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Authors: John Wilcox

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‘It’s a good idea,’ said the tall man. ‘But it will cost you.’
 
‘We’ll do it,’ said Jameson. ‘Johnson, you arrange it with the wagon master, and Colonel, I will leave the matter of the scouts to you, of course. Thank you, Fonthill and . . . er . . . Jenkins. Now, let’s get back.’
 
When they returned, they found that Alice had gone to find her fellow journalists and Mzingeli was erecting a tent for Simon and Alice, Jenkins having already elected to sleep in the wagon with the tracker.
 
‘I don’t mind tellin’ you, bach sir,’ said Jenkins, ‘that I’m glad they’ve accepted what you suggested, like. I’d ’ave felt very, very exposed, see, sleeping in this long thin line with blokes out in the bush gettin’ lost. Even I could see that this was barmy.’
 
Fonthill shrugged. ‘Well, I must say, Pennefather took it well. I have a feeling that he hasn’t seen much active service, so I hope these police chaps know what they’re about.’
 
The night was not exactly passed tranquilly, for little landmines of gelignite, spread all around the laager and fired from the searchlight’s battery, exploded throughout the dark hours. The searchlight itself stabbed the bush like some ghostly probing finger. Fonthill wondered if the column had the facilities to continue this nightly practice throughout the rest of the long trek, but had to confess that he could well understand these defences working against the superstitious Matabele.
 
The next morning, he found that the ‘police’ were, in fact, actual policemen, in that they were composed of five troops of the British South Africa Police and three troops of Bechuanaland Police, more militia cavalrymen than gendarmerie, but experienced horsemen who were used to putting down isolated instances of skirmishes with natives in the bush. He also learned that Pennefather had served in the Zulu and Boer campaigns. The puzzle of why the pioneers themselves were doing the labouring - an unheard-of thing in Africa, where black labour was plentiful and cheap - was explained when he was told that the original one hundred and fifty black labourers had been lent by King Khama in Bechuanaland, but had been withdrawn once they had left their own country.
 
Fonthill realised that he had not passed on Lobengula’s verbal promise to provide his own detachment of workers for the column, but when he confided this to Jameson, the doctor nodded and seemed unimpressed. ‘I’ll believe that when I see ’em,’ he said. Simon’s lingering doubts about discipline within the column, however, were dissipated to some extent early that morning when the pioneers assembled to begin their labours at the head of the line.
 
Setting off on their duties, they looked more like elite cavalry than labourers. They wore brown corduroy uniforms, yellow leather leggings and bush hats and had waterproof coats strapped behind their saddles. They carried Martini-Henry rifles in gun buckets, Webley revolvers in holsters at their waists and long-handled axes slung across their saddles. Fonthill could see that they were mounted on fine, well-salted horses and he could not help speculating how much this had all cost Rhodes. Later he learned that they were earning seven shillings and sixpence a day, with the policemen receiving five shillings, and that they had been promised a grant of five thousand acres of land each and the right to peg fifteen mining claims. He decided that he would not offer these details to Alice. She would only point out that the land was not Rhodes’s to give. Once at the head of the column, the men stripped off and worked with a will, although their weapons were at their sides and their mounts tethered nearby, ready for them to join the police in defending the column at the sound of a bugle. The thud of axes cutting into wood and trees falling was soon to become a constant companion to Fonthill as the days passed.
 
He rode to meet Jameson, who was already out and about. ‘I have written back to the king,’ said the doctor. ‘Tried to reassure him by saying that we have no militaristic ambitions at all and that the police are with us purely for protection, as insisted on by London. All of which is true, of course, although I don’t suppose he will believe me.’
 
Fonthill nodded. ‘Thank you. By the way, I would like us to be useful to you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think we would be much good wielding axes. What if my chaps and I scout ahead every day and even do a little shooting for the pot?’
 
