In this incisive and revealing book, Richard Bourne shows how a country which had every prospect of success when it achieved a delayed independence in 1980 became a brutal police state with hyperinflation, collapsing life expectancy and abandonment by a third of its citizens less than thirty years later.
Beginning with the British conquest of Zimbabwe and covering events up to the present precarious political situation, this is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and readable account of the ongoing crisis. Bourne shows that Zimbabwe's tragedy is not just about Mugabe's 'evil' but about history, Africa today and the world's attitudes towards them.
In this incisive and revealing book, Richard Bourne shows how a country which had every prospect of success when it achieved a delayed independence in 1980 became a brutal police state with hyperinflation, collapsing life expectancy and abandonment by a third of its citizens less than thirty years later.
Beginning with the British conquest of Zimbabwe and covering events up to the present precarious political situation, this is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and readable account of the ongoing crisis. Bourne shows that Zimbabwe's tragedy is not just about Mugabe's 'evil' but about history, Africa today and the world's attitudes towards them.
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Overview
In this incisive and revealing book, Richard Bourne shows how a country which had every prospect of success when it achieved a delayed independence in 1980 became a brutal police state with hyperinflation, collapsing life expectancy and abandonment by a third of its citizens less than thirty years later.
Beginning with the British conquest of Zimbabwe and covering events up to the present precarious political situation, this is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and readable account of the ongoing crisis. Bourne shows that Zimbabwe's tragedy is not just about Mugabe's 'evil' but about history, Africa today and the world's attitudes towards them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780321073 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 552 KB |
About the Author
Richard Bourne is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London University, and a former journalist. In 1998 he founded the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit and before that, in 1990, was the first director of the non-governmental Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. He has written and edited ten books and numerous reports, including a biography of President Lula of Brazil (2008) and a collection of essays in honour of the 80th birthday of Shridath Ramphal (2008). As a journalist he was education correspondent of The Guardian and deputy editor of the London Evening Standard.
Read an Excerpt
Catastrophe
What Went Wrong in Zimbabwe?
By Richard Bourne
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Richard BourneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78032-107-3
CHAPTER 1
CONQUEST
The occupation of Rhodesia, of what became Zimbabwe, at the end of the nineteenth century was not planned by the British government in London. Rather, it was the project of a single, powerful man – Cecil Rhodes, one of the few individuals to give his name to a country. It was bloody, it involved lies and the deception of the Ndebele ruler, Lobengula, and the conquest was not quick. It formed part of a complex web of politics involving local freebooting whites and European powers in the run-up to the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902. Looked at from the vantage point of the middle of the twentieth century, when Harold Macmillan told South Africans that a 'wind of change' was blowing through their continent, it was also surprisingly recent.
Cecil John Rhodes, born in 1853, was the sixth surviving child of an Anglican vicar, the Reverend Francis Rhodes, of Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire. He was only 17 when he arrived in Durban after a sailing voyage of seventy-five days to join his brother Herbert to grow cotton. His education was put on hold because it was thought that a long sea voyage would be good for his sickly health. After a year, when cotton was unrewarding, Rhodes joined the adventurers who were flocking to the New Rushdiamond mines at Kimberley, a radius of some two and a half miles in an area hitherto occupied by Boer farmers and Africans.
The story of how Rhodes came to dominate the diamond business, while at the same time getting a pass degree at Oxford University, has often been told – initially he was seen as a hero of imperialism, later as an ogre. But he was not just interested in wealth for the sake of it. He saw it as an opportunity to obtain power, and to realise his vision for expanding the British Empire in Africa. His maturity coincided with Disraeli's rebranding of Britain's ragbag of colonies and protectorates around the world as the empire on which the sun never set, and Queen Victoria as Empress of India.
In the 1880s Rhodes was operating in several fields simultaneously – as a businessman creating a diamond cartel and, after a cautious start, building a further fortune in the newly discovered goldfields of the Witwatersrand; as a politician in the Cape Colony parliament, where he would become prime minister in 1890; and as a lobbyist in Britain for imperial expansion who had the ear of ministers and journalists, while all the time needing to keep shareholders in his companies happy. Always worried about his health and longevity, he had prodigious energy, and showed increasing ruthlessness.
