But Why 1890 to 1914? 1890 Was the Year When Cecil Rhodes Managed

But why 1890 to 1914?

1890 was the year when Cecil Rhodes managed at last to consolidate his empire north of the Zambezi. In 1914, though the lights did not go out all over Africa, they were sufficiently dimmed by war and the subsequent economic depression to halt die initial impetus of development in Rhodesia. These twenty-four years were surely the most essential in Zambia’s progress into the modern world. The dialectical historian of Africa might ascribe this progress simply to copper; another might say that it was due to the northward thrust of the railway; or to the swift advance of tropical medicine, combating the tsetse and mosquito; yet another to the establishment of sound adminstration founded on missionary endeavour. The more discerning might ascribe it to the happy coincidence of all these factors, galvanised by the energy of Rhodes, that “brooding spirit”, as Kipling called him; for northern Rhodesia fell astride die highway of his dream. Let us look at Rhodes’s incursion north of die Zambezi and then briefly at some of these main forces, and, where possible, interrelate them.

In 1890 his empire ended on the shores of the great river barrier of the Zambezi. North-west are the low swampy plains of Barotseland and the Kafue basin, and to the north-east the plateau that extends down through east Africa and continues on to Natal. Like the traders and explorers, including Livingstone himself, the earliest missionaries entered northern Rhodesia from Bechuanaland or Lobengula’s country, where, by the Rudd Concession of 1888, Rhodes had forced the Chief to grant him the full mineral rights of his kingdom. Thence they crossed the Zambezi between Lealui and Sesheke in Barotseland, where Paramount Chief Lewanika ruled one of the largest territories in central Africa. Along this route, then, came successively explorer, trader, missionary and administrator. The early missionaries greatly facilitated the task of the administrators by acquainting the chiefs, particularly Lewanika, with the method of European negotiation, whether it was ultimately for religious teaching or secular power.

The earliest missionary to visit his kingdom was Francois Coillard of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. Hence, it was drawn towards Barotseland by the close linguistic ties between the two territories; and there, despite the competition of Frederick Arnot of the Plymouth Brethren, Coillard gained permission from the King to establish a mission station. But no sooner had he left to recall his colleagues from Basutoland than he passed, on its northward trek, the Zambezi Mission of the Jesuits in the charge of Father Depelchin. The Jesuits duly established themselves at Pandamatenka in Mashonaland; and, after successful negotiations with the Matabele, they, too, turned their attention northwards to Barotseland. For five years, from 1880, they struggled with disease, heat and torrential rain, which severely depleted their strength, and with the quixotic whims of the King who eventually decided against their entry.

Coillard was able to establish the first permanent mission in Rhodesia beyond the Zambezi at Sefula, in October, 1885. In the negotiations that were to follow between Lewanika and Rhodes’s more ruthless emissaries, Coillard remained the King’s chief adviser and interpreter. By the strong influence he was able to exert over Lewanika and the primitive people of western Barotseland he was already unwittingly helping to realise Rhodes’s dream. After the success of Henry Ware’s mission, designed to secure the gold concessions for the British South Africa Company over all the country between the Zambezi and the road to the north, Coillard decided to convene a conference at Sesheke in August, 1889, to prepare for the inevitable invasion of Rhodes’s emissaries. It was agreed to establish a mission at Kazungula’s village, which was traditionally the gateway to Barotseland. Helplessly at odds with the Company, Coillard was at once guardian and appeaser. In the same year, the British South Africa Company received a Royal Charter from the Queen.

