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Chapter Nine
Inside and Out

In which the Seventh Sense brings us face to face with the most powerful feature of our
age – and perhaps of any age.

1.

The Shangani River runs in a small, green vale through some of Southern Africa’s
most remarkable nature. It marked, a bit more than a century ago, the northernmost
line of the British presence in Africa. If other parts of Queen Victoria’s colonial
empire crackled with desert harshness, the mountains and hills rolling up from the
Cape and down to the Shangani were notable for a pleasing softness, a shading
towards pastels in the changeable light of the region. For London’s colonial
mapmakers, South Africa was a long-eyed treasure, an ideal restocking and transfer
point for British ships headed for Lombok, Calcutta, Pondicherry and beyond. “We
have lost America,” the explorer William Dalrymple wrote Prime Minister William
Pitt in 1785. “An halfway house would secure us India, and an Empire to Britain.”218
The African Cape would be that halfway house.

Following the 1814 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave the British control of the Cape,
the English pressed into Africa and found each newly opened district delivered
more wealth than the last. A colonialist’s dream: Diamonds. Gold. Endless fertile
fields. The efficient engines of industry and exploration (and exploitation) of the
British African Company chewed easily, profitably, into the land. “Having read the
histories of other countries, I saw that expansion was everything,” the mining baron
Cecil Rhodes wrote in 1875. “The world's surface being limited, the great object of
present humanity should be to take as much of the world as it possibly could.”219
And so the British did.

If there was a moment that showed the tenor, the power of this ruthless asymmetry
most clearly, it was the battle that exploded along the Shangani in 1893. The
Matabele, a powerful local tribe had been smash-and-run fighting the colonists for
years. The British had tried to charm, pacify and bribe the Matabele and their Chief
Lobengula with money and land. None of it worked. They tried threats. That did not
work either. “The Chief has had all your messages,” an imperial adjutant reported
back to Cape Town after another frustrating, pointless discussion in late 1892. “But
he has the art, not unknown to civilized despots, of ignoring what is not
convenient.”220 Or perhaps the instinct of knowing what to avoid. One Boer

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218 “We have lost America”: David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History,
Literature, and the South African Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2012), 67
219 “The world’s surface being limited”: F. Vershcoyle Cecil Rhodes: His Political
Life and Speeches, 1881-1900 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1900) 7
220 “The Chief has had”: Copies and extracts of further correspondence relating to
Affairs in Mashonaland, Matabeleand, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Nov 1893,

150

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