23) A History Lesson
I told you in a previous letter about a talk at the Salisbury Mother’s Club by a gentleman called Col. Hickman and how he head fired my interest in getting to know a little more about the country we were now calling home. Europeans had first settled Rhodesia in 1890 and as the year then was only 1969 you can see what a short history the country had. To me this made it all so much more interesting as one could meet people who remembered the very early days and there were many people there whose parents and grandparents had been part of that huge adventure.
The British Government settled Rhodesia but the money to fund the occupation was raised by Cecil John Rhodes by forming a company called the British South African Company. He was the one who sent people to speak to Chief Lobengula and to get concessions and agreements with him and Rhodes was the one that recruited and equipped the Pioneer Column, who were employed to take possession of the land and to start the first small settlement. It was considered too dangerous for women to go, so only men were allowed at first. Officially the first woman to enter the young colony was Mother Patrick with a small band of nuns to start a hospital in the tiny town of Salisbury but Col. Hickman told us the story of the young woman who really was Rhodesia’s “first lady”. Her name was Fanny Pearson and she was a 22 year old bar maid from London and the companion of a French man called Edmond, Vicomte de la Panouse who went into the country in December 1890 shortly after the Pioneer Column. Fanny went with Panouse disguised as a boy, but I doubt if too many people were fooled by the deception. They went to find gold but when that venture fail they leased a farm at Avondale, just outside Salisbury. The couple married later, in fact theirs is the first wedding recorded in Rhodesia, their farm supplied the community with fresh milk. When the cattle disease Rinderpest wiped out their entire dairy herd Edmond took his donkeys and cart down to the coast of Mozambique to bring in the supplies that were piling up there waiting to be transported to Rhodesia. As the oxen that usually pulled the carts had been killed by the Rinderpest there was work for men who owned donkeys. While he was on this journey the Mashonaland Rebellion broke out and he had a very frightening trip back to Salisbury. He had to leave the cart and all its load that represented his whole livelihood and hurry on to escape the bands of Africans who were pursuing them. Fanny was alone on the farm at the time and the story of her escape is thrilling to read. When I first heard about her in 1969 she was still alive and living in Paris.
Once I started reading about the people who had settled the land there were so many books and so many stories that I could not possibly tell you them all but there are a few that really stick out in my memories. There was the story of three nurses who went into the country to start a hospital in Umtali in the eastern section of the country. They were Lucy Sleeman, Rose Blennerhassett and Nurse Welby, they were asked to come by Bishop Knight-Bruce but the arrangements for their transport were not very good and they ended up having to walk the 140 miles from the coast of Mozambique through a land of swamps that was home to the fever and to marauding lions. The journey took them two weeks and was very dangerous, but they just did it and then got on with starting the hospital. People did not seem to make a fuss in those days they just saw what needed doing and set about doing it.
There was another lovely book I read called “Sally in Rhodesia” written by a young woman called Sally MacDonald who went to Rhodesia in about 1907 to marry her fiancé, a young man called Toby. Her book started as letters written to her mother about her life in Africa and is very amusing. She tells of the problems of trying to train young African men to be cooks and servants. She had explained to one of her trainees that she wanted him to boil the kitchen clothes each day to keep them clean. He assured her that he would do this. She was also training him to make soup and that evening when he served up the soup it tasted terrible so she went to the kitchen to investigate and found that to avoid using two saucepans and making more work (a potential time and motion expert?) he was boiling the kitchen clothes in the soup. She tells of buying wheelbarrows for the garden servants to use to carry stones up the hill when they were building a tennis court in her garden. She had seen that having to carry the stones on their heads was very slow and laborious but the wheelbarrows were a new invention to the men and she discovered that they filled them with the stones and then placed the barrows complete with stones on their heads and carried them up the hill like that.
There is a lovely story of how the Administrator of the new colony, a man called Leander Star Jamison was negotiating with a transport company to run a regular coach service between South Africa and Salisbury. He wanted them to do a weekly run for a set price but they suggested that for an extra 50% of the first amount they would do a biweekly run. Jamison was very pleased with this as he thought that biweekly meant twice a week and was very upset when he realised that it really meant every two weeks. At one time he was on a trip to the eastern part of the country and was due to pass through the town of Marandellas, so the people of the town decided to make his visit special and prepare a feast for him. Food stuffs of any kind were very scarce at the time but everyone in the town contributed what they could and a fine banquet was ready for him when he was supposed to be there but for some reason he did not arrive on time and though the towns people tried very hard to keep the meal nice and to wait for the gentleman’s arrival. Eventually after a few days things were beginning to spoil, (no refrigeration don’t forget) so they all sat down to the best meal they had had for a while. Of course no sooner had they finished and Jamison arrives and they had nothing to offer him to eat.