All was now ready to receive the secular missionary, F. E. Lochner. He arrived with severe fever and was offered hospitality by Coillard, but was not well received by the chiefs. Lewanika, according to custom, greeted Lochner with a present of forty slaughtered oxen, but refused to accept his gifts until the discussion had been concluded. But, when these appeared to be threatened by deadlock, Lochner invited the King and his principal chiefs to Scfuia to attend a great feast in honour of the Queen of England. Oxen were killed, lantern slides were shown and fireworks were let off. But there was method in his magic. Lochner was spectacularly successful. Yet it was surely Coillard who ultimately turned the negotiations in his favour. Why should he be partisan? He asked the King; after all, he was a Frenchman. But under a stable administration he foresaw better living conditions for the primitive Barotse and a great chance for his evangelism. He advised Iewanika to accept Lechner’s offer and on June 27th, 1890, the Treaty was signed. And so the British South Africa Company gained the complete mineral rights of the territory, which was to be opened to all employees of the Company and to traders, but not to immigrants. In return, the Company would govern and defend the Protectorate, but would respect the authority of the chiefs over their people and their internal affairs. Titus a form of dual mandate was established in a territory that Coillard considered to be incapable of self-government.

The Lochner Treaty was unfortunate for all concerned, particularly for Coillard. Feeling betrayed, Lewanika was angry with both the Company and Coillard. The Paris Mission’s secular trader, a man called Middleton, even tried to repudiate the Treaty as fraudulently represented; but Sir Henry Loch, the Governor of Cape Colony, was able to show that the British Government had ratified it; and he assured Lewanika that Barotseland was under the Queen’s protection.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate Dr. Jameson, who was anxious to avoid open aggression with the Matabele, whom he had hoped gradually to assimilate through a process of labour migration, decided at last on a policy of suppression. On October 2nd, 1893, the tribe’s resistance was ruthlessly crushed; Bulawayo was captured; and Lobengula, “that fat naked savage”, was killed as he fled the field. The rival Barotse were delighted, and Rhodes was able at last to fulfil his commitments to Lewanika. Ironically, then, this slaughter initiated a golden age for missionary work in Barotseland, and Coillard was revered everywhere in the Kingdom.

Rhodes had only one great rival in his northward expansion, the leading figure of the African Lakes Company and founder of Nyasaland, Sir Harry Johnston. By 1890 the Iakes Company was crippled by its long war with the Arab slave traders, and the Chartered Company agreed to subsidise it to the extent of £20,000. In the result, Nyasaland was placed under the Imperial Administration, for Johnston would not admit Nyasaland’s inclusion in any commercial enterprise in which the ascendancy had already been lost by the Belgians’ occupation of Katanga. The matter was eventually settled in February, 1891, when the Company agreed to pay the sum of £10,000 a year for the upkeep of a police force that was to be controlled by Her Majesty’s Commissioner and Consul- General for British Central Africa. The judiciary, as before, was to be administered in accordance with the African Order in Council of 1889, which was vested in the Supreme Court for Cape Colony. The unfortunate Commissioner was Johnston. His headquarters at Zomba was eight hundred miles from Lealui, with the result that Coillard, the missionary, found that he was virtually governor of Barotseland. Johnston’s position was clearly unsatisfactory. He was deeply suspicious of Rhodes, who himself did not cherish the idea of “an independent King Johnston over the Zambezi”. On November 24th, 1894, the Foreign Office and the Chartered Company agreed that the chartered sphere north of the Zambezi was to be withdrawn from Johnston’s control, and that direct administration was to be transferred to the Company not later than June 30th, 1895.

The new Deputy Commissioner for the chartered territory north of the Zambezi was Major Patrick Forbes, a serving officer who had distinguished himself during the first Matabelc campaign. He arrived at Zomba on June 23rd, 1895, to take up his duties; but within a few months he was unfortunately obliged by an injury to go to Cape Town for an operation.

It was at this crucial moment that Dr. Jameson launched his raid on the Boers of the Transvaal. Its failure obliged the Company to concentrate its forces south of the Limpopo, which, in turn, provided the opportunity for the Matabele to avenge their defeat. Six hundred and eighty- three Europeans were killed in the rising. The Colonial Office lost much confidence in the administration, which again was forced to neglect its more remote territories. At the end of 1895 it was proposed that Hubert Hervey should be sent as Commissioner of Barotscland; but, when he was killed in the Rising, no immediate replacement could be found; and Lewanika, whose kingdom continued to be neglected, was powerless to control the hoards of copper prospectors of the Northern Rhodesia (B.S.A.) Exploration Company (later called the Northern Copper Company), financed by one Edmund Davis and led by an American, Frederick Burnham. Large numbers of Portuguese also infiltrated into Barotseland.

