Second Matabele War

 | Military History  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Hundreds of men, women and children crowded into the dusty streets of Bulawayo. Vivid rumors of Ndebele atrocities terrified the refugees, even as barricades of meal bags and boxes were being erected on the town’s periphery. It was feared that as many as 15,000 warriors were preparing to attack. To make matters worse, in 1896 most of the mounted police force raised to protect Matabeleland were in the Transvaal, languishing in a Boer prison.

Trouble had been brewing in Matabeleland since the coming of white settlers nearly a decade earlier. Located in the southwest region of old Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Matabeleland had been carved up by the British South African Company (BSAC) under Cecil Rhodes in 1893. Hoping to expand their agricultural holdings and pay off debts, the company greedily eyes acreage owned by the Ndebele people. The problem was, of course, that the Ndebele were not interested in giving up their prime cattle grazing areas.

Kin to the Zulus of South Africa, the Ndebel-or Matabele (’people who duck behind their shields’) as the Sotho called them-had a long warrior tradition. Breaking away from their Zulu allies in the 1820s under the leadership of Mzilikazi kaMashobane, the Ndebele raided north of the Zambezi River and enslaved such people as the Mashonas; those living under Ndebele control were referred to by the contemptuous caste term of Holi. The Ndebele amabutho (regiments)-similar in organization to those of the Zulus but much smaller, seldom exceeding 500 men-had last clashed with whites in the 1830s, but since that time had managed to maintain a tenuous peace. King Mzilikazi’s son and successor, Lobengula, had witnessed the decimation of the Zulus by the superior firepower of British regulars in 1879, and hoped to steer clear of confrontations with the BSAC.

Unfortunately for the Ndebele, Rhodes and his company administrator, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, concocted a scheme to draw Lobengula into a war. Mashona cattle thieves had recently rustled a herd of Ndebele cattle, then sought refuge within the walls of Fort Victoria. Reacting in a traditional fashion, a large Ndebel raiding party attacked the Mashonas, massacring as many as 400 before the eyes of horrified white residents. As a pall of fear and revulsion swept over the white community, Jameson raised a band of 700 freebooters scraped from the streets and veldts of South Africa to punish the Ndebele and forestall an imagined invasion.

By mid-October 1893, Jameson’s mounted column had crossed the Umniati River into Matabeleland. Amred with two 7-pounder field guns and a number of machine guns, the troopers were at first virtually unopposed. Small pox had recently scourged Lobengula’s camp, and the king vainly tried to negotiate peace. It was not until October 25 that the Ndebele finally attacked. Six thousand warriors slashed at Jameson’s wagon-laagered encampment on the Sthangai River. Hundreds of Ndebele died under the flaming muzzles of Martini-Henry rifles and Maxim machine guns. Less than 10 members of Jameson’s column were killed or wounded.

A week later, on November 1, a second frontal assault on Jameson’s laager at Bembesi resulted in more than 1,000 Ndebele casualties. Lobengula fled. In an effort to overtake him, a 30-man detachment of troopers under Major Alan Wilson recklessly crossed the Shangani on December 3, but was cut off by the king’s amabutho and cut down to the last man.

That minor Ndebele victory, however, only lent irony to a war that Lobengula, at the time suffering from small pox, knew was lost. In January 1894, he took poising with his chief counselor and was buried sitting in a cave, wrapped in a black ox skin.

The 1893 campaign had been wildly successful for Rhodes and the BSAC. Ndebele cattle were considered loot and were divided among Jameson’s volunteers. Each trooper had been promised 6,000 acres of land. By mid-1894, more than 10,000 square miles had been docketed for farmland. Lobengula’s royal village of Bulawayo grew almost overnight into a European-style city, featuring tree-lined streets 120 feet wide, banks, hotels, a cricket club, a golf club and a roller-skating rink.

To the Ndebele, the white invasion seemed to be the harbinger of a series of disasters that struck the countryside. Plagues of locusts had ravaged croplands since 1890, culminating in a terrifying cloud of insects that darkened the noonday sky in 1895. At the same time, drought parched the Ndebele lands, shriveling the streams and pools needed to water the remnants of their herds not taken by the whites. Perhaps worse was the scourge of rinderpest, a malignant cattle disease that erupted in Somaliland in 1889 and had spread like a plague through Uganda and Barotseland before invading Matabeleland in 1896. By March, the road to Bulawayo was littered with abandoned wagons and the rotting carcasses of transport oxen.

Many of the Ndebele amabutho had not suffered any casualties in the 1893 war. Seemingly quiescent, the former warriors labored under the Company’s rule, paid a burdensome tax and had their cattle confiscated when they could not meet the tax rolls. Unknown to the white administration, however, the Ndebele had hidden 2,000 Marinti-Henry rifles they had seized during Jameson’s campaign. All they needed to reclaim their lands from the whites was a window of opportunity. And that window suddenly appeared in December 1895. In an ill-fated and reckless venture, Jameson and 600 horsemen invaded the Boer-held Transvaal to claim the area for Britain and the BSAC. The Boers, however, surrounded the raiders at Doornkop, pinning them down with long-range rifle fire. On January 2, 1896, Jameson surrendered. Imprisoned with the raid’s leader was most of the Rhodesian mounted police force. When news of the fiasco reached Bulawayo, there were only 48 policemen left to protect the whole of Rhodesia.

The Jameson Raid seemed to fulfill the prophesy of a white man’s disaster predicted by a mlimo-a medicine man from a cave in the Matopo Hills to the south, through whom the Ndebele believed a god spoke. Warriors listened as the mlimo outlined a plan to rid the land of white settlers. The rebellion was to erupt on the night of March 29-beneath a full moon-during a ceremony called the Big Dance. Quite simply, the Matabele and their Holi vassals would kill all the white people they found.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 19th Century, Historical Conflicts

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.