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British regicide in 19th Century Zimbabwe

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By Vusi Nyamazana

COLONIAL BRITAIN disregarded the traditional laws of war, which say an enemy is not a criminal. 

The 19th Century First Chimurenga war leaders should have been exempt from the normal criminal law, because they were justus hostis, justified enemies, with a right to fight. 

Mbuya Nehanda Charwe, Sekuru Kaguvi, Chief Chingaira Makoni and others were captured as criminals; their trials were conducted scrupulously and it was ordered that they be hanged or shot by firing squad. 

The undue assumption by colonists of legal jurisdiction over our people led to colonial crime of regicide – a killing of our chiefs. The chief’s person ought not to have been touched.

From where the colonists hailed, killing a king was high treason punishable by death. 

King Charles I ascended to the English throne in 1625. 

Due to political opposition to his rule, he decided in 1629 to rule entirely without Parliament, and this led to the outbreak of the first English civil war led by former parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell. 

He was defeated and surrendered in 1646. 

In 1648, he was forced to appear before a high court controlled by his enemies, where he was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Early in the next year, he was beheaded. 

Eleven years after King Charles I sentencing, 29 regicides were arrested and taken to court and were judged according to the ‘statute of the 25th year of Edward III’s reign’, with the declaration that “…it is a crime of high treason to imagine and meditate upon the death of the king.” 

It was put across that the king’s life was so precious that the intent was treason by that statute. 

Thirteen regicides were hanged. 

On January 30 1661, the 12th anniversary of the regicide of King Charles I, Cromwell, his son-in-law Ireton and Bradshaw were posthumously convicted of treason, and their bodies were exhumed, hanged on the gallows and then buried in a deep pit. The three heads were crudely hacked from the bodies, impaled on spikes and set up on Westminster Hall.

Despite regicide being a crime in their country, the colonists went ahead and murdered our chiefs (madzishe), the fathers of the country (pater patriae)

I identify them as kings and not chiefs, because the original African polities were tribal kingdoms. During the Victoria era, ‘paramount chief’ was a formal title created by British colonial administrators. They used it as a substitute for the word ‘king’ to ensure that only the British monarch held that title, and that our kings will not be able to exercise sovereignty concurrently with the crown.

Regicide was a didactic measure seeking to deter other kings from challenging the colonial order. This was a misconduct of the courts because they should, as a rule, not have accused those who took arms against them of treason. 

Chief Chingaira Makoni, suffered this racialised application of legal violence by the colonists. 

Chief Makoni and sons.

He was strongly opposed to BSAC rule and led an uprising in his area. He was taken prisoner on September 4 1896. 

Major Watts hurriedly convened a field general court martial at which Makoni was found guilty of ‘armed rebellion’ and was executed by firing squad. The trial and subsequent death of Chief Makoni was the subject of an investigation which exonerated Major Watts after he had been under open arrest for some considerable time.

Also affected was Chief Hwinya, one of the most influential chiefs of the Gweru District. In March 1896 he was the instigator of an uprising among the Shona people of the Gweru area. 

He was captured and, instead of being taken to Bulawayo for a trial in civil court, Colonel Baden-Powell decided to try him through a court martial. He faced charges of armed rebellion and was found guilty and sentenced to be shot by firing squad. 

Sir Hercules Robinson, the High Commissioner for Southern Africa heard the news of the execution and pointed out that Chief Hwinya should have been tried in a civil court and his execution appeared prima facie illegal, and he requested Baden-Powell to be placed under open arrest and order Court of Inquiry. A Court of Inquiry was held which cleared Baden-Powell of any wrong-doing.

The trials and executions of our chiefs were conducted in public despite public executions being outlawed in Britain since 1868. 

Chief Hwinya was taken out to an open place in the centre of his stronghold, where all his people could see, and he was shot by a firing party. 

In practice, the colonial law offered no redress or appeals, the native was always presumed guilty. Race was at the core of the colonial administration of justice. 

As the Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak observed in 1907: “The goddess of British Justice, though blind, is able to distinguish unmistakably black from white.” 

Whilst I express revulsion over sanitised judicial murders, the overbearing point is that the colonial courts had no jurisdiction over our First Chimurenga heroes and heroines. 

They had not consented to the Crown’s sovereignty, and they were not amenable to the Crown’s law. As the Crown had failed to protect their persons and property such consent could not be implied. Natives were outside the protection of those laws, which laws were extended over them in efforts to take their lands, resources and possessions. 

The application of ‘white’ law to native persons could not be justified because, in Zimbabwe, it was the colonists and not the natives who were the foreigners and uninvited intruders.

It is erroneous to suggest that the BSAC and the Crown acquired sovereignty nor absolute beneficial title over our lands. Rhodes’ invasion of Mashonaland, without any signed concessions by Shona chiefs, suggests that Mashonaland was terra nullis, in the sense that it was uninhabited or inhabited by people so low in the social scale of social organisation to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land. 

Title could not be acquired by occupying land already occupied by another. 

Chief Makoni strongly asserted this point before execution when he said: “It is well to call me a rebel, but the country belonged to me and my forefathers long before you came here.” 

It is, therefore, not correct to say there was no land law or tenure existing in the land at the time of its annexation to the Crown. 

Charles Rudd submitted to this inviolability of native law when he made the following oral promise to Lobengula, “…that they would not bring more than ten white men to work in his country …  and that they and their people would abide by the laws of his country and in fact be his people.” 

Lobengula, upon realising he had been tricked into signing the Rudd Concession, made efforts to persuade the colonial office that the concession was invalid by sending envoys to Queen Victoria and writing letters to the colonial office. 

King Lobengula

This was all in vain. 

It is submitted that the British government could be seen as an unlawful belligerent occupant that failed to obtain legitimate title to this land. 

The Rudd Concession was fraudulently obtained, thus rendering the Royal Treaty defective. Moreover, pre-existing sovereignty resided in the Mashona who never signed any concessions with BSAC. It was erroneous to say Lobengula, another invader, was the paramount Chief of Matabeleland and Mashonaland regions. 

The treaty of 1888 describes Lobengula as “…ruler of the tribe known as amaNdebele, together with the Mashona and the Makalakala, tributaries of the same.” 

This misrepresentation is material, for about 1888 Queen Victoria recognised Lobengula as sovereign of both peoples. 

The Mashona strongly resisted this invasion of imperial and colonial forces. There was no voluntary submission to the ‘conquering’ power, or implied acknowledgement of this occupant as the legitimate sovereign. 

This is the reason the Mashona never surrendered; they continued to fight for the restoration of that sovereignty. 

Reversion of sovereignty, supported by the Second Chimurenga movement for decolonisation and self-determination, saw the sovereignty of native peoples resurrected. 

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