THROUGHOUT AUGUST AND September of 1893, in preparation for war with Lobengula, Jameson had been recruiting volunteer fighters. The BSAC couldn’t afford to pay salaries, but once Lobengula was erased, Matabeleland would be available for distribution, so the company lured volunteers with speculative incentives. During the war each man would receive a horse, a rifle, and rations when available. Survivors were promised 6,000 acres, fifteen mineral claims, five alluvial claims, and a share in half of the spoils, mostly Lobengula’s cattle.
Jameson raised three columns of volunteers, in Salisbury, Victoria, and the Transvaal. He expected the British government to send a column as well, for a total of about 1,000 men. Burnham signed on as one of twenty scouts. This force would face 20,000 Ndebele warriors.
“It will be a hard and desperate service,” wrote Burnham to his uncle, “but full of adventure and a chance to see unknown lands for which in spite of the long trek I still love to see more. In fact, I am infatuated with Africa. It is grand in size and life, is full of possibilities and not carried on in such a hammer and tongs way as in California.”
He was sure he wouldn’t die, and equally sure he could recoup his finances. He thought the war would last four months, and expected his reward of 6,000 acres to be worth a dollar an acre as soon as peace was declared. If necessary, he could make a good living with his rifle as a hunter. With his typical combination of hustle and democratic idealism, he added that he wanted to “help build a commonwealth where the cry of ‘work or bread’ should not be heard.” He saw no contradiction between his proletarian politics and his intention to take Matabeleland from its natives.
As usual, he was astute about the politics behind the war. In England, the champions of native peoples such as the Aborigines’ Protection Society were clamoring for the government to stop Rhodes and the BSAC. On the eve of war, in a sardonic letter to his mother, Burnham described what he called “the true situation” “for the benefit of your missionary friends,” who evidently disapproved of events unfolding in the royal concession. To prevent other European nations from claiming this part of Africa, explained Burnham, Britain “gave it away to a company composed of her royal dukes, lords, &c. She gave an empire to which she had no shadow of claim and sanctioned the granting of a Royal Charter to perpetuate the power of the English nobility . . .” Lobengula had been compensated with lots of rifles and bullets “and other Christian tokens of sincere friendship.” He went on:
So the country is now owned by the Mashonas, claimed by King Lobengula in the hands of the Chartered Co, and supposed to be under the British government. Out of this muddle but one result can come—war—and as greed is at the bottom of all it would have been far more open and above board to have simply invaded the country at first and told King Lobengula, the Mashonas, and whites we take this because we want more empire and have the strength to uphold our claims. But that is not the way of England or English diplomacy. She has given her word to the whites to open up all central Africa that we may trade and settle in it. To the Mashonas she has said we will take you under the shadow of our wing and the Queen sheds tears as she says her evening prayers at the wrong the Matabeles have imposed upon you. . . . To the Matabeles she has said we only want to establish friendly relations and be allowed to exchange courtesies and eventually mix the noble blood of your house with our own nobility and so sail down the stream of time one lovely blended race of every shade from brindle to sorrel and pinto. As to wanting your land, impossible, did ever an Englishman rob a neighbor (unless very much weaker).
To the Christian nations she has said we claim only a little colony at Cape Town and a few other small possessions, but of course we do not expect you to interfere with our sphere of influence, which includes all that unknown region north of the equator, also all the known and unknown region south of the equator. All else we generously give as an Englishman always does . . . Under all this bombastic talk of civilization remains the one fact that to the victor belongs the spoils. Lobengula conquered by and holds his scepter by strength, and by great strength will he be conquered and at this stage of the world’s evolution the Caucasian in spite of his gloss is a mighty fighting animal, and a little blood stirs him stronger than any race in the world.