Getting supplies into the country from South Africa was a big problem in those days. It was a long journey and during the rainy season the roads were just mud and impassable and the rivers would rise and one could not cross them. I read a story of a group of men who were prospecting for gold in a very remote corner of the country during a particularly rainy rainy season. Supplies were not getting through and malaria was rife. One by one they were succumbing to the fever and many of them died. When one of the party died his colleagues would bury him with his arms crossed over his chest clasping a bottle of whiskey, supposedly to sustain him on his journey to the next world. But as the season went on and still the supply wagons did not get through to them they found that they were running short of whiskey so they started digging up their colleges and relieving them of the full whiskey bottle and substituting it with an empty one.
There are many stories of the characters that settled the country, Will Longden who was nicknamed The Red Buffalo, who was at one time the magistrate of a place called Tuli. The book about him tells of the time he had to amputate the leg of a young man who was involved in an accident. He had no medical experience, very few medical supplies and his only guidance was a young man who had been an orderly in a military operating theatre but who did not have the nerve to preform the operation himself. The two men holding the candles to light the scene both fainted and new candle bearers had to be brought in. In spite of all of this the patient seems to have survived.
There was a young man called Kingsley Fairbridge who accompanied his father, who was a surveyor, from South Africa to Rhodesia in 1896 when he was only 11 year old. His father taught him to do the surveying work and by the time he was 12 he, his dog and one African assistant worked all over the eastern section of Rhodesia called Manicaland measuring and recording it all. Nowadays we think twice of letting a twelve year old go to school on his own but this young lad worked all alone. He later became a Rhodes scholar and got a scholarship to Oxford University. He saw poverty and hardship in London that he had never experienced in Africa and started an organization to bring poor orphans from London to the colonies to learn to be farmers and have a better life than the one they had been used to in the slums of London.
Another of my favourites is a book called “Many Treks made Rhodesia” This is the story of the men and women who settled in Manicaland. They were mostly Afrikaans farmers from the Transvaal, looking for new land to farm. The hardships that they endured were terrible but they were very courageous and I shed quite a few tears when I read that book. Malaria was a big killer, so were wild animals and snakes. It either seems to have been drought or flood and it is amazing that any of them stayed and settled the wild bush into the lovely country that it became.
Rhodesia was a very young country, in less than one hundred years it had grown from untamed bush to a thriving modern community. People had come from England, South Africa and many other countries to try their luck there. The beauty of the land had captured their hearts, as it had mine, and they had put up with many problems to bring civilization to this little corner of Africa.
The British Government settled Rhodesia but the money to fund the occupation was raised by Cecil John Rhodes by forming a company called the British South African Company. He was the one who sent people to speak to Chief Lobengula and to get concessions and agreements with him and Rhodes was the one that recruited and equipped the Pioneer Column, who were employed to take possession of the land and to start the first small settlement. It was considered too dangerous for women to go, so only men were allowed at first. Officially the first woman to enter the young colony was Mother Patrick with a small band of nuns to start a hospital in the tiny town of Salisbury but Col. Hickman told us the story of the young woman who really was Rhodesia’s “first lady”. Her name was Fanny Pearson and she was a 22 year old bar maid from London and the companion of a French man called Edmond, Vicomte de la Panouse who went into the country in December 1890 shortly after the Pioneer Column. Fanny went with Panouse disguised as a boy, but I doubt if too many people were fooled by the deception. They went to find gold but when that venture fail they leased a farm at Avondale, just outside Salisbury. The couple married later, in fact theirs is the first wedding recorded in Rhodesia, their farm supplied the community with fresh milk. When the cattle disease Rinderpest wiped out their entire dairy herd Edmond took his donkeys and cart down to the coast of Mozambique to bring in the supplies that were piling up there waiting to be transported to Rhodesia. As the oxen that usually pulled the carts had been killed by the Rinderpest there was work for men who owned donkeys. While he was on this journey the Mashonaland Rebellion broke out and he had a very frightening trip back to Salisbury. He had to leave the cart and all its load that represented his whole livelihood and hurry on to escape the bands of Africans who were pursuing them. Fanny was alone on the farm at the time and the story of her escape is thrilling to read. When I first heard about her in 1969 she was still alive and living in Paris.
Once I started reading about the people who had settled the land there were so many books and so many stories that I could not possibly tell you them all but there are a few that really stick out in my memories. There was the story of three nurses who went into the country to start a hospital in Umtali in the eastern section of the country. They were Lucy Sleeman, Rose Blennerhassett and Nurse Welby, they were asked to come by Bishop Knight-Bruce but the arrangements for their transport were not very good and they ended up having to walk the 140 miles from the coast of Mozambique through a land of swamps that was home to the fever and to marauding lions. The journey took them two weeks and was very dangerous, but they just did it and then got on with starting the hospital. People did not seem to make a fuss in those days they just saw what needed doing and set about doing it.
