THE SHANGANI PATROL
In the 1960s and 1970s, Burnham’s reputation got scorched in the firestorm of white Rhodesian nationalism and reactions to it. In those days of racial and political turmoil in Rhodesia, conservative whites sought inspiration from heroes with the right British bloodlines. On the other side, liberals sympathetic to black nationalism were hunting for imperialist villains. Burnham, as an outsider, was a convenient target for both. He was attacked mainly for his role in the assassination of a native priest several years after Shangani (see next section), but also for his part in the Shangani Patrol. Several white Rhodesian historians accused Burnham, Ingram, and Gooding of the most shameful military crime: desertion.
One of the first modern hints of this appeared in 1968 in a book by Oliver Ransford called The Rulers of Rhodesia. “There is a good deal to suggest in fact,” wrote Ransford, “that Burnham was not ordered away from the patrol as he makes out, but deserted it with his brother-in-law Ingram when he saw the odds that Wilson’s men would have to face.” Ransford fails to offer a single shred from that “good deal” of evidence to support his vague slur.
In 1970, a Rhodesian writer named John O’Reilly came across a shred in the Rhodesian National Archives—in a letter written in 1935. It was from John Coghlan to John Carruthers, who had been a scout in the Matabele Wars. Coghlan wrote that “a very reliable man informed me that [Colonel Sir Aubrey] Woolls-Sampson told him” that Gooding had confessed on his deathbed to fleeing the patrol without permission. (Burnham and Woolls-Sampson knew each other from the Ndebele war and the Boer War.) O’Reilly exploited this brittle shred of second- and third-hand rumor and innuendo in his fictionalized account of the Shangani Patrol, Pursuit of the King, known to every Rhodesian. It depicts Burnham as a deserter, liar, and blowhard.
O’Reilly’s evidence hardly bears scrutiny, but requires it. Gooding died in 1899. Thirty-six years later, in a letter, someone (Coghlan) mentions to someone else (Carruthers) that a third person (“a very reliable man”) told him that a fourth person (Woolls-Sampson) told the unnamed reliable man at some unspecified date that Gooding had made a deathbed confession to which there were evidently no other witnesses. Perched on this slender reed, O’Reilly rhetorically asks why Wilson would send Gooding away with two expert scouts. Gooding provided the answer in his own contemporary account, which in all essentials matched Burnham’s and Ingram’s: Wilson asked Burnham to go, Captain Borrow told Gooding to accompany him, and Burnham asked if Ingram could join them. Captain Judd then said that Burnham should take two men to increase the chances that one could get through, and Wilson agreed. No innuendo or historical distortions necessary.
The next significant smear came in the foreword to a 1975 Rhodesian edition of Scouting on Two Continents by another Rhodesian writer, Peter Emmerson. He expanded O’Reilly’s insinuations without the bother of proof. Emmerson postulated that Wilson, facing such long odds, wouldn’t send three men back to Forbes, or at best that Wilson had given permission to escape to anyone who wanted to attempt it. So the trio either deserted and lied about it, or they ran away and lied about it. In any case, they were deceitful cowards.
Emmerson ignores the fact that on the previous evening Wilson had depleted his force by five men, sending back two before the gallop through the Ndebele encampment, and three after the encounter there. Wilson did this before Borrow’s patrol arrived and added twenty-one men to the group. More importantly, Wilson knew that the only way to avoid doom was to get word to Forbes about the patrol’s hazardous situation, in hopes of quick relief with a Maxim. Wilson also knew that the best chance of getting this message through the Ndebele lines lay with his two American scouts. Wilson’s logic, unlike O’Reilly’s and Emmerson’s, was based on tactical necessity rather than bias.
These attacks seem influenced by the popular Victorian notion that a soldier’s greatest triumph was to die with insouciant bravery. This ideal was celebrated throughout British culture, in popular novels and dramas, and in omnipresent paintings such as Lady Butler’s Floreat Etona, which portrays an officer, sword raised, riding gallantly toward certain death. It was epitomized by Tennyson’s revered “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.
The Wilson Patrol fit this image perfectly, turning military catastrophe into patriotic martyrdom, and the episode instantly hardened into myth. From the perspective of this ideal, it was almost unimaginable that Burnham would agree to leave his doomed comrades, and offensive that he didn’t seize his opportunity for heroic death. But to others, such as the Apaches and the frontiersmen who learned from them—and also, as the British would soon learn, to the Boers—this ideal looked like military stupidity. It certainly got a lot of British soldiers killed unnecessarily.