‘Excellent idea,’ said the doctor. He reached out and caught Simon’s arm. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I am most grateful to you for your suggestions yesterday.’ He nodded to where the wagons had been lined up in two rows. ‘It’s no good me saving Rhodes and the company money if we all end up disembowelled. And I was delighted to see the way Pennefather accepted you. It’s a relief to me to have you on board, I must say.’
 
Fonthill smiled. ‘Delighted to be of service.’ He looked around at the busy scene. It still looked vulnerable. ‘Tell me, Jameson. You know Lobengula. Do you think he will attack?’
 
Jameson frowned and lowered his voice. ‘To be honest, my dear fellow, I don’t see how he can resist doing so. As you know, we’ve deliberately mapped our route to keep as much distance between him and us as possible, but I know we offer such a juicy target that, considering how his warriors are jumping up and down and anxious to go to war, I don’t see how we are going to get away without blood being shed.’
 
Smiling his thanks, Fonthill pulled at his bridle and rode away. Unbidden, terrible memories of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift flooded into his mind as he made his way back towards the column. He saw again the Zulu warriors - ‘Here they come, as thick as ants and as black as hell!’ a terrified sentry had shouted - streaming across towards the red-coated defenders; he smelled the cordite and the blue smoke of battle; and he heard once more the screams of the wounded and the dying. Was it going to happen again - and this time with Alice amongst it all? He shook his head. He could not envisage how this attenuated and vulnerable column could escape the sort of massacre he had seen in Zululand eleven years ago. Surely it could not survive?
 
Chapter 15
 
Three months later, Simon, Alice, Jenkins, Mzingeli, Ntini and Joshua stood amongst cheering pioneers in the shade of jacaranda trees as the Union Jack was hauled up a very crooked pole and fluttered at the foot of Mount Hampden. The end of the trek had provided a rather embarrasing anticlimax, in that, having reached the high kopje, outspanned and declared the terminus Fort Salisbury, in honour of the Prime Minister of Britain, Johnson, as nominal leader, had sent a scout to the top of the kopje who had then seen the
real
Mount Hampden ten miles to the west. The ceremony had to be repeated at the new site, but this time the embryonic township was firmly declared to be the capital of their new country, which was then and there formally annexed in the name of Queen Victoria.
 
‘Why don’t they call it Fort Rhodes and have done with it?’ whispered Alice.
 
‘Probably will within a week,’ grunted Simon. He was almost right, for it took only a few days before it had become common practice to call the new territory ‘Rhodesia’.
 
The journey from the border to their destination, some two hundred miles to the north-east of Bulawayo, had not been without incident, for it had been a gruelling task to cut a road through the wooded territory of the south and then up over the mountain ridge that ushered them into Mashonaland. But despite all the threats and alarms along the way, Lobengula had not attacked. When the column reached the Lundi river, he had sent a message saying, ‘Go back at once and take your young men,’ but nothing ensued. Every night the searchlight had probed the bush, and every morning, from three a.m. until dawn, the column stood to, waiting for the attack that never came.
 
‘Why didn’t he come, eh, Fonthill?’ asked Colonel Pennefather just after Mount Hampden had been reached. ‘He could have taken us at any time, you and I know that. Why didn’t he do it?’
 
Simon shrugged. ‘I presume because he just didn’t want to. For all his faults, Lobengula is a shrewd man. His spies were observing us all the time as we plodded and cut our way through the timber country in the low veldt in the south, and he knew that a couple of impis could have overwhelmed us at any time. Yet he also knew that a terrible retribution would come afterwards, which would mean the loss of his country. He remembered that eleven years ago, Ulundi followed Isandlwana. He doesn’t want to take on the British Empire.’
 
‘Hmm. Suppose you are right. Pity, in a way. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of a scrap, don’t you know.’
 
