Stanlake Samkange (1922–1988)

Two trials held in the afterlife: one of the Matabele chief/king Lobengula, accused of losing his peoples’ lands to the white man and the other of Cecil Rhodes, accused of fraud, deception, and outright thievery, stopping at nothing to take land he believed should be governed by the English. Samkange goes into great detail in both cases, setting forth events on an almost day-by-day basis. He is particularly good at portraying the enormous pressures involved on both sides—particularly those faced by Lobengula; but he also goes to great lengths to examine Rhodes’ conduct as well. He stacks the case against Rhodes—not in his use of evidence but in his diction, his choice of words, but the book is nonetheless far more even-handed than one might expect. Very clearly, compassionately written. I enjoyed this a great deal and will actively look for more by Samkange.… (mere)

‘Damn it all. This buffet from Mashonaland,’ said Grey, as Rhodes joined Jarvis, Selous, Tembu and other members of the Baden-Powell intelligence unit, ‘is most provoking.’

‘It is the devil,’ agreed Jarvis.

This historical novel deals with the conflict known to the British as the "Second Matabele War", a rising by Ndebele, and later also Shona, people in Zimbabwe in 1896-7 provoked by a combination of drought, rinderpest, locusts and wholesale abuses by the British South Africa Company and its police force.

In the preface, Samkange quotes a critic who found that "the trouble with Samkange is that you never know where his fiction ends and history begins". In this book, it seems to be fairly easy to pin down: somewhere around the end of Chapter III. We get a few opening chapters set in an Ndebele kraal in which characters are introduced and there is all kinds of interesting fictional stuff going on — a young woman loved by an outsider but assigned to a political marriage; messengers arriving, journeys being planned, conflicts of religion and politics being set up, and so on. But then we move over to the British point of view, and most of the rest of the story is told through contemporary reports and memoirs rearranged, not always happily, into the form of dialogues. The characters from the first chapters pop up again in odd corners, but they are undeveloped and always in the background, displaced by a high-profile (but constantly changing) cast of company officials, soldiers, and British colonial representatives.

It's very interesting history, but a terrible novel, and because of that it's not even very good propaganda, because Samkange can't persuade himself to be one-sided. Obviously we're meant to think of Smith whenever Rhodes is mentioned, but Samkange is too conscientious to turn Rhodes into a stage villain: he often comes across as a great deal less bad than his colleagues (not that that's necessarily saying much...). The indignities, rapes, thefts and forced labour suffered by the Ndebele are represented as the fault of unsupervised minor officials, not the policy of the Company, and Rhodes is shown as a pragmatist happy to do a deal that would preserve the dignity of the chiefs, whilst his small-minded colleagues are more interested in looking for black scapegoats to punish for the crimes committed during the rising.

Samkange's academic conscience also prevents him from brushing over the weakness of the Ndebele's claim to moral superiority over the British interlopers: they themselves had come from Natal and had taken the land they were on from the Shona and Rozwi only fifty years earlier, after being displaced north in the mfecane.

Worth reading because of the way it documents what it feels like to be on the receiving end of colonial intervention, but it would have been better as straight non-fiction.… (mere)