The closer vigilance of tire Imperial Government over the affairs in southern Africa, following the Jameson Raid, now prejudiced Rhodes’s chance of extending the Matabele Order in Council, passed after the death of Lobengula, to include the country north of the Zambezi. Had that taken place, Rhodesia would not have been divided by the great river. But the natural ethnic isolation of Barotseland from the rest of northern Rhodesia made Johnston and others feel that it should be administered separately by an Imperial police officer, who would be more dispassionate in his attitude to the increasing number of white settlers. The Protectorate of Barotseland became a separate administrative unit; but the first Resident, Robert Coryndon, was in every way a loyal servant of the Company and one of Rhodes’s proteges. He was a man of enormous physical strength, who is reputed to have bent a crown piece in the palm of his hand. Although he was only twentyseven when he was appointed, his arrival in the kingdom in October, 1897, at last ushered in a period of administrative stability.

Unlike the business of administration, the early days of mining in northern Rhodesia depended far more on tire vitality and initiative of individual men of the calibre of Rhodes himself. Sir Edmund Davis (1862-1939), an Australian of Jewish origin, who through tireless effort and financial fortune finished life as High Sheriff of Kent, was the earliest of Rhodes’s mining agents north of the Zambezi. At the age of seventeen he had found employment with a firm of merchants in Cape Town; and, after various financial enterprises, including the Bcchuanaland Exploration Company, which he founded in 1888, he formed the Northern Territories (B.S.A.) Exploration Company in 1895, which became the Northern Copper Company four years later. By 1909, when the Rhodesia Copper Company was formed, Davis had interests all over the world, including West Africa and China. He controlled numerous companies in northern and southern Rhodesia, in addition to being a director of Rhodesia Railways and the British South Africa Company. He was also a man of considerable physical courage and a holder of the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society. With Bumham, Frank Lewis and another called Baragwanath, Davis established, in the late 1890s, a number of mines in the region of the Hook of the Kafue which were given such romantic names as Silver King, Sable Antelope, Hippo, Sugar Loaf and North Star. Sable Antelope, the most prolific, remained in production until the 1920s, when it was forced by lack of transport facilities and the cursed “fly” to stop production. The marriage between traction engine and ox-wagon was not an economic venture. Tropical medicine and the railway governed the fate of many such great enterprises as Sable Antelope. In time the mining area became clustered around the adjacent mines of Katanga, to which the railway had been directed.

Astride the projected route of rail was the important discovery of lead at Broken Hill by Davis’s Consulting Engineer, T. G. Davey. He had been looking for copper when he lost his way in the bush and came upon a strangely shaped kopje that, as he soon discovered by “knapping” the rock, contained carbonate of lead and zinc. The hill’s close resemblance to Broken Hill in Australia, which was well known to Davey, persuaded him so to name his new discover}'. Another expedition, sponsored by the Bcchuanaland Exploration Society—and thus again inspired by Davis—was that of William Collier, W. Sellers and J. Donohoe. They set out from Bulawayo in 1902 for the Silver King Mine with three Matabele porters,1 fourteen donkeys and adequate food. But the tsetse had killed all the donkeys by the time the men reached the part of Kapepo’s chiefdom that was administered by Stephenson’s colleague, Fletcher Jones. Accordingly, the place was called Bwana Mkubwa after his nickname. The demand for copper fell in 1907; and only Sable Antelope and Bwana Mkubwa were still in production in 1914.

