BECAUSE THEY WERE blind to the real causes of the Ndebele uprising, the settlers blamed agitators, especially the natives’ religious leaders. The whites knew little about the Ndebeles’ religious beliefs, but understood that priests, often termed witch doctors, served a deity called the Mlimo (or M’Limo or Umlimo). Foremost among these men, explained Selous in Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia, was a high priest also referred to as the Mlimo—not because he was the real deity, but because the Mlimo spoke through him at the main temple, a secret cave in the Matopos not far from Mangwe. This man’s influence had alarmed the settlers during the first war and they had tried to capture him, without success.
Some colonists, including Selous, believed that Ndebele military leaders had fomented the uprising by exploiting the natives’ faith in the pronouncements of the Mlimo’s priests. Most settlers simply blamed the man they called the Mlimo. He reportedly urged the Ndebeles to rid the land of whites, and promised that the god’s magic would turn the whites’ bullets into water.
When native commissioner Bonar Armstrong told Lord Grey (the Administrator), General Carrington, and Burnham that he knew where to find the Mlimo’s secret cave, they immediately recognized it as vital military intelligence. Armstrong had learned the cave’s location from a disaffected Zulu married to an Ndebele woman. The Zulu said a big indaba (meeting) would be held near the cave in the coming week, and the priest of the Mlimo would be conducting a ceremony. Though skeptical of the information, Carrington couldn’t afford to dismiss it. He approved the mission under the charge of his gregarious chief of staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Baden-Powell.
Baden-Powell and Burnham had just returned from a three-day scout into the Matopos. “Burnham a most delightful companion on such a trip,” wrote Baden-Powell in his book about the uprising, “amusing, interesting, and most instructive. Having seen service against the Red Indians, he brings quite a new experience to bear on the scouting work here. And, while he talks away, there’s not a thing escapes his quick roving eye, whether it is on the horizon or at his feet.”
Baden-Powell was fascinated by Burnham’s expertise at scouting and woodcraft, and he picked the American’s brain. After stints in India and Zululand, Baden-Powell had become convinced that scouts were crucial to military success, yet they were largely disregarded by Britain’s military establishment, as was woodcraft. He also worried, like many Victorians, that the urbanization of Britain was eroding masculine values and skills learned through an outdoor life: self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, knowledge of nature, physical and mental toughness—skills also needed by the military scout. Baden-Powell wanted to preserve these things, and he had vague ideas about teaching them to boys. He mentioned this notion to Burnham, who enthusiastically endorsed it.
Baden-Powell had arrived in Rhodesia wearing the British officer’s pith helmet and red blazer, invitations to enemy marksmen. He soon adopted Burnham’s distinctive stiff-brimmed brown Stetson and neckerchief, which would become emblems of Baden-Powell’s creation, the Boy Scouts. (In 1911, Burnham’s brother Howard wrote about watching the newly-crowned King George V review 30,000 Boy Scouts: “it made me feel quite queer to see your hat on every one of those boys’ heads and I recalled the one you took to Rhodesia which introduced the idea to B.P. and is now transmitted to these 30,000 boys.”) Baden-Powell’s motto for the Boy Scouts also may have been inspired by Burnham: “Be Prepared.” Though the two men spent only a month together in Rhodesia, they became lifelong friends and correspondents.
The day after the meeting about the Mlimo’s cave, Baden-Powell got scratched from the mission. General Carrington needed him to check into the movements of Ndebele regiments near Bembezi. The general told Burnham and Armstrong that he wouldn’t order them to go because it was too risky. Both men immediately volunteered. Carrington gave them their final instructions: “Capture the M’Limo if you can. Kill him if you must. Do not let him escape.”
“There was small need for that last injunction,” wrote Burnham in Scouting on Two Continents. “Constantly before my enraged vision rose the picture of my wife vainly holding to her breast our dying Nada.” He went to say goodbye to Blanche. Neither of them expected him to return, yet she didn’t ask him not to go, knowing it would be futile.
On June 20 he left for Mangwe with Armstrong. “The blackness into which I rode was no darker than the thoughts that ebbed and flowed through my mind during that night . . . Many gruesome pictures of tragedies to settlers at the hands of the natives rose before me. . . . And now, by a strange turn of fate, I was setting out in the hope that I might meet the artist who had inspired all those horrors.”
