Word: lobengula
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Author Cloete (pronounced clooty) is best known as South Africa's expatriate novelist (The Turning Wheels, The Hill of Doves). But Against These Three is no romance; it is bitter truth and hard fact. As biography, it tells the life stories of three famous South Africans: Lobengula, last King of the Matabele; Stephanus Johannes Paulus ("Oom Paul") Kruger, last President of the South African Republic ; Cecil John Rhodes, uncrowned king of the world of gold and diamonds. As history, it is a dramatic study of the beginnings of a long, drawn-out and bitter struggle for power over...
Gifts & Signatures. Lobengula was the last South African native king to fight for his independence. He ruled a territory as large as Finland, bounded by the Zambezi and the Limpopo Rivers. But even in this large and lonely expanse of grassland he could feel the presence of Portuguese, Germans, British and Boers. These white people sent emissaries to his court bearing gifts of champagne, brandy and sovereigns. Afterwards, they always asked Lobengula if he would kindly sign a piece of paper called a "concession." which permitted them to dig in the ground like children, and to open little stores. Lobengula...
...kept on signing concessions until the mounted police appeared in Matabeleland, "incidents" occurred and blood was shed. Finally the Matabele, armed with short stabbing-spears, hurled themselves against murderous lines of rifles and Maxims. Lobengula wrote his last letter to Queen Victoria: "Your Majesty, what I want to know from you is; why do your people kill me?" Six months later, his bodyguard buried his exhausted, dropsy-wasted body...
Diamonds & Taxes. "This young man is going to give me trouble," said old President Kruger, who knew that, to Rhodes, the Boers' pastoral way of life was as much out of date as Lobengula's. The gulf between the tycoon and the farmer was too wide for bridging. Rhodes admitted to only "a 50% chance that God exists" (a square deal on Rhodes's part, says Author Cloete, since it gave neither God nor Rhodes the controlling interest). But Kruger lived by the Bible. Rhodes was celibate; Kruger had 16 children. Rhodes believed that the world...
...Lobengula, Kruger, Rhodes-these three men are still Africa. A few miles from the site of the palace which was Lobengula's only monument stands one of the many statues of Rhodes, staring toward the north ("My hinterland," he called it). Kruger's frock-coated figure stands in dry, hot Pretoria: at his wife's request, the sculptor has left his top hat hollow, so that it will collect rain for the birds...