He dismissed the fantasy of bringing peace to Matabeleland through religious persuasion. In sixteen years, he pointed out, the missionaries had made three converts, and were in despair at the savagery of the Ndebeles and the Shonas. He also snorted at the hypocrisy of sugarcoating imperial aggression with Christian rhetoric, as a minister in Victoria had recently done by likening the volunteers to Crusaders spreading the Gospel. Far more accurate, noted Burnham, was a cartoon drawn by a settler, showing a cannon loaded with Bibles aimed at an Ndebele’s head. “All these things have been gone over with again and again in our Indian policy,” wrote Burnham, “and we are the same as the English in our greed and breaking of treaties.”
“To part of the world,” he told his mother, “we will be Apostles of civilization; to some freebooters and land pirates; to the Matabeles murderers and invaders; to the Mashonas what a lion is to a jackal, the giver of offal and stray bones, hence welcomed not loved. To the historian in later years we will but prove the continuity of evolution in the year 93–4. To the young and adventure hunting, and secretly that strain runs far into the life of many more men than one would at first believe, we will be considered lucky in falling upon stirring times.”
Blanche had a different view, that of a young wife who didn’t want to become a widow with a seven-year-old child on the African frontier. Her husband hadn’t yet left, but she was already feeling lonely and anxious. “I tell him that if he gets through this alive,” she wrote to her family, “he shall never go into another. Why do men love to fight.”
In August and September, as Jameson and Rhodes schemed to persuade the British government into approving a war, Lobengula had been trying to avoid one. In mid-August he sent a delegation to Cape Town. They carried a letter for Queen Victoria, with instructions to visit England and plead their case. The British High Commissioner for the Cape Colony, Sir Henry Loch, delayed the delegation in Cape Town throughout September. Loch’s main objection to grabbing Matabeleland was that Rhodes might control it instead of him and the British government. He tried to negotiate with the delegation to establish a border between Matabeleland and Mashonaland, and to end punitive raids against Shonas. The delegation rejected both suggestions as insulting to Lobengula’s royal authority. On October 5 Loch sent them back to their capital, Bulawayo, and telegraphed Jameson that the BSAC could invade Matabeleland. The next day, Jameson ordered the Victoria and Salisbury columns to move toward Bulawayo. The other two columns would approach from the south.
In mid-October the Victoria and Salisbury columns rendezvoused at Iron Mine Hill, about 130 miles from Bulawayo. Around the same time, Lobengula learned he was at war. Major Patrick Forbes took command, though the administrator Jameson carried much influence. Combined, the columns included about 700 volunteer fighters, 150 natives who drove wagons or tended livestock, and about 900 Shonas. Some of the Shonas carried spears or muzzle-loaders, but they were camp followers, not fighters, who hoped to recapture stolen wives, children, and cattle.
In addition to rifles, the column had three small artillery pieces, a larger gun called a seven-pounder (because of the weight of its shells), and five Maxims, a new belt-fed machine gun that had never been tested in battle but could fire 600 rounds per minute, versus about six rounds per minute with a breech-loading Martini–Henry rifle. The Maxim’s barrel was cooled by a water jacket; after several minutes of continuous firing, the water would boil.
The columns moved deeper into Matabeleland, “through as beautiful a land as ever an English army stole,” wrote Burnham to his uncle. They were also looting grain and cattle from Ndebele kraals in their path. “We raid and burn and destroy everything as clean as Sherman’s men did in Georgia,” wrote Burnham. Lobengula had not yet organized his army.
The scouts ranged far in front. In the open country of the veldt, they were often visible to the gathering Ndebeles. The natives frequently laid traps for the scouts, which Burnham found crude and easy to detect compared to those of the Apaches. He also had the advantage of being mounted, which permitted quick escapes. He killed several Ndebeles in skirmishes and took souvenirs. Blanche, in a letter home in late October, mentions that Burnham tried to send her “two assegais, a shield and a pair of Matabele ears.”
He kept his eye peeled not only for enemies but for opportunities. “This is a wonderful land in mineral,” he wrote to Blanche, “hundreds of quartz veins and one ancient working I have already found. . . . I see a thousand chances to make money and I like the country fine.”
