Pax Britannica (9 page)

These were the homely pleasures of a frontier town, given a touch of ironic finesse by the fact that this was British territory, with a British patrician in charge. Mrs Lewis’s first three partners were the Administrator’s aide-de-camp, a barber, and the chief of police: a girl never knew what to expect, for the original pioneer column had since been augmented by an astonishing collection of adventurers, soldiers, speculators and hangers-on. There was Fred Selous, the great hunter, who had wandered through this country shooting elephant long before Rhodes cast his eye on it: he had killed hundreds of elephant in his time, had won the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, liked to travel through the bush wearing nothing but a shirt, a hat and a belt, and claimed to have seen an extraordinary animal called a Nandi bear, like a cross
between a hyena, a bear and a leopard.
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There was George Pauling, the railway builder, a man of legendary strength whose favourite parlour trick was to pick up a horse and carry it around his billiards table, and who was once alleged to have shared with two friends a breakfast of a thousand oysters and eight bottles of champagne. There was Mother Patrick, the saintly young superior of the Dominican Sisters, who had been one of the first women to reach Salisbury, and was known mysteriously to the Mashona as ‘the lady without a stomach’. There was Major ‘Maori’ Browne, so nicknamed because he talked so much about his experiences in the New Zealand wars, and little Father Hartmann, the Catholic priest, an Austrian cobbler by origin, five foot tall and dressed generally in a Norfolk jacket, a felt hat and very baggy riding-breeches. There were ill-explained aristocrats like Lord George Deerhurst, who ran a butcher’s shop on Pioneer Street, or the Vicomte de la Panouse, popularly known as the Count, whose Cockney wife Bill had cheerfully travelled second-class on the ship out to Africa, while he lorded it aft. There was, intermittently appearing in town, an adventurer of vaguely ecclesiastical character who had chosen the brilliant pseudonym the Deacon of Hong Kong, and survived for some years upon the confidence of the cloth.

Nobody much cared, just yet, to inquire too closely into their neighbours’ backgrounds, but there were already suggestions that Jameson, as the first Administrator, had unfairly favoured the English upper classes in distributing land grants. ‘It is perfectly sickening’, one observer wrote, ‘to see the way in which this country has been run for the sake of hob-nobbing with Lord This and the Honourable That.’ Slowly, even then, the English social divisions were forming, and the English protocols setting in. Lord Grey’s all-red bicycle had a coronet on its back mudguard, and a municipal coat of arms was devised. It incorporated Mr Rhodes’s own arms, while another quarter contained the Cape Colony arms, a third was filled up with native weapons, and the fourth contained Martini rifles, axes, and a gold bar across a field of green. (There
were no supporters. Rhodes had suggested a pioneer on one side, a Kaffir on the other, but the Mayor, while he was all for the pioneer, would have nothing to do with the Kaffir.
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) The Salisbury Club, aloof among its little trees, was already hardening into a stronghold of officialdom. The Kopje Club in Sinoia Street was where the merchants went to grumble. Meikle’s, the general store, was
the
place to do one’s shopping, the Kettledrum in Pioneer Street the
only
rendezvous for ices and sticky cakes. Traditionally delicious scandals already attended the affairs of the Musical and Dramatic Society, and one may wonder whether the dramatic critic of the
Herald
was altogether unbiased, when he wrote that Mr Popplewell’s performance in
A
Pair
of
Lunatics
was not only a complete failure in itself, but put off all the other actors, too. The Salisbury Hunt Club, which chased jackals or buck with foxhounds, fox terriers and the odd kaffir-dog, had been posh from the start: its very first meet had been attended by Lady Henry Paulet, whose husband Lord Henry ran the town sawmills, and at whose wedding in Cape Town the best man had been, by special permission of the Dean, a dog called Paddy.
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Below the slowly cohering upper crust, and the incipient bourgeoisie that supported it, lay a sediment of poor whites, sporadically employed and disgruntled. The social fulcrum of the town was already shifting. Lord Bryce
3
reported in 1896 that ‘some very pretty country residences, in the style of Indian bungalows, have been built on the skirts of the wood a mile or two from the town’: the original pioneer streets were soon to fall into squalor, amidst which the whores of Salisbury, French and German flotsam of imperialism,
sat on kitchen chairs outside their teashops, inviting male passers-by to ‘take a bun on Pioneer Street’. Failed gold-prospectors loitered in these parts, and discredited promoters, and all the shifting gallimaufry of bagmen, petty thieves and even actors who made the long journey from the South African colonies in search of pickings. There was a small Indian colony, too, of traders and vegetable-growers, and a sprinkling of Jews—‘Ah!’ cried Rhodes, when shown the site of their synagogue, ‘if the Jews are here the country’s all right!’ Sometimes a lean and bearded fossicker wandered into town on his mule, with a couple of pack-donkeys loaded with blankets and provisions, and a pair of skinny African servants shambling along behind: and into a saloon he would go, to order himself a lager, greet a friend or two, recall the fortunes he had so nearly made down on the Rand or on the Kimberley diamond fields, and look forward with a wistful if watery eye to the bonanzas still awaiting him upcountry, hidden away among the quartz in the unexploited reefs of Rhodesia. They had no illusions of glory or idealism, the poor Europeans of the imperial frontiers. When Rhodes was once declaiming upon the debt posterity would owe the Salisbury settlers, a Scottish tradesman replied for them. ‘I wud ha’ ye know, Mr Rhodes, I didn’a come here for posterity.’

