THE RAID INTO the Transvaal was a massive miscalculation by all who plotted it: Rhodes, Jameson, conspirators in Johannesburg, and colonial officials in London and South Africa. It brought on the Second Matabele War and the Boer War, and also prepared the ground for World War I after Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany sent a congratulatory telegram to the Transvaal’s president, Paul Kruger, and later sent him military aid. Winston Churchill called the Jameson Raid the “event which seems to me when I look back over the map of life to be the fountain of all ill.”
At the time, in Rhodes’s view, the raid combined high purpose, business sense, and realpolitik. The Transvaal’s fabulous riches—Kimberley’s diamonds, the Rand’s gold—had been developed by foreigners (called Uitlanders by the Boers), mostly British investors and American mining engineers. Natives worked the mines. The Uitlanders and their mines quickly became the Transvaal’s major sources of income. By the 1890s the foreigners far outnumbered the Boers and owned more than half the land. The Transvaal government, concerned about losing control of their country, denied Uitlanders most rights. They couldn’t vote or own a gun. They couldn’t serve as jurors, so justice against Boers was almost impossible. Boer policemen were laws unto themselves. Only Boers were given contracts to supply crucial goods, another means of gouging Uitlanders. If Uitlanders tried to publish a newspaper that objected to any of this, the government shut it down. In response to every protest, the Transvaal’s shrewd fundamentalist leader, Paul Kruger, merely shrugged.
To Rhodes and various British officials, including Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, all this was a clear injustice. It also offered an excuse, under the right conditions, to remove an impediment to capital while absorbing the Transvaal and the Orange Free State (the other Boer republic) into a united British South Africa.
So the plotting began. Guns were smuggled into Johannesburg as Jameson gathered men and materials in Bulawayo. By the last months of 1895, the BSAC’s idle militia was draining the company’s finances. So Jameson, impetuous as always, made his premature move, despite the cautions of Rhodes, John Hays Hammond, and the other conspirators in Johannesburg.
But Rhodes certainly was behind the plan to invade. Afterward, Jameson took all the responsibility, as instructed by Rhodes, who worried that the British government might yank his charter. That didn’t happen, perhaps because Colonial Secretary Chamberlain couldn’t risk exposing his own winking connection to the plot. Rhodes got blistered by an official inquiry and by critics such as Labouchere, but denied everything and wasn’t charged. He was, however, forced to resign as prime minister of the Cape Colony. In Pretoria the jailed conspirators were sentenced to death, but Kruger decided that mercy could be purchased by the five ringleaders for £25,000 each. Rhodes paid the fines as well as other costs of the raid, for an immense total of £300,000.
After Jameson arrived in London for his trial—Kruger had shipped the raiders home—Burnham had breakfast with him one morning. Burnham regretted that he hadn’t been in Rhodesia to go on the raid, and blamed Jameson’s predicament on “the cowards and curs who failed to come to his assistance.” Jameson and some officers received sentences of between five and fifteen months but ended up serving less than half because public opinion had transformed Jameson’s folly into valor. He was portrayed as a quixotic hero who rode resolutely toward glory despite the odds. The poet laureate, Alfred Austin, set a treacly verse about the raid to music, and a small sculpture of Jameson astride his horse became a popular gimcrack.
In London, Burnham was managing some legal affairs of his own. Doré had died suddenly, ending that stream of income. The Jameson Raid had sent South African stocks crashing. Almost overnight, Burnham and Ingram lost $10,000, a small fortune.
The Jameson Raid also prompted Burnham to write a rambling eighteen-page will and final instructions. War with the Boers seemed imminent, and this time the opponents would be sharp-shooting frontiersmen, not natives with spears. The document, sent to his Uncle Josiah, ranged widely across serious matters. After years of spiritual turmoil, he wrote, he was finally “at rest on religious belief,” though “it has been reached by a tearing down process that was very severe.” If young Americans asked Josiah what Burnham thought about emigrating to Africa, he said to tell them “That if they want to come to Africa to heap up a pile and go home again to live, that we can do our own blood sucking without help and I hope they will stay away. But any man who finds himself crowded and wants to help build up a new nation of Anglo Saxon people in this great Continent, come, he will find friends and plenty of work, rough and hard, maybe—for that is the proof of the man—if he won’t work hard at home, we don’t want his worthless carcass here. We want men not paupers—or Mamma’s darlings. We want men who can plow and live hard, shoot straight and ride well—for them there is room.”