The next night they left Mangwe on a preliminary scout. Using the Zulu’s description, they failed to find the mountain with the cave. They tried again in daylight. The landscape mixed high granite kopjes, mesas, and flatlands covered with scrub trees, thorn bushes, and tall grass, all of it laced with trails. They proceeded slowly. Armstrong held the horses in a thicket or in tall grass while Burnham looked for a route to the next hiding place. Then he returned for Armstrong and the horses, and they repeated the procedure. They screened themselves with branches or bunches of grass as they moved through different terrains, and brushed out their tracks when crossing a trail.
Finally they saw it, swelling from the countryside like a blister: a huge oblong dome of dark granite, 600 or 700 feet high and perhaps three-quarters of a mile long. Most of it was naked stone, though big boulders littered a few places, and grasses and scrub sprouted from crevices. After more slow progress, they found the cave’s entrance about halfway up the mountain, hidden amidst a jumble of boulders and brush. At the mountain’s base, a ceremonial space had been flattened by thousands of dancing feet. Beyond that stood a hundred thatched huts. To get into the cave undetected while the priest was there seemed impossible.
That night they met with the Zulu informant outside Mangwe; he didn’t want to be seen talking to whites. Armstrong had been born and raised in Zululand, and knew the people and the language. In Burnham’s opinion, Armstrong “could extract more truth from a native than any man I ever knew.” The Zulu said the Mlimo’s priest was performing a ceremony the next afternoon to immunize a regiment of warriors against the settlers’ bullets. Beforehand, the priest would speak with the god in the cave, which only he was allowed to enter.
If the Zulu was correct and telling the truth, Burnham and Armstrong needed to be inside the cave when the priest arrived, to make sure they got the right man. They planned to kill him there and thus undermine two of his claims—that he could turn bullets into water and that anyone except the priest who entered the temple would be struck dead.
On June 23 they left Mangwe before dawn. They retraced the route scouted the day before, using the same cautions. They hid the horses in high grass as close to the mountain as possible, and tied the animals’ heads high to eliminate jingling harnesses. Camouflaged with grass to break up their profiles, they crept up the mountain. A breeze stirred the vegetation, helping to disguise their movements. They were often in full view of goatherds and women carrying vessels of beer to the huts for the upcoming feast. After two hours, they slipped into the cave and hid in its cool shadows.
Some time later they saw a man walking up the crooked path toward the cave, stopping occasionally to dance and pray. Burnham was surprised to see that he wasn’t an Ndebele but a Makalaga, a tribe indigenous to Matabeleland long before the arrival of the conquering Ndebeles. The man was about sixty years old but vigorous, with short white hair and skin more mahogany than black. He wore none of the animal skins and charms typical of a witch doctor.
He stepped into the mouth of the cave. “Here was the author of all our woes,” wrote Burnham of this moment. “Because of him, my little daughter was dead and the bones of hundreds of brave men and good women were scattered on the veldt by hyenas.” Armstrong’s information had gotten them there, so Burnham offered the young native commissioner the honor of killing the Mlimo’s high priest. “You do it,” whispered Armstrong. Burnham raised his Lee–Metford rifle and put a .303 bullet under the man’s heart.
The cave amplified the shot, which boomed down the mountain. Some startled Ndebeles began running away. Burnham later learned that this strong amplification was key to the high priest’s power—the cave turned his pronouncements into the thunderous voice of the god.
Burnham and Armstrong fled down the mountain toward their horses. The main obstacle to escape was the regiment of warriors awaiting the ceremony, half a mile away. To create confusion and a smokescreen, Burnham and Armstrong set fire to some huts. Within minutes the Ndebeles recovered from their shock and gave chase. For two hours, according to Burnham in Scouting on Two Continents, they “had a long hard ride and a running fight over rough ground” before crossing the Shashani River.
The news that the man called the Mlimo had been killed by the American scout Burnham flashed through Rhodesia and eventually around the world. Burnham wrote a report for Lord Grey on June 26. Most of the colony’s leaders and settlers, including Burnham, assumed that the assassination would cripple the rebellion. On June 27 the Bulawayo Chronicle noted, “If the right one be killed it should go far to damp the spirit of the natives, for it was this gentleman who was at the bottom of the rebellion, and who led the natives on by promising them the most wonderful things . . .”
But doubts quickly surfaced, mostly about whether Burnham had killed the right man. Did the chief prophet of the Mlimo really live at Njelele, in a district where the natives had not revolted? Wouldn’t the chief prophet be protected by many regiments?