Along the route, Jameson had dutifully followed the instructions from Whitehall that the column should leave a string of forts behind it, with small garrisons, to protect the lines of communications to the south. The last one had been called Fort Charter, and the one preceding it, Fort Victoria, had been sited just after Providential Pass, the 1,500-foot-high passage through the escarpment that marked the entry into Mashonaland. From this vantage point, the pioneers had looked down across the rolling, lush plains of what was, literally, their promised land. Here, the high veldt offered long grass and distant views, merging into mauve hills on the far horizons. This was what they had been straining to reach as they chopped and sawed their way through the humid bush of the low veldt. Here, stretching before them, were the farmlands and rich mineral sites that would make all their labour worthwhile.
 
After the pioneers had finally been dismissed as semi-soldiers under the flagstaff at Salisbury, it was not at first the threat of war that caused them problems as they spread out across the thinly populated land of the new Rhodesia, looking to stake their claims. The Matabele was not the enemy as they ranged through the high veldt, anxious to stake and then register their precious acres. Fonthill, together with his little party, was among them. And he, like the others - prospective farmers and miners alike - suffered as nature turned on them all, as though she had decided that if Lobengula would not protect his own, she would.
 
The worst storms that the region had seen in many years swept across the high veldt in late 1890 and the early months of 1891, turning dried-up dongas into swollen rivers and washing away the early diggings that the miners had begun. After the rains came mosquitoes and the blackwater fever, and rough burial grounds sprang up, almost outnumbering the wooden shacks that formed the early townships.
 
Fonthill, with Alice, Jenkins and Mzingeli - plus Ntini and Joshua, who had agreed to stay and help establish the farm - suffered less than some of the others, in that Simon had staked his claim in the north of the territory, far away from the diggings in the foothills of the mountains of the south, which had been so badly affected. They rode out the storms in the little huts the men had built. The members of the press contingent had returned home, of course, after Mount Hampden had been reached, and Alice had contentedly stepped down from her assignment with the
Morning Post
, clutching to her the congratulations from her editor on the quality of her reporting and a request that she should contribute the occasional colour piece about life on the high veldt in the new country. She retained her indignation that Rhodes had succeeded in riding roughshod over Lobengula and had, as she had predicted, settled land that was not his. Within a year, some fifteen hundred settlers had followed the pioneers and were living in the old Mashonaland. But there was nothing, it seemed, that Alice or the king could do about it. She had long since acquiesced in Simon’s determination to twin their land in Norfolk with a farm in the new territory, and they had all decided to grit their teeth and ride out the frightful weather to establish their holding, although it meant living the rough life of pioneers for a couple of years.
 
Fonthill had always known that it was Lobengula’s practice to send out raiding parties among the Mashonas to keep them in line - to maintain his sovereignty over them, at least, if not on the ground they trod. He also knew that Jameson, who had been appointed by Rhodes administrator of the new territory, had attempted to keep the king sweet by giving him the ownership of a gold reef and even equipping the mine with a steam engine, with the king’s initials picked out on the green paint of its boiler. It was Jameson who told Simon of the first dark shoots of unrest.
 
‘The trouble is,’ he confided, ‘the Mashonas are perfectly happy to have white people living among them and don’t see why they should pay tribute to old Lobengula any more. This has gone to the head of a Mashona chief called Lomagundi, who has refused to pay his dues to the old tyrant in Bulawayo. I am trying to soothe things down a bit and I don’t think it will get out of hand.’
 
A Matabele troop was sent and Lomagundi was killed. Jameson protested, but Lobengula was evasive in his reply. Soon the incidents began to mount. Another Mashona chief cut five hundred yards of Rhodes’s newly laid telegraph wire and was promptly fined by Jameson and ordered to pay the fine in cattle. He did so - but with Lobengula’s cattle, which had been sent to graze on the chief’s green land as part of his tribute. The king promptly sent his warriors, and this chief, too, paid the price for attempting to shield behind the white settlers. Once again Jameson’s protest was met by the bland and not altogether illogical answer that while all the white men must abide by the laws of Mr Rhodes’s company, the natives of Mashonaland and Matabeleland remained subject to the king’s laws. Nothing in any of the treaties that had been agreed between him and Rhodes, Lobengula pointed out, negated that fact.

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