Pax Britannica (8 page)

B
ENEATH a low kopje on the Makabusi River, 150 miles south of the Zambesi and 400 miles from the Indian Ocean, there stood at this time in fine rolling country a settlement of low brick buildings, with roofs of corrugated iron. Some had verandas, some were stark as shoe-boxes, and they were separated by wide strips of bare ground, worn by wagon-tracks and sometimes lined with scraggy trees. This was the township of Salisbury, Rhodesia, seven years old that summer, and only one muddy stage removed from the outspanning of the pioneers. Salisbury was a proper frontier town: a raw outpost of the British way, set in a territory largely unexplored and inhabited by African tribes so unpredictable that only a few months before the settlement had been in a state of siege, with the entire white population beleaguered in the police compound. Down the generations a long succession of such frontier posts had been created by the British, each maturing with time and stability, until their roads were paved, their savages restrained, their saloon toughs genteel in collars and ties and their natural avarice clothed respectably in municipal councils and benevolent societies. Salisbury was one of the latest, and was still making its way. Up at the cemetery a row of neat new iron crosses marked the graves of men killed in the Mashona rebellion a few months before. No epitaph was given them, nor even a home address: only the final imperial text: ‘
For
Queen
And
Empire’.

Cecil Rhodes, the most visionary of imperialists, had decreed the foundation of Salisbury. As Prime Minister of the Cape, and one of the great mine-owners of the Kimberley diamond fields, he had looked northward from South Africa and seen that the territory of the Mashonas and the Matabeles, between the Limpopo and the Zambesi rivers, was ripe for the British touch. For one thing, he was dreaming of that All-Red route from the Cape to Cairo. For
another, he wished to turn the flank of the unfriendly Boers of the Transvaal Republic. Thirdly, he really did believe that the extension of British influence in Africa would be good for the Africans. Fourthly, he thought there might be gold up there. He had therefore induced King Lobengula of Matabeleland, who held some sort of sway over both the Mashonas and the Matabeles, to grant him a mining concession in those areas, and then persuaded the British Government to allow him a Royal Charter, authorizing him to govern and administer them. He formed a Chartered Company, the British South Africa Company, to occupy the country, and in 1890 he sent a column of pioneers northwards into Mashonaland.

Two hundred young men had formed the nucleus of this column, with an escort of five hundred police. They had been carefully recruited as the embryo of a new white colony, and included farmers, miners, engineers, lawyers, doctors, builders, artisans and miscellaneous adventurers. They had travelled under military discipline as soldiers, but when they reached Mashonaland they were disbanded and let loose as civilian settlers. A young pioneer called Frank Phillips, who travelled in many parts of the Empire in the 1890s, summed up their attitudes thus: ‘There was much swearing at times, and a fond wish never to see old England again until pockets were pretty well lined with the needful.’ The origins of Salisbury were therefore rough but not altogether ready—many of the pioneers were totally ignorant of Africa and the outdoor life. The concessions extracted from Lobengula were morally dubious, for he had little idea how much he was signing away, and the Company’s right to administer the country at all, however confidently it had gained the imperial assent, was morally shaky. The local tribes, secretive Mashona, mercurial Matabele, repeatedly turned on the settlers, and Lobengula, finding himself dispossessed, proved a bitter enemy until his death in 1893. There had been two major wars against the Matabeles, and that summer the Mashonas were still in rebellion. Disease had ravaged the settlers’ cattle. The gold reefs had proved disappointing. All in all things had not been easy, and Salisbury had developed a wiry, rather bitter, often bigoted kind of self-sufficiency, mud on its boots and guns on its shoulders.

It was a sign of the imperial times that Rhodesia, an enormous and carefully ill-defined slab of territory, should be governed by a Company. The New Imperialism was easily fired by dreams of freebooter and buccaneer, and was also much concerned with private profit: and prominent in its lore were the grand old companies which had created the original Empire, established the imperial routes and planted the first trading posts—the Levant Company, Hudson’s Bay, the Gold Coast and Gambia Companies, above all the East India Company, a major power in itself, with its own armies, warships, diplomats and currencies. Inspired by these swashbuckling examples, the British conceived the idea of re-creating such companies of adventurers, both to blaze new trails and to administer new possessions of the Crown, as they had done long before. Since 1882 four Chartered Companies had been formed, and given sovereign rights in various unexploited parts of the Empire. The system was admirably suited to men like Cecil Rhodes, who saw in it the chance both of profit and of almost sovereign power, and his British South Africa Company was much the biggest and most ebullient of them all.