He turned to Roderick. “I would fain shield him from the woes and failures I have passed through.” He was comfortable entrusting his young son to Mother Burnham’s enveloping love. But Roderick also needed “the other and more rugged virtues of true manhood,” and to that end Burnham was sending detailed instructions. He wanted his son to know how to ride and shoot, swim and fish, sail and row. Roderick also should learn to dance, a request Burnham felt necessary to defend to his strict religious uncle: “Tis natural in all races in some form and I believe no harm comes of it in moderation.” He wanted Roderick to learn responsibility by owning and caring for a horse, so he was including $15 to buy a little mustang, which his son should learn to ride bareback to improve his horsemanship. For its upkeep in feed and hay, Burnham was providing $10 a month, and Rod was to keep strict accounts that Josiah checked. Rod’s allowance would be a dollar a month to start, and he needed to mark down every penny spent for candy, pencils, and stamps, for Josiah’s auditing. “I will see but little of him till he is a man grown,” he wrote, explaining these fatherly wishes, “and am anxious to hold a few threads between us that may influence him for good.”
Then to business. He instructed Josiah not to sell the two farms in California, which weren’t worth much but assured the family a place of refuge. Besides, he continued, Nada “may marry a worthless pup who would squander money, and she might have to raise vegetables for the family, and I might need to give [a farm] to her.” He wanted the pesky orange trees cut down since they continued to drain money, most recently through the state’s expensive demand to spray them for black scale. Burnham told Josiah to sell the other two houses he still owned in California, and to use the proceeds to buy a nice lot where a small home should be built for his mother and Roderick.
Despite recent losses, he had done well in Africa and was sending home more than $12,000 to be invested so that the interest supported his mother and Roderick, and also helped provide a small pension for Blanche’s parents. When all this was done, he concluded, “I can draw a breath and know that my long struggle to place those that are dependent on me out of the clutches of poverty, is at last over.”
He felt ready for the impending war that would unite South Africa. It struck him, once again, that every empire and religion seemed to require a baptism of blood. “It is the only cement that holds a people together,” he wrote. “It took the blood of the Son of God to save the souls of men, and it constantly takes the blood of the bravest and finest of the sons of men to save the earthly kingdoms.”
Yet when war came, he was as shocked as everyone else.
On March 20, 1896, some Ndebeles east of Bulawayo killed several native policemen. Within days blood was flowing all over Matabeleland as Ndebeles massacred isolated settlers and prospectors. Whites called it the Second Matabele War. Natives called it the First Chimurenga or the War of the Red Axe. The whites later learned that the revolt was supposed to start on March 28 with a simultaneous uprising throughout Matabeleland, with the goal of wiping out most colonials. The impatience of a few young warriors had spoiled this plot. Nevertheless, the revolt had been comprehensively planned under the noses of the settlers. The Ndebeles had stockpiled food, weapons, and ammunition. Yet even old hands such as Frederick Selous didn’t see it coming—a measure of the settlers’ obliviousness.
The easy victory in the first war, combined with the economic boom and racial arrogance, had blinded the settlers to the natives’ seething discontent. Their grievances were many.
First, land. The BSAC claimed it all. Like the U.S. government in the American West, the company adopted a policy that sounded humane and high-minded but in reality called for sequestering natives on desolate reservations while saving the best land for settlers, miners, and powerful allies. Rhodes gave one friend, Sir John Willoughby, 600,000 acres (an area a bit smaller than Rhode Island). As in the American West, the white colonizers justified taking these lands because the natives were wasting them by merely living on them, and besides, the people were savages. The two reserves set aside for natives in northern Matabeleland were so arid and inhospitable that most Ndebeles and Shonas refused to move there. Instead, they became squatters on their former lands, many of which were owned by absentee white speculators.
