By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

IT had always been Cecil John Rhodes’ belief that the newly-defeated former Matabeleland Kingdom was highly rich in minerals and that his company would develop the country’s economy with mining as its anchor.
In 1898, in a rambling speech to British South Africa Company (BSAC) shareholders in Bulawayo, Rhodes said: “I do not want to be pessimistic because I am an optimist, and because I feel sure and have a great belief in the future of the country as a great mineral-producing country.
“The last year-and-half I have been in it has shown me personally a very great deal.
“I find this huge area — I only know the area south of the Zambesi (Zambezi), but I am told that in the north it is the same – 400 000 to 500 000 square miles, and there are now 157 000 claims registered.”
This short extract from a volume titled Cecil Rhodes: His Political Life and Speeches 1881-1900 shows us the importance the man attached to the mining industry.
It was because of that belief that he had already, the previous year (1897), launched the construction of a railway line from Mafeking in British Bechuanaland (Botswana) in the Northern Cape to Salisbury (Harare) via Bulawayo.
The Railway line was for many years the greatest investment in the former southern African British colonial region.
Rhodes had promised to build the line from the Cape to Cairo if the British Government granted his company a Charter.
Starting near Mafeking in 1895, the engineer, George Pauling, completed the distance to Bulawayo in two years, the last 400 miles (640km) in 400 days.
The first train pulled into Bulawayo on October 19 1897.
Meanwhile, the Beira-Salisbury line had been started in 1892, and the first train to travel along it from Beira arrived in Umtali (Mutare) in 1898 after Rhodes had moved the town from the old to a new site.
Those two industrial undertakings would some years later play a major part in the subsequent de-colonisation of the region then called Southern and Northern Rhodesia.
The railway line had by then reached the Copperbelt, a mining region whose black workers played the decisive role in the birth of Zambia.
In Southern Rhodesia, Rhodesia Railways became the launching pad from which the founder of that country’s modern African nationalism, Joshua Nkomo, sprang to sensitise the oppressed and dispossessed indigenous people about their rights.
In both cases, that is in the mining as well as in the railways, trade unionism played major liberatory roles, leading to the birth of Zambia on October 24 1964 and to that of Zimbabwe on April 18 1980.
We shall, however, look at that relatively closely later when we come to that period in terms of the clock and the calendar.
As for now, we need to dwell on the BSAC’s administration after the pacification brought about by the Rhodes Matopo Hills 1897 Indaba.
We need not analyse the terms on which that pseudo-conference arrived at the peace because there were no written minutes.
All that Rhodes did was to take advantage of the terrible starvation the black people were experiencing.
After listening to their grievances, he peremptorily said: “All that now belongs to the past; what I would like to know is whether it is now peace or it is still war?”
Each of those thirsty and hungry guerillas sitting in a half-moon formation in front of Rhodes threw their knobkerries or clubs to the ground before them and declared: “Here is my gun; I say having told you about my grievances, I believe you will deal with them as a man so that we live in peace.”
Rhodes, a man who obviously lacked human feeling, except only for the English people, had achieved his objective, that is to get the Ndebele patriots to lay down their arms.
If he had been sincere about the whole peace-creating matter, at least he would have asked one or two missionaries to be a witness or witnesses from the beginning to the end.
At that time, the Roman Catholics, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Anglicans, the Brethren-in-Christ were within the Bulawayo laager, so were the London Missionary Society pastors.
Although all these Christian denominations were culturally sympathetic to the imperialists/colonialist cause, they most probably could have kept some form of minutes of the occasion , and also translated the exchanges fairly.
However, after the Matopo Indaba, the BSAC administration behaved like conquerors by arresting and publicly hanging or shooting many black people they suspected to have participated in the uprising.
A tree in what was then called Main Street (now Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo) in Bulawayo still exists where the BSAC is said to have hanged some of those patriots.
That apart, the BSAC’s Charter was due to expire in 1923 and the company would be required to choose between becoming a part of the South African Republic then under President Oom Paul Kruger, or to be granted internal self-Government.
While that idea was still floating in the air, the Anglo-Boer War erupted in 1899.
That greatly soured Anglo-Boer relations.
No sooner had that bitter military encounter ended in 1902 than Rhodes died in June that very year.
The BSAC drifted along without its founder, but with the support and blessings of the British Government.
Northern Rhodesia had, by then, become a protectorate, and so had Nyasaland (Malawi).
Many white people of Dutch extraction (the Boers) had settled in Southern Rhodesia, and after the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, the Boers in South Africa agitated for a union of the two British colonies of Natal and the Cape with the two Boer states of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, formerly the South Africa Republic (SAR).
Those four states amalgamated in 1910 to become the Union of South Africa with Cape Town as the legislative capital, Bloemfontein in the Free State as the judicial seat and Pretoria in the Transvaal as the administrative centre.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email: sgwakuba@gmail.com