There was another lovely book I read called “Sally in Rhodesia” written by a young woman called Sally MacDonald who went to Rhodesia in about 1907 to marry her fiancé, a young man called Toby. Her book started as letters written to her mother about her life in Africa and is very amusing. She tells of the problems of trying to train young African men to be cooks and servants. She had explained to one of her trainees that she wanted him to boil the kitchen clothes each day to keep them clean. He assured her that he would do this. She was also training him to make soup and that evening when he served up the soup it tasted terrible so she went to the kitchen to investigate and found that to avoid using two saucepans and making more work (a potential time and motion expert?) he was boiling the kitchen clothes in the soup. She tells of buying wheelbarrows for the garden servants to use to carry stones up the hill when they were building a tennis court in her garden. She had seen that having to carry the stones on their heads was very slow and laborious but the wheelbarrows were a new invention to the men and she discovered that they filled them with the stones and then placed the barrows complete with stones on their heads and carried them up the hill like that.
There is a lovely story of how the Administrator of the new colony, a man called Leander Star Jamison was negotiating with a transport company to run a regular coach service between South Africa and Salisbury. He wanted them to do a weekly run for a set price but they suggested that for an extra 50% of the first amount they would do a biweekly run. Jamison was very pleased with this as he thought that biweekly meant twice a week and was very upset when he realised that it really meant every two weeks. At one time he was on a trip to the eastern part of the country and was due to pass through the town of Marandellas, so the people of the town decided to make his visit special and prepare a feast for him. Food stuffs of any kind were very scarce at the time but everyone in the town contributed what they could and a fine banquet was ready for him when he was supposed to be there but for some reason he did not arrive on time and though the towns people tried very hard to keep the meal nice and to wait for the gentleman’s arrival. Eventually after a few days things were beginning to spoil, (no refrigeration don’t forget) so they all sat down to the best meal they had had for a while. Of course no sooner had they finished and Jamison arrives and they had nothing to offer him to eat.
Getting supplies into the country from South Africa was a big problem in those days. It was a long journey and during the rainy season the roads were just mud and impassable and the rivers would rise and one could not cross them. I read a story of a group of men who were prospecting for gold in a very remote corner of the country during a particularly rainy rainy season. Supplies were not getting through and malaria was rife. One by one they were succumbing to the fever and many of them died. When one of the party died his colleagues would bury him with his arms crossed over his chest clasping a bottle of whiskey, supposedly to sustain him on his journey to the next world. But as the season went on and still the supply wagons did not get through to them they found that they were running short of whiskey so they started digging up their colleges and relieving them of the full whiskey bottle and substituting it with an empty one.
There are many stories of the characters that settled the country, Will Longden who was nicknamed The Red Buffalo, who was at one time the magistrate of a place called Tuli. The book about him tells of the time he had to amputate the leg of a young man who was involved in an accident. He had no medical experience, very few medical supplies and his only guidance was a young man who had been an orderly in a military operating theatre but who did not have the nerve to preform the operation himself. The two men holding the candles to light the scene both fainted and new candle bearers had to be brought in. In spite of all of this the patient seems to have survived.
There was a young man called Kingsley Fairbridge who accompanied his father, who was a surveyor, from South Africa to Rhodesia in 1896 when he was only 11 year old. His father taught him to do the surveying work and by the time he was 12 he, his dog and one African assistant worked all over the eastern section of Rhodesia called Manicaland measuring and recording it all. Nowadays we think twice of letting a twelve year old go to school on his own but this young lad worked all alone. He later became a Rhodes scholar and got a scholarship to Oxford University. He saw poverty and hardship in London that he had never experienced in Africa and started an organization to bring poor orphans from London to the colonies to learn to be farmers and have a better life than the one they had been used to in the slums of London.
Another of my favourites is a book called “Many Treks made Rhodesia” This is the story of the men and women who settled in Manicaland. They were mostly Afrikaans farmers from the Transvaal, looking for new land to farm. The hardships that they endured were terrible but they were very courageous and I shed quite a few tears when I read that book. Malaria was a big killer, so were wild animals and snakes. It either seems to have been drought or flood and it is amazing that any of them stayed and settled the wild bush into the lovely country that it became.
Rhodesia was a very young country, in less than one hundred years it had grown from untamed bush to a thriving modern community. People had come from England, South Africa and many other countries to try their luck there. The beauty of the land had captured their hearts, as it had mine, and they had put up with many problems to bring civilization to this little corner of Africa.
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