Second, cattle. The culture and economy of the Ndebeles and Shonas were based on cattle. After Lobengula’s defeat, the BSAC seized thousands of head, at least 200,000 according to one British official’s estimate. The BSAC claimed ownership of all cattle belonging to Lobengula as part of the loot that had been promised to the volunteers. The BSAC also pledged to redistribute some of the royal cattle to the Ndebeles. But the separation of royal cattle from private cattle was done sloppily and corruptly, robbing many Ndebeles and Shonas of their only economic means. About 65,000 cattle were auctioned or distributed as loot. Another 20,000 were appropriated for “police rations.” Only 41,000 were redistributed to Ndebeles, leaving at least 75,000 unaccounted for. Most of the cattle given to the Ndebeles went to chiefs and elders, leaving many young men with no cattle and no land, and hence no status. Two years earlier this volatile group had been elite warriors with assured futures. Now they were indentured laborers with no prospects.
They were indentured laborers because of the third major grievance, the hated hut tax, which forced natives to work for white miners and farmers. These laborers often ran off before their contract was up. In January 1896 John Blick described what happened after he reported several truants to the police: two native (Ndebele) policemen caught and returned two of them to Blick for judgment. “After all evidence was in,” he wrote to his sister Kate, “I rose up and spake thus, ‘Guilty, fetch um, tie um and give em ten.’ The police then ran a rope through them, handcuffed them up through the crotch of a tree about two ft above the victim’s head and then lashed his feet to the trunk of the tree and then stood off and laid on ten with a hearty good will.”
Which brings up the fourth grievance: the police. They spent much of their time recruiting laborers, chasing runaways, or confiscating cattle. Most were young men handed considerable power, and they developed a reputation for bullying and brutality. In a country with few white females, some policemen inevitably used their power to abuse native women.
Then there were the native police. After the war, the BSAC trained some Ndebeles from Lobengula’s crack regiments as policemen, including marksmanship with modern rifles. These men were equally detested by the natives, perhaps more so, for inflicting cruelties and depredations on their own people. The first victims killed in the revolt were native policemen. By that time, most natives had learned to flee at the sight of police of any color.
In early 1896 all these grievances were intensified by terrible drought and a plague of locusts. And then, from the north, came the scourge of rinderpest. In early March this contagious disease began annihilating Matabeleland’s herds of cattle and oxen. To slow the spread of rinderpest, the BSAC ordered the shooting of any animal that showed symptoms. The Ndebeles, who had already lost most of their cattle to the BSAC, didn’t understand the concept of a fatal invisible virus and thought the whites were killing healthy cattle to starve the natives.
And so plans for the revolt went from simmer to boil. Many of the leaders were sons, brothers, and nephews of Lobengula, as well as his old indunas. They were urged on by priests of the god Mlimo, who assured them that the whites would be driven from the land. The settlers had assumed that once the Ndebeles had been defeated, the matter was closed. But the tribe’s longstanding belligerence had merely gone into hiding, where it had been sharpened by losses and humiliations.
The Burnhams heard about the revolt when they stepped ashore in Cape Town. In the first week, more than 140 men, women, and children had been slaughtered, often gruesomely. Many victims were the Burnhams’ friends. The Burnhams and Ingrams departed immediately for the north. The husbands left their wives in Mafeking and continued toward Bulawayo, promising to send for them as soon as possible.
Like the other settlers, Burnham was stunned by the uprising. The whites saw the Ndebeles as docile and grateful. Many settlers had stopped carrying guns. The BSAC was so confident of the natives’ loyalty that the company hadn’t required them to turn in most of the 1,000 rifles given to Lobengula, and had taught about 200 natives (150 Ndebeles and fifty Shonas) to use modern rifles for their jobs as policemen. Most of these policemen deserted to the rebels, taking the rifles that they now knew how to use, unlike the warriors in the first war.