On October 24, the army crossed the Shangani River. Each column formed its own laager in the usual way, arranging the ox-wagons in a square, with the livestock inside and the bigger guns positioned at the angles. The natives camped just outside the perimeter.
At four o’clock in the morning, a shot from the Shona camp startled the laagers. The Ndebeles had hoped to overrun the columns in the dark before an alarm could be given, but an alert Shona foiled that plan. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Ndebele warriors, including some of Lobengula’s elite royal impis, attacked. In addition to the 1,000 Martini–Henrys supplied by the BSAC, the Ndebeles had a large collection of old muzzle-loaders. But their two main weapons were designed for close-quarter killing: the assegai, a fearsome stabbing spear about five feet long including a one-foot blade, and the knobkerrie, a short wooden club with a bulbous tip for crushing bones and skulls. They also carried oval shields made of thick bull-hide.
At daybreak they attacked again. Ndebles typically used the old Zulu formation of a crescent formed by two horns and a head. The horns consisted of fast-running young men who rushed along the enemy’s flanks. The head consisted of stacked impis made up of older warriors who charged up the middle. The strategy was to surround, crush, and destroy the enemy.
Ndebeles were trained to be ferocious. They didn’t attack with cries and whoops like American Indians, but chanted loudly to the beat of a war song while racketing their spears on their shields. Most warriors were over six feet tall and appeared even taller because of headdresses made of ostrich plumes. They wore the skins of lions and leopards. When thousands of these disciplined warriors stomped forward in tight formation, shaking the ground and making their eerie din before breaking into a running charge, it was nerve-racking and terrifying.
Because of the new Maxims, it was also calamitous. The machine guns shredded the compact blocks of warriors, mowing down each successive wave, causing the lines to waver and hesitate. The Ndebeles had never faced a weapon like the Maxim gun (nor had any other army). Many stopped to use their rifles, but they were poor marksmen, often overshooting because they believed that raising their gun sights improved accuracy. Still, if the Ndebeles had pressed on, they would have easily overpowered the whites and finished them with assegais and knobkerries. By eight o’clock the war’s first battle was over. At least 600 Ndebele warriors lay dead. The column lost one white man and about sixty natives.
Jameson realized they might not be so lucky next time. The numbers were still overwhelmingly against the colonials. The countryside was swarming with thousands of Lobengula’s warriors. If the columns got caught in rough wooded terrain, an ambush could engulf them, and their advantage of sweeping firepower would be lost. No road to Bulawayo existed here, so the columns were picking their way cross-country. They didn’t know the territory ahead or even the precise location of Bulawayo. “Daylight scouting became extremely difficult,” noted Burnham, “both on account of the roughness of the country and because of the harassing presence of the enemy. We were in country absolutely unknown to any of us; no man could even guess what the next hill or ridge might show.”
Jameson entrusted Burnham and another scout named Robert Vavasseur with the mission of finding Bulawayo and an open route to it. Otherwise the columns were likely to be annihilated, and that would allow the Ndebeles to massacre the women and children left in Forts Victoria and Salisbury, protected only by a few old men and an antiquated Gatling gun from the American Civil War. If one of you gets wounded and can’t ride, instructed Jameson, the other must abandon him and return to guide us to Lobengula’s capital.
The two scouts left at daylight on October 28. They were immediately spotted by Ndebeles shadowing the wagon train. The two men spent the day edging west toward Bulawayo while playing cat-and-mouse with Ndebele patrols and people from the many kraals. At dark they took turns watching the horses and sleeping, then rode from midnight until daybreak. They were looking for a landmark near Bulawayo called Thabas Induna, “Mountain of the Chiefs,” named for an event in recent Ndebele history. After a long absence from Bulawayo, Lobengula’s father, Mzilikazi, had been presumed dead, so one of his chiefs assumed the throne. When Mzilikazi returned, he ordered this hasty usurper executed, along with his wives and his chiefs, on a nearby hill, known thereafter as Thabas Induna.