It was a company, but more than a company. You could not look it up in the Register of Companies, because it was not obliged to register under the Companies Act. In the field it could acquire territory, make treaties, administer laws, levy taxes and custom duties, coin money, maintain its own armed forces. Rhodes saw it partly as a means of exploiting the wealth of the country, but partly as a specific instrument of British expansionism. Its chairman, the Duke of Abercorn, said at its first annual general meeting that the shareholders were more interested in earning dividends than in any ‘high political or philanthropic motives’. They hoped to be backing a new Rand. To Rhodes, and to the Imperial Government in London, the Company was also a convenient way of keeping foreigners out of the country, and binding the whole of Southern Africa more closely within the Empire.

The headquarters of the Company was in Kimberley, where
Rhodes had made his fortune, but its roots had been carefully planted in the British hierarchy. Two Dukes and a V.C. were on its board, and its air of realistic patriotism attracted the best kind of investor. Its all-embracing concessions extended half-way up the east coast of Africa, merging indefinitely with the British protectorate in Nyasaland: south of the Zambesi it dealt with London through the Colonial Office, north of the river through the Foreign Office. Its flag was the Union Jack with a lion in the middle and the letters BSAC. Its stamps showed the Company crest supported by springboks and surmounted by an imperial lion. Its motto was ‘Justice, Freedom, Commerce’. It laid its own railways, built its own roads, ran its own courts of law, was served by its own district officers and telegraph services. The men who settled under its auspices were absolutely its subjects: every immigrant was bound to abide by its laws, and defend its possessions if called upon. In return the Company helped to settle them, supplied stock at reduced terms, distributed free seed and undertook to buy crops. It was a sort of feudalism.
1

‘As for us,’ said the
Rhodesia
Herald,
dutifully celebrating the Jubilee, ‘in this distant corner of VICTORIA’S domain, no matter what our troubles, we join in the deafening shout that will, today, go up in the space before St Paul’s—“Long Live The Queen!”’ But elsewhere the paper was full of dispatches about the Mashona troubles, and in the shops they were selling Robert Baden-Powell’s book on the Matabele campaign of the previous year (‘guilty’, the
Herald
reviewer thought, of ‘glaring inaccuracies and execrable taste’). The air was full of bloodshed, grievance, and warlike rumour. ‘I estimate there were considerably over 100 natives’, reported Captain van Neikerk of the police, in a dispatch to the Chief Staff Officer in Salisbury, describing how he and four others had recently attacked a couple of Mashona
kraals. ‘I managed, almost at the cost of my life, to capture the chief alive, he was very nearly putting an assegai through me. … Trooper Hellberg also captured a woman and three children. … I must bring to your notice the gallant and brave manner in which Sergeant Major Weeden, Sergeant McAdam and Trooper Hellberg behaved yesterday in the fight, considering the enormous odds the four of us had to contend with.’

Salisbury naturally felt tense. There were still only a thousand citizens. The railway had not yet reached the town, and all communication was by mule-coach or ox-wagon. The coaches, built like the Australian mail-coaches to the Cobb pattern, were dragged along by spindly sore-covered teams of animals, and were often jammed with twelve passengers inside and seven or eight on top. The wagon trains, sometimes of thirty oxen, hauled their covered wagons with fearful labour through the veldt, men and beasts co-operating to drag them across rivers or up precipitous bluffs. Even these tenuous links were threatened now by the rinderpest, a vicious cattle disease which had killed thousands of animals throughout East Africa that summer: the transport riders were desperately inoculating their oxen by soaking strings in the lung-fluid of a victim, and threading them through their tails—if the inoculation ‘took’ the tails presently dropped off, and the animals were immune.

The citizens of Salisbury were angered by their isolation. They thought it unnecessary. In 1896 they had sent a petition to Queen Victoria, asking her help in hastening the construction of a railway to the city, and there was an undercurrent of resentment against the British South Africa Company, for its failure to look after people who were, after all, its protégées. Salisbury was rather given to grumbling, like most company towns.

