Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Rhodes’s statue should remain, on one condition

It should be allowed to remain — but opposite it should be erected a new statue of Lobengula, the great Matabele leader

Lobengula was the second king of the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe. He was also the last. Cecil John Rhodes smashed his authority, and broke his tribe.

The Matabele (a breakaway people from the Zulu kingdom to the south) had been making their way north, and by the time Rhodes arrived on the scene were in effective control of a vast area of southern Africa, stretching from the Limpopo river to the Zambezi. Matabeleland was rich in -minerals and the tribe were being pestered by white prospectors. Rhodes saw his opportunity. He made an ally of Lobengula, who had been king since 1869, and in 1888 persuaded him to grant Rhodes’s emissaries an exclusive deal known as the Rudd Concession.

Lobengula could not read or write and key parts of the understanding were verbal, but I’ve never heard it seriously disputed — even in the unwaveringly pro-Rhodes version of history I absorbed during my Rhodesian boyhood — that Rhodes tricked Lobengula. As a king, he admired and trusted the dynamic white man in whom he recognised the qualities of leadership. For £100 per month, a steam boat, and one thousand rifles plus ammunition, Lobengula believed he was selling the mineral rights to his territory. He didn’t realised Rhodes intended to occupy it. Rhodes himself described the concession as ‘so gigantic it is like giving a man the whole of Australia’.

Within a year Rhodes had attained a charter for his company so that legally he was unassailable the eyes of a (suspicious) British government. Soon prospectors — and settlers, and a police force — moved in, on Rhodes’s orders. The maxim gun followed. The Matabele rebelled in 1893. They were utterly defeated. Lobengula, deceived into selling his people for a mess of potage, had fled. He died a few months later of an imported disease, smallpox.

I recall, even among the hardened white supremacists among whom I grew up, an embarrassment about Lobengula’s fate.

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