It must be noted that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council held the erroneous view that Lobengula was king of both Matabeleland and Mashonaland, writes Dr Felix Muchemwa in his book The Struggle For Land in Zimbabwe (1890 – 2010) that The Patriot is serialising.

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of 1918
THE Judicial Committee of the Privy Council eventually presented its report on July 29 1918.
In defining its reference, it asserted:
There still remains unalienated a vast area of land, which consists partly of native reserves, partly of land in the Company’s own occupation for ranching or other purposes, partly of country altogether waste and unsettled.
It is to this area, known as ‘the unalienated lands’, as to which the Company has never granted to others estates or interests therein and so long as it does not so grant them, that the present case refers.
Meanwhile, even though, in England, some philanthropic societies representing Africans in Southern Rhodesia made it abundantly clear to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council that all land in Southern Rhodesia belonged to the indigenous Africans of Southern Rhodesia, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council still dismissed outright all African claims to their ancestral lands in its judgment.
And, this was notwithstanding the fact that the same Judicial Committee actually acknowledged the African Land Tenure system (Chapter 1 refers) in the statement:
When they were governed by their own customs and laws the notion of separate ownership in land or of the alienation of land by a chief or anyone else was foreign to their ideas.
In considering the 43 000 000 acres (17 200 000 hectares) of ‘unalienated lands,’ the Judicial Committee noted that:
Their Lordships had the advantage of hearing the case for the natives, who were themselves incapable of urging or perhaps unconscious of possessing any case at all … in substance, their case was that they were the owners of the unalienated lands long before either the Company or the Crown became concerned with them and from time immemorial.
It seems to be common ground that ownership of the lands was ‘tribal’ or ‘communal’, but what precisely that means remains to be ascertained.
According to the argument, the natives, before 1893, were owners of the whole of these vast regions in such a sense that without their permission or that of their King and trustee, no traveller, still less a settler, could so much as enter without committing a tress-pass.
The Judicial Committee went further to note:
This fact makes further enquiry into the nature of the native rights unnecessary. If they were not in the nature of private rights, they were at the disposal of the Crown when Lobengula fled and his dominions were conquered – if they were, any actual disposition of them by the Crown upon a conquest, whether immediately in 1894, or four years later (1898), would suffice to extinguish them as manifesting an intention expressly to exercise the right to do so.
It must be noted here that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council held the erroneous view that Lobengula was king of both Matabeleland and Mashonaland; the same erroneous view in the Rudd Concession.
Lobengula was never king of Mashonaland!
The Judicial Committee further observed that:
The Matabeleland Order-in-Council of 1894 and the Southern Rhodesia Order-in-Council of 1898, provided for Native Reserves, within which the tribal life of the natives might be continued under protection and control and to the rest of the country the Company’s officers and whiteman were admitted independently of any consent of the natives.
The Judicial Committee had been convened to consider and make a legal ruling on the Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia Resolution on the ownership of ‘unalienated lands’ as defined by the Legislative Council or by the BSAC, but in the end, it had considered and ruled on virtually all matters related to land in Zimbabwe.
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’s Final Ruling on Land Ownership
After the foregoing considerations, the Judicial Committee concluded and ruled that: ‘Whoever now owns the unalienated lands, the natives do not’.
In reality, therefore, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council gave a land-mark ruling according to which Africans could not lay claim even to the 21 594 957 acres (9 000 000 hectares) of ‘native reserves’ because that land was ‘Crown Land’ by right of conquest.
In the same ruling, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council also ruled out any claim by Africans to the 43 000 000 acres (17 200 000 hectares) of the ‘unalienated lands’ on the grounds that they were equally part of the conquered territory and therefore ‘crown lands’ by right of conquest.
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council also finally dismissed African claims to the 31 000 000 acres (12 400 000 hectares) already under private ownership by individual white settlers virtually on the same grounds that it was ‘crown land’ by right of conquest, and that it was land which was sold privately after conquest to white settlers as individual rights with title deeds because ‘the company’s officers and white men were admitted independently of any consent of the natives.’
By this ruling of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of July 29 1918, Africans in Zimbabwe lost claim to all the 96 226 560 acres of their ancestral lands in Zimbabwe without any compensation whatsoever.
Africans could only be quarantined into ‘Crown Lands’ of ‘native reserves’ without right or title to their ancestral lands in Zimbabwe.