Counting Lobengula's looted head

Just under two days ago I held a fascinating discussion with Baffour Ankomah, the British-based, Ghanaian-born Editor of the world-read New African magazine. Well known for his obdurately pro-Mugabe stance, he makes a point of connecting each time he visits the country. We hurriedly dispensed with those customary pleasantries which we all know to stand in the way of real beefs.

Those once out of the way, we got down to a real talk. And like all such talks, the beginning was random, unpruned, but with time, some structure and direction began to emerge, and beyond which the cerebral took over.

I can't quite recall what triggered it, but out of this Ghanaian pair of lips darted a pedestrian statement whose awesome profoundness only became apparent as our conversation wore on. "Why", he asked, "are we so useless when in fact our forebears were so good?"

A journey across civilisations
Now I remember the context. The conversation related to history - African history - and its monumental points and turns. Soon it went beyond the continent, but always coming back to it. We covered the Aztecs of South America; we came back home, visited the pyramids of Egypt. We wondered off again to England, met the Moors who built her ancient ruins, putting a lie thereby to the thinking that the Blackman has always been at the beck and call of the white man.

Baffour had dedicated a whole issue to this vanished - much worse - denied and repudiated black civilisation. Of course I was happy to steer the discussion back to Zimbabwe, my country, patriotically pointing to the Great Zimbabwe Monuments and their numerous siblings dotted across the country. Then there were the rice terraces of Nyanga, all pointing towards a dashing, food-secure civilisation of indigenes.

Great Zimbabwe, with pride
Remembering how my interlocutor is routinely given to reminding me that Kwame Nkrumah was a great son of Ghana, I made sure the discussion on the Great Zimbabwe Monuments stretched out for full measure, inflections unambiguously falling on Zimbabwe's unparalleled architectural tradition.

West Africa, let alone Ghana, could cite no equivalent, I bragged, fully asserting the Zimbabwean moment that had come. Great Zimbabwe has always been a mighty glow in our past, shall always be.

Realising the scales had tilted, Ankomah then slid in the above quoted pedestrian-couched diatribe against contemporary Africa, against all of us! Our forbears had erected monuments, themselves eloquent statements on the boundless creativity that ruled their times, themselves expressions of untrammeled power they wielded in their time. More important, these monuments marked high-points in their civilisations and, to the extent that they have beaten time and have proved indelible, mark permanent footprints of a timeless era.

You needed ingenuity, you needed stability, you needed resources and organisational aptitude to put up such an awesome structure. Above all, you needed good, advanced technology to handle so brittle a medium that granite stone is. And of course from a sum of all that emerged a legacy that has become a country. From all that emerged a people whose personality is characteristically defiant, brittle and sedately indifferent like the granite outcrops that abound, that defy nature's withering.

Enter a featureless epoch
But all that was my encomium to my forbears, to their monumental footprint, to my country, to my past. Against Baffour's question, it sounded like some escapism, itself an attempt to dodge present failures and setbacks. True the forbears had given us this huge monument whose little siblings were strewn all over the country; why are we failing when they were so good? What happened to this DNA of success and achievement? They erected monuments.

By contrast, our times are flat, our epoch featureless. Harare, the supposed acme of our civilisation is just there: a clutter of matchboxes chaotically darned by the reckless hand of an absent-minded god hurrying for a better place, for better things elsewhere. And we both wondered: wondered how a people emerging from the architectural tradition of round huts, round granaries, round shrines, suddenly morphs into this cubicle culture foreign to our past.

Where is the stone? Where is the rondavel? Where are the architects of this epoch, our epoch? Creepers have nowhere to clog, spiders nowhere to spin their cobwebs. We have seen the builders of yore, seen their works. Where are the builders of now? Oh Zimbabwe, this great Stone now more supple than a drooping, tired breast! Oh Harare, this great white city on African soil!

A comb through history
These two weeks I have decided you and I, gentle reader, must comb through our past, comb through our history to see, as the late Achebe would put it, see where the rains began to beat us.

