For a quarter of a century the regions adjacent to the Zambezi were disturbed only by migratory bands of natives and marauding animals. Then Stanley came with his mile-long caravan of porters, halting long enough to explore and map the region, on his historic march from coast to coast. In the middle eighties a young English prospector, trekking through the country with a single wagon, found that for which he was seeking—gold. Likewise he saw that its verdure-clad prairies would support many cattle and that its virgin soil was adapted for many kinds of crops; that it was, in short, a white man's country. Unarmed and unaccompanied, he penetrated to the kraal of Lobenguela, the chief of the warlike Matabele, who occupied the region, and induced him to sign a treaty placing his country under British protection. The price paid him was five hundred dollars a month and a thousand antiquated rifles; cheap enough, surely, for a territory three times the size of Texas and as rich in natural resources as California. A year later the British South Africa Company, a corporation capitalised at thirty million dollars, under a charter granted by the Imperial Government, began the work of exploiting the concession; naming it, properly enough, after Cecil John Rhodes, the lone prospector who, with the vision of a prophet, had foreseen its possibilities and by whose unaided efforts it had been obtained. Such was the first step in Rhodes's policy of British expansion northward—a policy so successful that in his own lifetime he saw the frontiers of British Africa pushed from the Orange River to the Nile.
To hand over a colonial possession, its inhabitants and its resources, to be administered and exploited by a private corporation, sounds like a strange proceeding to American ears. Imagine turning the Philippines over to the Standard Oil Company and giving that corporation permission to appoint its own officials, make its own laws, assess its own taxes, and maintain its own military force in those islands. That, roughly speaking, was about what England did when she turned Rhodesia over to the chartered company. It should be remembered, however, that, beginning when the European nations were entering upon an era of economic exploration of hitherto virgin territories, these chartered companies have played a large part in the history of colonisation in general and in the upbuilding of the British Empire in particular, though in the great majority of cases it was trade, not empire, at which they aimed. Warned, however, by the fashion in which the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company abused their power, the British Government keeps a jealous eye on the activities of the Rhodesian concessionaires, their charter, while conferring broad trading privileges and great administrative powers, differing from earlier instruments in neither delegating sovereignty nor granting an exclusive monopoly.
The Rhodesia protectorate is the result of the consolidation of four great native kingdoms: Mashonaland in the southeast, Matabeleland in the southwest, Barotseland in the northwest, and in the northeast a portion of the now separately administered protectorate of Nyasaland. Practically the whole country is an elevated veldt, or plateau, ranging from three thousand five hundred to five thousand feet above sea-level; studded with granite kopjes which in the south attain to the dignity of a mountain chain; well watered by tributaries of the Congo, the Zambezi, and the Limpopo; and covered with a luxuriant vegetation. Like California, Southern Rhodesia has a unique and hospitable climate, free from the dangerous heats of an African summer and from cold winds in winter. Though the climate of nearly all of Southern Rhodesia is suitable for Europeans, much of the trans-Zambezi provinces, especially along the river valleys and in the low-lying, swampy regions near the great equatorial lakes, reeks with malaria, while in certain other areas, now carefully delimited and guarded by governmental regulation, the tsetse-fly commits terrible ravages among cattle and horses and the sleeping-sickness among men. The climate as a whole, however, is characterised by a rather remarkable equability of temperature, especially when it is remembered that Rhodesia extends from the borders of the temperate zone to within a few degrees of the equator. At Salisbury, the capital, for example, the mean July temperature is 57.5° and for January 70.5°, the extremes for the year ranging from 34° to 93°. It is a significant fact, however, that the glowing prospectuses of the chartered company touch but lightly on the climatic conditions which prevail north of the Zambezi, a region from which, it struck me, the European settler who does not possess a system that is proof against every form of tropical fever, a head that is proof against sunstroke, and a mind which is proof against that oftentimes fatal form of homesickness which the army surgeons call nostalgia, is much more likely to go home in a coffin than in a cabine de luxe.
In mines of gold, of silver, and of diamonds Rhodesia is very rich; agriculturally it is very fertile, for in addition to the native crops of rice, tobacco, cotton, and india-rubber, the fruits, vegetables, and cereals of Europe and America are profitably grown. The great fields of maize, or “mealies,” as all South Africans call it, through which my train frequently passed, constantly reminded me of scenes in our own “corn belt”; but in the watch-towers which rise from every corn-field, atop of which an armed Kaffir sits day and night to protect the crops from the raids of wild pigs and baboons, Rhodesia has a feature which she is welcome to consider exclusively her own.
