LOBENGULA HAD FLED his capital and his army was shredded, but he still had thousands of devoted warriors in scattered units. Matabeleland wouldn’t belong to the white settlers until the king was captured or killed. He was reportedly traveling north toward the Zambezi River with a great herd of cattle and many regiments. Jameson sent a message to Lobengula: if he surrendered, he would be spared. Jameson added that he would wait until the messenger returned, plus two more days, but after that he would send pursuers. Lobengula replied that he was on his way to surrender, then immediately resumed flight.
Jameson wasn’t fooled for long, but the colonials were short of ammunition and their horses were exhausted. Jameson and Forbes decided, perhaps because of economy, perhaps because of brash misjudgment, to cut the pursuit column to 158 men and two Maxims. Burnham and Ingram were among those chosen to go. They loaded provisions for ten days onto pack horses, took some slaughter oxen for meat, and left on November 25.
A number of men in the column acted as scouts, but by this point the most difficult assignments were given to the Americans, Burnham and Ingram, and to a Canadian named Robert Bain. Lobengula was traveling with seven heavy royal wagons whose tracks were easy to follow even among those made by his 50,000 head of cattle. But when the rains started, the cattle obliterated the wagon tracks and the trail sometimes went cold.
The spoor had been lost again when a native rumor reached the column that Lobengula’s wagons had crossed a nearby river seven miles downstream. Major Alan Wilson, Forbes’s second-in-command, sent Burnham to check the story. He took Jan Grootbaum with him. A Fengu native, Grootbaum appears in many histories of the era. Burnham often scouted with him and admired him. He compared Grootbaum to H. Rider Haggard’s noble Zulu hero Umslopogaas, calling him “one of the pluckiest Negroes I have ever seen” and “the coolest and bravest black of all my African experience.” Twice while tracking Lobengula, he and Grootbaum suddenly encountered bands of Ndebeles in the tall grass, and Grootbaum’s quick thinking helped save their lives. Once, he immediately shouted in the Ndebeles’ language that despite being with a white man, he was on their side, and they should run away because a troop of white men with guns was right behind them.
The native rumor about the river crossing proved true, and the column picked up the trail again. By December 2 they were near the Shangani River. Burnham, Ingram, and Bain reported to Forbes that many of Lobengula’s impis were very close by. The volunteers were too tired to be alarmed. Their horses were exhausted; most could no longer gallop. The rains kept everyone wet and added to the misery of hauling the Maxims through sand, creeks, and heavy brush. The country ahead was dense with more acacia thorn and scrubby mopani trees. The ten days of provisions were almost gone. The column wanted a decisive confrontation or Lobengula’s surrender.
Lobengula was ready to give up. His army had been decimated by the Maxims. Some of his regiments still wanted to fight, but others had started to desert with their families, weary of this sodden trek. He had been forced to abandon and burn several of his royal wagons. The rains had started and he was heading into fever country during fever season. Smallpox had broken out as well. More of his people would soon sicken or die.
On the morning of December 3, he and his entourage crossed the Shangani. On the other side, he gave two messengers a bag containing 1,000 gold sovereigns. He told them to find the Forbes column and deliver the gold as a peace offering, with a simple message: I am conquered. The messengers took a route that they thought would intercept the front of the column. But the volunteers had been on the move that morning, too. They reached Lobengula’s previous encampment on the banks of the Shangani while the fires were still warm. So when Lobengula’s messengers emerged from the bush, the column had already gone by except for its tail end. The messengers’ small miscalculation tilted events toward tragedy instead of diplomacy.
They delivered the gold and the offer of surrender to the only whites still in view, two men lagging at the rear, and then disappeared back into the bush. The recipients were William Daniel, thirty-one, and James Wilson, twenty-three, batmen who habitually dawdled behind the column. They opened the heavy bag. Simple greed did the rest. By the time anyone learned about the gold and Lobengula’s offer of peace, the war was over, the king was dead, Forbes had been investigated for incompetence, and one of Rhodesia’s foundational myths had taken deep root near the Shangani.
The warm campfires at the river confirmed that Lobengula wasn’t far ahead. In his diary, Captain William Napier estimated that 1,500 people had stayed there the previous night. The king’s trail led along the riverbank. The volunteers didn’t yet know that Lobengula had crossed the Shangani two miles farther east. Forbes wanted to know the strength of Lobengula’s force and to confirm reports by Burnham and other scouts that the Ndebeles seemed to be gathering again for another battle. Forbes ordered Burnham and Johan Colenbrander, a longtime colonial who often served as an interpreter, to nose ahead and capture an Ndebele for questioning, as Burnham had done several times during the march.