Meanwhile, a party' led by Michael Holland had left Abcrcorn, in the remote north-cast comer of the territory, simultaneously with Grey’s departure from Bulawayo. Both journeys, particularly Grey’s, were epic undertakings of large-scale travel. From Bulawayo a thousand carriers, two hundred donkeys and many span of oxen crossed the Zambezi above the Victoria Falls, a process which in itself took a fortnight, and so made their tortuous way northward. In 1910 James Moffat Thomson, a local Native Commissioner, came across a lonely outcrop in lus district that later became the wealthy mine of Nkana. But Kansanshi, Sable Antelope Australian of Jewish origin, who through tireless effort and financial fortune finished life as High Sheriff of Kent, was the earliest of Rhodes’s mining agents north of the Zambezi. At the age of seventeen he had found employment with a firm of merchants in Cape Town; and, after various financial enterprises, including the Bcchuanaland Exploration Company, which he founded in 1888, he formed the Northern Territories (B.S.A.) Exploration Company in 1895, which became the Northern Copper Company four years later. By 1909, when the Rhodesia Copper Company was formed, Davis had interests all over the world, including West Africa and China. He controlled numerous companies in northern and southern Rhodesia, in addition to being a director of Rhodesia Railways and the British South Africa Company. He was also a man of considerable physical courage and a holder of the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society. With Bumham, Frank Lewis and another called Baragwanath, Davis established, in the late 1890s, a number of mines in the region of the Hook of the Kafue which were given such romantic names as Silver King, Sable Antelope, Hippo, Sugar Loaf and North Star. Sable Antelope, the most prolific, remained in production until the 1920s, when it was forced by lack of transport facilities and the cursed “fly” to stop production. The marriage between traction engine and ox-wagon was not an economic venture. Tropical medicine and the railway governed the fate of many such great enterprises as Sable Antelope. In time the mining area became clustered around the adjacent mines of Katanga, to which the railway had been directed.

Independent of Davis, but not of the almighty Rhodes, was Robert Williams, whose Zambezi Exploring Company was started in 1891. By 1899 he had become obsessed by the prospect of finding copper deposits beyond the Zambezi, on the Congo watershed. His expedition’s leader, George Grey, was a shy man who spumed the lights of politics and power. He was the younger brother of Sir Edward Grey (later Lord Grey of Falloden). The party’ travelled along the east bank of the Zambezi, and on September 6th, 1899, they prospected and pegged the mine at Kansanshi. This was followed by the floating of Tanganyika Concessions; and in December, 1900, Williams obtained a concession of 60,000 square miles in Katanga, where his new company, the Union Miniere, was founded, and in which his Tanganyika Concessions held a large interest. Williams now urged the Chartered Company to build a railway link between Broken Hill and Katanga; and thousands of Africans, who trekked across with their Barotse cattle, sought employment on Williams’s new mine. The huge scale of African migration as a result of the new economy is a subject beyond the scope of a short article. Meanwhile, a party' led by Michael Holland had left Abercorn, in the remote north-cast comer of the territory, simultaneously with Grey’s departure from Bulawayo. Both journeys, particularly Grey’s, were epic undertakings of large-scale travel. From Bulawayo a thousand carriers, two hundred donkeys and many span of oxen crossed the Zambezi above the Victoria Falls, a process which in itself took a fortnight, and so made their tortuous way northward. In 1910 James Moffat Thomson, a local Native Commissioner, came across a lonely outcrop in lus district that later became the wealthy mine of Nkana. But Kansanshi, Sable AntelopeAustralian of Jewish origin, who through tireless effort and financial fortune finished life as High Sheriff of Kent, was the earliest of Rhodes’s mining agents north of the Zambezi. At the age of seventeen he had found employment with a firm of merchants in Cape Town; and, after various financial enterprises, including the Bcchuanaland Exploration Company, which he founded in 1888, he formed the Northern Territories (B.S.A.) Exploration Company in 1895, which became the Northern Copper Company four years later. By 1909, when the Rhodesia Copper Company was formed, Davis had interests all over the world, including West Africa and China. He controlled numerous companies in northern and southern Rhodesia, in addition to being a director of Rhodesia Railways and the British South Africa Company. He was also a man of considerable physical courage and a holder of the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society. With Bumham, Frank Lewis and another called Baragwanath, Davis established, in the late 1890s, a number of mines in the region of the Hook of the Kafue which were given such romantic names as Silver King, Sable Antelope, Hippo, Sugar Loaf and North Star. Sable Antelope, the most prolific, remained in production until the 1920s, when it was forced by lack of transport facilities and the cursed “fly” to stop production. The marriage between traction engine and ox-wagon was not an economic venture. Tropical medicine and the railway governed the fate of many such great enterprises as Sable Antelope. In time the mining area became clustered around the adjacent mines of Katanga, to which the railway had been directed.