In any case, the rumors, insinuations, and theories about Burnham’s cowardice evaporate in the face of facts and evidence. None of the men who served with Burnham during that campaign and depended on him daily ever reported any doubts about his courage or his dedication to the mission. The Ndebeles called him “the white induna’s eye” and gave him the admiring nickname He-Who-Sees-In-The-Dark. Contemporary journalists heard nothing but praise for Burnham from officers and troopers. Typical is the following passage from Charles L. Norris-Newman, who arrived in Matabeleland in 1894 and interviewed participants for his book about the war: “Too much praise cannot be given to Burnham, who led the night marches from this time [during the retreat of the Forbes column], and who seemed to possess a distinctive intuition of when difficulties arose and how they were to be avoided, and when it is remembered that the nights were dark, no stars being visible, chopping wind, and heavy showers, thick bush country, with no paths, and entirely strange to him, his wonderful powers of mind, heart, and body will better be estimated.”
Even decades later his companions were clear about this. In 1944, in response to a story in the Rhodesia Herald about the Shangani Patrol and Forbes’s column, a member of that column named M. E. Weale wrote, “I have always looked upon Burnham as the most efficient scout we ever had, and it was greatly due to his good scouting that we managed to get away on that memorable night when we left the tired horses and Maxim carriages behind and Commandant Raaf took over command. I have always felt that the honours were equally divided between these two men, to whom we owed our lives on that occasion.”
THE MLIMO
The Mlimo episode is by far the most controversial incident in Burnham’s life. Doubts about it festered for decades and eventually erupted among some Rhodesian historians, who alleged lies and cover-ups by Burnham and Armstrong. The first attack came in 1897, in a book called With Plumer in Matabeleland: an Account of the Operations of the Matabeleland Relief Force During the Rebellion of 1896, by Frank W. Sykes. He cited an anonymous source who claimed that Burnham and Armstrong had murdered a helpless old black man and then inflated themselves into heroes.
The next serious allegation was slipped into a book entitled The Making of Rhodesia (1926), by a Rhodesian civil servant named Hugh Marshall Hole, who had spent the war years as a BSAC clerk in Salisbury. In a footnote, without naming Burnham and Armstrong, Hole wrote of the Mlimo incident, “On their return they were greatly applauded for having achieved their dangerous errand, but some time later, when it was found that the Mlimo was still at work, an official inquiry was held, with the result that the whole affair was exposed as an elaborate hoax.”
Hole offered no proof for this assertion. In private letters he claimed to have read Judge Watermeyer’s report, and further claimed, uniquely, that it denounced Burnham and Armstrong. He added that the incident was clearly a hoax because the two men erroneously stated that the Mlimo’s cave was “close to the Sashi River, and within about 30 miles of the Matopos Hills,” which would put it fifty miles west of Mangwe, far from Njelele.
Such a claim did smell like a hoax, but neither Burnham nor Armstrong ever made it. In all of his reports and newspaper interviews, Burnham located the cave less than twenty miles east of Mangwe, near the Shashani River, not the Sashi. Hole’s “proof” was a geographical error he copied from a report written in April 1899 by Armstrong’s enemy, Chief Native Commissioner H. J. Taylor, in response to a list of complaints by Armstrong that got the young man dismissed as a native commissioner. In the same report, Taylor also asserted that Jobani was not a priest of the Mlimo, despite all the local witnesses to the contrary.
Then in 1948 a man named Frederick Ramón de Bertodano (later the Marquis de Moral) donated a typed copy of his diary to Rhodesia’s National Archives. He had written it, he said, while in Bulawayo for several months during the uprising. De Bertodano had been raised in Australia and had trained there as a solicitor. He arrived in laagered Bulawayo on May 19, 1896, aged twenty-five. He hoped to depart quickly after selling some mining interests for a British syndicate, but got delayed by the revolt. During his time there, he avoided military service and, based on his diary, spent most of his time drinking and gossiping in the Bulawayo Club. Later, in the Boer War, he served as a commandant and intelligence officer, but lost that appointment amid charges of fraud, corruption, and profiteering. In 1947, the year Burnham died, de Bertodano settled in Salisbury, Rhodesia, where he came across a copy of Scouting on Two Continents. In a note added to his diary in 1948, he wrote that Burnham’s lies had inspired him to donate the diary to help set the record straight.
