History of Ndebele Kingdom
Ndebele are distantly related to Zulu tribe. However, they are totally different nation. Ndebele are people of South Africa and Zimbabwe as the kingdom is a union of different tribes including the Northern Ndebele and their not so closely related Southern Ndebele.
Northern Ndebele are a bantu speaking group of people, an ethnic group in Southern Africa that shares common culture and language called isiNdebele. The Northern Ndebele were originally known as Matebele, meaning people who are protected behind tall cow hide shields.
The history of Northern Ndebele people began when a Abe-Nguni gropu split from King Shaka of Zululand in the early 1970, they were under the leadership of Mzilikazi a former chief and ally to Shaka Zulu under his command Abe-Nguni went to conquer and rule the areas of the Southern Ndebele. Mzilikazi (meaning The Great Road), was a Southern African king who founded the Matabele kingdom (Mthwakazi), Matabeleland, in what became Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. He was born ca. 1790 near Mkuze, Zululand (now part of South Africa).This is where the identity and kingdom of Ndebele were chosen at a particularly disturbing period in Nguni and Sotho-Tswana history as the Mfecane. In Zulu, the word means "crushing." Mfecane refers to a period of political disruption and population migration in Southern Africa which occurred during the 1820s and 1830s.
The First Matabele War was fought between 1893 and 1894 in modern day Zimbabwe. It pitted the British South Africa Company against the Ndebele (Matabele) Kingdom. Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, had tried to avoid outright war with the company's pioneers because he and his advisors were mindful of the destructive power of European-produced weapons on traditional Matabele impis (units of warriors) attacking in massed ranks. Lobengula reportedly could muster 80,000 spearmen and 20,000 riflemen, armed with Martini-Henry rifles, which were modern arms at that time. However, poor training meant that these were not used effectively.
The British South Africa Company had no more than 750 troops in the British South Africa Company's Police, with an undetermined number of possible colonial volunteers and an additional 700 Tswana (Bechuana) allies. Cecil Rhodes, who was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and Leander Starr Jameson, the Administrator of Mashonaland also tried to avoid war to prevent loss of confidence in the future of the territory. Matters came to a head when Lobengula approved a raid to forcibly extract tribute from a Mashona chief in the district of the town of Fort Victoria, which inevitably led to a clash with the Company.
The arrival of the AmaNdebele in Matabeleland and the succession of King Lobengula
Migration of the amaNdebele to Matabeleland
When Mzilikazi left the Transvaal[1] they all came together to the Limpopo. Just before the Limpopo they parted into two sections. Mzilikazi told Gundwane,[2] one of his principal indunas, to take Nkulumane[3] with him and carry out Moffat’s instructions; that is, travel with the sun on his right cheek in the morning and on his left cheek in the afternoon…and keep on until they reach a range of granite hills and he said; “if there is any disobedience among my people, you have my leave to kill them.”
Lobengula was then about the age when they look after the goats; that is, about seven years old.[4] Nkulumane was born in Zululand and at that time was just reaching the age of puberty.
Gundwane and Nkulumane followed out these instructions. There is a hill in the Gwanda district called Isizeza, and they travelled to the east of that and then they struck up along the foothills on the eastern side of the Matoppos[5] and eventually landed at what we know today as the Bushtick Mine,[6] which they called Ntabaenda[7] and settled there. Lobengula was with this crowd. Gibbeklexu was the name of the place that Lobengula’s people came from in Zululand. There was no induna of that name. At Ntabaenda they arrived before the rains started when the first leaves come out in September and they built their huts.
The regiments that came with Gundwane were called according to the section of Zululand they came from. They were: Mzinyati, Nkenankena, Uyengu, Matshetje, Godhlywayo, Zinkondo, Ngwekwe, Sipezi, Insingo, Gibbeklexu and Makanda.
The regiments that came up with Mzilikazi were: Mhlahlandhlela, Isizinda, Amambambo, Msizi, Ilanga, Mfagoqeba, Nkani, Kumalo, Mpongo and Magoko who amalgamated into the Magokweni and Inyanda. These were the regiments that went to the west with the King.
Lobengula entered the Amashlogoshlogo regiment. Lobengula was able to walk when he came into the country. He was born at Mkwahla in the year they first clashed with the Boers.[8] When we clashed with the Boers, it was the Boers who made the first raid on us.
Please click on file below to read more...
Seeking Lobengula's Millions
The Rhodesian (Central African) Annual, 1962
By W. L. Speight
The Hottentot John Jacobs is said to have been the only man to live after seeing the burial of Lobengula’s treasure, and he died in 1937, reputed to be 105 years old. He was a sort of private secretary to the Matabele chief, but in later years he did attempt to get at this treasure, without success. He does not seem to have passed on his secret.
With the death of Lobengula and the occupation of Rhodesia, Jacobs was taken prisoner, confined for a long time in Kimberley, closely watched. On his release, he was refused permission to return to Rhodesia, but he was found there in 1909 and deported. He was there again in 1917, and some years later once more sought to stay in Rhodesia. He was never there long enough to get to the treasure and, so far as is known, he would only smile and shrug his shoulders when pressed for details.
Lobengula’s Millions are now one of the big mysteries of Africa, and huge sums of money have been spent in trying to solve that mystery.
Please click on link below to read more:
Rhodesiana, Volume 23, December 1970
By C. K. Cooke
To read on Lobengula: Second and last King of the Amandabele - His final resting place and treasure in Malindi.
THE WHITE MEN OF NORTHERN RHODESIA AND THEIR BLACK “WIVES”
By Shalala Oliver Sepiso
The attached picture shows Matebele King Lobengula Khumalo with George Copp Westbeech, an explorer, trader and a serious womanizer who was so loved among the Lozi people that he was made a white induna. He is the only white money to have been friends with both Lobengula and the Litunga and could speak Ndebele, Shona, Lozi, Sotho, etc.