But that history needs salvaging. It is groaning, wounded by the biting lips of a foreign teller, indeed chewed and spat by the jaundiced eye of the victor. And a beaten people suffer a double fate. They have no history, no narrative of their own.

They find they are inserted into someone else's narrative, which is not even accurate to the victor - the narrator. Even his own history must hide key aspects, lest by knowing these, the underdog gets awakened. The biggest enemy of the white settlers, both as individuals and as successive administrations, was always "the mission boy".

The mission boy was that native who, through long association with missionaries, got enlightened in the western sense. He could read. He could write. He could work our sums. He had, in other words, mastered the three "Rs" and thus could read the mind of the master, catch up with its devious unfairness. Robert Mugabe is one such "mission boy".

So was Joshua Nkomo, Herbert Chitepo and many other nationalists. See what they ended up doing to the laager! The white settler narratives which sing their praises, routinely avoid certain enlightening revelations.

Rhodes and Johnson
One telling anecdotes. After Cecil John Rhodes had secured a nod from the British Queen, a nod legally called The Royal Charter, to occupy Zimba bwe, he quickly went about consulting on how best to do it, on how best to put together an occupying force on a shoestring budget.

The first quote asked for 2 500 invading men, and about one million pounds, requirements well beyond the reach of Rhodes' investments. Accidentally, he bumped into a 23-year-old adventurer by the name of Frank Johnson, who had made several hunting trips to Zimbabwe. Before long they sat down to talk about Rhodes' invasion plans.

Impressed, Rhodes then asked Johnson to draw up a budget for the invasion and occupation of Zimbabwe, always bearing in mind the scarcity principle which was assuming a vengeful immediacy on Rhodes' sparse means. A while later, Frank Johnson came back with an £87,500 invasion plan that needed only 250 men and nine months.

After dropping the plan on Rhodes' desk, Johnson boarded a train bound for the Cape. Rhodes was stranded. He needed the young man to be in charge of the execution process, but the young man would have none of it.

He had other fishes to fry, and well away from Macloutsie, the launch pad. Rhodes had to follow Johnson to the Cape, had to plead with him to take up the offer whose value, both pecuniary and by way of land and minerals, kept leaping up with Rhodes' mounting desperation.

When soldiers were unimportant
Let it be noted that Johnson was no outstanding soldier. There was an Irishman, one Lt. Colonel Edward Pennefather who had served in the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons. He was better, far better than Johnson, and ended up commanding the forces. There was Captain Maurice Heany; there was also Captain Henry Hoste.

You also had Captain John Roach, an artillery man. I will not mention Major Allan Wilson who would later meet his fate on the banks of the Shangaan, our one major victory against white invaders we curiously don't celebrate, in the process generating a chilling reminder to any Rhodesians knitting mischief.

I will not even mention Wilson's rival, Major Patrick Forbes, who failed to rescue him, let alone reach that spot where, together with his comrades, fell at the hands of Lobengula's Indunas.

To all these men, add Captain Frederick Selous, the itinerant hunter-turned-intelligence officer for the invading Column, and then you realise Rhodes' real dilemma was never assembling the human requirements for a formidable invading force. For that he would have had to look elsewhere, look for someone other than Frank.

Conquest as an ideas war
Frank Johnson whose hard-to-get antics delayed the whole deployment, Frank Johnson the man who ended up providing the overall command of the 212-men Column, was no real soldier.

Rather, he was Rhodes' PC, or Political Commissar! Just in case you thought the notion of a PC is a perfection of Zanu-PF from an invention by the Chinese PLA! The column could not move until Rhodes was satisfied it had its ideological maker, the possessor of its soul, of its values.

Often, in our Eurocentric grasp of history, we forget Zimbabwe was not conquered and occupied by the Maxim Gun. Save for guns that rang in shooting game for the pot, there was no fighting right up to Mt Hampden.

The gun was brought into play much, much later. Zimbabwe's conquest was an idea, a value, an ideology, which is why long after ousting the white man, we still find ourselves shackled by white ways. Could this be key to where and when the rain began to beat us? In these two weeks, we shall both found out.