Astride the projected route of rail was the important discovery of lead at Broken Hill by Davis’s Consulting Engineer, T. G. Davey. He had been looking for copper when he lost his way in the bush and came upon a strangely shaped kopje that, as he soon discovered by “knapping” the rock, contained carbonate of lead and zinc. The hill’s close resemblance to Broken Hill in Australia, which was well known to Davey, persuaded him so to name his new discover}'. Another expedition, sponsored by the Bcchuanaland Exploration Society—and thus again inspired by Davis—was that of William Collier, W. Sellers and J. Donohoe. They set out from Bulawayo in 1902 for the Silver King Mine with three Matabele porters, fourteen donkeys and adequate food. But the tsetse had killed all the donkeys by the time the men reached the part of Kapepo’s chiefdom that was administered by Stephenson’s colleague, Fletcher Jones. Accordingly, the place was called Bwana Mkubwa after his nickname. The demand for copper fell in 1907; and only Sable Antelope and Bwana Mkubwa were still in production in 1914.

Astride the projected route of rail was the important discovery of lead at Broken Hill by Davis’s Consulting Engineer, T. G. Davey. He had been looking for copper when he lost his way in the bush and came upon a strangely shaped kopje that, as he soon discovered by “knapping” the rock, contained carbonate of lead and zinc. The hill’s close resemblance to Broken Hill in Australia, which was well known to Davey, persuaded him so to name his new discover}'. Another expedition, sponsored by the Bechuanaland Exploration Society—and thus again inspired by Davis—was that of William Collier, W. Sellers and J. Donohoe. They set out from Bulawayo in 1902 for the Silver King Mine with three Matabele porters,1 fourteen donkeys and adequate food. But the tsetse had killed all the donkeys by the time the men reached the part of Kapepo’s chiefdom that was administered by Stephenson’s colleague, Fletcher Jones. Accordingly, the place was called Bwana Mkubwa after his nickname. The demand for copper fell in 1907; and only Sable Antelope and Bwana Mkubwa were still in production in 1914.

There was naturally considerable exploitation of labour in the mines. This was not necessarily applied to Africans; there were many poor Europeans in the territory for whom life was a day-to-day struggle. But the Africans did suffer at the hands of white foremen who knew nothing of their language and ways of life. The actual recruitment of Africans gradually became the responsibility of native labour agents, or “capitaos”, who themselves were often a primitive form of shop steward over their frugal bands of men. A single case before the First World War will illustrate their method of establishing solidarity against harsh conditions. A certain Edward Copeman, a district officer, discovered that at Kansanshi mine desertions were caused by a capitao who had held the Africans under the pretence of supernatural powers. Those who would not comply were deprived of the prospect of eternal life; whereas those who did were promised a share of the Europeans’ wealth. The initiation rites consisted of converts going with the capitao to a nearby burial place, where they exhumed the bodies of the most recently buried corpses, took certain portions away, broke the bones and sucked out the marrow. Copeman had the capitao beaten and sent to prison for two years. The objects of his black magic were then publicly burnt before all the Africans on the mine, and the desertions ceased.

Communications by road for the purpose of the Administration and the postal services developed quickly during the early years of this period both in the north-west and in the northeast. Originally Rhodes had intended the railway line to go to Lake Tanganyika; and, for his schemes beyond, he had arranged with Kitchener that the Egyptian and Sudanese railway should be brought down to the border with Uganda. Here the Imperial Government already intended to construct a line, and so secure the new Protectorate against the continuation of the slave trade. The British Government, however, refused to support the projected line through north-eastern Rhodesia, which, on account of the nature of the country', would be far too expensive. Meanwhile, in 1894, a German- bom prospector, Albert Giese, discovered coal in the Wankic area. The concessions were obtained by the Mashonaland Agency, one of Davis’s concerns; and it was an automatic decision for the line to pass through the coal field. Thence it crossed the Zambezi over the Victoria Falls Bridge, a magnificent piece of engineering, which, like the line itself, was undertaken by the outstanding Rhodesian railway contractor, George Pauling. But the actual route of the railway was decided by the offer of Robert Williams, who foresaw useful collaboration between Davis’s coal mines at Wankic and his own copper mines in Katanga. In 1906 Broken Hill was reached; and in 1909 the Rhodesian system was finally linked up with that of the Congo.