The country which is Zimbabwe was, in the 1880s, largely controlled by an offshoot of the Zulu warrior nation, the Amandebele – 'the people of the long shields' – whose illiterate but imposing king was Lobengula. Now the Ndebele, their name was anglicised at the time as Matabele. Lobengula, who had many wives, ruled from his royal kraal in the traditional African town of Gubulawayo, near what is now Bulawayo. White hangers-on and fortune-seekers, and Christian missionaries, were beginning to arrive.
The Ndebele had moved up from the south in the 1830s, conquering or obtaining tribute from the more numerous but often more peaceable Shona polities. The first moment of Shona glory, the Mutapa civilisation, with its remarkable stone buildings at Great Zimbabwe, had peaked over three centuries earlier. In the late sixteenth century the Mutapa rulers had accepted Portuguese suzerainty. The Ndebele expanded at the expense of a later Shona political system, the Rozvi confederacy, when they arrived in the nineteenth century.
The Ndebele were led by a commander named Mzilikazi, who had helped Shaka establish Zulu power, but then fell out with him, crossing the Limpopo river after defeat in a nine-day battle by Boers who were on their Great Trek north to escape the British. Along the way they incorporated others, with lower status, in the Zulu-led army. The Ndebele were courageous, regimented, but extremely brutal in their raids on the Shona villages, slaughtering adults, enslaving children, and capturing cattle and supplies. Mutinhima, from a powerful Rozvi family was 'pursued ... under instructions from King Mzilikazi to pluck out his heart and deliver it to him'. Some Shona became vassals. Some retained an insecure independence. Two years after Mzilikazi's death in 1868, Lobengula, one of his sons, established himself as his successor.
Lobengula was regal and tall, with a dreadful mien and elephantine walk, approached by his subjects on their knees. Praise-singers called him 'Eater of Men' and 'Stabber of Heaven'. European contemporaries who visited him were not sure whether he had sixty wives or two hundred. Either way the wives kept an eye on his regimental kraals, while he ruled formally with the aid of indunas, or senior councillors. In modern terminology he was a micromanager, who knew what was going on in his kingdom.
But his territory was coveted. The Germans had ambitions to take it, to link German South West Africa (now Namibia) with German East Africa (now Tanzania). The Portuguese, although they seemed indolent and absent-minded colonialists to northern Europeans, published a foreign ministry map in 1887 which set out a claim from today's Angola in the west to today's Mozambique in the east; this simply absorbed the lands in the middle as Portuguese. The Boers had an interest too, and in 1887 Pieter Grobler, on behalf of the Transvaal republic, had renewed a treaty of friendship with Lobengula. And all this was to ignore the driving force, imperialist and entrepreneurial, which was Cecil Rhodes.
Rhodes's power in the 1880s was expanding on several axes. In 1884, three years after becoming an unpaid MP in the Cape parliament, he became the colony's treasurer and deputy commissioner of Bechuanaland, which he saw as 'the road to the North', bypassing the Boer republics. He lost a point the following year when Bechuanaland became a protectorate under Whitehall, fuelling his suspicion of 'the imperial factor'. But in 1887, with his partner Charles Rudd, he registered the Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa Ltd in London. This, like the De Beers diamond combine which he and Barney Barnato brought together as a monopoly the following year, was empowered to annexe and govern territories as well as conduct business.
In 1888 too, Rhodes won the support of Sir Hercules Robinson, British high commissioner in southern Africa, for his dream of expansion to the north. In July, Robinson agreed to try and obtain a concession from Lobengula of
parts of Matabeleland and Mashonaland which are not in the use of the Natives, and to provide for the protection of the Natives in the parts reserved for them, as well as the development of the unoccupied territories surrendered to the Company by a Royal Charter somewhat similar to that granted some years ago to the Borneo Company.
Although Rhodes remained ambiguous about the imperial factor, this was the go-ahead he needed. With fortune-hunters representing other syndicates surrounding Lobengula, Rhodes sent Charles Rudd and two others to see the Ndebele king to negotiate an exclusive mineral concession. Rudd was kept hanging around in the insanitary quarters of the white encampment by Gubulawayo and, in spite of a gift of 100 gold sovereigns to Lobengula and of 200 to the Rev. Charles Daniel Helm of the London Missionary Society, who was the king's trusted interpreter, the project seemed to be going nowhere.
Lobengula was right to be cautious. Whites were beginning to infiltrate his territories. Some of his young militants would have liked to kill the lot of them. He also needed to consult his indunas, his senior councillors. He knew the military power of the British, but he also knew they could not be trusted.
