Zimpapers Logo

Basil Fuller, a travel writer, recounts a dramatic encounter between the Posselt brothers — Harry and Willie — and the advance party of Mhlahlandhlela regiment of Lobengula. The year was 1888, the area Lundi. The Posselt brothers had pressed from Transvaal in South Africa, through Nuanetsi, Matibi, and had just reached Lundi. Following Karl Mauch’s rather romantic description of the Great Zimbabwe Monuments, the youthful and adventurous brothers had thought of an adventure trip up north to find this site famed for its hidden nuggets of gold.

For this was the Ophir, the legendary King Solomon’s Mine. Their march was a good two years before Rhodes’ so-called pioneer column crossed into Zimbabwe. Travel meant a compass and stars for direction. It also meant following native footpaths. The Transvaal Natives were their couriers.

Encounter with the Ndebele warriors
In and around the Nuanetsi — now Mwenezi — area, they made friends with a Native named Mketi, the son of Chief Matibi. They engaged Mketi as their guide. They also got more Shona carriers, and with their three wagons, they advanced towards Lundi where the encounter with Ndebele warriors took place. On sighting the warriors, the Mashona carriers melted away, leaving behind the loyal Mketi and the Transvaal Natives with the two brothers.

The impis were a dreaded spectre. “Matabele, master,” said Mketi in obvious fright. But the two brothers who had been in contact with the Zulus down south were relieved that they had run into warriors who could be spoken to, albeit in Zulu. And the two white man spoke Zulu very well. After a tense moment, the head of the warriors’ lead party suggested a meeting half-way between the two tense parties, emphasising the would-be interlocutors had to be unarmed. After hesitating a bit, Harry Posselt accompanied by Mketi, stepped forward to meet the head warrior.

The King with ten fingers
Here is how the conversation went: “Why do the white men travel where no road goes?”
“We make our own road.”
“There is only one road for strangers — the road to Bulawayo.”
The warrior added: “You are spies!”
“We are not spies.”
“Then, where are you going?”
“We are hunters and traders. We go where trade takes us.”
“You are spies.” And the tension could be felt.

The warrior changed the charge: “Whose game do you kill?” And without waiting for an answer, he added: “It is Lobengula’s game.” The Posselts only demurred, and then offered to make presents to the King.
“You will have to pay well,” grinned the warrior.

“The King has ten fingers,” he added. The brothers understood that each finger must be satisfied. Ten woollen blankets were passed to the warrior who laid these separately on the ground to ensure each finger had been paid. Satisfied, the warrior ordered his juniors to collect the tribute.

“Now I have ten fingers!” At this, the Posselts protested. They had given enough, they said. A burly warrior, presumably second in command stepped forward. He yelled: “They are spies. Send them back!”  So more blankets — another ten all told — were laid out. The same counting caution was followed before the blankets were put away.

And the King’s Two Feet!
There followed a second pregnant pause. “You have forgotten my feet,” the lead warrior said. And the “feet” were his forty-nine fierce, hungry looking warriors who watched the whole scene from behind their shields. This time the brothers took calico from their store and gave out, hoping this was the end of it all. “Have you forgotten the King’s feet?” the warrior demanded, yet again.

And the King’s feet were himself and his second-in-command. “For these,” he added after a moment, “we want your guns.”  At that point Harry responded: “We have given you all you asked, but this has been only for the sake of friendship. Now you demand what is not possible. You are a man; we are men. If you want our guns you must take them when we are dead.” At that point the indaba ended, with both sides bravely walking away from confrontation.

But the last word belonged to the warrior: “Do not cross the Tokwe River . . . Beyond is the district of another commander. He will make more trouble!” That friendly yet chilling tip froze the mission, although it did not stop it. The two brothers separated, with Harry staying behind with the wagons to trade, while Willie, Mketi and one Cape Boy made the final effort to reach the mysterious Great Zimbabwe. A smaller party on foot was more difficult for the warriors to detect. Or abuse beyond their personal effects.

Swopping blankets for heritage
What followed was very revealing. Willie could not find direction to the mythical monuments. He walked until he reached the kraal of Mugabe, a local chief who then provided a guide. Still the guide was deliberately obtuse, according to Fuller’s account. Fortuitously and when he was on the point of giving up, Willie Posselt looked down into the valley and there, deep amidst trees and undergrowth, he saw part of the great circular wall. Together with his search party, he sat down and clapped his hands. The heavens had seen him.