The diary was indeed damning. It chronicled contemporary talk that was sneering and disbelieving about Burnham, Armstrong, and the killing of the priest. De Bertodano and others described the two men as lying, boastful self-promoters. The entry for July 6, 1896, was typical: “Several of us talking at the club. Very strong opinion expressed of the shooting of the M’limo by Armstrong, Native Commissioner at Mangwe and Burnham the so-called ‘Great American Scout.’ Several men say that the whole thing is a farce . . .” In a note he added to the diary later, de Bertodano recalled that “Burnham in conversation could not get away from himself and young Armstrong was temperamental and conceited,” though the diary was unclear about when or if de Bertodano ever met Burnham, seemingly an important event. In another entry de Bertodano described a stroll with Judge Watermeyer, during which Watermeyer told him, “The whole thing was a ‘fake’ and a lie of self-glorification of young Armstrong and Burnham. The ‘M’limo’ was an old native working in a kaffir garden.”
Rhodesian researchers pounced on de Bertodano’s diary. Terence Ranger’s superb Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–97 (1967) is the most influential book of history written about the uprising. For his account of the Mlimo episode, however, he relied heavily on de Bertodano’s diary to conclude that Burnham and Armstrong killed a harmless old priest and then magnified the episode into a hoax.
Oliver Ransford, another Rhodesian historian, also trusted de Bertodano’s diary as well as Hole’s repetition of Taylor’s erroneous report. Ransford adopted Hole’s sneering tone and phrasing to make his case that Burnham and Armstrong were hoaxers: “After a cloak and dagger affair which was boisterously applauded at the time, Burnham claimed he had succeeded in shooting the oracle and was certain this would play a large part in ending the rebellion. . . . to make it now seem even more absurd the weight of evidence that has since come to light suggests that Burnham and his friend Armstrong ‘faked’ the whole affair for self-glorification and that the man they killed was an inoffensive peasant.”
Historical assertions (and assumptions) build upon themselves. From seeds planted by Sykes, Taylor, Hole, and de Bertodano about Burnham sprang the judgments of Ranger and Ransford, which were accepted as accurate and have been repeated by other historians. But Sykes’s and Hole’s accusations were based on malicious gossip and errors, and de Bertodano’s diary, which called Burnham and Armstrong liars, is rotten with fabrications. For instance, de Bertodano claimed to talk to Frederick Selous in Bulawayo on May 21, 25, and 29—but Selous was away (as was Burnham) from May 11 to May 31 with the patrol sent to meet the Salisbury column. In his entry for June 17, de Bertodano reported, “Long talk with P. D. Crewe, Selous (silent as ever!), Macfarlane & others.” Perhaps Selous was silent because, as he wrote in Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia, he was gone with Colonel J. A. Spreckley’s column from June 7 to June 23.
De Bertodano’s entries about Burnham and Armstrong are equally fraudulent. According to his diary, people at the Bulawayo Club knew on June 17 that Burnham and Armstrong had found the Mlimo’s cave in the Matopos and were “trying to get him.” This would have been news to Burnham, since on that date he hadn’t yet heard about Armstrong’s plan. The two men didn’t leave until June 20, and it’s doubtful that their secret mission had been broadcast in the Bulawayo Club. On June 21, de Bertodano again foresaw the future: “Widely reported that Armstrong and Burnham have shot the M’Limo in his cave or ‘temple.’ Several men don’t believe it because they don’t trust the yarns of either Armstrong or Burnham.” The men’s skepticism was understandable; the assassination wouldn’t occur for two more days.
In the diary, de Bertodano ridiculed the two men for claiming to gallop away from the natives after the shooting, snorting that the rough terrain in the Matopos would not allow it. Putting aside that this was curious mockery from someone who evidently never left laagered Bulawayo to assist in its defense, anyone who has seen the landscape between Njelele and the Shashani River knows, as Burnham stated many times, that flat grassy areas are interspersed with kopjes, as opposed to the rugged landscape west of Mangwe, where Taylor and Hole incorrectly placed the cave. Inventive newspaper illustrators did sometimes portray Burnham and Armstrong escaping through rocky defiles where no horse could gallop, which may be the source of de Bertodano’s secondhand misimpression.
Similarly, in his July 15 entry, de Bertodano scoffed at Burnham and Armstrong for telling people that after killing the Mlimo they had “A hard ride and running fight when they were nearly exhausted.” In Scouting on Two Continents, written thirty years after the alleged diary, Burnham described “a long hard ride and a running fight over rough ground, until we were nearly exhausted.” De Bertodano evidently plagiarized the sentence and inserted it into his “diary.” And so on.
De Bertodano doubtless spent time in Bulawayo and kept a diary, but the document he submitted to the National Archives was so corrupted by fabrications that researchers should have dismissed it as historical fiction. It is valuable mostly as a manufactured specimen of bias against Burnham and Armstrong.
In a foreword to a Rhodesian reprint of Scouting on Two Continents (1975), the Rhodesian researcher Peter Emmerson did question the reliability of de Bertodano’s diary, without explaining why, and also challenged Hole’s assertion that Judge Watermeyer had censured Burnham and Armstrong. Further, he noted that the accusations against Armstrong by H. J. Taylor and others “may be of doubtful validity.”
