By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
THE fall of the Ndebele Kingdom was immediately followed by the construction of the town of Bulawayo and some of its European residential suburbs such as North End, Bellevue and Saurstown and the African Old Location high density suburb, also known as Makokoba.
One of the first crimes that the British South African Company (BSAC) committed after defeating the former Ndebele Kingdom was to round up all cattle in the region, saying that they had all belonged to King Lobengula and were, therefore, legitimate war booty.
A very conservative estimate by the BSAC officials puts the total number of the seized cattle at 262 000, obviously less than the actual figure.
Many white settlers became rich overnight in this country because of this massive theft of the helplessly terrorised black people’s livestock.
The BSAC faced one quasi-legal problem which was that whereas its occupation of Mashonaland was based on the 1888 Rudd Concession, that of Matabeleland was a result of military conquest.
In addition to that, Matabeleland had been, by international law, an independent and sovereign state, exactly the same as the 32 kingdoms of Mashonaland which emerged from the collapse of the Munhumutapa Empire in the 18th Century.
The BSAC built a Government House and a Reserve Bank in Bulawayo and administered the two territories separately until November 1894 when they merged them as Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Earlier, a boundary had been drawn by Dr Leander Starr Jameson across the Midlands, dividing the two territories.
After the formation of Southern Rhodesia, the BSAC looked into the possibility of dividing the country into two administrative sections, one part being meant for the white settlers and the other for the black people.
Cecil John Rhodes was at that time the prime minister of the Cape Colony, a British territory to which the British Government had granted what it called ‘internal self-Government’.