The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham

Author:Thomas Pakenham [Pakenham, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780349141930
Google: KwRMCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B006R5CY10
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 1996-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

CECIL JOHN RHODES

CHAPTER 21

A New Rand?

Mashonaland and Matabeleland (Rhodesia), Cape Colony, the Transvaal and England

27 June 1890-December 1892 and before

‘I am tired of this mapping out of Africa at Berlin;

without occupation, without development… the gist

of the South African Question lies in the extension

of the Cape Colony to the Zambesi.’

Cecil Rhodes in the Cape House of Assembly, 1888

It was just over fifty years since the voortrekkers, the Boer pioneers of the Great Trek, had shaken the dust of Cape Colony off their feet. In their canvas-covered wagons, followed by their cattle, sheep and African servants, they had splashed across the drifts of the Orange and Vaal rivers to carve out an empire in the ‘empty’ veld to the north. On 27 June 1890, it was the turn for a Great Trek, British-style, out-Boering the Boers – a leap out of Cape Colony, clean over the Boer republics, past Matabeleland into Mashonaland. It was here that Cecil Rhodes would use his pioneers to create his own kingdom, ‘Rhodesia’, in the still ‘emptier’ land between the Limpopo and the Zambezi, 300 miles to the north of the Transvaal.

To compare the two treks might seem absurd. They were as different as biltong (dried meat) from roast beef. Of course there were the same discomforts that attended any South African trek in the dry season: dust everywhere, enclosing everyone like a cloud, from the African voorloper at the front of the first covered wagon to the men bringing up the rear; and the constant bang of the springless tyres of the wagon wheels grinding over the ruts in the veld and jamming in the stony streambeds. But the Boers had gone over the frontier as fugitives without a flag, defying the British authorities to stop them. In contrast, Cecil Rhodes’s pioneers carried two Union Jacks; both the Cape government’s and the imperial government’s. Their mission was confirmed by the royal charter for Rhodes’s company, and London had cabled the go-ahead.

The Boers had migrated in families, like flocks of birds, each family and clan grouping and regrouping under different leadership. Rhodes’s pioneers had not a woman among them. They were a single invading column, an assegai made in Britain, paid for by Rhodes’s new Charter Company and honed by military discipline.

That at any rate was the theory. But Rhodes himself was not with the column on the Bechuanaland border at the Motloutsi. He had been forced by a political crisis at the Cape – which resulted in his taking over as Prime Minister – to stay behind at De Beers in Kimberley, his own financial and political power base 200 miles further south. Even if his restless spirit was everywhere, a great deal had to be done in a hurry and a great deal left to luck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.