Burnham knew the story, and its dreadfulness led him to expect an imposing gloomy peak jutting from the grassland. But as he and Vavasseur rode along that morning with one eye on the spearmen flanking them, nothing on the horizon fit the description. They wondered if they had gone seriously off track. In one of their dashes away from an ambush, they surprised two old women carrying water jars on their heads. The frightened women calmed down when Vavasseur spoke to them in isiNdebele (the Ndebele language). He asked about the location of Thabas Induna. Right over there, said one, pointing toward a modest elongated hill that had been visible for an hour. And beyond that was Lobengula and his capital.
They rode toward it, constantly evading or spurring away from Ndebele pursuers. Cresting a rise, they saw Bulawayo. It was impressive. Behind a tall stockade, thousands of handsome woven huts were arranged in a deep circle around another stockaded circle—the compound of Lobengula and his many wives. Great storehouses held Lobengula’s ivory, weapons, and other treasure. The smoke from a thousand fires hazed the air.
The scouts now knew the town’s location and an open route to it. Inexperienced men would have rushed back to the wagon train, but they realized that without rest and forage, their horses would be too weak to carry them through the Ndebele lines. The men rode to a wide vlei (flat marshy lowland) where their horses could graze and they could see anyone approaching. Burnham slept first, for an hour. Vavasseur woke him with coffee and biltong (dried meat). Before napping himself, he said that the natives were running from kraal to kraal, forming a big circle around them. “He was enough of a fatalist to drop to sleep at once,” wrote Burnham. He watched the Ndebeles gather in depressions and thickets until the circle was complete. When they began walking toward the scouts and shaking their shields, Burnham woke Vavasseur. It was time to go.
The Ndebeles expected them to head south, the easiest escape route, and had put most of their men and guns there. The line on the west was thin, since that direction took the scouts away from the colonial wagon train. Burnham and Vavasseur started south, then darted west, galloping through the line and into the darkness. They turned north, rested their horses by walking them, then shifted southeast. A sudden cold wind brought heavy mist that hid earth and sky, obliterating landmarks and direction. Vavasseur brought out a compass, but Burnham distrusted its reading. He never used a compass, relying on the Western Indian way of creating a mental map while traveling, “orientation by means of memory pictures.” His mental map and Vavasseur’s compass pointed in opposite directions. They agreed to split up, and vanished in the mist. A few minutes later Burnham heard Vavasseur’s soft “Coo-ee!” behind him. Vavasseur hardly knew Burnham, but after two days he trusted his American companion over his compass.
They hit the edge of a forest and heard voices—a large regiment of warriors, probably marching to attack the wagon train. The scouts rode parallel to them for an hour. Near midnight Burnham’s horse abruptly stopped, snuffled, and dipped its head. Burnham, delighted by this message, dismounted and sniffed the ground. He found the odor of their own horses and saddles. This was the place where they had unsaddled and rested the first day. They were on the right track.
Within a few hours they found the wagon train. As they were reporting their findings to Forbes, scouts rushed in: a mass of warriors was quickly approaching. The columns hastily laagered on the red soil near the Bembezi River, about twenty miles east of Bulawayo. It was November 1.
After the rout at the Shangani River a week earlier, Lobengula sent his crack regiments, Imbizo and Ingubo (the latter his personal bodyguard), to stop the white army. These haughty warriors were disgusted that the other impis hadn’t been able to eradicate a few white men. At Bembezi they told their fellow soldiers to watch how real warriors fought, and took their place in the “head” position among 6,000 others who attacked that day.