“These brutes who were treated better under the white man than they ever knew have neither gratitude or pity,” wrote Burnham to his mother while en route to Bulawayo, sounding like the Minnesota settlers who had been shocked by the Sioux uprising. Despite later reports and accounts about the abuses that led to the revolt, Burnham never abandoned his myopic view, perhaps because of the searing personal consequences of the war for him. Thirty years later, in Scouting on Two Continents, he still sounded baffled and outraged by the uprising. “Under the terms of peace made with the Matabele at the close of the first war,” he wrote, “natives were given generous reservations of land; also certain allotments of cattle, seed, etc., and ample employment for all who were willing to work on the farms, in the mines, or for the Government. . . . Here were people given more liberty than they had ever known before; the slaves all freed, labour paid in coin, lands held in safety, and taxes lighter by far than those levied on any white man in the empire.” All these blessings, he continued, were blown away by a whisper from Mlimo’s priest, “the Mouthpiece of God.”
At Palapye Burnham and Ingram bought horses, already scarce. For a mount worth $15 in the U.S., Burnham paid the war price of $600. The road to Bulawayo was littered with thousands of stinking carcasses—oxen and cattle killed by rinderpest. Some of the animals had dropped in their yokes, still attached to wagons that had been looted of goods. Bulawayo depended on supplies hauled by ox-train from the nearest railhead at Mafeking, 600 miles away. As the oxen died, so did Bulawayo’s lifeline for supplies.
Burnham and Ingram reached Bulawayo in early April without incident, a surprise since by then about 10,000 Ndebele warriors had the town surrounded on three sides. Bulawayo was in laager (defensive encirclement). Settlers and natives had come in from the countryside—about 2,200 whites and 2,000 natives. Like the settlers in Minnesota, the people in Bulawayo were panicked and unprepared for war or siege. They had only 380 rifles for the 800 men able to fight. Of their eight machine guns, three were broken. So were two of their three seven-pounders. They could muster only 100 horses for a cavalry. Burnham helped build a series of small fortifications—mostly sandbags atop kopjes—on the road between Bulawayo and Mangwe Pass, to protect coaches and supply wagons.
In Bulawayo, the white women and children were staying in the market building, the town’s biggest. Burnham helped fortify the laager. Wagons chained together encircled the central square, with sandbags between the wheels. The defenders broke all the empty bottles in town and spread the shards several inches thick in a wide band around the wagons. Barbed wire formed a third ring. Around all these defenses Ndebele campfires formed a fourth ring, visible every night.
If the Ndebeles attacked after dark, the defenders would ignite oil-soaked bundles of wood on the rooftops so that riflemen could see. A machine gun was positioned at each of the laager’s corners. The defenders spread blasting gelatin between boards and positioned these crude bombs on the perimeter so they could be detonated by rifle shot or electric current. They dug a well inside the laager and built tanks to hold reserves. After hearing stories about Ndebele atrocities, they formed a plan to prevent women and children from falling into native hands: if the laager got overrun, each man was assigned to kill a family not his own. In the weeks after the revolt began, nine black men were charged with spying or looting, and were hung in Bulawayo. Photographs of them caused an outcry in England.
Conditions in the laager were so unpleasant that during the day many settlers stayed outside in their houses, returning to the market building only at night or when the alarm bell clanged. Rinderpest and the Ndebele blockade had cut off almost all supplies. The plague also wiped out cattle, eliminating the settlers’ main sources of milk and fresh meat. Nada Burnham’s two pet ostriches, like other domestic animals, ended in the stewpot. By May the defenders were reduced to drying and salting meat from diseased carcasses of livestock, whose stench pervaded the laager. Like the Shangani Patrol, the siege of Bulawayo pitted outnumbered whites against encircling hostile natives, and contributed to the emerging Rhodesian identity.
