By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

HAVING got rid of the man claiming to be Nkulumane, King Lobengula then concentrated on consolidating his power over the Ndebele Kingdom.
Mbiko Masuku and his pro-Nkulumane supporters had been either physically eliminated or forced to flee into exile, or to adopt new identities for their safety.
Many indigenous traditional leaders had been killed during an earlier period when Swazi military bands raided mambo’s territory.
Remnants of the mambo kingship had either later been neutralised by Mzilikazi’s warriors or were living in mountain retreats for fear of Nguni warriors.
In that kind of socio-cultural environment did King Lobengula strike his roots in a territory stretching from roughly where Kwekwe town is now located in the east, to the Mntoutsie River in the west in what is now Botswana.
That river is now known as the Macloutsie, and is south of Francistown.
To the north, Lobengula’s rule ended at the Victoria Falls, formerly named Shongwe Inotitima in TjiKalanga, and later as Mosi-oa-Tunya in SeSuthu of King Sebituane’s people Shongwe Inotitima means ‘the rock that thunders’, and Mosi-oa-Tunya means ‘the smoke that thunders’.
To the South, his Kingdom ended along the Limpopo River, among the Venda people. The Boers had seized the region on the southern side of that waterway which the Venda call ‘the Bembe’, and named it the South African Republic.
King Lobengula’s territory was secure but for two very worrying more or less common occurrences, which were visits by white concession-seekers, and those by white hunters who wanted permission to roam throughout the territory shooting elephants and rhinoceros for their ivory and hides.
They wanted crocodiles as well for their skins.
These two groups of white people posed a significant threat to the Ndebele Kingdom in that they studied the country’s geological characteristics and passed the information to their respective European governments, some leaders of whom had actually attended the 1884–85 Berlin Conference that divided the African continent among European states.
Hunters, such as Frederick Courtney Selous, were a security threat to the kingdom. Selous later served as a guide, first to the Pioneer Column in 1890, and later, in 1896, to a regiment, a part of which comprised a Bechuanaland Protectorate mounted Border Police.
That regiment did not see any action, however, as the military conflict ended when Cecil John Rhodes entered into discussions in the Matopo Hills with Ndebele leaders while he had just crossed the boarder from Bechuanaland into Southern Rhodesia
Another source of threat, this time that
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