Word: lobengula
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Most blacks now prefer to call their nation Zimbabwe, after the thousand-year-old ruins of a civilization of master artisans who apparently traded with places as far away as China. To Rhodes, however, it was Zambesia, realm of King Lobengula of the Matabeles, and coveted by the colossus as a link in his dream of an "allred route" of British colonies from Cape Town to Cairo. Rhodes's interest was not exclusively imperial: Explorer David Livingstone had returned from the area some 30 years before with tales of gold nuggets "as big as grains of wheat...
...Lobengula was a curious combination of statesman and savage. To demonstrate his ability to keep up to date, he had built a Victorian brick house among the wattle huts of his royal compound at Bulawayo. The brick pile was only ceremonial; he lived in a covered wagon given him by a passing trader and used its driver's seat as his throne. He loved to show bug-eyed visitors the royal treasury: two rusty biscuit tins filled with diamonds. A crafty giant of a man who stood 6 ft. 6 in. and weighed 300 Ibs., the Matabele king...
...column marched 400 miles northward, formally took possession of King Lobengula's vassal state of Mashonaland, and began staking out their plots. The old King was dismayed. "I thought you came to dig gold," he wrote the British South Africa Co.'s board of directors, "but it seems you have come to rob me of my people and my country as well...
...take long. When Lobengula's armies finally rose in 1893, company police cut them down with machine guns, burned his capital to the ground, and made off with half a million cattle. Lobengula, forced to flee for his life, died in flight. The company took over his throne...
...sketched scenes and characters who. not surprisingly, speak like people in Waugh fiction. There are astute little studies of key figures in African history, including Cecil Rhodes, an empire builder for whose financial chicanery and ''Anglo-Saxon'' racialism Waugh expresses intense distaste, and the tragic Lobengula, last king of the Matabele. for whom he has intense admiration. And there is a truly Waugh-like figure. "Bishop" Homer A. Tomlinson of New York, self-styled "King of the World," whose self-coronation in Dar-es-Salaam. Tanganyika, with the aid of a plastic terrestrial globe, was witnessed...