By all accounts, including Burnham’s, the courage of these crack regiments was magnificent but suicidal. They charged into the mouths of the volunteers’ rifles, artillery, and Maxims three times, the living climbing over the rising wall of the dead. “Nothing but death could stop many of them,” wrote Burnham in a letter, “but under such a fire as we poured in a bird could not have lived long, and in a few moments the crack regiment was no more.” Of Imbizo’s 700 warriors, 500 died. Some survivors hung themselves in shame. A few years later Hilaire Belloc would summarize such carnage in a glib couplet:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun and they have not.
After Bembezi, Lobengula’s days were numbered, though much bloody fighting was ahead, as well as an event that would make Burnham famous to most, infamous to a few.
On the morning of November 3, as the columns marched toward Thabas Induna, they were startled by a distant explosion followed by a black umbrella cloud in the direction of Bulawayo. Burnham was ordered to find out what had happened. He took two men, a colonial frontiersman named Harry Posselt and a twenty-two-year-old American friend from the Fort Victoria wagon train named Pete “Pearl” Ingram, who would figure in many of Burnham’s later adventures.
They found the town deserted and in flames. Lobengula had ordered everything burned that he couldn’t take, especially the storehouses of ivory, skins, and ammunition. The explosion had been his supply of gunpowder. The scouts found two white men sitting on the roof of a shed. James Fairbairn and William Usher had long been traders at Bulawayo under Lobengula’s protection. When war broke out, some warriors wanted to kill them and take their goods, but Lobengula forbade it. He had promised his protection, and he sent a guard to uphold it. After hearing this, Burnham wrote in a letter, “Old Lobengula is, for a savage, not so bad as he might be.”
On November 4 the wagon train entered the capital of the Ndebeles. But Jameson remained worried. The southern column of 400 men under Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton James Goold-Adams, plus another 1,000 warriors under Lobengula’s mortal enemy, Khama, king of the Bamangwato tribe, was supposed to meet the northern columns here. But Jameson had heard nothing from Goold-Adams since the campaign began. Had the southern column been wiped out? Lobengula still had thousands of warriors, now evidently heading northeast. Jameson could not hope to overtake the king and also protect the colonial towns unless Goold-Adams showed up.
It was imperative to find the column. It was equally important to inform Rhodes and the world—and the panicked stockholders on the Kaffir Exchange—about the fall of Bulawayo and the preservation, at least so far, of the BSAC. Goold-Adams and another Ndebele army were somewhere to the southwest. So was the nearest telegraph, at Tati, an outpost 130 miles away, over Mangwe Pass through the rugged Matopo Hills. On the same afternoon that the colonials occupied Bulawayo, Jameson sent off the man who had proven best at slipping through areas bristling with Ndebeles. Burnham chose Pearl Ingram to accompany him, plus a native who could ride and speak isiNdebele.
Fifty miles from Bulawayo, they reached Mangwe Pass. The scouts wound their way through the strange stacked outcrops of the Matopos, constantly evading Ndebele patrols. It was raining, which caused the hooves of their horses to soften and throw their worn shoes. The rocky terrain soon made the horses nearly lame, threatening the mission. In an abandoned hut, the scouts found several old Ndebele shields. Burnham, remembering an Indian improvisation, soaked the shields and then cut the softened bull-hide into moccasins that the scouts stretched over the horses’ hooves.
They found the Goold-Adams column on the other side of the mountains and delivered Jameson’s order to hurry. The scouts continued to Tati, covering the 130 miles from Bulawayo in thirty-eight hours. The telegraph transmitted the newsflash that Lobengula’s capital was in the hands of the British South Africa Company. This report, Burnham noted wryly in a letter, would quadruple the value of the company’s shares. He was also enthusiastic about his own prospects, ever more certain that opportunities abounded in Matabeleland.
He wrote to Blanche to arrange transportation for herself and Roderick from Fort Victoria to Bulawayo, where their African life would begin in a new frontier settlement. “All things will be explained when I hold you in my arms again,” he promised, “for now I have tales to tell that would put Othello in the shade.”