This was difficult in daylight, but the two scouts managed to seize a young Ndebele who was herding some of Lobengula’s cattle. They brought him to Forbes, who sent Burnham back out to scout the flank. The prisoner turned out to be a relative of Lobengula’s. He was “brave and crafty,” wrote Burnham, “and he totally misled Major Forbes as to the positions of all impis and their ability to attack us.” The interpreter Colenbrander, who had lived among the Ndebeles for years, warned Forbes that the youth was lying, but Forbes chose to believe that the Ndebele regiments had scattered and that Lobengula was protected by only 100 sick warriors.
By this point it was five o’clock. Forbes decided to rest the men and the horses. But Lobengula seemed tantalizingly close, so he sent Major Alan Wilson and nineteen men on a quick strike to try to capture or kill the king. If that proved impossible, ordered Forbes, Wilson should return before dark, in less than two hours. Wilson’s patrol was leaving just as Burnham returned from his reconnoiter. Forbes ordered him to go with the patrol as a scout, along with Robert Bain. Burnham had been on horseback for most of the day, and his mount was worn out. Forbes said to take his horse, a strong young animal that had been resting all afternoon.
The patrol followed Lobengula’s tracks along the river for two miles to a sandy drift, or ford, where two wagons had crossed. The Shangani was twenty feet wide there, but only six inches deep, with high steep banks. They crossed and stayed with the tracks, winding through the mopani and acacia thorn. After about five miles they came to the edge of an encampment of Ndebele warriors and their families. The camp seemed to go on forever, with thousands of people. Clearly, the captive boy had lied about the size of Lobengula’s remaining army.
The sun was sinking. Instead of turning around, as both prudence and his orders dictated, Wilson consulted with his officers and made an impetuous but characteristic decision. He told two troopers whose horses were done in to return to Forbes with the message that the patrol had tracked Lobengula for six miles, across the river, and they hoped to capture him that night or the next morning. He asked Forbes to send reinforcements and a Maxim gun. These two riders made it back to camp about nine o’clock that night and delivered Wilson’s message.
Then, on Wilson’s order, the rest of the patrol spurred their horses and galloped right into the encampment. Captain Napier wrote in his diary, “The howling, shouting, and scurrying as we dashed through scherms [brush shelters] occupied by the King’s guard and their family, boys milking, women and girls grinding their evening meal, must be left to one’s imagination.” Napier spoke isiNdebele, and as they galloped he kept shouting that they had not come to kill anyone but only to talk to the king. They rode through so many camps, past so many startled people, that Burnham later said they felt as if they were riding into the heart of the entire Ndebele nation. Behind them they could hear shouting and commotion as the warriors recovered from their shock at seeing this small group of white men passing among them.
Wilson hoped to find Lobengula’s royal wagons, and suddenly there they were, two of them behind a rough brush enclosure. Napier shouted a greeting in isiNdebele, with many verbal curtsies and offers of peace. Silence. They pulled back the flap—empty.
From the dark all around they heard the cocking of rifles. Napier heard warriors asking their chiefs for permission to fire. He quickly told Wilson, who ordered the patrol to scatter and dash for some thick bush on the edge of the vlei. At that moment the skies opened and a tremendous thunderstorm began, the lightning illuminating their way. No shots had been fired.
The heavy rain turned the night inky, hiding them. But they couldn’t stay where they were because the Ndebele would be able to hear the jangling of their horses’ bits. They decided to work their way down the perimeter of the vlei, in the direction they had come. Progress was slow. They couldn’t see, and the vlei was now marshy with small streams. They finally stopped in a thicket and dismounted.
Wilson discussed the situation with his officers. They agreed to sit tight while someone carried a message to Forbes. Wilson believed Lobengula would return to his wagons and could be taken the next day, if Forbes sent a large force and at least one Maxim before daylight. Forbes must do this without fail. Otherwise they would not only lose the king, the patrol would be trapped inside the Ndebele nation.
Because the message had to get through, Wilson sent three men, noted Napier, in case any two of them got “drowned, shot, or lost.” The three were Napier, a trooper, and the scout Bain, who had the skills to backtrack the wagons in pitch darkness and avoid the roused Ndebeles. They left about eight o’clock. The heavy rain had obliterated the trail in spots, but Bain recovered it by feeling for the wagon ruts with his bare feet. As they crossed the Shangani, Napier saw that it was beginning to flood. They could hear a roar upstream. Their horses staggered into camp at 11:45. Bain fell off his mount, shivering with fever. Napier reported immediately to Forbes and delivered Wilson’s urgent message.