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Updated: June 15, 2025
They were erected at a cost of £400,000, the water supply being obtained from the Vaal River, seventeen miles away. After spending a most pleasant and agreeable week there, I left Kimberley at six o'clock on the morning of June 7, in a wagon drawn by eight horses, and accompanied by five friends, for Warrenton, en route for Bechuanaland and the Transvaal.
They coveted Swaziland, Zululand, Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, and Tongaland, and set to work by devious methods to establish claims to these countries. In Bechuanaland they took sides; that is to say, parties of freebooters from the Transvaal took up the cause of certain native chiefs against certain others.
From this place we have only fifty or sixty miles to go over, and then we come to the border of this province, and of British Bechuanaland.
German designs in South Africa undoubtedly quickened the resolve of the Gladstone Ministry to save Bechuanaland for the British Empire. It is impossible here to launch upon the troublous sea of Boer politics, especially as the conflict naturally resulting from two irreconcilable sets of ideas outlasted the century with which this work is concerned.
But Kimberley taken with Rhodes as a prisoner of war, the man who had curbed and checked on every side the expansion of the Republics, who had taken Matabeleland on the north and Bechuanaland on the west into the fold of the British Empire, would be more than a prize, would be a triumph.
Down at Capetown was Rhodes, dreaming of a Greater Britain and determined to block the Kaiser and Kruger. It was largely due to his efforts while a member of the Cape Parliament that Britain was persuaded to annex Bechuanaland as a Crown Colony. Forestalled here, Kruger was determined to get the rest of the country beyond Bechuanaland and reaching to the southern border of the Congo.
For this purpose an armoured train was despatched only three days after the expiration of the ultimatum to the point four hundred miles south of Bulawayo, where the frontiers of the Transvaal and of Bechuanaland join. Colonel Holdsworth commanded the small British force.
As for the future of the vast territory which came to be known popularly as Rhodesia, we may note that the part bordering on Lake Nyassa was severed from the South Africa Company in 1894, and was styled the British Central Africa Protectorate. In 1895 the south of Bechuanaland was annexed to Cape Colony, a step greatly regretted by many well-wishers of the natives.
Mrs. Haile apologized for calling when we were so very busy. They had just stopped in passing, because they were reorganizing their missionary society and wanted to see if they couldn't interest us in the good work. Their day-school in Mozambique needed another teacher, and their hospital in Bechuanaland had to have more beds.
In 1889, when traveling from Kimberley to Johannesburg by coach, I picked up an old newspaper at a wayside hotel. In it was a paragraph giving an account of how a prospector named William Bogis had been blown to pieces in a shaft somewhere in Northern Bechuanaland. I have no doubt this related to my old mate.
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