Finding our own Walter Rodney
But there is a systematic belittlement of us, of our past, which slur remains un-rebutted, unchallenged. You read colonial literature, you find you and me, from our forebears, are imaged in animal terms. It collapses the spirit, dwindles self-esteem.

We look puny, non-human even, in history. Before you and me worry about the buffeted stock exchange, the sanctions, the dwindling earnings, you and me must know we have a problematic history, a problematic role in that problematic history.

Rodney talks about how Europe underdeveloped Africa. He lays down broad principles of that underdevelopment, but without speaking to our circumstances in their uniqueness. He could not have. He was writing from elsewhere, capturing a slice of colonial experience as lived in the Caribbean. You, me, we need to test Rodney's thesis, validate it using facts from our own experiences.

Colonial lore says we are dark, good-for-nothing munts who never invented the wheel, the atom, who never knew the cell. And looking at all of those, we never did, something that seems to give veracity to the assault. And it sears, eats into our sense of self-worth. With that, you can only be useless, Baffour. Let's seek to overcome that, and here is a sample from the deformed history we have never sought to master.

Karl Mauch admits
At the time of its occupation, Zimbabwe had made very serious advances in civilisation, principally in the areas of mining and agriculture. Karl Mauch, that German explorer who in fact had combed through much of Zimbabwe before Rhodes or his henchmen, had given a tantalising report on the man-made riches and achievements across the "Crocodile River", or the Limpopo nowadays.

He had witnessed very sophisticated agricultural practices of the "Banyai" and the "Makalaka", Vanyai and Makaranga nowadays. They produced rice, groundnuts, maize, sorghum and, yes, tobacco. He is exploring our country in the 1840 and 1850s.

When we started the tobacco industry
Much later, but soon after the 1890 occupation of our country, a poor British immigrant, one Stanley Portal Hyatt, would soon found himself scotch-carting across the country, in a search for a rich African village somewhere in the present-day Masvingo province, a village he called "Chivamba" and located somewhere to the Southeast of present-day Masvingo town.

Poor, unemployed and starving, he had to eke out a living initially as a transporter who drove wagons and relied on cattle and donkeys for motive power. Later, he graduated to a cattle trader, a pursuit that finally paid off. He made roaring business, at one time finding himself commanding a head of well over 400, all of them from the trading villagers of Chivamba.

He made a fortune from buying and selling cattle - all of them got from natives - although he still maintained in his narratives natives were "lazy baboons". My focus is not on Hyatt. It is on the civilisation and economy that yielded so much cattle for Hyatt. It was a huge animal economy which precolonial Zimbabwe commanded.

But there is more, and Hyatt's reminiscences, all captured in a monograph titled "The Old Transport Road", include a telling paragraph: "In addition to the fowls, we had a number of pairs of bucks' horns, ranging from an eland's down to reedbuck, and, more important still, about half a ton weight of selected native tobacco, the very first Rhodesian tobacco ever put on the market, the beginning of the now flourishing Rhodesian tobacco industry."

I am copying this extract from a white book, written by a white hand, from a white memory and experience. Here is a tribute to us through our forebears, for founding a tobacco industry whose origins we mistakenly ascribe to the Rhodesian settler farmer. Mugabe, don't take the white man's land, the tobacco industry, the country's foremost currency earner, will die. Was this not told us? And why are we surprised when in under half a decade, we have turned things around, when it comes to growing tobacco after booting out the white man? Where do we think went the genes, the tobacco DNA of Chivamba? Where? Man, know thyself!

When we fed the white settler
Let it be recorded here that from the days of occupation right up to the late twenties and even early thirties, the settler community lived off African agriculture, both for subsistence and for incomes. Most settlers survived and later thrived on trading native grains and animals.

They never turned the soil, or when they tried, did so on very small scales. Here is Hyatt from his observations from Fort Victoria again: "The day after leaving that valley we struck a farm, one of the very few in Rhodesia on which I ever saw anything being grown. The owner, whom we had left in Victoria, had told us proudly of his vegetables, and given us permission to help ourselves.