Nevertheless, he adopted de Bertodano’s description of Burnham—“He was loud, brash, boastful and conceited”—despite scores of contemporary descriptions that remarked on Burnham’s exceptional modesty, not to mention his own frequent admissions of failure in Scouting on Two Continents. To illustrate Burnham’s self-aggrandizement, Emmerson evidently wrote on the flyleaf that Burnham, in Scouting on Two Continents, claimed he had “done Rhodesians a stupendous service by exploding the myth of the cave and destroying the M’Limo’s power.” But Burnham never made this claim about himself; the sentence Emmerson quotes was about Armstrong, whom Burnham always credited with breaking the Mlimo’s power.
Like other Rhodesian writers, Emmerson also disregarded the friendship and accolades Burnham received from every leader who knew him in Africa—Rhodes, Jameson, Carrington, Baden-Powell, Selous, Earl Grey, Lord Roberts, and on and on. Some of these men made military decisions affecting hundreds of men based on their trust in Burnham’s accuracy and truthfulness. Emmerson, like other Rhodesian writers, also disregarded Burnham’s eager return to southern Africa to fight for the British in the Boer War, and his heroic service in that conflict. Perhaps all this is disregarded because it cannot be squared with a portrait of Burnham as a cowardly blowhard.
And so Emmerson, despite his doubts about the main accusations against the American, allowed himself to be persuaded anyway: “nevertheless the weight of evidence has become overwhelming that there was deception after the event, if not before.” All doubts get swept aside in a wave of condemnatory rhetoric: “At best the incident would seem to have been a clumsy attempt at psychological warfare, which failed . . . At worst it was a cold blooded murder of an innocent noncombatant for personal gain.” After writing such a sentence, Emmerson was forced to conclude that Burnham’s book couldn’t be believed: “Certainly this is so of the African chapters.”
Yet the “weight of evidence” is hard to find in Emmerson’s essay, where insinuations rather than proofs become overwhelming. Even Burnham’s documented achievements are somehow discounted as fabrications and campfire tales. There is no hint that he could have been anything other than a boastful lying seeker of fame. Everything is twisted toward one end—diminishment of Burnham. There seems to be no room for the American scout in Rhodesian history, a peculiar snub of someone who loved the place and devoted so much sweat and blood to it. No similar bias against Burnham exists within South African history.
Still, parts of Burnham’s account and subsequent claims about the Mlimo incident are troubling, starting with that two-hour chase. De Bertodano is wrong that the topography makes it impossible, but wouldn’t two men on horseback in somewhat open terrain quickly outrun pursuers on foot? Did Burnham exaggerate the escape to make a better story?
On December 10, 1938, a man named E. C. Hartley wrote to the Bulawayo Chronicle about those long-gone days. Hartley had been the postmaster-telegraphist at Fort Mangwe in 1896 and claimed to be good friends with Armstrong (evidently one of a few, owing to Armstrong’s spiky temperament). Hartley confirmed the basics of the episode as he had heard them from Armstrong: Armstrong learned the location of the priest’s cave, he and Burnham volunteered for the mission of killing him, and Burnham did so. But then, according to Hartley, Armstrong’s account diverged from Burnham’s:
The return journey was accomplished without incident. A good deal of publicity was given this expedition which Bonar Armstrong very strongly deprecated but owing to his official position could not publickly [sic] refute. . . . his version was that neither going nor returning did they contact with any male natives and that the statements that they were chased by natives etc. were absolutely untrue. This narrative which constitutes what actually transpired in connection with the M’limo episode was frequently related to me by Bonar Armstrong and which I had an opportunity of verifying from his official reports. [These have disappeared.] It must however be conceded that the expedition was an extremely brave and dangerous undertaking.
Hartley went on to say that because of doubts about the episode, Armstrong insisted on an inquiry, and that Judge Watermeyer’s “very exhaustive investigation” confirmed that “the native killed was the Chief Priest of the M’limo,” though there may have been other important priests.
Hartley’s version seems more plausible than Burnham’s, with its dramatic two-hour chase, or the Rhodesian historians’, with their reluctance to acknowledge anything risky or courageous about the mission. If Hartley’s version is true, it certainly dents Burnham’s credibility about the mission’s aftermath.