In the first week of July, Sir Richard Martin, deputy commissioner of South Africa, was dispatched to make inquiries for the government. Rhodes was in disgrace because of the Jameson Raid, and Martin wasn’t averse to further embarrassing the British South Africa Company. Lord Grey asked Burnham to submit a more detailed report, which he did on July 8. A number of settlers who had lived in the Mangwe area for many years—among them Commander Van Rooyen, Hans Lee, and a missionary named Father Prestage who lived among the natives of the district—confirmed to Deputy Commissioner Martin that they as well as natives in the area believed that the man killed in the cave at Njelele was the oracle of the Mlimo. A native named Banko also corroborated this and added that he should know, since the dead man was his brother, Jobani. Martin concluded that Burnham had indeed shot the chief prophet of the Mlimo.
The British South Africa Company awarded Burnham a gold watch but ignored Armstrong, perhaps because he had thorny relations with the administration over several matters. Moody and headstrong, Armstrong also had ignored the chain of command when reporting his information about the Mlimo, bypassing the chief native commissioner, Herbert J. Taylor, due to mutual dislike. Worse, he had gone to Bulawayo despite Taylor’s specific order to stay in Mangwe. Taylor’s enmity would cost Armstrong, and Burnham as well.
Meanwhile, doubts about the Mlimo incident persisted. That offended Armstrong, who insisted on another thorough investigation. The BSAC appointed Judge Watermeyer, who spent several months collecting testimony and evidence. Watermeyer’s report has been lost, but it evidently confirmed the official story, since neither Lord Grey, General Carrington, nor any other official ever suggested otherwise by word or action, nor were Burnham and Armstrong censured or reprimanded. If the report had suggested that the two men duped Lord Grey and Carrington, it’s doubtful that Burnham and Lord Grey would have remained lifelong friends, and even more doubtful that a few years later Carrington would have recommended Burnham to Lord Roberts as Chief of Scouts for the Boer War. Further, after Watermeyer’s inquiry, the BSAC finally sent Armstrong a gold watch, which implies exoneration—though Armstrong returned it, probably piqued by its lateness. But doubts about the episode never died and led to accusations that Burnham and Armstrong had concocted a hoax. (See appendix.)
Eleven days after the assassination of the Mlimo’s oracle, the Bulawayo Field Force was disbanded because of the arrival of the Matabele Relief Force. Some men joined other companies, some packed it in. Selous departed for England to write Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia. Burnham also had plans. A week after the disbandment, on July 11, he and Blanche left Rhodesia for Britain and Pasadena. Burnham’s Rhodesian critics sometimes suggest that he was running away, an accusation they never aim at their hero Selous. But family letters make clear that Burnham considered the trip a hiatus and still expected to settle permanently in Rhodesia.
The Burnhams went home because Blanche needed to get away from the place that had killed her daughter and constantly threatened to make her a widow. She needed to embrace her remaining child and see her mother. In a letter announcing their surprise visit, Blanche regretted that they couldn’t bring their “African lily,” and added, “Sometimes I just hate the country but I must not let myself do that for Fred’s sake.” That Burnham agreed to leave Rhodesia during wartime suggests how worried he was about her.
They arrived in London on August 16, spent a few days there, then continued to New York and on west. When they got to Pasadena in October, they had been away for three years and ten months. On November 15 the San Francisco Chronicle ran a page one story about the Burnhams and The Wizard, Rider Haggard’s new book dedicated to Nada. (He dedicated two other books to her as well: Elissa: The Doom of Zimbabwe, and Black Heart and White Heart: A Zulu Idyll. All carry the same dedication: “To the memory of the child Nada Burnham, ‘who bound all to her’ and, while her father cut his way through the hordes of the Ingobo Regiment, perished of the hardships of war at Bulawayo on 19th May, 1896, I dedicate these tales—and more particularly the last, that of a Faith which triumphed over savagery and death.”) The article noted that the Burnhams had returned to Pasadena “partly with the hope that the change of scene would benefit Mrs. Burnham who is heart-broken over her little daughter’s tragic death. The family expects to return to south Africa next January.” This is confirmed by a letter Burnham wrote to Blanche while away on a business trip during this time. He mentioned his hopes of striking some deals when they returned to London, and then added, “For I tell you B. life is getting more and more worthless and ere long will not be worth living at all. You and Africa are still my Gods and none can step between.”
In Rhodesia, during the month after Burnham killed the Mlimo’s priest, the war intensified. Major battles in the Mambo Hills and in the Matopos proved that the Ndebeles remained fierce and determined. About 10,000 of them were hiding in the rugged kopjes and labyrinthine caves of the Matapos. General Carrington foresaw a lengthy war of attrition there. To the east, the Shona rebellion had opened another front. Carrington told Rhodes he would need 2,500 more imperial troops, 2,000 more carriers, teams of engineers to blast the natives from their caves, and more artillery. Such an expansion also would require thousands more horses, mules, and oxen, plus food for men and animals, not to mention rifles, ammunition, tents, blankets, and other necessities of war.