He himself found it more profitable to act as barman in the hotel during the wet season"! Gentle reader, I hope you get the full import of it all: he found it more profitable to tend the bar than take advantage of the rain season on the land! A whole myth has been haunting us: that we have always been fed by the white farmers, which is why the land reforms created food insecurity for Zimbabwe, once Southern Africa's bread basket! It sears our soul, disable us from confidently assuming our heritage. And such a state of mind can never give you monuments. Never!

Hard Mashona turns the colonial wheel
I left the animal side of African agriculture too soon. The pioneers had brought in their own animals from down South. These animals -bullocks-pulled their wagons, 117 wagons all told at the time of the invasion. Soon, most of them succumbed to local diseases, as also did most of their owners.

But never many enough to kill the occupation! For that reason, the early settlers turned to local breeds, principally the hard Mashona, to move the wheels of occupation - literally. Our early transporter, Hyatt, tendered a hard-headed opinion on the matter: " . . . I held . . . and still hold - that the Mashona cattle, the actual cattle of the country, were far the best for transport work up there.

They kept their condition, when bullocks from the South were too thin to trek, much less to pull; they were not nearly so liable to disease as the others; and they actually travelled a good deal faster. True, they could not pull more than seven thousand pounds where the big oxen could manage eight thousand; but, in the twelve months, they usually earned about twenty-five per cent more than their rivals – an argument which was good enough for me, even though, by using "niggers' beast," I was offending that dread South African fetish, the Custom of the Country."

The winning loot clause in contracts
It is fascinating that when Dr Jameson decided the Ndebele Kingdom had to be dismantled militarily, so occupation of Zimbabwe as we know it today would be complete, he reassembled settlers who had been demobilized nearly three years before, who by then were already dispersed, chasing various gainful pursuits along river banks, forests, veldts and in bars of whiskey!

These redrafts demanded payment upfront. Or concrete promises that would tightly bind the untrustworthy British South Africa Chartered Company. Jameson readily agreed to make binding contracts with these volunteers, many of them rounded up around Fort Victoria, Masvingo nowadays. A key element in the contract was the promise of a share in the "loot", a reference to native cattle.

That was attractive, very attractive for every white settler knew the natives, principally Lobengula, commanded massive herds. The cattle was the major commodity, the main source and store of value.

Counting Lobengula's looted head
Among the volunteers who enlisted was one Neville Johns, himself a close associate of Rhodes. Before he died, in the early fifties, he put together vivid accounts from direct actors in the Matabele war of 1893, to give us a small but loaded red book titled "Rhodesian Genesis". The little book reminds us that one of the Meikles Brothers, John, actually chaired the Loot Committee.

Another settler participant in that war, Jack Carruthers, born in Grahamstown in 1863, to die in 1951 at Banket, gave an account of what happened in Matabeleland from December 1893, after the fall of Lobengula: "Farm rights were being sold for ten pounds each and loot rights were fetching twelve pounds. The Loot Committee eventually accounted for three hundred and sixty two thousand head of cattle and paid out forty-two pounds on a Right".

THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO THOUSAND head of cattle is what Lobengula alone was worth, and thus what he lost following his defeat. What of the whole of Zimbabwe? Does this not bear out Rodney and his thesis?

Native disease control technology
One more detail, a very important one in gauging native civilization before the onset of colonialism. The detail relates to amazing inoculation and animal disease control technology which the Ndebeles had developed before the arrival of the white man. Meikles, whose job it was to collect loot cattle, gave a vivid account of loot cattle and the loot market which arose.

His account unwittingly revealed this unique disease control technology developed by the Ndebeles. I quote him: "(In Bulawayo), cattle were being brought in and disposed of. It was said that they were twenty five thousand collected at the time of my visit. Lung sickness (pleuropneumonia), was playing havoc with them.