To break the stalemate, Rhodes and Robinson turned to Sir Sidney Shippard, a Rhodes ally who as acting attorney general had steered him through some tricky legal moments in the diamond fields of Kimberley, and who was the first resident commissioner in Bechuanaland. On 16 October 1888 Shippard turned up at Gubulawayo, escorted by his mounted police, and with the Anglican Bishop of Bloemfontein and other notables in his party. Shippard refused to grovel to Lobengula, walking to greet him across a carpet of goat dung, in a buttoned-up frock coat in the heat. The British, he said, were not like the Boers who wanted land; they only wanted to mine and to trade. Rudd had earlier offered guns – although Rhodes was already planning a military conquest – and a steamship on the Zambezi.
After a two-day meeting with the indunas, who were won over by the white delegation, Lobengula agreed to put his mark to the concession document. Of course he was deceived. The concession gave Rhodes's new chartered company complete charge over the metals and minerals in his kingdom 'together with full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to win and procure the same'. Lobengula was promised £100 a month, 1,000 Martini-Henry rifles and 100,000 rounds of ammunition, and the armed steamboat. Verbal promises that there would only be ten diggers, or that white miners would fight for the king, were meaningless. Without fully appreciating it he had given away his country, including those parts occupied by Shona and others which had never come under his rule.
The situation remained difficult for Rhodes as information about the real scope of the concession got back to Lobengula, who wrote a letter denying the concession, which was published in the Bechuanaland News. He also refused to accept the first consignment of rifles, and sent two of his indunas on a mission to London to see Queen Victoria. The two indunas, Babayane and Mtshete, got a letter from the colonial secretary making clear that 'Englishmen who have gone to Matabeleland to ask leave to dig for stones have not gone with the Queen's authority' and warning that not too much power should be given to the concession-hunters who got to Lobengula first. There was considerable hostility to Rhodes in London, both from those concerned for Africans, from rivals, and from those appalled that a rich man had hijacked imperial policy.
But in an extraordinary turn of speed, using his money and gifts of persuasion, Rhodes chased after the indunas to London and overcame his main opponents. He won over the press – The Times and the financially pressed but reputable W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette. He offered prominent Liberals and Conservatives places on the board of a new company, the British South Africa Company, which got a royal charter, and to which the concession was transferred. This company harked back, in the grandeur of its powers, to those earlier instruments of trade and empire-building, the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company.
The new company was empowered to operate north of the Limpopo and west of the Portuguese possessions in East Africa. It could act as a government; set up banks and companies; build railways (always an interest of Rhodes); settle and cultivate land; carry out mining operations; and set up its own police force with its own flag, to keep order. Notwithstanding the disaster which had overcome the East India Company and British authority in South Asia only thirty-two years earlier, when the mutiny broke out, a British government had once again handed over a large region, and many thousands of indigenous people, to a private company.
Lobengula realised that he had been tricked. He had one of his trusted advisers, Lotshe, and some 300 of Lotshe's extended family put to death, for persuading him to sign the Rudd concession. By December 1889, Rhodes had decided to conquer Lobengula's lands. He commissioned Frank Johnson, a 22-yearold former quartermaster in the Bechuanaland mounted police, to raise a force of 500 men to defeat the Ndebele. If successful, Johnson would get £100,000, and the men would be rewarded with 3,000 acres of land and the right to look for gold.
Due to a leak, the invasion was postponed. It had reached the ears of the new high commissioner in the Cape, Sir Henry Loch, who was not as friendly to Rhodes as Sir Hercules Robinson. Johnson took the blame, not incriminating Rhodes. But less than a year later Rhodes made another contract with Johnson, under which he would skirt Matabeleland and take over Mashonaland to the north and east; the Shona lands would be handed to Rhodes's company, fit for civil government, by 1 October 1890. In principle a direct clash with the Ndebele, the strongest military nation in central Africa, might be avoided.
This time Johnson thought he could occupy the land with only 250 pioneers – good fighting men who might also be the nucleus of a civilian population. Rhodes, a bachelor with a penchant for handsome young men, added a dozen names of his own – 'angels' or 'lambs' according to contemporaries. And Sir Henry Loch insisted, in a row with Rhodes before he would sanction the expedition, that the Chartered Company needed at least 400 mounted men to hold the base. These were the forebears of the British South Africa Police, who policed Rhodesia until the independence of Zimbabwe. In the end there were 200 pioneers, a mixed bag from the Cape, accompanied by 500 charter company police, 350 Ngwato labourers and 2,000 oxen pulling 117 ox-wagons.
