Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 72

Matabele Raids

page 59

Matabele Raids.

The ruthless character of Matabele raids upon the Mashonas—by means of which alone the military organisation of the Matabele could be maintained—is vividly impressed upon anyone who has travelled over any extent of Mashonaland. In passing through large areas of that country I have again and again seen the evident traces of what must once have been a well-populated, perhaps densely-inhabited, and cultivated country. Bishop Knight-Bruce, the missionary Bishop of Mashonaland, Sir Sidney Shippard, Administrator of Bechuanaland, and Mr. Selous are witnesses of established character as regards power of observation and reliability.

The former, who in 1888 travelled in Matabeleland, wrote that:—

Every spring his [the Matabele chiefs] regiments of fighting men (impis they are called) were marched in to kill and sack, bringing back with them girls, boys, and cattle. The Matabele had all to gain and nothing to lose by the process—it provided their food without the drawback of labour; it 'blooded' the young regiments; it gave future recruits to the army. The poor Mashona were incapable of offering any resistance, and their disintegration into separate tribes, with no paramount chief, left them helpless before the disciplined power of the Matabele, with their thousands of fighting men in organised regiments.

Again—

These impis do not know, till they have gone some distance, whom they are to attack. A man who had returned from a late raid described how they had surrounded the helpless people, dragged them one by one out of the crowd, and given them one fatal stab with the assegai, till the dead bodies lay in heaps. Sometimes the poor victims were tied up in dry grass and then set on fire. The wives of the late Matabele chief say of him with pride, "He was a king; he knew how to kill."

After passing the border into Mashonaland, "for more than a week 'no man, woman, or child was met'—not a Mashona was to be seen; the former population had been killed off or driven away."

In another passage it is related that

the track of the impi was constantly crossed, and presently the town was passed that had just been destroyed. The chief and all the men had been killed, as well as the older women who could not walk; the boys, the younger women, and the cattle, had been taken back to Matabeleland.

page 60
Sir Sidney Shippard, in a despatch on the condition of Matabele-land while on a mission to Lo Bengula in 1888, wrote:—

No less than thirteen impis of Matabele have been sent on forays this year, and the desolation among the Mashona and Banyai villages, south of the Zambesi, and among the tribes for some distance on the north of that river, has, I am assured, been appalling. Bishop Knight-Bruce, of Bloemfontein, whom I have been so fortunate as to meet here on his way down, and who has been four days' journey north of the Zambesi, and as far as Umzila's boundary on the east, gives a terrible picture of the results of a Matabele raid. He describes the ruins of a Mashonaland village destroyed this year, the burnt huts, and the little patches of garden ground fenced in and carefully cultivated by the industrious Mashona, none of whom have lived to reap the fruits of their labour. Every man, woman, and infant in these villages had been killed by the spear or "stabbing assegai" of the Matabele matjaka, except the old women, who are used as carriers as long as they are wanted, and then tied to trees, round which dry grass is heaped up and then set on fire, such holocausts of old Mashona women being regarded as a capital joke by the Matabele matjaka. Of the children and girls who are driven here as slaves, those who survive the journey are afterwards fairly well treated. Lo Bengula allows the slave boys nothing but beef to eat, however great their craving for farinaceous food; the result being that all the weaker boys soon die of dysentery, while the survivers become very strong, and consequently fit to he incorporated, in duo time, into a regiment of matjaka of the requisite ferocity. I see great numbers of these slave-boys here.