The morning I visited the kraals where they slept I was told that one hundred and fifty had died during the night. Cattle were being sold for two pounds ten shillings to pick, or thirty shillings to take them as they walked out of the kraal. Tom (his brother) had by this time started a branch in Bulawayo, coming up after the rains were over.

He bought some of the looted cattle for me and we were fortunate in not losing any from lung sickness. Of course the Matabele had had the disease in the country long before it was occupied by us and they knew all about inoculating as a preventive.

Most of their cattle had been inoculated, otherwise the losses would have been much heavier. We picked out mostly those with short tails, a pretty certain proof that they had been inoculated." Of course when rinderpest came, brought in by the settlers through their own imported bullocks, most cattle succumbed, creating greater misery for the defeated and ruined Ndebeles.

Unknown to the Ndebeles, no technology had been evolved. Only whites were compensated, although they themselves had brought in the blight, and even though native cattle, the few to remain from loot, had also been destroyed as a preventive measure. Contrast the Ndebele inoculation knowledge and the settler's primitive fire technology!

Native grain storage technology, food security
The same Meikles also tells us about Ndebele technology in building grain silos, all of them underground. You cannot help but admire this budding civilization, but by then already prostrated by conquest.

Here is Meikles: "Further on I slept at what had been one of the Queen Mother's huts where one of the fighting regiments lived in Lobengula's time. The place was quite deserted but a lot of grain and kaffir corn had been left in pits, and this was being carried away by a white man using pack oxen and taken to Bulawayo.

In those days there were no farmers even in Mashonaland or, I would say, no farmers grew grain, it being cheaper to trade the country's requirements from the natives. The pits in which the Matabele and Zulus stored their grain were dug in the kraals, the mouth or top being just big enough to admit a man's body, then they opened out bottle shaped, each pit holding probably 30 muid sacks of 200lbs. each.

The covering to the opening was usually a flat stone and then manure, something more than a foot deep, placed over the stone. Grain will keep for two seasons in these pits, but has a fermented taste to which the natives do not object but very few white people can face. Care must be exercised on opening the pit to allow all gasses to escape before entering, otherwise it means certain death." Fermentation is key to food science, and here it was being harnessed.

And the white settlers confess to a robust native beer industry which they themselves drew from to drown their loveless sorrows! But that is to miss the grim side of this grain loot.

The reverend who wept
Of course together with the conquest of the Ndebele went this veritable food security policy and technology, opening a whole year of massive famine never known in Matabeleland before. The famine year was 1894. Women died, children perished to the delight of the new gods of the land who saw this as a more effective demographic plan for better occupation.

Even Reverend David Carnegie, a white cleric sympathetic to colonialism, was moved: "There never before was such a famine in this country, and no one living outside it will ever know how much pain and suffering thousands of natives went through. We were in the midst of it and saw its ravages with our own eyes.

We had to try and save people from dying of hunger whenever we could. We gave out food twice a day to starving men, women and children. The beseeching looks of the hungry mothers, the bitter cries of the little children, and the silent pleading on the part of the men, were very hard to bear . . . This was one of the sad results of the war…"

Why we are so useless
I have dwelt quite elaborately on indigenous agriculture to show our worth before the white man. Carl Mauch's accounts pay tribute to the mining side of our economy before the coming of the white man. He spoke of iron mining. He spoke of copper mining. He spoke of gold mining. Above all, he reported a very sprite beneficiation industry woven around those minerals. Implements were being made by our own ironmongers.

Weapons were being developed. And there was brisk business around this burgeoning metal industry. Above all, Mauch and early hunters spoke loudly of abandoned mining pits, most of them to do with early gold mining. The Mazowe Valley was full of these, as was also the area around Hartley, now Chegutu. And all settler accounts confess to one key fact, namely that most of Rhodesia's key mines were sited on old workings done by indigenous people.

They add that speculators who held title to claims got far more for claims sited on old workings which gave buyers a sure result. It was a key geological technology that had emerged from a mining civilization that was ours. Hark, I hear someone whispering about a white investor who must come. Why are we so useless when our forbears were so good?

icho!

nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw