Matabeleland (1838-1897), also known as the Ndebele Empire or Mthwakazi by the Ndebele themselves, was an African state covering what is today part of southern Zimbabwe and northern South Africa. This area, which included other African peoples, notably the Shona, was coveted by colonial settlers and the British South Africa Company, and so two wars followed, the First and Second Matabele Wars, from 1893 to 1897. Matabeleland, defeated and dismantled, was eventually absorbed into the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe).
Origins: Mzilikazi
The Matabele people, better known nowadays as the Ndebele, were an African tribe who occupied an area of what is today southern Zimbabwe and northern South Africa in the 19th century. The Ndebele were a Nguni-speaking people (a language descended from Bantu) who broke away from the main tribe of the Zulu Kingdom around 1822 to found their own state further north, accumulating additional population groups as they migrated, notably Sotho-speaking peoples. The Ndebele leader was Chief Mzilikazi (c. 1790-1868).
Mzilikazi, having left the Zulu Kingdom with only around 200 warriors, somehow forged himself a kingdom of 30,000 square miles (77,700 sq. km), which he could defend with his army of up to 5,000 warriors. The first Ndebele capital was at Mosega (near modern Zeerust in the very north of South Africa). When thousands of Boers (White European settlers in Southern Africa who spoke Afrikaans) migrated northwards in the Great Trek of 1835-6, Mzilikazi was obliged to move his kingdom to the other side of the Limpopo River. This region was not empty, and the Ndebele had to defeat several tribes to claim this land, notably the western Shona (aka Kalanga), peaceful pastoralists who populated the decaying remains of the once proud kingdom of Butua. A new Ndebele capital was established at Bulawayo, where, on a plain sprinkled with mimosa trees, the royal enclosure sat: a large oval composed of a double ring of giant mud and grass huts. Through the late 1830s, repeated raids were made against neighbouring peoples, like the Tswana in the west, the Pedi in the east, and the Sotho in the south. These raids involved burning villages, capturing women and children, and taking cattle back to Matabeleland.
Ndebele Society
The local geography of what was once Matabeleland is mostly grassland savannah but includes forested and mountainous areas. Water is supplied by tributaries of the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. The Ndebele lived in small villages where daily necessities were supplied through animal husbandry and the raising of crops such as maize, millet, beans, and sweet potatoes. A general division of labour was that men hunted and looked after the livestock, while women were responsible for the crops. Ndebele women were also highly skilled at creating decorative beadwork. Livestock were the principal indicators of wealth and were inherited down the male line. A Ndebele marriage was made legal by the passing of a dowry, the lobola, which consisted of a number of cattle. Ndebele culture was a polygamous one.
Chief Mzilikazi, like the Zulu kings, created a highly centralised and militaristic state, where males, organised in regiments based on age, served as warriors in times of war. When on military service, Ndebele warriors lived in villages separated from the rest of the community. There was an additional hierarchy besides that based on age. The Nguni speakers considered themselves the ruling caste, while the Sotho speakers, who had joined the original Ndebele on their trek northwards, were considered the second rank in the kingdom. The third and lowest class was composed of the Shona people. If a Nguni man married a Sotho woman, the child was considered to be Nguni.
Matabeleland successfully repulsed attacks by Boer settlers, and a peace settlement was agreed in 1852 between the Ndebele and the Boer state of Transvaal. Matabeleland continued to expand thanks to the highly trained nature of its army and the use of highly effective weapons like the short assegai spear, traits learned from the Zulus. Wary of having his authority undermined, Mzilikazi allowed European missionaries into the kingdom, "but he kept them isolated and did not allow his subjects to be baptized" (Curtin, 295).
Mzilikazi was succeeded by his nominated heir, Lobengula, in 1868, but only after a civil war against the followers of a rival claimant, Nkulumane (who was killed in the war). The boundaries of the Matabele Kingdom were fluid, and it was often a question of regularly raiding a neighbouring area to claim it as Ndebele territory. In 1879, an Ndebele army defeated the Rozwi people. The Rozwi chief Chivi Marorodze was captured, taken to Bulawayo, and skinned alive. The Rozwi were then obliged to pay regular tribute to the Ndebele.
The Ndbele, despite their success, were about to face a new challenge to their regional dominance. The discovery of gold in Matabeleland back in 1867 meant that European colonists once again took a keen interest in this area of Southern Africa. It was even rumoured that Matabeleland could be the location of the legendary gold mines of King Solomon, rumours fuelled by explorers noting in their journals that there were certainly ancient mine workings in this region. Much more dangerous than individual prospectors, though, was the arrival of a new and powerful European trading company with a large army at its disposal and an utterly ruthless imperialist at its head: Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902).
British Expansion in Southern Africa
The British, already well established in Cape Colony and Natal, defeated the Zulu Kingdom in 1879. They then acquired both the Basutoland Protectorate (modern Lesotho) in 1884 and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (modern Botswana) in 1885. Now the British, and particularly Cecil Rhodes, turned their attention further north. Rhodes, then a prominent minister (indeed soon to be prime minister) in the Cape Colony government, was something of a visionary who wanted Britain to dominate this side of the African continent and establish a continuous line of colonies from Cairo to Cape Town. He also wanted gold and personal success, in short, to be seen as a great man of the British Empire. Other considerations that motivated Rhodes' desire to conquer the Matabele Kingdom included developing a new, lush territory where British colonists might settle and prosper and creating a new market for British-manufactured goods. The more British in Southern Africa, the better for Rhodes, since this would shift the balance of the European population in Britain's favour and reduce the influence of rivals like the Boers (already well-established in Transvaal and Orange Free State) and German colonists (then establishing themselves in German East Africa and German South West Africa). Finally, conquering Matabeleland would provide a springboard from which to penetrate deeper into Central Africa and limit any expansion of the Belgian Congo, a potential threat to British East Africa.
Rhodes negotiated with Chief Lobengula to have trade, farming, mining, and settlement rights in Mashonaland, a territory under his jurisdiction where the Shona lived. Other groups had also sought and received such rights, notably Portuguese, German, and Boer adventurers, but now Rhodes insisted that the British have exclusive access, and any future treaties Lobengula might see fit to award other nationalities were to be first approved by the British. Rhodes' negotiators had to endure Ndebele court etiquette:
Visitors of every nationality had to crawl on all fours into the royal presence, then squat in the dust, without a chance of sitting on a chair or getting out of the sun, during endless palavers with the King.
(Pakenham, 383).
Lobengula was willing to give away certain mining rights since it would avoid his people going to war and suffering the fate of the now broken-up Zulu Kingdom. It was also perhaps better to let one European power into his kingdom rather than several of them at once. Lobengula was an imposing figure at over 6 feet tall (1.82 m) and a shrewd negotiator. The king managed to get himself a very handsome personal pension of £100 a month from the deal (equal to $15,000 today), 1,000 Martini-Henry rifles (good weapons but now superseded by better alternatives in the British Army), 100,000 rounds of ammunition, and a gunboat (although the last was never delivered).
The 1888 Anglo-Ndebele agreement became known as the Rudd Concession, named after Rhodes' envoy to Matabeleland, Charles Dunnell Rudd. The agreement had some rather vague clauses concerning the British right to defend militarily any mines or other business enterprises it established in the kingdom. These were an ominous sign of things to come, but for the moment, relations were amicable. In addition, the British had been rather duplicitous in their negotiations with Lobengula. The oral agreements the chief consented to were not the same as those the British wrote down in their contract. Lobengula had insisted that no more than 10 White prospectors at any one time be present in the kingdom, that they mine away from villages, and that they be regarded as subjects of the Ndebele king. None of these requirements was respected by the British.
Rhodes, following standard imperial practice, now created a new trading company, the British South Africa Company (BSAC). In 1890, the company received a royal charter after Rhodes convinced the British government that imperial expansion would be profitable to investors and guarantee British primacy in this part of Africa. Trading companies allowed European governments to colonise on the cheap since the private investors of the company met the costs and assumed all the risks. Another consideration was that governments could distance themselves from any embarrassing stories of brutal conquest. If the venture was a success, the government could always take over the chartered company in the future and establish a colony proper.
In the closing months of 1890, up to 350 Black and White settlers came to claim their rights in Mashonaland. The newcomers were accompanied by 500 BSAC police officers armed with rifles, machine guns, and artillery. It was clear the new arrivals were here to stay. Indeed, the settlers raised the British flag and promptly declared that Mashonaland now belonged to Queen Victoria. Lobengula rather regretted his deal with the British, who could very easily decide one day soon that they wanted the rest of Matabeleland. Indeed, Lobengula executed the chief negotiator (and his family) responsible for the Rudd Concession and officially repudiated the agreement. Lobengula had sent a delegation to London to meet with Queen Victoria and plead the Ndebele case that they had been cheated in their arrangements with Rudd, Rhodes, and the BSAC, but nothing much came of this mission.
Meanwhile, the British were disappointed, too, since they could not find any gold, although they did find sizeable deposits of coal, chrome, and asbestos. Lobengula thought he could reassert his authority by having his warriors attack Shona villages near the British settlements, but this backfired badly when some Shona retreated to Bulawayo, where the chasing Ndebele clashed with the BSAC's mounted police. There was also a Ndebele attack on the settlement of Fort Victoria in Shonaland despite Lobengula's orders that no White property be touched. The British now had an excuse to declare war on Matabeleland.
The British-Matabele Wars
The First Matabele War (October 1893 to January 1894) saw a predictable British victory for two reasons: the Ndebele warriors, although numbering up to 20,000, stuck to their traditional strategy of a massive head-on charge at the enemy, and the British were armed with the latest weapons, including Maxim machine guns that could fire 600 rounds a minute. The entirely new experience of such weaponry completely overawed the Ndebele warriors, whose courage could not overcome bullets, as here explained by historian L. James:
The Maxims terrified the Ndebele, who saw them as some awesome kind of magic; a native baby, born at this time and alive in the 1970s, explained his unusual name, Zigga-Zigga, as being based on the sound made by the machine-guns, and therefore believed by his parents as having some supernatural power.
(261)
Bulawayo was torched, and Lobengula fled to the north. The king of Matabeleland later died, possibly of smallpox or by taking poison. In his final speech to his people, Lobengula had warned them:
You have said that it is me that is killing you: now here are your masters coming…You will have to pull and shove wagons; but under me you never did this kind of thing.
(Pakenham, 487)
Lobengula was succeeded by his son Nyamanda. The Matabele state still existed, but the BSAC now confiscated cattle at will and gave out vast tracts of land to White settlers. "Within twelve months, 10,000 square miles of the rich red soil, virtually all the high veld within eighty miles of Bulawayo, had been pegged out as European farms" (Pakenham, 496). A European version of Bulawayo was built near the old royal kraal, nothing more than a township with a few red brick buildings. The Ndebele and Shona suffered taxation on their huts, more land confiscations, and the arbitrariness of the colonial justice system (whose primary tool of punishment was the vicious rhinoceros-hide whip, the sjambok). In addition, they were forced to work as labourers, and their traditional culture and traditions were being overwhelmed by those of the invaders.
The Second Matabele War (March 1896 to October 1897) is also known as the Ndebele-Shona Rebellion, which is perhaps a more accurate description of this event. Although the Matabele state had by now been dismantled and an Ndebele police force formed, the British were still unable to prevent European settlers in the region from being attacked by rebel groups. As the spread of rinderpest ravaged what remaining cattle they had, and drought and a plague of locusts ravaged their crops, the Ndebele and Shona decided that they could no longer bear the taxation and forced labour policies of the colonial authorities. In 1896, these rebels rallied around a mystic, an individual who claimed to be the medium of Mlimo, a powerful local spirit. The timing of the uprising was dictated by the removal of most of the colonial police force to deal with Boer unrest further south. The Ndebele-Shona Rebellion was known locally as the Chimurenga or 'struggle'. The rebels gained success by using guerrilla tactics and killed one in ten Europeans in what had once been Matabeleland.
The British government, urged on by an increasingly racist press coverage, felt obliged to quash the rebellion in an utterly ruthless campaign of retribution. Imperial soldiers involved in the campaign recorded that Ndebele villages were torched, crops destroyed, women and children were shot at, and people were executed without trial. News of the campaign's brutality caused a debate in the British Parliament, but the general approach in Africa was not altered. The final pockets of resistance were not eliminated until October 1897. 8,000 Africans had died in this second war. A legislative council, which represented settlers, was formed shortly after, but the British did not establish total administrative control over former Matabeleland until 1901.
One curious consequence of the Matabele Wars was the creation of the Boy Scout Association, a phenomenon that spread worldwide. In order to combat the guerrilla tactics of the Shona and Ndebele, the British had employed scouts and big game hunters to use bushcraft to stalk the enemy. One such officer was Major Robert Baden-Powell (1857-1941), and he set up an organisation for British boys in 1908 where they could learn bushcraft and survival skills, winning badges of honour along the way. The scout uniform reflected its origins in the experience of Baden-Powell in the Matabele Wars: khaki shirt and shorts, neckerchief, and broad-brimmed bush hat. The Boy Scouts movement was established in the United States in 1910 and then spread to over 150 countries, including Zimbabwe.
Later History
After the wars, the British created two provinces: Matabeleland and Mashonaland. These provinces became part of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1923, a state which was formed from the former territories of the British South Africa Company. Black Africans suffered acute prejudice under the White-dominated regime, not least the necessity from 1930 for them to live on 7.5 million acres of reserved land while the minority White Rhodesians farmed 49 million acres of much better land. Southern Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, eventually gained recognised independence in 1980 after a long battle, one in which the rebellions of nearly a century before were recalled as a source of inspiration.
Today, the Ndebele people continue to live around what is now the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo in the administrative region which is called Matabeleland. These people are often called the Zimbabwe Ndebele to distinguish them from the other main group, the Transvaal Ndebele in the Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces of modern South Africa.
