Rhodesian History

RHODESIAN HISTORY The Ancient Gold Field.—The regions of South-Central Africa, now known as Rhodesia (North and South) include what was probably the greatest gold field of the ancient world. The remains of the mines, sunk to a vertical depth of sometimes I soft. in gold-bearing rock, are found in an area Soo miles long by 400 broad; and it is estimated by the mining engineers of to-day that, allowing for imperfect methods of extraction, gold of a value equivalent to at least L75,000,000 must have been won from these pre-historic workings. Even so, enough was left to make this very ancient gold field one of the chief resources of the youngest self governing colony of the British Empire; and eleven-twelfths of the 129,000 claims registered in 1910 were pegged out on the site of mines of varying antiquity. In this gold-bearing area numbers of non-indigenous plants, fruits, and trees of Indian habitat are found, and there may have been a Hindu colonisation and su premacy here as there was in Java in the centuries preceding the Mohammedan conquest of that island. Another solution is that the gold area was mined by the Sabaeo-Phoenicians of Yemen with Indian labour, and that while the Ophir of King Solomon was the south-west corner of Arabia, most of the gold of this Ophirl (and of the Graeco-Roman world) came from South-East Africa. A glance at the map will show how easily the Sabaeans could reach by land and sea the east coast of Africa. In addition to the ancient gold workings there are two other classes of re mains which reveal something of the early history of the country. As many as 426 Bushman rock paintings have been found in caves. They are generally hunting scenes and animals, but nine of them depict the Victoria Falls. Until the discovery at Broken 'The word "ophir," like "tharshish," is a generic term indicating any conspicuous source of natural products or merchandise.

hill in 1920 of the skull of what is thought to be an extinct species of man (Homo rhodesiensis), comparable to the Neanderthal species of Europe which perished at the close of the last glacial period, the Bushmen were taken to be the earliest inhabitants. This discovery (the actual skull is in the British Museum ; a plas ter cast of it is in the museum at Bulawayo) in conjunction with the prevalence of palaeolithic hand-axes and other implements similar to those of the Neanderthal men in Europe, suggests that the country was peopled by this extinct species of man thousands of years before the era of the Bushmen ( ?I 000 B.c.). The other class of remains consists of the ruined stone buildings, at least 400 in number, of which the Great Zimbabwe is the most re markable. Some hold that, while these ruins are of varying pe riods, ancient, mediaeval, and comparatively recent, the oldest must be associated with the Asiatic rock-miners. Others believe that they are exclusively mediaeval, or post-mediaeval.

Monomotapa.

The gold area of South-Central Africa emerges as the Bantu kingdom of Monomotapa with the capture of the East Coast ports from the Arabians by the Portuguese in A.D. 1500-20. At that time the fertile and temperate uplands which lay inland behind the fever-stricken coast lands were peo pled by industrial Bantu, who, migrating from the north many centuries before, had perhaps mingled with, and absorbed, a decadent remnant of the Sabaean, or Indian, or Persian, gold mining population of the Graeco-Roman era. The ancient rock mining had been long abandoned, and the gold was won by river sand washing and such rude methods of quartz crushing as were known to the Bantu. The paramount chief was styled grandilo quently the Monomotapa, or Lord of All; and the territory of the dynasty is shown on the 16th and 17th century maps as Monomo tapae Imperium. Although the Portuguese desired from the first to obtain possession of the gold area, they made no permanent settlements in the interior except where the waterway of the Zam bezi gave easy communication from the coast. The missionaries, however, whose reports on the Monomotapa, or Kafir, mission are preserved in the archives of the Propaganda and in the Vati can library at Rome, penetrated to the great chief's "court" and converted him to Christianity. As the result of the relations thus established, the Monomotapa of the day granted, by treaty in 1629, the "gold mines" to the king of Portugal. This acquisition failed to yield even a moderate revenue at the time, but 25o years later it brought the Portuguese a very substantial advantage. For it was this treaty with the cross of the Bantu chief affixed to the words, "Manuza, emperor of Monomotapa," that enabled Portu gal to make good her claim to Delagoa bay in the MacMahon arbitration of 1875.

Matabele Conquest.

But possession of the country had passed from the industrial to the military Bantu. In 1837 Moselekatse, chief of the Amandabele (corrupted to Mata bele), a military tribe akin to the Zulus, having failed to kill the white men north of the Orange river, was himself driven across the Limpopo by the Boers. There he almost exterminated the light-skinned, industrial Ma-Kalanga population, and established himself and his tribe in the best of their lands—thereaf ter Mata beleland. Three years later the Mashonas were reduced to slavery and vassalage. They also, like the Ma-Kalanga, were industrial Bantu, living in open villages with land under permanent culti vation, and practising the arts of metal-working, pottery, and weaving; and the supremacy of Moselekatse and his successor Lobengula was maintained over them by the despatch of the Mat abele warriors once a year to work indiscriminate murder and robbery throughout their villages.