away the country-they have that weakness, the Ndebele. Lobengula sent two envoys to London with a letter of protest to Queen Victoria, all to no avail. Despite the method by which the concession was obtained, Rhodes was granted a royal charter to make treaties, promulgate laws, establish a police force, and award land throughout Mashonaland and Matabeleland, an area of 175,000 square miles-about three times the size of England.
Initially known as Zambezia, the name was changed to Rhodesia in his honour, while the land north of the Zambezi became Northern Rhodesia. In the picture in our schoolbook he looked like a very small man to have two whole countries named after him. I couldn't think of anyone else who did, even the Queen of Britain who we used to sing asking God to save every morning. I thought she must have done something very bad to need so many children so far away asking God to save her.
With the charter granted, the Pioneers had set off on horseback or in their covered wagons through the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland, skirting the edge of Matabeleland with its Ndebele warriors, toward the unknown land of the msasa tree. Their guide was the big game hunter Frederick Selous whose bestseller A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa had made him a hero in Britain. To protect them they had been assigned 300 paramilitary police from Rhodes's new British South Africa or Charter Company who were armed with Martini-Henry rifles and a steam-powered naval searchlight that would sweep the plains at night.
It was hard work hacking their way through the wilderness even though they had taken hundreds of African labourers to cut and dig. The dryness of the season meant the column spent much of its time enveloped in a huge dust cloud and their boots ‘rotted like paper’. Several Pioneers fell sick and died, keeping the Jesuit priests who had accompanied them busy with funerals. Many oxen succumbed to tsetse fly and almost 100 horses died of horse sickness while several wagons of supplies had been washed away in crocodile-infested rivers or jammed on stony stream-beds. Their perilous journey would inspire Rudyard Kipling to write in ‘The Elephant's Child’, one of his Just So Stories, of the ‘great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees’.
The natives laughed at these strange arrivals in their unsuitable thick clothes even though the ngangas were warning of bad times ahead. The white men were undeterred and pitched their canvas tents in Masvingo, which they renamed Fort Victoria after their Queen. From there they rode off to see Great Zimbabwe and were astonished by its soaring walls made of ‘even shaped blocks of granite fitted so closely that a blade of a knife could not be inserted’. Although it was overgrown they saw ‘enough to realise that their extent and importance had not been overstated’, and excitement mounted.
They continued north, past Chivhu or Enkeldoorn, up to a marshy spot they named Fort Salisbury, after the Prime Minister. A 21-gun salute boomed out over the plains as on 13 September 1890, five months after setting off, they hoisted the Union Jack on a hill called Harare after a local chief.
A year later their women started arriving, first nuns and ladies of the night, a strange vision in all their petticoats, then wives. There were gold rushes all over the land, including in the hills around Chivhu, but instead of the imagined quartz reefs studded with lumps of gold they found malaria and famine. So they turned to the next available prize-land.
Each settler was awarded 3,000 acres for just sixpence-the price of a British South Africa Company revenue stamp-and farms were pegged out regardless of whether there were people living there. The Jesuits were rewarded for their services with 12,000 acres for a mission station. Soon the whites had taken the best land on the Mashonaland plateau, chasing away the area's previous inhabitants, stealing their cattle and forcing them to flee to stony ground. When you went there you couldn't think you were going to visit a person but a baboon climbing in all those mountains and bush. To pay the hut tax of ten shillings a year that the whites charged them, many of the men had to go and work in the mines in South Africa or the farms of the settlers.
Aqui's father said their own people were fortunate to have been granted communal land which might not have been grassy like that of the whites in Chivhu, and was away from the places with rain, but at least some things grew,