The truth was, of course, that the issue of peace and war had never lain with Lobengula. Nor did the issue lie with the Imperial authorises, unless they had chosen to assume a really decided attitude, which they were apparently disinclined to do. It lay with the Chartered Company, whose chief representative in South Africa had already arranged for the "loot" of Matabeleland by the freebooters he had gathered together on the borders, who had sent a false account of the affray with Captain Lendy's troopers to the High Commissioner, and who had been engaged in "working" the London and South African Press, as assiduously as he afterwards did when maturing his plans for raiding the Transvaal.[1] War had, indeed, already begun, the final pretext being that one of the Company's patrols had been fired upon by Matabele scouts, fore-runners of a great invading army. The "invading army" turned out to be a phantom one, and the alleged firing upon the Company's patrol was never established.
In less than three months the war was over. Thousands of Matabele were killed—one regiment of 700 lost 500 of its number. Many fled towards the Zambesi, where they suffered terribly from fever and famine, as well as from wild animals. It is said that 18 of them were killed by lions in one night, in the dense forest that lies some fifty miles north of Gwelo. Lobengula, a hunted fugitive, had disappeared and was seen no more. One wonders whether in his untutored savage soul he ever puzzled over the message which had reached him, only four years before, from the advisers of that far-off mighty Woman-ruler, whom his missionary friends had taught him to revere, assuring him that the persons who had come to dig for gold in his country could be trusted not to molest him and his people. Buluwayo was a smoking ruin. The "loot" contract was being actively put into execution, the beneficiaries thereof, as a contemporary observer records, "being scattered all over the country, either for themselves or backed by capitalists, in search of the best country and the richest
- ↑ This system of deception was imitated when the Company's plans for raiding the Transvaal had matured. When, in December, 1905, the High Commissioner learned that the Company's police were being concentrated on the Transvaal border, he wired to Rhodes asking what the purpose was. Rhodes replied "For the purposes of economy and to protect the railway." Two days later the Company's forces crossed the border and attacked the Transvaal Republic