Burnham’s brief letters to Blanche about conditions in Bulawayo made her wild to get there and see her little girl, now almost two. “If only I had her in my arms this minute,” Blanche wrote to her mother. “I will never leave her in Africa alone again.” She also learned that one of her brothers had slight wounds and another had narrowly escaped death at a cabin besieged by Ndebeles. If anything happened to them, she wrote to her mother, she would never forgive herself for urging them to come to Africa.
Most travel was prohibited, and space in the few stagecoaches was limited. In mid-April Burnham arranged a special pass for Blanche and Grace, but everyone in Mafeking strongly advised against the trip, so they let two coaches leave without them. But Blanche had been separated from Nada for six months, and the desire to see her finally outweighed the risk. She left Mafeking eight days after her first opportunity, an interval she would always regret.
The journey to Bulawayo took eleven days. Food and water were scarce. Putrefying livestock were inescapable. At Palapye, Grace left with Ingram for Bloemfontein, where he was going to buy horses and mules for the war. Blanche reached Bulawayo on May 13. The next day Burnham left with a patrol to meet a relief column coming from Salisbury with Rhodes.
Blanche’s reunion with Nada was distressing. A few days earlier, the child had become seriously ill with a fever and a cough, perhaps the result of poor diet. She seldom opened her eyes but seemed to know Blanche and kissed her several times. Blanche expected her to be fine in a few days. Instead she worsened, leaving Blanche with the ifs of regret—if only she hadn’t left Nada in Africa, or hadn’t stayed so long in London, or hadn’t delayed her departure for Bulawayo. “How I wish she could have been well until two or three days after I came,” wrote Blanche to Roderick on May 18, “so I could have seen all the cute little ways they tell me about.”
On May 19 the Blicks in Pasadena got a telegram from Bulawayo: “Nada died today.” Burnham was away and out of reach. So were Blanche’s brothers, John and Judd. Grace and Roderick were elsewhere. For ten days Blanche was nearly alone in her grief before Burnham returned from patrol and learned about their child’s death. Two days later he wrote to Roderick to break the news. Nada often kissed your photograph, he wrote. He wished Roderick could be with them to comfort his mother, but the war made that unwise. He signed the letter, “With unbounded love for you my dear boy.” A week later Blanche sent her son a wistful, loving letter. She mentioned that there were still bits of biscuit on Roderick’s photo, left by Nada’s daily kisses. “Our little war baby,” she wrote, “born just at the close of one war and buried in the middle of another.”
Rider Haggard sent a letter of condolence. Burnham’s reply was aggrieved but restrained, with one exception: “You know the tempest that is raging in my soul,” he wrote. “I am hit awful hard, but for Africa and the Empire I will fight on.”
Many children in Bulawayo died because of the siege, but the settlers were far more enraged by the Ndebeles’ atrocities in the countryside. During April and May, as patrols ventured out of the laagered townships, they came upon horrifying scenes from the revolt’s early days: women and girls naked and violated, children pinned to the ground with assegais or brained by knobkerries, men slit open with their toenails pulled out. Most victims had been taken by surprise.
These savageries ignited a bloodlust that often surprised even those who felt it. Frederick Selous had spent decades hunting and exploring in south-central Africa, and knew the region and its peoples better than most white men. By all accounts he was modest, thoughtful, and evenhanded as well as brave. (Rider Haggard modeled his character Allan Quatermain on Selous.) At the first reports of the uprising, Selous immediately grasped the timing and motivation—the police were away so the Ndebeles saw a chance to recover their seized land and cattle. Unlike Burnham, he also granted that, from the Ndebeles’ perspective, the attempt to overthrow white rule and reclaim property was understandable. He was, he later wrote, “inclined to judge the Kafirs very leniently,” though of course the revolt would have to be quelled.