The tab for all this would fall on the British South Africa Company as a condition of its charter. The company was already reeling from expenditures caused by the Jameson Raid and the Ndebele uprising. A long war on two fronts would bankrupt the BSAC and also install thousands of British troops in Rhodesia, increasing the imperial government’s control over the territory. But refusing the troops would prolong hostilities and endanger the settlers, who were demanding protection.
To Rhodes, all these choices were bad. In a burst of genius and courage, he conceived another possibility: he would try to end the war by talking directly to the indunas. He knew the tactic would anger the British government—he had no authority to negotiate—and also the settlers, who wanted the Ndebeles punished if not exterminated. But Rhodes saw that if he succeeded, he would end the bloodshed, save the BSAC, and preserve the company’s control over Rhodesia. He suspected that the Ndebeles were tired of fighting and hiding, and probably were hungry since so many of their granaries had been destroyed.
He approached the indunas through intermediaries. The chiefs agreed to talk if he came into the Matopos with no more than half a dozen men, unarmed. Too dangerous, warned his associates, probably an ambush. Rhodes hadn’t become one of the world’s wealthiest men by ducking big risks. On the afternoon of August 21, 1896, he rode into the hills with several interpreters, white and black, and also, shrewdly, a journalist named Vere Stent who had been critical of the BSAC. Most of Rhodes’s associates didn’t expect him to return. As the group reached the designated place, the kopjes above them filled with Ndebele warriors. Rhodes’s companions didn’t want to dismount, wrote Stent in his account, but Rhodes insisted, as a sign of trust. He sat down on the remains of a giant anthill, a natural throne. The indunas appeared. “Yes, yes, there they are,” said Rhodes with a huge smile. “This is one of those moments in life that make it worth living.”
The indunas gave Rhodes an earful. Somabhulana, the Ndebele spokesman, detailed many grievances: how the native policemen violated Ndebele girls and insulted elders, how the white policemen brutalized Ndebeles and took their cattle, how a native commissioner had stopped a wedding ceremony and claimed first rights to the bride. These injuries seemed to surprise and disturb Rhodes. But still, he asked, why had the Ndebeles killed and violated white women and children? The white tax collectors had started it, replied Somabhulana, by murdering four Ndebele women who wouldn’t reveal their hidden cattle. Johan Colenbrander, one of the interpreters, confirmed the incident. “You came, you conquered,” said Somabhulana. “The strongest takes the land. We accepted your rule. We lived under you. But not as dogs! If we are to be dogs it is better to be dead.”
Rhodes was moved. He promised to abolish the native police force, reform the administration, and investigate the seizure of cattle. To avert starvation among the Ndebeles, he pledged to send loads of mealies (corn). He also promised the chiefs that if they made peace, they would not be punished. The indaba lasted four hours. Rhodes was elated that peace seemed at hand.
When the British deputy commissioner, Sir Richard Martin (the same man who had looked into the Mlimo episode), heard about the indaba, he was furious at Rhodes’s usurpation of his authority. Rhodes asked him to the second indaba on August 28, but Martin insisted on bringing an armed escort and was disinvited. Martin wanted unconditional surrender and criminal trials. Colonial Secretary Chamberlain told him that the government couldn’t afford to appear more punitive than the BSAC. He instructed Martin to offer advice but to let Rhodes negotiate.
On September 21, after two more indabas, most Ndebeles surrendered. Rhodes kept his promises, for a while. He disbanded the native police force and appointed a strong deputy to reform administrative practices. He tried to stay alert to native concerns by holding more indabas. He realized that it had been a mistake to disregard the Ndebele leaders after the first war, so this time he honored their authority by offering some of them salaried positions as district heads—which incidentally coopted them into the BSAC administration. He also allowed the Ndebele leaders to return to their original landholdings for two years while a permanent solution was designed. Speculators were angered when he ruled that any whites who hadn’t yet pegged their allotment of land must wait until the land issue was settled. He also decided to enforce the BSAC’s original stipulation that landowners must improve their holdings or lose them.
The reforms were sincere but temporary. When the two-year reprieve for Ndebele landowners expired, they again lost their property. Nor did the BSAC ever repossess and redistribute the huge idle holdings of absentee syndicates and influential London friends—land whose seizure had initially been justified because the natives weren’t fully using it.