I will let Fuller pick up the narrative: “On the hill was situated a Native kraal which he visited. Later, he found four carved soapstone birds, a stone dish, and a carved stone shaped like a wheel. Proposing to carry away certain of these finds, he met strong opposition, the Natives until he had made presents of blankets and other articles. Then it was realised that a soapstone bird, intact with pedestal, would be too heavy to carry, so one “bird” was cut from its base. The stone wheel was taken also. Then Willie turned back to the Lundi, and the brothers returned to the Transvaal.”

Relics of Groote Schuur
Let’s leave Fuller for a while and turn to “hard” facts of history. Adam Renders, an American hunter, had been the first white man to see the Great Zimbabwe Monuments. Renders, we are told by white history, had to go native before locals agreed to show him the monuments. And they stiffly stopped him from taking anything from what for locals amounted to a holy shrine. Karl Mauch, the second white man to see the ruins, struggled before he finally got to them. In fact both white men had to steal to the site by night, when the rest of the village was asleep. And in the case of Mauch, he was temporarily taken prisoner when the village discovered he had visited the shrine at night.

Great Zimbabwe

This is why neither of them reported on the dominant feature of the Monuments, the Conical Hill. They never saw the acropolis, which became known to the white world only after Willie’s visit, the third ever by a white man. Word went round that the Posselt brothers had finally discovered the legendary mine of King Solomon.

They became famous and that fame reached the ears of South Africa’s two most powerful men: Paul Kruger and Cecil John Rhodes. Both wanted the relics which the brothers had pillaged from Great Zimbabwe Monuments. One John Noble, a member of the Cape Parliament, wrote to the Posselts, indicating Rhodes who had heard of the relics, wanted to buy them. “So the carved stones were sent south, where they found a home in Groote Schuur. By return of post Rhodes sent a cheque for £25. ‘And, in those days, we thought the sum quite a small fortune,’ laughed my host.” The quote comes from Fuller’s 1954 book, Bid Time Return, and the host is none other than Harry, then the surviving one from the Posselt brothers.

The story of Felixburg
Fuller held the interview with Harry at his farm called Felixburg. The road to the farm tears off Masvingo-Mvuma highway, just after Chaka Business Centre in Chirimuhanzu, on your way to Mvuma and Harare. Felixburg runs north-eastwards, in the direction of Driefontein. The footprints are real, still there for all to see. After occupation of Zimbabwe by Rhodes, the Posselts went back to Rhodesia, this time intent on settling in the country. But they ran into a diffident Dr Starr Leander Jameson, Rhodes’ trusted administrator of the new colony.

But upon seeing Mr Noble’s letter concerning the relics, Jameson mellowed. They got enough land, not only for themselves, but for two of their friends. The relics letter and its link with Rhodes had made the Posselts deserving citizens in the new colony. They pegged land around the Great Zimbabwe and occupied it for a while. On the eve of Christmas, 24th December, 1892, a notice appeared in the Rhodesia Chronicle.

It read: “Notice is hereby given that the Zimbabwe Ruins and the space within a radius of one mile from the top of the Zimbabwe Hill is preserved by the Government solely for archaeological and scientific purposes, and that no farmers, squatters, or other persons will be allowed to reside therein, and further, that no ploughing or excavating for private purposes will be permitted within such radius. Any person infringing this notice will be regarded as a trespasser and be liable to prosecution.” Willie and his brother had to leave. Thereafter Willie pegged farmlands at Felixburg, while Harry opened a trading store in the Belingwe district, now Mberengwa. Later, Harry would come back to Felixburg after the death of Willie. Today Felixburg is owned by various indigenous farmers, thanks to the land reform programme.

A past that is a resource
Dear reader, I have given you two vignettes to do with the Posselt brothers, both involving encounters with us back in history. In drawing up these two vignettes, I am aware that last week I gave you very compelling testimonies of a great civilization that our forebears developed, a civilization which you and me rightly lay claim to. I singled out serious breakthroughs in cropping, livestock and mining, three key activity areas of that great civilization. My chief aim was to show that our past was never arresting, that it should never be cited as a handicap to us in the present.

It was a generous past, too generous in fact. It was a past of accomplishments. It looked after invading aliens as well — the British in this case — indeed gave pointers to invaders as to where our wealth lay, where our comparative advantage inhered. The disused mines were one such vital pointer. To this day the economy of this country rests on agriculture and mining. Indeed our forebears were very good.

But I am also mindful of two factors around narrating our past. The first factor comes as a bitter complaint, and I gave spurts of that last week. White history paints our past as benighted, as populated by barbarians who were heathens. It is a vegetative past which white narrators ascribe to us. I added that this mischaracterisation had taken a heavy toll on our sense of self-worth, on our confidence in tackling challenges of today, on our confidence in finding a place to stand out, amidst the throng of a racialised humanity.

