The Matabele Campaign / Being a Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, 1896

by Baron Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell Baden-Powell of Gilwell

And this is what we find is the situation of affairs.

Matabeleland had been captured by the Chartered Company’s troops, acting from Mashonaland, in 1893, and Lobengula driven to his death as a fugitive. Since then the country had been governed by the Administrator and his magistrates and native commissioners in the various districts into which the country was divided.

By 1896 the white population had increased to nearly four thousand, guarded by an armed police force distributed about the country. At the end of 1895 the greater part of this police was taken from Rhodesia, in order to take part in Jameson’s raid into the Transvaal.

Just about the same time the terrible scourge of rinderpest came down upon the land. Three years before, it had made a start in Somaliland, and had steadily and persistently worked its way down the continent of Africa—and it now crossed the mighty barrier of the Zambesi, and was sweeping over the great cattle–country, Matabeleland. With a view to checking its ravages, the Government took all possible steps for preventing the transmission of infection, and, amongst others, that of slaughtering sound cattle was adopted. This procedure was perfectly incomprehensible to the native mind, and before long it was mooted among them that the white man’s idea in slaughtering the cattle was to reduce the native to the lowest straits, and to starve him to death.

The natives had only been very partially beaten in the war in 1893, and the memory of it rankled strongly in their mind. They had thought the war was merely a passing raid, and it was only now they were realising that the whites had come to stay, and to oust them from their land. They were only waiting for their opportunity to rise and drive out their invaders.

Then, ever since the war, there had been a partial drought over the land, and what little crops there were had been devoured by unprecedented flights of locusts. All these misfortunes tended to spread among the people a general feeling of sullen discontent.

And this was increased to a feeling of bitter resentment against the whites, because they, the Matabele, found that the one remedy for want which in the old days they had been wont to ply so readily—namely, the wholesale raiding of their weaker neighbours—was under the new régime denied them. Nowadays, not only was every such raid prevented or punished as unlawful, but even in their home life their liberties were interfered with, and trifling thefts of cattle from a neighbour’s herd, or the quiet putting away of a lazy slave or of a quarrelsome stepmother, were now treated as crimes by policemen of their own blood and colour, but creatures of the white man, strutting among them with as much consequence and power as any of the royal indunas.

These things developed their hatred against the whites, and served as plausible reasons for their conduct when the chiefs came to be questioned later on in giving in their surrender.

Meanwhile, the chiefs and headmen, hoping to get back their ancient powers, fomented this feeling for all that they were worth. And they had a ductile mass to handle, for to the vast majority of their people the question of rights and wrongs was an unknown quantity, but the lust of blood—especially blood of white men, when, as they anticipated, it could be got with little danger to themselves—was an irresistible incentive.