Amazingly the pioneer column, which started from Bechuanaland and included Anglican clergy, got past the Ndebele lands, moving with wagons at 12 miles a day, without being attacked or ambushed. At a certain point Dr Leander Starr Jameson, a friend of Rhodes who had been one of his negotiators with Lobengula, decided on a demonstration of firepower to impress a deputation of suspicious indunas. A firing of nine-pounder guns and machine guns suggested that the white men should not be trifled with. On 13 September 1890 the Union Jack was hoisted at a place named Fort Salisbury, in honour of Lord Salisbury, the current Conservative prime minister in London. Within a couple of years the first issue of a newspaper, the Rhodesia Herald, was being published there.
Rhodes himself, by now prime minister of the Cape Colony, visited 'his' territory in October 1891 to find numerous complaints from the pioneers who had not found gold, had found agriculture difficult and company levies extortionate, and were ravaged by disease. Shona villagers, often mistreated, had staved off hunger for some by giving them food. At the same time the Chartered Company's claim remained insecure, for the following month Lobengula concluded a competing agreement with a German adventurer, Eduard Lippert, under which, in return for a down payment of £1,000 and £500 a year for a hundred years, he had the right to establish farms and towns in the territory of the Ndebele and the Shona. The Chartered Company was in danger of going bankrupt, and to save money Rhodes took the risky decision to reduce his police force from 650 to 150 by Christmas 1892.
Nevertheless it was in 1893 that Lobengula and his impis, or military forces, were challenged directly, and overcome. The story began with the cutting of a section of telegraph wire between Fort Victoria and Fort Tuli by the subjects of a petty Shona chief. Telegraph communications were vital for the company and Lobengula was prevailed on to send two regiments to massacre the miscreants, and burn their kraals, their traditional homesteads. He also wanted to punish Shona cattle thieves. The vengeance spread and other Shona, who had been working for white farmers, were killed or ran away. Possibly 400 Shona were hacked to death by the Ndebele, under the walls of Fort Victoria, frightening the whites with visible barbarism. There was minor damage to white property.
Dr Jameson, a medical doctor and Rhodes's representative – who had beguiled Lobengula by treating his gout – decided to provoke the Ndebele. He was acting on his own initiative, but knew that he had Rhodes's backing. He created a bogus incident outside Fort Victoria in which he claimed that troops under the command of a Captain Lendy, who believed in terrorising the African population by 'severe measures', had been attacked by Ndebele. Lendy then shot thirty Ndebele, who had offered no resistance. Lobengula had taken care to avoid conflict with the whites in the Shona areas, though he still wanted tribute and his suzerainty recognised. He was worried that the company would use any excuse to invade Matabeleland. Although Sir Henry Loch tried to put the brakes on the blatant war-making of Rhodes and Jameson – sealed by a passage from Luke's gospel in the New Testament – Lobengula's efforts at appeasement failed.
The Chartered Company put a force of 1,400 troops in the field in three columns, supported by African wagon drivers. Though vastly inferior to the Ndebele in numbers, they were armed with the new machine guns invented by Hiram Maxim in London's Hatton Garden, and Lobengula's troops were unfamiliar with the rifles supplied by Rhodes. On the Shangani river, Jameson's army was surrounded by 6,000 Ndebele. But the company's guns were devastating, and some 500 Ndebele were killed. Soon after, on the Bembisi river close to Gubulawayo, the slaughter was worse: 500 out of 700 in Lobengula's royal regiment were killed, and 3,000 Ndebele altogether, with only one white killed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Catastrophe by Richard Bourne. Copyright © 2011 Richard Bourne. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Glossary of Acronyms, Personalities, OrganisationsTimeline
Preface and Acknowledgements
Prologue: Two Birthdays
1. Conquest
2. White Supremacy and the Settler State
3. From UDI to Lancaster House
4. ZANU in Power - the 1980s
5. The 1990s - When the Wheels Began to Fall Off
6. Disaster Years, and the Third Chimurenga
7. From Operation Murambatsvina to an Inclusive Government
8. How Did it Go Wrong?
Select Bibliography