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Updated: May 14, 2025
This Mr. Sonnenberg who was subsequently to represent the Dutch party in the Cape Parliament, and who became one of the foremost members of the Afrikander Bond during one of his journeys into the interior of the country from Basutoland, where he resided for some time, had taken the opportunity of a visit to Matabeleland to obtain a concession from the famous Lobengula.
This repudiation notwithstanding, an impi, or armed body of savages, again crossed the border in 1892, and raided in the Victoria district. Encouraged by the success of these proceedings, in July 1893 Lobengula sent a picked company to harry in the neighbourhood of Victoria itself, writing to Dr.
Go, tend your corn, dwellers in Bambatse, for this I swear in the name of Lobengula, never shall you see it ripen more." Now the crowd of listening Makalanga trembled at his words, but in the old Molimo they seemed only to rouse a storm of prophetic fury. For a moment he stood staring up at the blue sky, his arms outstretched as though in prayer.
Hand over to my messengers fifty cows and fifty oxen, with herds to drive them, and twelve maidens to be approved by them, or I wipe you out, who have troubled the earth too long, and that before another moon has waned. "Those are the words of Lobengula," he concluded, and taking the horn snuff-box from the slit in his ear, helped himself, then insolently passed it to the Molimo.
One of these gentry framed a plan by which one of the many sons of Lobengula was to return to Matabeleland, claim his royal rights, and create trouble generally. The whole idea was to start an uprising and derange the machinery of the British South Africa Company. The name of the son was N'jube and at the time the plan was devised he held a place as messenger in the diamond fields at Kimberley.
Then the three men placed themselves back to back, in such fashion that they faced every way, and could not be smitten down from behind, and waited. "I do not kill envoys," said the Molimo, "but if they are foul-mouthed, I throw them out of my walls. Your message, men of the Amandabele." "I hear you. Hearken now to the word of Lobengula."
It never occurred to him that there might exist people who objected to the breaking of a certain kind of eggs, and that humanity had a right to be considered even in conquest. And, after all, was this annexation of the dominions of poor Lobengula a conquest?
The "war" was not unlike the Indian fighting of his early days, and although the country was new to him, with the kind of warfare then being waged between the Kaffirs under King Lobengula and the white settlers of the British South Africa Company, the chartered company of Cecil Rhodes, he was intimately familiar.
"Speak your message then, envoys of Lobengula, in my ear and in those of my people," said the Molimo. "Your people! Are these all your people?" the spokesman replied contemptuously. "Why then, what need was there for the indunas of the King to send so large an impi under a great general against you, when a company of lads armed with sticks would have served the turn?
The concession awarded by King Lobengula to Rhodes and to the few men who together with him took it upon themselves to add this piece of territory to the British Empire had, in reality, already been given by the dusky monarch long before the ambitions of De Beers had taken that direction to a Mr. Sonnenberg, a German Jew who had very quickly amassed a considerable fortune in various speculations.
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