But far lower even than the vagrants in the social scale of Salisbury were the black men of the country, shadowy presences on the perimeters—butter-fingered houseboys, uncoordinated labourers, convicts from the city prison ineptly weeding the flower-beds in Cecil Square. Relations with the black Africans were unfortunate from the start, and for the most part the tribespeople were regarded with suspicion and contempt. Rhodes set the official policy when he declared the aim to be ‘equal rights for every civilized man’: but here there was little of the evangelical spirit that was part of the New Imperialism at home, and not much compunction in deluding or exploiting the African. Rhodes liked to say that his proudest moment was his entry, alone and unarmed, into an indaba of the Matabele in the Matopo hills, when he made peace with the
Matabele chiefs after the 1896 rebellion, and earned the tribal title
Lamula
’mkunzi
—‘Separator of the Fighting Bulls’. Most Rhodesians, however, thought of the African either as a savage or as a slave. This was White Man’s Country—in climate, in opportunity, in fact.

Such glory as there was to the frontier was provided by the hostility of the black men, as fundamental to the folk-lore of Salisbury as was the legend of the fighting Indian to the American West. In the early Rhodesian allegories the forces of evil were represented always by the tribespeople, ambushing innocent prospectors, murdering lonely farmers and their wives, treacherously going back on their word and calling upon old skills of sorcery and mass delusion to incite the tribes against the white man. We read about ‘hordes of blood-maddened savages’, white men ‘isolated in a raging black sea’, ‘shadowy black forms of natives’. A well-known photograph shows the witch Nyanda, the instigator of much violence against the settlers, brought in to Salisbury for her trial. A small group of men and women stands motionless in an empty square, with low-verandahed houses in the background, and a few sticks and stones littering the unpaved street. Native Commissioner Kenny, booted, spurred and bow-tied, stands in relaxed assurance on the left, a cigarette in his hand, a wide-brimmed scout hat on his head. Eight barefoot African policemen stand vacantly to attention behind, slung with bandoliers and holding rifles at their sides. In the foreground are four little bareheaded Africans, with cloths around their loins and shoulders: two sad old sages, a crop-haired woman with dangling breasts, and in the very centre, the smallest figure of all yet much the most compelling, the witch herself, with a queer little pursed-up, puzzled face—a figure at once pitiful and arrogant, emerged from some shadowed and impenetrable backwood, as alien to the European understanding as a little black goblin.
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The Rhodesians saw their successive conflicts with these primitives as a fight for survival against odds. Two episodes in particular, the Mazoe Patrol of 1896, Wilson’s Last Stand in 1893, were already enshrined in the colony’s pride. The first was a do-or-die run
through sixteen miles of ferociously hostile territory, made during the Mashona Rebellion by thirty men and three women. The women travelled in an iron-plated wagonette with a rifleman on the roof and a fighting escort all around, and so they plunged and clattered through the rebel country from the Alice Mine at Mazoe to safety in Salisbury. The second epic was a tragic stand made by Major Allan Wilson and a patrol of thirty-two men during the wars against the Matabele. Wilson and his men were pursuing Lobengula himself when they found themselves surrounded on the bank of the Shangani River by an impi of several hundred Matabele. When they had run out of ammunition, according to Matabele accounts of the episode, the survivors shook hands and sang
God
Save
the Qu
een,
before being speared or shot to a man. Their memory was made familiar to every Rhodesian by a painting, ‘There were No Survivors’, by Allan Stewart, showing them shrouded in gunsmoke in a wood, with barricades of dead horses around them, and Wilson himself bareheaded in front.

Such memories so close behind them, with rumours of bloodshed reaching them every day from the outstations, and the Africans of Salisbury still so close to the bush that most of them wore nothing but loin-cloths and none of them could write—so many barriers between the European and the African meant that not many Rhodesians seriously considered the black people as fellow subjects of the Queen. There were church services for natives, and even a night school: but the human contact was fragile and testy, few settlers bothered to learn the languages of the country, and it would be generations before Salisbury people forgot or forgave the wars with their black neighbours.

Salisbury was scarcely a sentimental town. It took what it could, and stuck by the survival of the fittest. Grey, the gentle and high-minded Administrator, was shocked by the reluctance of the British settlers to do much work for themselves while they had natives at hand to do it for them. ‘Monsieur Vicomte de la Panouse,’ he wrote,
‘sang
bleu
and a great Gentleman—you may see him in his
garden digging and trowelling, and the kaffir boy holding the seeds, but the Englishman, no.’

There was no denying the settlers guts and courage. It took guts to go to Rhodesia at all, and many of them were now performing prodigies of land development in the bush, sticking it out in dangerous loneliness, learning the hard way to improvise and experiment—the water-wheel used to crush ore at the Liverpool mine, on the Umtali River, was made out of old whisky boxes. But too often they had a blind spot about manual, or menial, labour. That was black man’s work. Caste was strong among the Rhodesians already, and it could easily harden into evil. Grey thought he would use the festival of Empire, that celebration of imperial brotherhood and self-reliance, to set a contrary example. It had been hoped to celebrate the occasion at the same time as a final victory over the Mashona: but the final victory was not yet won, so Lord Grey announced that the big festivity—a games meeting—would be postponed until September. In the meantime June 22 itself would be a tree-planting day. ‘Every stalwart who wishes to show his loyalty to the Queen and plants his tree on the Queen’s day must dig his own hole. No black or paid labour allowed, as the labour required for the digging of the holes is to be regarded as a voluntary act of individual homage to the Queen.’

A few days before the Jubilee Grey was to be seen in his shirtsleeves digging a hole in the grounds of the hospital, watched by clusters of curious Africans. ‘I am glad of the opportunity,’ he observed, ‘of showing by my personal example what damned nonsense this is.’ But the pioneering spirit did not respond to this challenge. Hole-digging held no symbolism for the frontiersmen of Rhodesia, who ‘didn’a go there for posterity’. When Jubilee Day came round, the only tree planted in homage to Queen Victoria was the Administrator’s gum-tree.