We have remained an anonymous lot, undeservingly so if you ask me. The second factor has to do with seeking to heal that mischaracterisation. How have we gone about it? Often it has been through a romanticized past, through overstating our achievements, and not stating at all or understating our foibles, our wrongs in history. We make happy tales, make-belief narratives that glorify us. That we spent all our days tending to tobacco and small grains, rearing livestock or boring the earth for its hidden riches, all in everlasting harmony. Patently, the second factor does not redeem us; it amounts to a distorting reaction — overreaction — to a falsified history. It takes us no nearer the truth of who we are, than the racialised history of colonial narratives.

Between Orphir and Trevor-Roper
David Basildon puts it so well for me. Prefacing his corrective account of Africa’s historical past, Old Africa Rediscovered, he wrote: “I have tried to steer between the rock of prejudice and the whirlpool of romance. Enquiries into the African past have suffered from both . . .” The whirlpool of romance school, he says, presents Africa through tales of Sheba and Ophir, through romance.

The rock of prejudice school repudiates Africa as a thinking, evolving continent. “No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences,” asserted David Hume who looms so large in our received Eurocentric knowledge systems. “No approach to the civilisation of his white fellow creatures whom he imitates as a monkey does a man,” added Anthony Trollope, the mastering of whose creative writings earn us advanced degrees in European universities. And these were not cases of passing miscomprehension of Africa; rather these were verities of European history. In the words of one commentator, well into the sixties, the idea of Africa with no history “was still alive and writhing in respectable circles.”

The commentator goes on to cite Hugh Trevor-Roper, the highly famed Oxford historian who taught leading African historians like Terence Ranger. Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1963 wrote: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none; there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, and darkness is not the subject of history.”

Amous the vicious Cape Boy
The above vignettes allow me to steer between the Ophir syndrome and the Trevor-Roper one. The Posselts needed Cape Boys from South Africa, and Mketi from here, to reach Great Zimbabwe, to reach the fontanelle of our soul. The two African types are emblematic, key human emblems of faces of our conquest as Africans. And check our history, you will find it littered with Cape Boys who by and large were Zulus, Fingoes, Basuthus, Xhosas, Tswanas or “Cape half-breeds”, better known as coloreds nowadays. Even food portions given to native labour in Bulawayo after occupation were called “Cape boy rations”. Our man in last week’s instalment, Stanley Portal Hyatt, survived on the meagre services of a Zulu “schelm” called

Joseph. This is before he gets Amous, the diligent and furiously loyal Basuthu “boy” who performed the feat of bridling his oxen, moulding a dependable “span”  that drove his wagons to riches. Amous was much more than a wagon driver, as the following narrative from his master Hyatt shows: “It is the way of the Mashona always to be insolent until he is taught the danger of that course. They held out for cash at first, and when offered trading goods, demanded wholly unreasonable measure.

However, they soon came to their senses. The first few lots not only had to carry their staff back again, but they also met Amous just outside the camp, and, when he was not actually driving, the little man invariably carried a four-foot-six hippo-hide sjambok. I made a rule of never asking what the noise meant. He had an excellent sense of discipline and the fitness of things, and he saved us an immense amount of trouble. His reputation spread very quickly, or, rather, our reputation with the fear of his sjambok attached to it, and, after a day or so, we had no trouble at all. The Mashona came in from miles round to sell to the chiefs who were really chiefs, the white men whom you could not swindle.”  Through his hippo-hide sjambok, Amous the Suthu boy changed terms of trade in favour of the white man. Much worse, he personified imperialism’s coercive arm interposing between the white ruler and the native ruled.

The abused and short-changed native saw and hated Amous; they never saw the white man who motivated his black-on-black cruelty. And like Gramsci’s dog, we went for the stone, never for the hand that threw it! Colonial narratives are full of Amouses, themselves a part of us, themselves us.

Khama, the faithful Fingo and more
One more case. Colonial accounts on the attack of the Ndebele Kingdom speak of the outstanding services of a Cape Boy who was a Fingo native. His name, no doubt given him by his white masters, was John Grootboom! The team which is despatched to rescue Major Forbes, whose unit in turn has lost its way in a bid to rescue Major Allan Wilson, could never have done so successfully without the services of this “faithful Fingo native”. He used his excellent tracking services to rescue the white man.

John Grootboom will feature again during the storming of the Matopos in the 1896 rebellion. He is used by the assaulting colonial unit to infiltrate Ndebele fighters who mistake him for one of their own. That way vital intelligence was passed on to the occupiers. You meet John Grootboom yet again in the Mazoe campaign here in Mashonaland during the 1896 Shona uprising.

