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This time the operations against them were on a large scale. The present Lord Plumer, who commanded the Fourth British Army in France against the Germans, he was then a Lieutenant Colonel came up with eight hundred soldiers and drove the Matabeles into the fastnesses of the Matopos, a range of hills fifty miles long and more than twenty wide.
It would be impossible to find a milder lot than the survivors and sons of the cruel and war-like Lobengula who once ruled here like a despot of old. His tribesmen the Matabeles were put in their place by a strong hand and they remain put. Bulawayo was the capital of Lobengula's kingdom. The word means "Place of Slaughter," and it did not belie the name.
One by one the chiefs came down from the hills and succumbed to the persuasiveness and personality of this remarkable man who could deal with wild and naked warriors as successfully as he could dictate to a group of hard-headed business men. After two months of negotiating the Matabeles were appeased and permanent peace, so far as the natives were concerned, dawned in Rhodesia.
One could, for example, point out how the aboriginal Tasmanians and Australians have been almost completely extirpated; how, in the name of civilization, thousands of Dervishes have been mowed down in Egypt, and how South African soil itself has been stained from time to time by the blood of Zulus, Basutos, Matabeles and other coloured races, who became the victims of British, and not Boer, arms.
The wars waged against the Mashonas and Matabeles were a doubtful good; but the plays of Oscar Wilde had already given many hours of innocent pleasure to thousands of persons, and were evidently destined to benefit tens of thousands in the future. Such a man is a benefactor of humanity in the best and truest sense, and deserves peculiar consideration.
So in South Africa, about the month of April, the Matabeles light huge fires to the windward of their gardens, "their idea being that the smoke, by passing over the crops, will assist the ripening of them." Among the Zulus also "medicine is burned on a fire placed to windward of the garden, the fumigation which the plants in consequence receive being held to improve the crop."
Practically the entire force under the many-sided Doctor was recruited from the Rhodesian police and they were all captured by the Boers. Rhodesia was left defenceless. The Matabeles seized this moment to strike again. Ever since the defeat of 1893 they had been restless and discontented. Various other causes contributed to the uprising. One is peculiarly typical of the African savage.
Here the savages took refuge in caves and could not be driven out. You now reach one of the remarkable feats in the life of Cecil Rhodes. The moment that the second Matabele war began he hastened northward to the country that bore his name. As soon as the Matabeles took refuge in the Matopos he boldly went out to parley with them.
Just as soon as it was unveiled the Matabeles expressed considerable astonishment over it. They could not understand why the figure never moved. Shortly afterwards a great drought came. A native chief went to see the Resident Commissioner and solemnly told him that he was quite certain that there would be no rain "until they put a hat on Mr. Rhodes' head."
And the said king says of himself that he alone is god of the earth, for which reason if it rains when he does not wish it to do so, or is too hot, he shoots arrows at the sky for not obeying him." The Mashona of Southern Africa informed their bishop that they had once had a god, but that the Matabeles had driven him away.
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