The Company had been, it is true, under a cloud since the Jameson Raid, in which it had been intimately concerned—its police force provided the posse. The first Administrator and senior citizen of Rhodesia, Dr Jameson, was unavoidably absent in London, where
the Select Committee was inquiring into his conduct, and Rhodes himself, the vicarious founder of Salisbury and eponymous father of the country, had been obliged to leave the Company’s board. He had resigned his Premiership of the Cape, too, and sometimes seemed to be losing his grip upon the loyalty of the colonists.

But there was still no mistaking the nature of the place. The Government was still a Company Government. The police were Company police (though since the Raid an imperial officer had been appointed to keep an eye on them). The
Herald
incorporated the Company’s official gazette. There was still almost no civic activity in which the name of Mr Rhodes (as he was universally known)
1
did not appear, despite the fact that he lived 800 miles away in Kimberley. He was President of the Mashonaland Turf Club. He was Honorary President of the Literary and Debating Society. In the ‘Personal Pars’ column of the newspaper paragraphs about Mr Rhodes’s movements nearly always came first, even if they only announced that he was ‘expected to visit Salisbury shortly’. It was a foregone conclusion that Engine No1 on the Salisbury line, then being built in England, would be named
Cecil
J.
Rhodes
,
2
and when Collins the barber in Pioneer Street invented a new cure for dandruff he cast his mind through a fairly limited range of patent names and plumped for Rhoderine.

The settlers often chafed under this patronage, and wrote letters to the papers demanding more self-government: but when Mr Rhodes did turn up in Salisbury it was marvellous how their grievances shrivelled before the force of his presence. It was the peculiar nature of the administration that gave Salisbury its tang. There were imperial troops in Salisbury, helping with the wars, but there were no imperial governors—no liberal scholars from the Colonial Office, rationally debating the balance of power or the emancipation of the natives, no plumed pro-consul at Government House, lately transferred from Singapore or British Honduras, no stream of Whitehall directives binding Rhodesia to a wider imperial
pattern. The settlers were inclined to be contemptuous of British imperial authority, distantly and occasionally though it was exerted: had not Lord Ripon, the Colonial Secretary, four years before, forbidden the disarming of the Matabele because they would need their weapons to deal with the baboons?
1
No lessons were drawn from the long British experience in India, no conclusions were exchanged with British colonial experts in London. Rhodesia was an irregular sort of country, and Salisbury a fairly irregular capital. In 1895 a hard-labour prisoner escaped from the city gaol and made his way to the remote northern territories; he was recaptured up there, but the country was so short of Civil Servants that instead of sending him back to prison they gave him a job in the administration.

Of course Salisbury had its social pretensions. Until 1891 it had been a bachelor community and half its citizens indulged in African mistresses. Since then many white women had arrived, and the town had acquired a streaky veneer of decorum. The bushier beards had been trimmed, the language was more restrained in company, visiting cards were printed. The social centre of the colony was Government House, a pleasant rambling bungalow in the Indian manner, with an iron roof and a wide veranda, and servants’ huts around a yard.
2
There lived Lord Grey, described by his predecessor Jameson as ‘a nice old lady’, with his wife and his daughter Lady Victoria. The grandson of a British Prime Minister, Grey was a director of the Company, a fervent disciple of Rhodes and an ardent imperialist—‘The Empire is my country’, he used to write in autograph books, ‘England is my home’.
3
In that crude setting his
ménage
was a paragon of cultivated order. An invitation to a dance at Government House was, for most Salisbury women, the great event of the year—though the dances
themselves were more enthusiastic than correct, if only because the men still outnumbered the women by at least three to one. In the old days women had often improvised their dresses out of puggarrees, calico or curtain material. Now the shops were better supplied, and there were even one or two dressmakers in town, but in other respects the arrangements remained makeshift. Some guests rode up to Government House by bicycle, the ladies pinning up their skirts and riding in their petticoats, with their gloves and fans in basket carriers. Many took their babies along, to put down in a bedroom all among the wraps. A Mrs Mary Lewis went to one such dance, and had a delightful time. The house, she wrote home, was brightly decorated with fairy lights, the police band played lustily, and though the dance floor on the veranda sloped disconcertingly outwards, to draw off the water when they scrubbed it, Mrs Lewis thought this was rather like dancing on the deck of a ship at sea, and had no complaints. There were twenty-six dances during the evening, and she played for two of them herself on the Administrator’s piano, while the band had its supper. Next day the newspaper reported the function, and announced that Mrs F. and Miss G. ‘were in combinations of black and white’—a remark which, Mrs Lewis says, ‘gave cause for a great deal of hilarity’.