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commander, a blood enemy of Rhodes, had warned Lobengula: “When an Englishman once has your property in his hands, then he is like a monkey that has its hands full of pumpkin seeds – if you don’t beat him to death, then he will never let go.”221

So when, in October of 1893, the British finally tracked Lobengula down to the banks of the Shangani, the two sides faced off for what promised to be an intense, decisive battle. “It was just after 2:15a.m., a peaceful night, clear sky but on the dark side,” one of the British infantrymen later recalled. “The bugles gave the alarm, the camp was all excitement in a moment, all noise with the opening of ammunition boxes and shouting of officers, the men were getting into their places. There was a din outside from the on-rushing Matebele impis that had decided to attack in the usual Zulu fashion.” The British soldiers were outnumbered. They were thousands of miles from home, hanging on the thin end of a 5,000 mile supply line. The Matabele knew the territory. They were fighting for the lives and families and honor. But one sound was the decisive noise of the scale tipping towards the British soldiers. A hushed clicking against the yelling all around. The opening of ammunition boxes. The British, for the first time in African action, had mounted machine guns.

The weapons worked that morning on the Shangani with a violence you and I would have expected. They reversed, more or less instantly, the Matabele advantages of men, familiarity, and even furor. Machine-gunned Matabele were found, in the hours after the attack, perched in trees, dug into dirt mounds and piled desperately atop each other, killed as they had scrambled. One British soldier wrote later that that the weapons had mowed down the Matabele “like grass.” Lobengula survived, but his army was massacred down to a squad and he was reduced to pleading. “Your Majesty,” he wrote to Queen Victoria in the days after the battle, “what I want to know from you is: Why do your people kill me?”222 With this missive, the Chief entered the ranks of the Queen’s powerless correspondents, once-omniscient feeling men in Africa or Asia or India who wrote her after some devastating battlefield reverse – baffled, confused, overwhelmed. Did she even read the letters? It was hard to know, but that only made the pleading more perversely imbalanced. The locals had no idea, really, what they were up against.

Martial leverage. It was the inarguable force of the 19th Century. It made Europe’s colonial masters. Of course they lied, stole, fought – did whatever sensible and sleazy thing Cecil Rhodes and his ilk suggested was needed. The monkey with the pumpkin seeds. Expansion was everything. Imperial dreamers in London, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna and Paris saw with total clarity the immense historical imbalance across the chasm of industry and science and reason. The “Convergence Club”

Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Telegram from Assistant Commisioner, Palapye, to his Excellency High Commissioner, Cape Town, p 13.
221 “When an Englishman”: Vershcoyle, p 191-192
222 “Your majesty”: Report, Report, Volume 61 Sessional papers, (London: Commonwealth Shipping Committee, H.M. Stationery Office, 1893), 77 from University of Michigan online digitized library

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