But Hartley may not be right either. A well-known correspondent and illustrator named Charles Edwin Fripp happened to be at Mangwe when Burnham and Armstrong returned from killing the priest. That evening Fripp got the first version of the event from the two men, and sent a story and sketch about it, datelined June 23, 1896, to the London newspaper The Graphic (the story appeared on August 15). The basic elements that appeared in subsequent stories and reports were all in Fripp’s story. The accompanying illustration, drawn by another artist from Fripp’s sketch, showed Burnham and Armstrong riding across a grassy, level landscape as natives with spears pursued them. In the background, as Burnham often described, the grass was on fire. “This sketch,” noted the newspaper, “was made from materials supplied to our correspondent by Mr. Armstrong.” So did Armstrong change his story for Hartley? Is Hartley misremembering or distorting what he heard? Did Burnham exaggerate? It seems impossible to know.
Burnham always claimed that the man in the cave was the chief priest of the Mlimo, and that killing him shortened the Ndebele uprising. In Scouting on Two Continents he wrote, “peace followed the downfall of the M’Limo.” In 1896 and for years afterward, most people agreed with that assessment, as did official inquiries. In 1900, for instance, in A History of Rhodesia, Compiled from Official Sources, Howard Hensman wrote, “With the downfall of Wedza and the shooting of the M’Limo in a cave in the Matoppos by the American scout, Burnham, the Matabele rebellion may be said to have come to an end.”
But both of Burnham’s assumptions were incorrect. First, Jobani wasn’t the only chief priest of the god. Even at the time, a few knowledgeable people suspected as much, and it soon became clear that priests in other parts of the country were urging on the rebels. This led to doubts that Burnham had killed the real oracle, doubts that festered into accusations of a hoax. Part of the problem was ignorance about the Ndebeles’ religious organization. Njelele was just one of several major shrines to the Mlimo in Matabeleland, each of which had a chief priest.
That’s partly why Burnham’s second assumption was flawed. Killing the chief priest at Njelele didn’t shorten the war; rather, it almost certainly worsened the situation south of Bulawayo. The settlers and their military men couldn’t understand why the Ndebeles didn’t close the vital road over Mangwe Pass, Bulawayo’s lifeline for supplies. Nor could they understand why the natives in that region rarely attacked whites. Selous, Baden-Powell, Carrington, and Burnham, among others, all expressed puzzlement at these military conundrums. They assumed that the Ndebeles were leaving the road open either to encourage the settlers to give up and flee by that route, or to lure a large number of them into the pass for slaughter.
The truth was simpler but unknown at the time: the priest at Njelele had advised the people in his region to remain neutral in the uprising. The pass remained open and attacks were few because most of the area’s natives weren’t actively hostile. Ndebele impis did enter the region, and commanders did try to recruit the local people. Burnham and Baden-Powell, in their three-day scout into the Matopos just before the Mlimo mission, found signs of these impis and local cooperation with them. But scholars such as Ranger later showed that the priests most responsible for encouraging the uprising lived elsewhere in Matabeleland, and that the assassination at Njelele was a blunder that provoked the neutral population. It did more harm than good.
Later writers, especially Rhodesians, have attacked Burnham for not correcting his mistaken assumptions. “That he was aware of the doubts before he left is clear,” wrote Emmerson, in a typical accusation, “as must have been the palpable falsehood that the killing ended the Rebellion. Even if he wasn’t wholly aware of the situation at the time, he would certainly have been so by 1926, the year his autobiography was published.”
Burnham surely did know about the doubts, yet never mentioned them, perhaps because he never saw things that way, or because the official inquiries supported him, or because he wanted to protect his reputation. But he couldn’t have known about Hole’s initial accusation of fraud when he wrote Scouting on Two Continents, because Hole’s book appeared that same year, and Burnham apparently didn’t read it until 1935. That year, Burnham’s lawyer sent a letter to Hole asking for an explanation. Hole evidently answered, but nothing came of it. Burnham also must have known by 1926 that the priest he killed was not the sole oracle of the Mlimo—that became common knowledge after the assassination—but there’s less reason to believe that he knew the priest was neutral or that the assassination didn’t help end the war, since that information wasn’t well-established by scholarship until the 1960s.
The Mlimo episode is fraught with ignorance, malice, inaccurate reports, conflicting stories, lost documents, fraudulent documents, antagonism between the people involved, and bias. Amid the murk, a few things seem clear, or at least less cloudy: the settlers and their military leaders believed that the priests of the Mlimo were guiding the uprising; Lord Grey and General Carrington thought it was militarily advisable to target the one priest whose whereabouts they knew, based on Native Commissioner Armstrong’s information; Burnham shot the wrong priest, a blunder that may have worsened the situation. Finally, and most importantly, Burnham was following orders to assassinate someone he believed to be the prime mover of an uprising that had killed many of his friends as well as his infant daughter.