Again, check your history on occupation. Khama sends a whole battalion under the command of his brother to support the pioneer column in their penetration of Zimbabwe. He disliked Lobengula, against whom he had fought repeatedly. That was not all. During the storming of Matabeleland and its pacification during the 1896 uprising, again Khama and his army feature prominently on the side of colonial forces.

They are part of the Imperial contingent which advances through the Mangwe pass to reinforce the settlers in Bulawayo, who were on the verge of being overrun. Relate all these details to contemporary history and current affairs, and tell me whether or not that history is dead, whether or not that history is not repeating itself.

The streak of collaboration
Of course the story is more complex. What of Mketi, the local collaborator-son of Chief Matibi? He was not alone. The pioneer column acquired local guides all the way to Harare. The names are there in colonial narratives. The 1893 assault of Ndebele impis included Shonas around Fort Victoria, Masvingo nowadays.

The notorious native force which featured so prominently in the run-up to the 1896 Ndebele uprising comprised Cape Boys and Shonas. Amous the Basuthu is contemptuous of the “lazy” Zulu Joseph, not so much from their working together under Hyatt, but from established ethnic rivalry cultivated by whites as they occupied South Africa. The warriors who harass the Posselts were the advance party of Ndebele impis on a raiding expedition in Mashonaland.

The British Mounted Infantry which becomes the Mashonaland Field Force in the 1896 rebellion needed a pro-colonial Chief Mutasa and an informer called Chipunza to subdue the truculent Chingaira, or Chief Makoni. Similarly, the “grinning” Chief Mutekedza was key to the subdual of Chief Chiwashira, his fellow Hera clansman. Inter-group and inter-tribal conflicts enabled colonial penetration, leading Du Plessis, the Afrikaner who helped open up the Eastern Highlands, specifically Melsetter and Chipinga to Afrikaner settlers to conclude: “I am convinced that fear of the Matabele and fear of the lion were two important factors which drove the native to the white man.”

I am trying to explain how this false sense of evening out tribal conflicts, this false sense of forging new alliances with whites against, say Lobengula and his marauding impis, or against rival chiefs, actually gave us the cruel history of defeat and occupation, actually allowed the white man to divide us before misruling us.

The legacy of intricate diplomacy
I don’t know what you make of the exchange between the Posselts and the Ndebele warrior. For me it brought out two distinct facets to our national personality. The set-up and the actual encounter, betokened sophisticated negotiation skills. Arms are removed and guilt is mobilized to turn the tables, to manage the intruder.

If you don’t accede to my demands, then you must be a spy. If you do, there is always an advantageous formula founded on my ten fingers and feet to exhaust your limited means, all to halt your advance. But there is also a way in which I could try to disarm you in the name of trade or the institution of tribute. And when both fail, I try and stop your advance by warning of numerous commanders along your way who will demand the same, thereby beggaring you.

Here is a case of a customs regime well integrated into a defence strategy. And all this founded on an overriding sense of full sovereignty that extends even to ownership of game!

When we lost an argument
But there is also an unsettling streak. The warrior makes a case for himself. Is he being corrupt? Or is he raising the stakes so as to halt the advance of the Posselts? The language, the idiom he employs makes our corrupt tax collectors grin with envy! And the vignettes clearly show that corruption or vapid materialism was not a prerogative of Ndebele warriors alone.

Willie Posselt has to bribe his way to the Great Zimbabwe, has to pay to be allowed to remove and take away the highly symbolic Zimbabwe Birds from their spiritual habitat, the Great Zimbabwe. And Chief Mugabe of Masvingo and his people are to blame for this spiritually enervating pillage. To this day, the bird which was taken by the Posselts and then sold to Cecil John Rhodes has not been found, has not yet come back home. It is still in South Africa, a pillaged heritage, exiled spirituality.

The rest have come back, including one which had travelled as far as Russia, after the fall of Nazi Germany. Soon after occupation, Rhodes made sure a representation of the Soapstone Bird was incorporated in the Rhodesian Coat-of-Arms. The actual carving — the actual bird from Great Zimbabwe – occupied a prominent place in Rhodes’ house, Groote Schuur. Once, he is quoted to have remarked: “Whenever they criticise my plans north of the Limpopo, I just show them these relics.”  For a few blankets from the Posselts, we lost a country, an identity, indeed an argument. Why are we so bad when our forebears were so good? Another instalment will tie up the argument.

Meet you next week.

Icho!

[email protected]