Mashonaland

“ In Mashonaland there exist tens of thousands of acres of fertile land entirely unoccupied. Thanks probably to the Matabele raids, the population is here exceedingly scanty, and when one travels through the long-deserted stretches of country, healthy, well watered, and capable of growing anything, which still exist between the Zambesi and the Limpopo, one cannot help thinking that those who complain of the world being too full, and that there is no opening for colonisation, are a century or two before their time. ”

“ Hence it is very clear to us that the country now called Mashonaland has been inhabited for at least a thousand years by the ancestors of the present barbarous race—a race of men who at one time became powerful and almost civilized, owing to their intercourse doubtless with foreign traders, but who during the later centuries have fallen away into barbarism. ”

“ But the greatest parody of all is at Sarmento itself, a Portuguese settlement on the banks of the Pungwe. Here two handsome coaches, made expressly in New Hampshire, in America, for the occasion, lie deserted near the Portuguese huts. They are richly painted with arabesques and pictures on the panels; ‘Pungwe route to Mashonaland’ is written thereon in letters of gold. The comfortable cushions inside are being moth-eaten, and the approaching rains will complete the ruin of these handsome but ill-fated vehicles. ”

“ Mashonaland, a plateau 4000 ft. high crossed by the Umvukwe Mountains, lying to the NE. of Matabeleland and S. of the Zambesi River, of which its streams are tributaries; is a fertile country, and being traversed continually by cold SE. winds is healthy and bracing; the natives, of Bantu stock, are peaceful and industrious, growing rice, maize, tobacco, and cotton, which they also weave, and working with skill in iron; they live in dread of the fierce Matabele tribes; the country is very rich in iron, copper, and gold, and has traces of ancient scientific gold-mining ”

“ For myself, I have never been beyond the Great River; but many moons ago there came into Mashonaland a stranger who said that he had been one of a band accompanying a white man from afar, who, after much weary wandering, had arrived in the Bandokolo country, and had there died—how I know not. And when the white man died the Bandokolo took his followers and made slaves of them, treating them so cruelly that at last the man who told me these things resolved to escape. ”

“ Approaching Mangwendi’s, and also going between Mangwendi’s and Chipunza’s, our way lay along a very high watershed, on the western side of which rose some of the eastern tributaries of the Sabi River, the most important of which was the ’Msheke. At Makoni’s we reached the highest part of the plateau, and this is, with the exception of some villages on Mount Yenya, the highest inhabited part of Mashonaland. From Makoni’s to Mount Yenya the country is broken; and the descent is very rapid, but on the east of our route the descent is still more rapid and the mountains more imposing. ”

“ Perhaps it will be two years before this line is completed, and it must be done by the cooperation of the two interested companies, the British South Africa and the Mozambique. Between Massi-Kessi and Umtali it will cost a considerable amount of capital if the hills are to be tunnelled. On the flats the swamps will cause difficulties: fevers will play havoc with the labourers, and the rivers and the dongas will have to be bridged.
When this line is completed, I feel confident that Mashonaland will rapidly go ahead. There are in it all the elements of prosperity ”

“ It is a high plateau, fully mineralised, and every report shows that the high plateau is a part where Europeans can live. If we pass from that to the South, we first come to Matabeleland and Mashonaland. There we have had great difficulties in the past. We had a Charter, but not a country. We had first to go in and occupy Mashonaland with the consent of the Mashonas, and then we had to deal with the Matabele. At the present moment there is a civilised government over the whole of that. ”

“ Three months later the rebellion spread to the north-western province of Mashonaland, and there the number of independent and isolated tribes made the task of suppression more difficult. The chief town of Mashonaland is Salisbury, but scattered in the country round were a number of embryo townships connected by precarious roads. Everywhere there was a large native population, and the white residents were separated by many miles of difficult country from their fellows. ”

“ They have a better chance, I think, of increasing in numbers in Zululand than in Mashonaland, in which latter country it is at present impossible to afford them any protection either from natives or Europeans. ”

“ CHAPTER VII THE GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY OF THE MASHONALAND RUINS
The ancient geography of the east coast of Africa is a subject fraught with difficulties on all sides. To begin with, our authorities are not only meagre, but they are men who had no practical knowledge of the subject, and who knew next to nothing of the vast extent of commercial operations which were going on outside the limits of the Red Sea. ”

“ In 1890 Mashonaland was occupied, a vast and fertile territory nominally under the rule of Lobengula, king of the Matabele, which had been ceded by him to the representatives of the Company in return for certain valuable considerations. It is, however, an easier task for savage kings to sign concessions than to ensure that such concessions will be respected by their subjects, especially when those 'Subjects' are warriors by nature, tradition, and practice, as in the present case, and organised into regiments, kept from year to year in perfect efficiency and readiness for attack. ”

“ Selous has done more than any other man to bring Mashonaland into notice, and is credited, together with Cecil Rhodes, with having contributed most to the creation of Rhodesia. The first comprehensive account of Mashonaland was given by him in the Fortnightly Review for May, 1889, when he described the country as a land of perennial streams in which thirst is an unknown quantity ”

“ On the third day after leaving Chipunza’s, one of our men had the good luck to shoot an antelope, an event which was hailed with delight by all in our camp. We had never in our lives been so long without meat, and the want of it was beginning to be felt by all. On the fourth day we crossed the Odzi River, the boundary between Mashonaland and Manicaland. It is a fine stream even here, with a good body of water even at the end of the dry season, on its way to join the Sabi River, just where we touched it a few weeks before. ”

