Lendy, Lobengula, and London: The 1893 Anglo-Ndebele War Revisited

Abstract

In October and November 1893, Ndebele warriors of Lobengula Khumalo’s Matabeleland kingdom in the western third of what is now Zimbabwe were defeated by troopers of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. Framed by the context of what Friedrich Engels understood to be the driving force behind colonization, ‘today this is purely a subsidiary of the stock exchange … Africa leased directly to companies … and Mashonaland … seized by Rhodes for the stock exchange’, but refracted through local, regional, and international issues, the first section covers the period 1888 to 1892. It focuses on the ownership of the concession extracted by Rhodes’s emissaries, the amalgamation in London of competing financial interests, and the local dynamics of the Ndebele state. The second part looks at the reasons why Rhodes was persuaded that war would solve the chartered company’s problems. The conclusion points to the global reach of late nineteenth-century financial capitalism.