Though Rhodesia is distinctly a frontier country, with many of a frontier's defects, her towns—Salisbury, Bulawayo, Umtali, and the rest—are not frontier towns as we knew them in Butte, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and Carson City. There are saloons, of course, but they are not of the “gin palace” variety, nor did it strike me that intoxication was particularly common; certainly nothing like what it used to be during the gold-rush days in Alaska or in our own West. This may be due to the fantastic prices charged for liquor—a whiskey-and-soda costs sixty cent—and then again it maybe due to the fact that most of the settlers have brought their families with them, so that, instead of spending their evenings leaning over green tables or polished bars, they devote them to cricket, gardening, or a six-weeks-old English paper. Though nearly every one goes armed, the streets of the Rhodesian towns are as peaceable as Commonwealth Avenue, in Boston, on a Sunday morning. Indeed, the commandant of police in Bulawayo assured me that he had had only one shooting affray during his term of office. In Rhodesia, should a man draw his gun as the easiest means of settling a quarrel, his companions, instead of responding by drawing theirs, would probably call a constable and have him bound over to keep the peace. Even the rights of the natives are rigidly safeguarded by law, an American settler in Umtali complaining to me most bitterly that “it's more dangerous for a white man to kick a nigger down here than it is for him to kill one in the States.” Now, all this was rather disappointing for one who, like myself, was on the lookout for the local colour and picturesqueness and whoop-her-up-boys excitement which one naturally associates with life on a frontier; but I might have expected just what I found, for wherever the flag of England flies, whether over the gold-miners of the Yukon, the ivory-traders of Uganda, or the settlers of Rhodesia, there will be found the deep-seated respect of the Englishman for English order and English law.
In my opinion the country club, more than any other single factor, has contributed most to the making, socially and morally, of Rhodesia. Though the American West is dotted with just such towns as Salisbury, Bulawayo, Gwelo, and Umtali, with the same limitations, pitfalls, and possibilities, the men's centre of interest, after the day's work is over, is the saloon, the dance-hall, or the barber-shop with a pool-room in the rear. They do things differently in central Africa. In every Rhodesian town large enough to support one—and the same is true of all Britain's colonial possessions—I found that a “sports club” had been established on the edge of the town. Often it was nothing but a ramshackle shed or cottage that had been given a coat of paint and had a veranda added, but files of the English newspapers and illustrated weeklies were to be found inside, while from the tea tables on the veranda one overlooked half a dozen tennis courts, a cricket ground, and a foot-ball field. It is here that the settlers—men, women, and children—congregate toward evening, to discuss the crop prospects, the local taxes, the latest gold discoveries, and, above all else, the news contained in the weekly mail from home. Why have not our own progressive prairie towns some simple social system like this? It was in speaking of this very thing that the mayor of Salisbury—himself an American-remarked: “In the little, every-day things which make for successful colonisation of a new country, you fellows in the States are twenty years behind us.”
Living is expensive in Rhodesia, the prices of necessaries usually being high and of luxuries ofttimes fantastic. To counterbalance this, however, wages are extraordinarily high. It is useless to attempt to quote wages, for the farther up-country a man gets the higher pay he can command, so I will content myself with the bare statement that for the skilled workman, be he carpenter, blacksmith, mason, or wheelwright, larger wages are to be earned than in any part of the world that I know. The same is true of the man who has had practical experience in agriculture or stock-raising, there being a steady demand for men conversant with dairying, cattle-breeding, and irrigation. Let me drive home and copper-rivet the fact, however, that in Rhodesia, as in nearly all new countries, where there is a considerable native population to draw upon, there is no place for the unskilled labourer.
For the man with resource and a little capital there are many roads to wealth in British Africa. I know of one, formerly a laundry employee in Chicago, who landed in Rhodesia with limited capital but unlimited confidence. Recognising that the country had arrived at that stage of civilisation where the people were tired of wearing flannel shirts, but could not afford to have white ones ruined by Kaffir washermen, he started a chain of sanitary up-to-date laundries, and is to-day one of the wealthy men of the colony. If you ever had to pay one of his laundry bills you would understand why. Another American, starting business as a hotel-keeper in Salisbury, soon perceived that the people were ripe for some form of amusement other than that provided by the cricket fields and saloons; so he built a string of cinematograph and vaudeville theatres combined, and to-day, on the very spot where Lobenguela's medicine-men performed their bloody rites a dozen years ago, you can hear the whir of the moving-picture machine and see on the canvas screen a military review at Aldershot or a bathing scene at Asbury Park. Still another American whom I met has increased the thickness of his wallet by supplying prospectors and settlers with sectional houses which are easily portable and can be erected in an hour. Taking the circular, conical-roofed hut of the Matabele as his model, he evolved an affair of corrugated iron which combines simplicity, portability, and practicability with a low price, so that to-day, as you travel through Rhodesia, you will see these American-made imitations of Kaffir huts dotting the veldt.
Though Rhodesia has a black population of one million six hundred thousand, as against twenty thousand whites, there has thus far been no such thing as race troubles or a colour question, due in large measure, no doubt, to the firm and just supervision exercised by the British resident commissioners. Arms, ammunition, and liquor excepted, natives and Europeans are under the same conditions. Land has been set apart for tribal settlements, the mineral rights being reserved to the company, but, if the native occupation is disturbed, new lands must immediately be assigned, all disputes being ultimately referrible to the British high commissioner. Those natives living near the towns are segregated in settlements of their own, a native under no circumstances being permitted to remain within the town limits after nightfall, or to enter them in the day-time without a pass signed by the commandant of police. Though possessing many of the temperamental characteristics of the American negro, and in particular his aversion for manual work, the Rhodesian native is, on the whole, honest and trustworthy, a well-disciplined and efficient force of native constabulary having been recruited from the warlike Barotse and Matabele.