Then he saw what the Ndebeles had done to their victims, especially to women and children. A fury for revenge rushed through him. “I don’t defend such feelings nor deny that they are vile and brutal when viewed from a high moral standpoint,” he wrote in his classic personal account of the uprising, Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia,
only I would say to the highly moral critic, Be charitable if you have not yourself lived through similar experiences; be not too harsh in your judgment of your fellow-man, for you probably know not your own nature, nor are you capable of analysing passions which can only be understood by a European who has lived through a native uprising, in which women and children of their race have been barbarously murdered by savages; by beings whom, in their hearts, they despise; as rightly or wrongly they consider that they belong to a lower type of the human family than themselves. . . . the murder of white women and children, by natives, seems to the colonist not merely a crime but a sacrilege, and calls forth all the latent ferocity of the more civilised race.
Like Burnham, Selous was agitated that the settlers were condemned by critics such as Henry Labouchere, who insisted, from a safe distance, that the poor natives be treated humanely, as if they had not slaughtered whites without mercy. Selous returned to the subject over and over in his book, trying to explain the rage felt by whites, to explain why in skirmishes they chased down and killed as many Ndebele warriors as they could find, including the wounded. In Scouting on Two Continents, Burnham put it succinctly: “There were scenes pathetic enough to melt a heart of stone, and others so awful in their shocking cruelty that the blood surged with the craving for vengeance.”
Within a month of the first murders, the settlers knew this war would be different. Thanks to training, many of the Ndebeles were now better marksmen. They also had adjusted their military strategy, using their overwhelming numbers to surround all four white settlements in Matabeleland: Gwelo, Mangwe, and Belingwe in addition to Bulawayo. Better to starve out the whites and to attack smaller patrols away from the forts, they realized, than to charge into the mouths of Maxim guns.
The strategy worked for a while. The settlers’ patrols lost men. Conditions in the settlements deteriorated. But ultimately the Ndebeles’ new patience was a mistake. Time was not on their side, immediately or historically. With their greater numbers, if they had attacked the laagers in April, they almost certainly could have overwhelmed them despite the Maxims. But in mid-May two relief columns arrived in Bulawayo—from the south, 800 regulars sent by the British government, and from the north, another 150 volunteers from Salisbury, including Rhodes. At the end of May, Major General Frederick Carrington arrived to take command. The besieged people of Bulawayo relaxed a little.
On the evening of June 5, during a routine patrol, Burnham and a companion detected a force of more than 1,000 Ndebeles close to the town, clearly planning to attack. After eluding capture, Burnham reported the force to Carrington, who sent out a troop of 250 cavalry, including Burnham, now eager to avenge Nada. The next morning the last major battle of the Matabeleland uprising was fought at the Umguza River outside Bulawayo. The Ndebeles retreated in a rout, with more than 200 killed. The settlers lost one man. Burnham told Blanche that he killed three natives, then later returned to the battlefield and helped finish off twenty-five wounded.
“It all sounds awful,” wrote Blanche to Roderick that evening, “but when the men think of the women and children who were brutally murdered they could do anything and then think of all the deaths that have been caused there by people leaving to go into the laager. Our dear little Nada. I could kill the black beasts myself.”
After June 6 about 10,000 Ndebeles took refuge in the granite kopjes of the Matopo Hills, a warren of caves, clefts, and huge boulders, terrain almost impossible to conquer. In a reverse, white patrols began destroying native granaries to starve out the insurgents. The war was far from over, but the momentum had shifted.
Then on June 17, while most of Mashonaland’s policemen were in Matabeleland fighting the Ndebeles, the Shonas began massacring whites in Mashonaland. About 120 were murdered in the first few days, with the usual atrocities. To the settlers, this uprising was even more shocking. Weren’t the Shonas grateful for being freed from Ndebele taxes and oppression? Weren’t the Shonas servile by temperament and happy to be under white protection? The settlers couldn’t conceive that the answer to these questions was no. Not a single Shona warned the whites that an uprising was brewing. Salisbury went into laager. It was Bulawayo’s turn to send relief.
A day or two after the news from Mashonaland, Bonar Armstrong, a young native commissioner from Mangwe in the Matopos, came to Bulawayo to propose a risky mission that he believed would help end the war: the capture or assassination of “the mouthpiece of God,” the high priest of the deity called the Mlimo.