Bishop Knight-Bruce (1891–1894)
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CHAPTER ONE OCCUPYING THE GROUND: BISHOP KNIGHT-BRUCE (1891–1894) In 1891 the Church of the Province of South Africa (CPSA), a daughter church of the Church of England, expanded into Central Africa. A diocese was created by the Provincial Synod for an area north of the Diocese of Pretoria, which ended at the Limpopo River. This diocese, “for Mashonaland and the surrounding territories”,1 was one of the largest Anglican dioceses in the world. It was roughly the size of France, two-and-a-half times the size of Great Britain (see Map 1, p. xx). The central area of the original diocese is today divided into the fi ve dioceses of the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe (Harare, Matabeleland, Mutare, Central Zimbabwe and Masvingo). Mashonaland itself was little known to the outside world in 1891 and undefi ned, other than by its general topography and the distribu- tion within it of Shona-speaking peoples (‘the Mashona’). At its centre was a large, high plateau, well-wooded and watered. To the north, the land fell away to the Zambezi River; to the east, in the region of the Manyika people rose a mountainous barrier beyond which lay the colony of Portuguese East Africa. Much of the area was dominated by two peoples of Southern, Nguni, origin: the Gaza, in ‘Umzila’s country’ to the south-east;2 and the Ndebele (‘Matabele’), in the south-west (see Map 2, p. xxi). Ndebele territory (Matabeleland) was itself bordered to the south- west, across the Ramokwebana and Shashe Rivers, by territory known as ‘Khama’s country’: Khama was the leading chief of a number of native polities which had come under British infl uence, as the Bechuanaland Protectorate, in 1885.3 To the south-east of Matabeleland and south- west of Gazaland ran the Limpopo River, which served not only as an ecclesiastical boundary between the new Diocese of Mashonaland and 1 ‘The Bishop’s Letter: Resolutions: Section VII’, CMSA 6:64 (April 1891), xxxi. 2 The Gaza people migrated east, just outside the area covered by this study, in 1889: David Beach, The Shona and their Neighbours (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 137. 3 Modern Botswana is composed of the former Bechuanaland Protectorate and British Bechuanaland. 6 chapter one that of Pretoria but also as a political boundary: it was the northern border of the Boer South African Republic, or Transvaal. I Knight-Bruce and Cecil Rhodes: rival visions The immediate cause of the creation of the Diocese of Mashonaland was political rather than ecclesiastical. Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, claimed to rule Mashonaland and certainly exercised effective control over approaches to the area from the south. In October 1888, he granted a mining concession for Mashonaland to agents of Cecil Rhodes, the Kimberley diamond millionaire and Cape politician. Rhodes subse- quently formed a large company, the British South Africa Company and the British government, already interested in extending imperial infl uence in the region, granted the company a charter to exploit the Rudd concession (and any other concessions its representatives were able to obtain from local rulers). In mid-1890, a force of 1,000 men entered Mashonaland: some 200 ‘pioneers’, with their waggon drivers and other employees and a mounted police escort. The hold these men then established on the area was limited in both extent and effect: indeed, its very precariousness was the reason no resistance was offered to their presence. It is clear that, for some years, local people believed the invaders to be little other than the prospectors and miners they purported to be.4 By early 1891, nevertheless, ‘British Zambezia’ was a political fact (from the imperial perspective, at least) and the BSA Company seemingly suffi ciently settled for the church to make formal its presence in the new territory, to create a diocese and appoint a bishop.5 In forming the Diocese of Mashonaland, however, the church was not simply following the fl ag. Interest had been shown in the area as early as 1874 by the English missionary society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).6 In 1886 this inter- est was revived when a young English clergyman, George Wyndham Hamilton Knight-Bruce, who had long wanted to do missionary work, 4 Ibid., 167. 5 W/CPSA, AB/1162/A, Diocese of Capetown, Letter-books (1886–1895), Bish- ops, letters from, 16, to Bishop of Maritzburg, April 17th, 1890, f. 224, to Rev. H.W. Tucker, February 18th, 1891, f. 258. 6 H.St.J.T. Evans, The Church in Southern Rhodesia (Westminster and London: S.P.G. and S.P.C.K., 1945), 9–10..