“ He was one of those devil-may-care, reckless, wandering fellows, so many of whom are to be found upon the frontiers of civilisation in Southern Africa. I first saw him, outspanned at breakfast, near Palla Camp on the Crocodile River, with a number of other men, going into Mashonaland upon the same errand as himself. He was the life and soul of the party, and was superintending the “bossing-up” of the meal. For the next week our waggons moved on together and I saw a good deal of Strangeways. He was a tall, handsome fellow of thirty or thirty-one. ”

“ That once exhausted, is there anything else worth bringing a ten-mile journey to the coast?
In the late very cool partitioning of Africa we may congratulate ourselves in having obtained possession of Mashonaland, a district healthy enough for colonisation, and apparently rich enough to repay it. The tsétsé, that great enemy to the cattle-breeder, will disappear before the approach of civilisation, and the killing off of the game, especially the buffalo, its standing dish, as it has done many times already in African lore. I am speaking of the tracts south of the Zambesi. ”

“ Lutzi did not interest us much; it is a scattered and poor-looking kraal on a bleak hill, with large stone semicircles, where the men of the village can sit and smoke sheltered from the wind; so on hearing that the ’Mtoko’s kraal was really about six miles off, we set out for it about ten o’clock on the following morning.
There is much that is different in this country [318] from what we had seen elsewhere in Mashonaland, enough almost to point to a difference of race ”

“ The native of Mashonaland, for example, living in a country blessed with a fruitful soil and splendid climate, protected by our rule from the raids that used to devastate his lands, reaping his crops in security, assisted by the Administration in hard times of rinderpest or locust scourge, is now more than ever loth to work. ”

“ Farming operations in Mashonaland should offer special advantages, owing to the proximity of the various gold-fields, which have always afforded markets at most remunerative rates for all farm produce, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future in an even greater degree. ”

“ Reserve supplies in the country did not amount to anything dependable, and could only last the defenders for a few weeks at most.
The rebels in Mashonaland occupied chiefly the districts round Salisbury and the Salisbury–Umtali road, and the district east and south–east of Charter. They are by nature far less warlike than the Matabele, and are not given to attacking in the open, but content themselves with murdering helpless farmers, waggon and other small parties, and then retire to their fortified kraals and cave strongholds if attacked. ”

“ Deer of every conceivable species are to be seen still quietly grazing within shot of the road; buffaloes, zebras, lions, hyenas, wild pigs, nay, even the elephant, may be found in this corner of the world. Disappointed as the sportsman may have been with the results of his exploits in Mashonaland and the high veldt, he will be amply rewarded for the fatigues of his journey to Beira by finding himself in a country which would appear to produce all the kinds of wild animals that came to Adam for their names. ”

“ The practice was not one which a white authority, responsible for setting up an orderly administration of Mashonaland, could be expected to tolerate. Frontier incidents at Fort Victoria, and a claim by the Matabele to be allowed to slaughter some of the Mashona whom they accused of cattle-thefts, precipitated a conflict which in reality had been inevitable from the first. Jameson, hastily equipping a handful of volunteers and police, hurled them at the hitherto invincible ‘impis’ of Lobengula. The force numbered in all under 700 white men. ”

“ The ruined buildings of Mashonaland and Matabililand have excited in recent years an amount of interest and curiosity which is disproportionate to their number, size, and beauty, but by no means disproportionate to their value as being the only record, scant as it is, we possess of what has been deemed an early South African civilization. ”

“ A picked commando of 1,000 men would possibly be sufficient to keep control over Mashonaland, while 1,500 at Mafeking would suffice to cut off the Bulawayo division, and in that case the troops which are now occupied about Mafeking and Kimberley could be better employed and with likelihood of good results, by being pushed South. If a sufficient number of men are left behind to dispute an eventual sortie from Kimberley and Mafeking, there is little benefit obtainable in the investment of towns which probably can hold out six or eight months. ”

“ One lot stuck in the mud in the Pungwe River for twenty–four hours; a train ran off the line and killed several of the horses, another train collided with the wreckage, and Colonel Alderson and others on the engine had to jump for their lives. But in spite of all obstacles the force made its way rapidly into Mashonaland. It turned and attacked Makoni’s position, defeating him and taking his fortified kraal; 200 of the enemy were killed, 350 head of cattle and a number of prisoners taken, our losses being 4 killed and 5 wounded. ”

“ This is a time-honoured industry in Mashonaland. Dos Santos alludes to it in his description, and so do Arab writers of the ninth and tenth centuries, as practised by the savages of their day.3 In Chibi’s country iron-smelting is a great industry. Here whole villages devote all their time and energies to it, tilling no land and keeping no cattle, but exchanging their iron-headed assegais, barbed arrow-heads, and field tools for grain and such domestic commodities as they may require. I am told also of villages which, after the same fashion, have a monopoly of pot-making. ”

“ May the venture turn out better than many another has done, and not end in that very questionable blessing, a rum-civilisation!
The influx of immigrants into Mashonaland will, in time, with the gold and diamond seeking population further south, tend to minimise the power of the Boers over the native tribes. Dutchmen are slow colonists, and will not be able to hold their own with the incomers in enterprise, or in a few years in numbers or power, and the evil influence and oppression they have at times exercised upon the black race will be at an end. ”

“ And after waiting many moons for an opportunity it came, and he succeeded. But when he arrived in Mashonaland he was so weak and ill with fever and starvation that, after lingering for a short time, he died.
“But before he died he told me many wonderful things about the Bandokolo. He said that they were little people, about so tall (indicating with his hand a stature of about four feet eight or nine inches) . Also, that instead of being black, as I am, they are almost white; that they live in great houses dug out of the rocks of the hillside ”