CHAPTER XV

FROM BULAWAYO TO FORT SALISBURY--MATABILILAND AND MASHONALAND

Bulawayo means, in the Zulu tongue, the place of slaughter, and under the sway of Lo Bengula it deserved its name. Just sixty years ago Mosilikatze, chief of the Matabili, driven out of what is now the Transvaal Republic by the Dutch Boers who had emigrated from Cape Colony, fled four hundred miles to the north-west and fell like a sudden tempest upon the Makalakas and other feeble tribes who pastured their cattle in this remote region. His tribe was not large, but every man was a tried warrior. The Makalakas were slaughtered or chased away or reduced to slavery, and when Mosilikatze died in 1870, his son Lo Bengula succeeded to the most powerful kingdom in South Africa after that of Cetewayo, chief of the Zulus. Of the native town which grew up round the king's kraal there is now not a trace--all was destroyed in 1893. The kraal itself, which Lo Bengula fired when he fled away, has gone, and only one old tree marks the spot where the king used to sit administering justice to his subjects. A large part of this justice consisted in decreeing death to those among his _indunas_ or other prominent men who had excited his suspicions or whose cattle he desired to appropriate. Sometimes he had them denounced--"smelt out," they called it--by the witch-doctors as guilty of practising magic against him. Sometimes he dispensed with a pretext, and sent a messenger to the hut of the doomed man to tell him the king wanted him. The victim, often ignorant of his fate, walked in front, while the executioner, following close behind, suddenly dealt him with the _knob-kerry_, or heavy-ended stick, one tremendous blow, which crushed his skull and left him dead upon the ground. Women, on the other hand, were strangled.[46] No one disputed the despot's will, for the Matabili, like other Zulus, show to their king the absolute submission of soldiers to their general, while the less martial tribes, such as the Bechuanas and Basutos, obey the chief only when he has the sentiment of the tribe behind him. One thing, however, the king could not do. He owned a large part of all the cattle of the tribe, and he assumed the power to grant concessions to dig for minerals. But the land belonged to the whole tribe by right of conquest, and he had no power to alienate it.

Moved by the associations of the ancient capital, Mr. Rhodes directed the residence of the Administrator, Government House, as it is called, to be built on the site of Lo Bengula's kraal. But the spot was not a convenient one for the creation of a European town, for it was a good way from any stream, and there was believed to be a valuable gold-reef immediately under it. Accordingly, a new site was chosen, on somewhat lower ground, about two miles to the south-west. Here new Bulawayo stands, having risen with a rapidity rivalling that of a mining-camp in Western America. The site has no natural beauty, for the landscape is dull, with nothing to relieve its monotonous lines except the hill of Tsaba Induna, about fifteen miles distant to the east. The ground on which the town stands, sloping gently to the south, is bare, dusty, and wind-swept, like the country all round. However, the gum-trees, planted in the beginning of 1894, when the streets were laid out, had already shot up to twelve or fifteen feet in height and began to give some little shade. Brick houses were rising here and there among the wooden shanties and the sheds of corrugated iron. An opera house was talked of, and already the cricket-ground and racecourse, without which Englishmen cannot be happy, had been laid out. Town lots, or "stands," as they are called in South Africa, had gone up to prices which nothing but a career of swift and brilliant prosperity could justify. However, that prosperity seemed to the inhabitants of Bulawayo to be assured. Settlers kept flocking in. Storekeepers and hotel-keepers were doing a roaring trade. Samples of ore were every day being brought in from newly explored gold-reefs, and all men's talk was of pennyweights, or even ounces, to the ton. Everybody was cheerful, because everybody was hopeful. It was not surprising. There is something intoxicating in the atmosphere of a perfectly new country, with its undeveloped and undefined possibilities: and the easy acquisition of this spacious and healthful land, the sudden rise of this English town, where two years before there had been nothing but the huts of squalid savages, had filled every one with a delightful sense of the power of civilized man to subjugate the earth and draw from it boundless wealth. Perhaps something may also be set down to the climate. Bulawayo is not beautiful. Far more attractive sites might have been found among the hills to the south. But it has a deliciously fresh, keen brilliant air, with a strong breeze tempering the sun-heat, and no risk of fever. Indeed, nearly all this side of Matabililand is healthful, partly because it has been more thickly peopled of late years than the eastern side of the country, which was largely depopulated by the Matabili raids.

Next to the prospects of the gold-reefs (a topic to which I shall presently return), the question in which a visitor in 1895 felt most interest was the condition of the natives. It seemed too much to expect that a proud and warlike race of savages should suddenly, within less than two years from the overthrow of their king, have abandoned all notion of resistance to the whites and settled down as peaceable subjects. The whites were a mere handful scattered over an immense area of country, and the white police force did not exceed four or five hundred men. Nevertheless, the authorities of the British South Africa Company were of opinion that peace had been finally secured, and that no danger remained from the natives. They observed that, while the true Matabili who remained in the country--for some had fled down to or across the Zambesi after the defeats of 1893--were comparatively few in number, the other natives, mostly Makalakas,[47] were timid and unwarlike. They held that when a native tribe has been once completely overcome in fight, it accepts the inevitable with submission. And they dwelt on the fact that Lo Bengula's tyranny had been a constant source of terror to his own subjects. After his flight some of his leading indunas came to Dr. Jameson and said, "Now we can sleep." This confidence was shared by all the Europeans in the country. English settlers dwelt alone without a shade of apprehension in farms, six, eight, or ten miles from another European. In the journey I am describing from Mafeking to Fort Salisbury, over eight hundred miles of lonely country, my wife and I were accompanied only by my driver, a worthy Cape Dutchman named Renske, and by a native "Cape boy." None of us was armed, and no one of the friends we consulted as to our trip even suggested that I should carry so much as a revolver, or that the slightest risk was involved in taking a lady through the country. How absolutely secure the Administrator at Bulawayo felt was shown by his sending the Matabililand mounted police (those who afterwards marched into the Transvaal) to Pitsani, in southern Bechuanaland, in November, leaving the country denuded of any force to keep order.

It is easy to be wise after the event. The confidence of the Europeans in the submissiveness of the natives is no