The Congo link, in turn, was a great boon to the farmers, who were able to transport their maize and beef to the Katanga mines. The development of tobacco farming north of the Zambezi really belongs to the period after the First World War, when the British Government was no longer influenced by Lord Milner, and other of its more pessimistic officials in Cape Town, who believed the Zambezi to be the southern frontier of black Africa.

As for the railway, an eye-witness’s account of its arrival at Lusaka gives us the real atmosphere of the occasion:

“The night that the rails reached Lusaka . . . the siding was laid. As usual, some ten ox-wagons were in waiting, the backs of the wagons close to the siding, and the spans of oxen lying down tied to their trek-tous (ropes), stretching away into the darkness beyond, all ready for loading and moving off at daybreak. Lusaka was the worst place on the section for lions, and they had caused a certain amount of trouble with ox transport already. There were no lights in the new siding, except for the headlights of the engine the world was in darkness. Heedless of the noise of the engine and the shunting, the lions actually came in that night and killed some of the leading oxen ...”

When Johnston visited London in 1891, it was agreed, as I have already mentioned, that Nyasaland should be placed under the control of the British Government, and that all the territory to the west of it and to the north of the Zambezi, falling within the British sphere of influence, was to be developed by the British South Africa Company, but administered politically by the Commissioner and Consul- General for British Central Africa. The antagonism between Rhodes and Johnston, and the subsequent appointment of Forbes to Blantyrc to take charge of the chartered sphere north of the Zambezi, made the cast less remote from effective control.

The most powerful tribes of the area had long been the Bemba, and their closely allied kinsmen. Fortunately these people, under their Paramount Chief Chitimukulu, were impressed by Johnston’s victories over the slave-traders in Nyasaland, although throughout the northeastern territories of Rhodesia the Arabs had traditionally worked in collaboration with the Bemba. By strategically dividing these people and securing the alliance of at least one important Bemba chief, the British, under three “collectors”, Bell, Young and Drysdale, were able finally in 1898 to break the Arab influence.

The pacification of the warlike Bemba was a process that demanded skill and luck. These customarily well-disciplined people, covering a vast territory, lacked sufficient cohesion to face the British, whose advance westwards from Nyasaland was still political rather than military. The Bemba’s first defeat by Europeans was inflicted by the German Commissioner for Tanganyika, Hermann von Wissmann, whom they attacked in 1893. Johnston, worried by German interest, sent emissaries to report the outcome. But it was the White Fathers who, by their peaceful conquest of Chitimukulu’s Kingdom, gave Johnston his chance. These Missionaries were founded in 1873 by Archbishop (later Cardinal) Charles Lavigcrie, who believed that the Gospel could be spread through French Colonial expansion. The White Fathers eventually arrived in north-eastern Rhodesia in 1891 from Tanganyika. Their leader was the courageous Bishop Joseph Dupont who, like his compatriot Coillard, was a peasant’s son. Dupont had a natural affinity with the Bemba and, like the Protestant Coillard, was immediately favoured by the chiefs. He even established his own “court” near Chitimukulu’s village, from which he ministered to the Bemba warriors. In his pacification of the followers of the rebel chief, Mwanda, Dupont showed remarkable courage and patience, and so helped to consolidate the Bemba Kingdom.

