"What is it?" I asked.
"You are in Rhodesia and I want to know who you are," boomed a voice out in the corridor.
I opened the door and a tall, rangy, bronzed man—the immigration inspector—stepped inside. He looked like a cross between an Arizona cowboy and an Australian overseas soldier. When I proved to his satisfaction that I was neither Bolshevik nor Boche he departed with the remark: "We've got to keep a watch on the people who come into this country."
Such was my introduction to Rhodesia, where the limousine and the ox-team compete for right of way on the veldt and the 'rickshaw yields to the motor-cycle in the town streets. Nowhere in the world can you find a region that combines to such vivid and picturesque extent the romance and hardship of the pioneer age with the push and practicality of today. Here existed the "King Solomon's Mines" of Rider Haggard's fancy: here the modern gold-seekers of fact sought the treasures of Ophir; here Nature gives an awesome manifestation of her power in the Victoria Falls.
It is the only country where a great business corporation rules, not by might of money but by chartered authority. Linked with that rule is the story of a conflict between share-holder and settler that is unique in the history of colonization. It is the now-familiar and well-nigh universal struggle for self-determination waged in this instance between all-British elements and without violence.
All the way from Capetown I had followed the trail of Cecil Rhodes, which like the man himself, is distinct. It is not the succession of useless and conventional monuments reared by a grateful posterity. Rather it is expressed in terms of cities and a permanent industrial and agricultural advance. "Living he was the land," and dead, his imperious and constructive spirit goes marching on. The Rhodes impress is everywhere. Now I had arrived at the cap-stone of it all, the domain that bears his name and which he added to the British Empire.
Less than two hours after the immigration inspector had given me the once-over on the frontier I was in Bulawayo, metropolis of Rhodesia, which sprawls over the veldt just like a bustling Kansas community spreads out over the prairie. It is definitely American in energy and atmosphere. Save for the near-naked blacks you could almost imagine yourself in Idaho or Montana back in the days when our West was young.
Before that first day ended I had lunched and dined in a club that would do credit to Capetown or Johannesburg; had met women who wore French frocks, and had heard the possibilities of the section acclaimed by a dozen enthusiasts. Everyone in Rhodesia is a born booster. Again you get the parallel with our own kind.
To the average American reader Rhodesia is merely a name, associated with the midnight raid of stealthy savage and all the terror and tragedy of the white man's burden amid the wild confines. All this happened, to be sure, but it is part of the past. While South Africa still wrestles with a serious native problem, Rhodesia has settled it once and for all. It would be impossible to find a milder lot than the survivors and sons of the cruel and war-like Lobengula who once ruled here like a despot of old. His tribesmen—the Matabeles—were put in their place by a strong hand and they remain put.
Bulawayo was the capital of Lobengula's kingdom. The word means "Place of Slaughter," and it did not belie the name. You can still see the tree under which the portly potentate sat and daily dispensed sanguinary judgment. His method was quite simple. If anyone irritated or displeased him he was haled up "under the greenwood" and sentenced to death. If gout or rheumatism racked the royal frame the chief executed the first passerby and then considered the source of the trouble removed. The only thing that really departed was the head of the innocent victim. Lobengula had sixty-eight wives, which may account for some of his eccentricities. Chaka, the famous king of the Zulus, whose favourite sport was murdering his sons (he feared a rival to the throne), was an amateur in crime alongside the dusky monarch whom the British suppressed, and thereby gained what is now the most prosperous part of Southern Rhodesia.