George died about 41 years old. But due to heavy drinking and womanising (his white wife left him after just 3 yrears because he had concubines all over the Lozi kingdown up and down the Zambezi Valley) he looks quiet old in this picture, when he should have been in his early 30s. So hurt was his ex-wife about his sexual depravation, that she was still trembling in shame about it many decades after divorcing him. Writings from that time suggest that "every kraal along the Zambesi River had at least one woman who called Westbeech ‘husband.’" By this time, Westbeech was reported by the his European contemporaries to be ‘…no longer a white man, but had become to all intents and purposes an African’.
George had a rough childhood and once he settled in Bulozi he went native. He died of Malaria on his way to sell his ivory in Cape Colony. He was buried in Transvaal at a mission of the very missionaries he prevented to set up a mission in Barotseland. His tombstone was removed around 1937 (his grave cant be traced now) and his name and history has largely been ignored even though he had the biggest influence in ensuring that Barotseland came under British colonial rule and not Portuguese rule. The Mambari from Angola were the first traders to deal with the Barotse people in guns but George's better-quality guns and fairness in business won over the Litunga and his people. George, who was later appointed a white induna within the Borotse Kingdom and was affectionately called "Georos". George Westbeech stayed in Loziland working with the various Lozi factions that fought for control of the kingdown such as Sipopa (who was killed in 1876, the kingship being taken over by Mwanawina II), Mwanawina (whose reign only lasted for two years when he too was ousted in a coup by Lubosi in 1878), Akafuna Tatila (in 1884, Lubosi was ousted and replaced by Akafuna Tatila) and Lubosi (in 1885 Lubosi regained his throne), who became known as Lewanika – The Uniter or The Conquer – and would remain there until his death in 1916. His presence prevented his maurading friend Lobengula from attacking the Lozis but instead raiding the Tongas and the Mashukulumbwe (Ilas). Westbeech was to become the main purchaser as well as hunter of Lozi ivory. Such was the devastating cull of elephants north of the Zambezi during Westbeech’s time there that, by the time of his death in 1888, the trade in ivory in this region had already become unprofitable due to scarcity and the remoteness of remaining elephants.
Early white settlers - especially traders and hunters - are known to have had African wives and even concubines. Those who arrived in Northern Rhodesia before the BSA Company and later the Colonial government frowned upon interraccial sex and mescegenation, did end up have many mixed blood or half-caste children.
There was John Harrison Clark or “Changa-Changa” who effectively ruled much of what is today southern Zambia from the early 1890s to 1902. He married the daughter of the Chikunda chief Mpuka – though it is said that she was but one of many. John Clark’s relations with the natives weren’t good. He was known for a roving eye for the local womenfolk, which didn’t go down too well with the local menfolk, and in April of 1899, the BSA Company received a formal complaint from Chief Chintanda. Clark’s womanizing and sexual peccadillos being behind the discontent. He would later become a successful farmer in Mkushi before retiring to Kabwe where he ran a brewery.
Then there was “Kachachola”. Dr Sidney Spencer Broomfield, was came to Northern Rhodesia in the late 1890s, where he made a name for himself as a hunter, adventurer and gold prospector. Here he married several African women in traditional ceremonies. While his wives continued to live in the African community, Broomfield raised the children born of these unions separately at his homestead on the Jessie Gold Mine near Mkushi, central Zambia. In 1928 he abandoned his African family in Northern Rhodesia. His Zambian family knew nothing about his whereabouts or fate until his great-granddaughter in 1999 discovered his grave in Brisbane, Australia, where he had died in 1933. She soon thereafter came across his autobiography "Kachalola or the Mighty Hunter" in which he chronicles his adventures and sexual escapades. Stephen Broomfield’s children changed their surname from Broomfield to Bloomfield. The children never got to know who their real mothers were. In his honour, there is a town in Eastern Province named ‘Kachalola’ later Kacholola near where he once lived. Though Broomfield loved to say the name Kachalola meant "a great hunter", some people have explained that in Nsenga ‘Kachalola’, in its crudest sense, is used to describe a man who ‘likes women’. Maybe those who called hima great hunter meant he hunted women. Hahaha.
Another pioneer European who married local women was Arthur Harrington of Senanga the father or grandfather to former Transport Minister William Harrington. Arthur Harrington lived and died on the Zambezi in Barotseland. He worked in trading of cattle and the recruitment of Lozi migrant workers going to work in the Diamond mines of South Africa under the WENELA syndicate. Stories are told of old Harrington's household where he had six African wives, whom he would visit, each in her own hut, according to a carefully checked schedule.
One day I will talk about how in the colonial days, African women were considered too sexually potent to be allowed on The Copperbelt. There were laws banning women from entering the mines. White women were particularly worried about affairs developing between Black Women and White Men. But the colonial men still used to have secret relationships with black women since there were not so many white women in Northern Rhodesia anyway. The white men found a way to keep women called "The Cook's Woman" in their households pretending that was the native servants woman.
In the end, Zambia ended up with a large population of half-caste children called "coloureds" or "goffals". These were not considered white by law. And they were denied recognition as British despite their parents being British. Many white fathers abandoned these coloured children to live among blacks for fear or being ridiculed since at that time even a white woman carrying her own child on a chitenge on her back was considered "riff-ruff". Its only towards Independence that coloureds had their own quarters like Thornpark and also areas where they worked like Railways and car-repairs – now you know why coloured have garages. After Zambia’s independence, Britain changed its laws and recognized these half-caste kids as British. More that 50% of them left Zambia and settled in Britain. The more affluent ones like Aaron Milner settled here.
I could not trace any child of George Westbeech.