The Lunda community of Kazembe on the Luapula now remained as the only pocket of resistance in the north. This required the assault of Kazembe’s stockade, which was led by Captain Margesson with a small force from Nyasaland. Kazembe eventually fled to Belgian territory, but was allowed to return on condition he surrendered. In the south-east, saved by their isolation, were the barbarous Ngoni, who persistently refused to treat with Sir Alfred Sharpe, the new Commissioner for Nyasaland, and Sir Joseph Thomson, better known as a leading explorer of central Africa. The only European who seemed to have gained their confidence was a German Jew, Carl Wiese, a man of great daring and initiative. The Anglo- Portuguese agreement of 1891 placed the Ngoni Chieff Mpeseni in British territory; and the concessions that Wiese had obtained from the Chief were bought from Wiese for £1,500 by the Chartered Company. The North Charterland Exploration Society duly absorbed Wiese’s Mozambique Company on May 8th, 1895; and, at the same time, they placed over their interests Colonel Wharton, who was, in Johnston’s view, “neither very capable nor very prudent”. He quarrelled with Mpcscni, who sought to avenge himself on Wiese, whom he thought had betrayed him.

At this time, Forbes was succeeded by Captain Henry Lawrence Daly, who immediately decided to relieve Mpeseni and the garrison at Fort Jameson. In the ensuing Ngoni Campaign, which lasted six weeks from December, 1897, until January, 1898, the Ngoni foolishly tried to engage the British in open warfare. Had they emulated the Matabele, they would not have been destroyed. The court martial of an Ngoni called Nsingu, for leading his hostile men on to British territory, provided the only case of execution during the entire annexation of Northern Rhodesia. The result of the annexation was to stabilise the geograpliical position of the tribes and virtually to extinguish those, like the Ngoni, who relied on cattle-raiding and the capture of land from their neighbours. As for the Arabs, their assimilation into the territory' was made easier by the Muslim practice of polygamy. For tribal and administrative reasons—and by the very nature of its annexation—the northeast could not be subject to the African Order in Council of 1889; so that the North-Eastern Rhodesia Order in Council was passed in 1899, whereby the indigenous chiefs were able to dispense justice “as far as possible in accordance with their own laws”. English Common Law prevailed rather than the Roman Dutch of Cape Town, as demanded by the Chartered Company.

In May, 1898, Robert Edward Codrington, one of Johnston’s men, became Deputy Administrator of North-Eastern Rhodesia. I remember the way old Chirupula used to talk about Codrington. He spoke, with distant admiration, about this brusque but fair-minded man who had rescued him from the frustration of the Telegraphist's Office at Fort Jameson and sent him with Fletcher Jones to explore the Kafue. The Bemba apparently called Codrington “Mara” (“it is finished”), for he would hold no grievance against anyone. One of his chief legacies was the establishment of a sound civil service, which in those days was an essential means of government.

Meanwhile, Coryndon’s capital in the northwest had been moved away from the unhealthy station of Mongu in Barotseland to Kalomo. In 1907 he was appointed Resident Commissioner in Swaziland; and during the same year, when Codrington moved down from the north-east to take his place, the administrative centre was moved yet again to the Old Drift at Livingstone. But Codrington spent only a few months there before his sudden death at the end of 1908. Finally, L. A. Wallace was transferred from Fort Jameson to Livingstone to become the first Administrator of Northern Rhodesia when the two territories were amalgamated in 1911. Lusaka eventually became the capital when the Imperial Government assumed control of the territory from the Chartered Company on April 1st, 1924.

A few years before the Congo crisis began, I remember Chirupula telling me how narrowly we had lost the Katanga-of the failure by Sharpe and Thomson to find the great chief Mushidi until it was too late; of his change of heart and how the notorious Captain Stairs, in the service of King Leopold, had caught Dan Crawford, the missionary and Mushidi’s trusted friend, and destroyed the note to Sharpe. And as we talked we gazed out towards that elusive Kingdom. Who had been its real ruler— Leopold, Mushidi or Williams? Again, 1890 was the crucial year. The imponderable processes that guided the destiny of Rhodesia in the early days of the Charter drew the line, by what later proved to be a fateful coincidence, south of Katanga. But will the ethnical bonds of central Africa be stronger than the fortunes of statecraft, colonial or national ? Or will the economy that Zambia has inherited, largely from the vital years of her transition into the modern world, give her a sense of national solidarity? Herein lies her ultimate conflict.