The settlers watched Rhodes’s negotiations and reforms with growing rage. For them the war’s cost in blood and grief had been steep. Of the 450 whites killed, more than 80 percent were settlers, as were about 70 percent of the nearly 200 wounded. (At least ten times as many natives died.) About 10 percent of Rhodesia’s white population had been wiped out, a substantial loss.
Like the pioneers in Minnesota and Arizona, the settlers in Rhodesia wanted vengeance as much as peace. Instead they watched Rhodes and the BSAC reward the commanders who had brought suffering and death to their families and friends. Like the pioneers in Minnesota and Arizona, they were sure that coddling would bring more atrocities. This resentful fear hardened into the siege-mentality racism that plagued Rhodesia for generations.
Burnham, too, wanted the Ndebeles exterminated, a desire thwarted by Rhodes’s policy of appeasement. Years later, in an essay entitled “An American Viewpoint of the Greatness of Cecil John Rhodes,” evidently never published, Burnham noted that this was one of many times when, because of Rhodes, “I had to enlarge my view points on important matters.”
[The Ndebeles] had attacked us so unjustly and killed our women and children so mercilessly that we, their fathers and neighbors, were seeing red worse than some of the present nations of Europe. It was Rhodes who took his life in his hands to save these people by going unarmed into their bloody power. There is nothing finer in all history. Yet while we foamed and raged at the time he was right and above all just.
After five months in California, the Burnhams started back for Africa. During their pause in New York City, a gregarious police commissioner insisted that Burnham be his guest at the Boone and Crockett Club. Though only thirty-nine, the commissioner already had considerable reputations as an author, reformer, and outdoorsman. Born an eastern aristocrat, he had gone west and turned himself into a tough Dakota rancher. (Early on, he instructed a cowboy to round up a steer by saying, “Hasten forward quickly there.”) As an appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission he had chopped away at the spoils system, and as a New York police commissioner he had waded into the city’s deep corruption with a sharp muck rake.
The prospect of meeting this dynamo made Burnham pace up and down the street beforehand. But Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt was equally impressed by his guest’s reputation and was eager to hear about African hunting, Frederick Selous, Rhodes and Rhodesia, and the problematic Boers. Burnham thought Rhodes would find a way to prevent war with them, but Roosevelt said it was inevitable, as was a war between the United States and Spain over Cuba. The lunch began a lifelong friendship.
By mid-May the Burnhams were back in Africa. They stopped in Kimberley to see Rhodes, then went on to Bulawayo. The Ndebeles were peaceful, but the Shonas were still at war in the east and wouldn’t surrender until late 1897. The Burnhams began building another house outside of town. In letters home, Burnham described the fast growth of Bulawayo and Gwelo. Prospectors were poised to rush north of the Zambezi, he wrote, and the coming of the railroad later that year would connect Bulawayo to the outside world and accelerate progress. The war had delayed all this, but perhaps soon he would realize a fortune from his shares in the rich concessions up north.
Blanche, by contrast, noticed that everything, including food, was scarce and expensive, and that fever had killed many people. Nada’s shadow still darkened the place. They had arrived in town on the anniversary of her death. A few days later Blanche wrote to Burnham’s mother, “Coming to Bulawayo brought it all back so vividly to my mind. I cannot write more.” She already missed Roderick, and since Burnham was soon gone for weeks at a stretch, making up for lost time, loneliness quickly descended.
That autumn, a few weeks before the railroad linked Bulawayo with Cape Town, Burnham was still imagining their future in Rhodesia. “Just think,” he wrote to his mother, “when I touched Africa only in 93 Bulawayo was in hands of Loben and only a few white men had ever set foot in the country and in four years we have fought two wars, endured a pestilence, built a city, and hundreds of miles of R.R.” Meanwhile, Blanche was writing that she hoped her husband would only be absent a week on his newest trip, because “it is very lonely when he is away now that Grace has gone.” When Burnham looked at Rhodesia, he saw how much had been achieved and the rewards to come. Blanche, despite her desire to support her husband’s dream, saw loss, with loneliness ahead. Something had to give.
In typical fashion, they changed direction abruptly. On January 4, 1898, Burnham bought a prospecting license in Bulawayo. Three weeks later they were headed for California again. En route they stopped in London, where some of the investors in Burnham’s African ventures formed a syndicate to fund his newest gamble. As he explained in a letter to his mother, “We have a dose of Klondyke fever and have a strong desire to lose 30 or 40 toes and fingers in the arctic circle.”
Even his dream of Africa couldn’t withstand gold fever. Blanche was no doubt enthusiastic to leave Bulawayo for the white North. They were joining the gold rush.
Routes to the Klondike. (Courtesy of the National Park Service.)
