The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba by Robin Brown-Lowe Read Free Book Online Page B

him someone from herself. To this request the King is advised that Her Majesty may be pleased to accede.
    This is the most extraordinary reply. It suggests that Queen Victoria has realised that she has been deceived by Rhodes and senior British cabinet ministers and is now seeking to reverse these wrongs by sending a personal negotiator to sort it all out. Lobengula, delivered of this conciliatory message, points out that, ‘I have not asked the Queen to send anyone to me.’ This may have been a considerable mistake because nothing more is heard of royal intercession and within weeks Rhodes is granted his Charter.
    Chartered companies had their prototypes in the seventeenth century with the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company but by Rhodes’ era of empire the charter system – essentially the licensing of commercial colonialism – had been reduced to the British North Borneo Company, the Royal Niger Company, and the Imperial British East Africa Company. For the British government the advantage of these charter companies was that they fell short of full colonial responsibility, leaving the host country under no great obligation to intervene should the enterprise founder. Everyone knew that a war between the militant Matabele and Rhodes’ Charter Company was a real possibility and they were right. In fact there would be two wars.
    The British premier, Lord Salisbury, was at this time presiding over a British Empire at the apogee of its power but with all of Europe probing its weak spots. Salisbury was personally less than enthusiastic about more colonial expansion but he was certainly not prepared to compromise Britain’s lead, least of all to the Portuguese.
    But the factor which tipped the balance in favour of Rhodes was, paradoxically, David Livingstone, whom history has shown to have been as inexorable as Rhodes and almost as great a British imperialist. Livingstone’s wife had died after he insisted she and other Church of Scotland missionaries join him on the malaria-infested Zambesi. When many of these missionaries died too, Livingstone opened a new string of missions in the healthier Shire highlands of Nyasaland. Livingstone was by now the great hero of African exploration and everyone’s favourite missionary for his unswerving assault on the slave trade.
    For the Portuguese, however, this little crop of Celtic religious institutions stood square in the way of their proposed trans-African linkage of Angola and Mozambique which would also secure them Ophir. Lord Salisbury at first attempted to stop the Portuguese by doing a deal on the disputed land, and the Portuguese initially agreed on condition that they got the Shire highlands. All of Scotland was up in arms when this deal leaked, with 11,000 ministers and elders of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland petitioning against it.
    Lord Salisbury then decided that Britain might strengthen its own claims to the hinterland by making new treaties with tribal chiefs, superseding the ancient claims of the Portuguese. A young African expert from the Colonial Office, Harry Johnston, who was fluent in Portuguese, was chosen for this assignment, but Salisbury’s Treasury baulked at the costs. Rhodes stepped in and offered to pay, actually sending Johnston a cheque for £2,000 – a huge sum in those days – along with the suggestion that he widen his sphere of operations with the money. Lord Salisbury, who knew little of Rhodes at this time, asked Lord Rothschild about him and was told that Rhodes was already ‘good for a million or more’. Salisbury saw the chance to bring down a number of birds with one stone. He could clip the wings of the Portuguese, earn the righteous thanks of the Scots, stop Lobengula making life difficult for him with the Queen, and have Rhodes pay for it. Under a charter, Ophir would remain firmly within the British sphere of influence and with luck there was money to be made. If it all