adminSaul Gwakuba Ndlovu
THE month of September is of much significance to the modern history of Zimbabwe in that it is associated with two important occasions. The first, on the dark side though, was occupation of the country, of Mashonaland to be exact, by the Pioneer Column of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) on 12 September 1890, and second with the amalgamation of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress (SRANC) led by Joshua Nkomo with the (Salisbury) City Youth League (CYL) on 12 September 1957.
The Pioneer Column flew the British flag for the first time on the Kopje on that day in 1890 to mark its occupation of the country. Its members were military men selected by Cecil John Rhodes in the Cape Colony, of which he was the prime minister, and were armed to the teeth. Nonetheless, 67 years later, leaders of the black African people of this country decided to unite and launch a liberation struggle to regain their land.
But that was not the first time the country’s indigenous people united to fight against colonial forces. In 1693, Monomutapa (pronounced Munhumutapa) and Mambo (referred to officially by some historians as Changamire) combined their forces to confront and kick out Portuguese colonial troops who had seized large areas of what we now call Manicaland, Mashonaland East and Mashonaland Central.
We are not aware, however, in what month that combined military operation was carried out, but of interest to all Zimbabwean patriots, however, is that Monomotapa and Mambo recognised as early as the 17th century that their strength was in their unity.
Some 264 years later we find the SRANC led by Nkomo, and the CYL headed by James Robert Dambaza Chikerema and George “Bonzo” Nyandoro recognising the same truth.
The enemy were no longer the Portuguese, but the British whose head in Southern Africa was Rhodes. But although there had been a change in the colonial dramatis personae, their aim was identical, and it was to occupy and exploit various territories abroad in the names of their respective mother countries.
To harmonise their colonisation of Africa, a number of European nations gathered in Berlin, Germany, in 1884-85 with the German government as the host, to share the African continent among themselves.
We may find that utterly difficult to understand, let alone to appreciate, today after the First and the Second World Wars intervened, followed by the League of Nations and the United Nations anti-colonial charters.
The 1942 Atlantic Charter of Sir Winston Churchill (Britain) and Theodore Roosevelt (the United States) also had an anticolonial tone.
When the Pioneer Column invaded Mashonaland, the aims of all colonial powers included finding lands on which to settle some of their unwanted (anti-social) and excessive nationals .
Typical examples of such people were settled in Australia. Hundreds of some of those criminals were sent to South Africa in the early 1820s, but the Boers along the Cape coast would not allow the ship carrying them to dock. It was later ordered to proceed to Australia.
Many Portuguese settlers in Angola were also criminals convicted in Portugal but dumped in Angola where they were let loose to do as they pleased. Some were sent to Mozambique, others to Goa, some to Brazil, Guinea (Bissau), Sao Tome and/ or wherever Portugal had a colonial territory.
Many of those convicts were social degenerate; some were actual social rejects deemed unsuitable to live in what were described as “civilised” societies in the metropolitan countries. Some Pioneer Column members belonged to such discredited social classes; guttersnipes, in fact, who had been found guilty of one or other crime in their countries of origin.
Another aim of colonialism was to exploit colonised lands for the production of food for the various metropolitan nations.
Britain, for example, heavily relied on New Zealand and Australia, Canada, Kenya, Nyasaland, Southern Rhodesia, India, Egypt, Cyprus, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago for a variety of everyday consumer commodities ranging from butter, lamb, oranges, rice to fresh water fish.
Raw materials such as wool, cotton, timber, leather and a range of minerals were produced in the colonies but for processing and value addition in the metropolitan states. That generated a great deal of employment for the colonial nations but relatively much less for the colonies themselves.
Land from which the various foods were produced, and mines from which minerals were extracted, woodlands from which timber was harvested were owned and exploited by the white colonial settlers or their descendants, and not by the indigenous non-white people.
It was to achieve that objective that Rhodes promised to give each of the 692-member Pioneer Column large areas of land and mining claims, 3 000-acre farms and 15 gold mine claims, as reward for participating in the colonisation of Mashonaland.
Of those 692 Pioneer Column members, 192 were prospective miners and 500 were armed freebooters. That was the initial group that used field and machine guns to displace and dispossess the Seke, the Mhembere, the VaChawasha, the Nyamweda, the Mufakose, and the Chinamboro communites within about 70km radius of Fort Salisbury (Harare) for the first month or two as from 12 September 1890.
By June 1896, that is, slightly less than three years after the hoisting of the British flag on the kopje, the BSAC had spread its dispossessive and oppressive administrative machinery as far north as Mount Darwin, and as far west as where Francistown in Botswana stands today.
Some oral historical tradition say that King Lobhengula’s opinion was that the BSAC territory covered by the Rudd Concession ended along the Hunyani River, which he referred to as the Ganyane River, Ganyane means “wild dog” in SiNdebele.
Rhodes fortune seekers had within the first three years or so turned the BSAC Concession area inside out in search of a legendary gold bonanza believed at that time to be in this part of Africa. Having failed to locate the fabulously rich gold area in Mashonaland, the BSAC cast its covetous colonial gaze on Lobhengula’s kingdom to the west.
But for the company to move into that state, there had to be a pretext. That was created by Rhodes’s right-hand man, Dr. Leander Starrr Jameson, who said that some of Lobhengula’s people had stolen some BSAC telegraph wire near Fort Victoria, now Masvingo.
He and Rhodes had obviously secretly agreed to attack King Lobhengula’s territory.
The plan was put into action when Dr. Jameson refused to co-operate with King Lobhengula’s regional administrator and most senior representative, Mgandane Dlodlo, who went to Fort Victoria to investigate the alleged theft.
Not only was Dlodlo hindered and insulted by Dr. Jameson, but he was shot and killed in cold blood as he was leaving the BSAC’s Fort Victoria operational centre. That was the beginning of the 1893 Anglo-Ndebele War that led to the defeat and disappearance of King Lobhengula in November of that year.
Among indigenous people who aided the BSAC forces against those of King Lobhengula were some 700 men recruited by Chief Zimuto.
They were, in fact, porters, and oral tradition has it that they came as far as Gadadi and that none of them was injured during the several armed clashes between the two forces.
There is a strong opinion, however, that the BSAC authorities used force and threats to make Chief Zimuto supply the company with the personnel. Another opinion is that Chief Zimuto had entered into some alliance with the BSAC against King Lobhengula earlier to protect his people against Lobhengula’s military raids, and that he used the 1893 war to show his bona fides to his allies.
The administrations pro-Fort Victoria regional bias continued into the period well past the country’s attainment of what Britain called “internal self-government” on 1 October 1923 as reflected by the large number of recruits from that region in the British South Africa Police (BSAP) force as well as in the Rhodeisan army.
The situation changed in the early 1960s when one of the sons of that region, Michael Mawema, acted as the National Democratic Party president while Joshua Nkomo was abroad. Thereafter, the region continued to contribute actively to the liberation struggle through patriots such as Eddison Zvobgo, Leopold Takawira, Henry Hamadziripi, Samuel Munodawafa, Nelson Mawema, Shuvai Mahofa and a large number of others most of whom were in the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (Zanla).
- To be continued
derick.khumalo