In old Bulawayo was a king's garden --
Lobengula's, son of Mzilikazi
who came from forests of Ngome
and founded the Matabele people.
Some garden!
A bamboo stockade floored. with maggoty dung
grazed by hundreds of sheep and goats.
Lobengula sat on a block of wood,
a huge man, smiling, worried, friendly,
cruel in the laws of the tribe.
Around him 30 whites, wanting to mine
legendary gold, scrabbling for treaties,
mistranslated for the illiterate king
by the smooth missionary Helm
whom Cecil Rhodes was paying well.
Three other envoys of Rhodes
squatted on haunches in the dung.
The dapper London lawyer Maguire,
M.P., Fellow of All Souls, stuck
out a leg to raise his buttocks from the mire.
A chorus greeted this discourtesy.
"Gh-h-o," called the younger warriors gleefully,
"He wants to be as big as the king."
The king of the Matabele,
Lobengula, sat on his wood block, smiling.

An official from the Rhodes mines
down in Kimberley, one Thompson,
muttered aside to Maguire: "It's as much
as your life's worth to shirk homage."
Down squatted Maguire, back into dung,
down squatted Charles Dunnel Rudd,
and it was managed like that,
the Rudd Concession,
born in the filth of false homage.
The king's most trusted white friend,
a son of the great missionary Moffat,
spoke in his ear (but secretly for Rhodes).
The king, tricked about the treaty's words,
and thinking of a few small mining holes,
signed away his country.
Better advised, he panicked, sent
envoys to the white Queen, proclaiming
"Lobengula did not say these words,"
(for land couldn't be owned in private).
Unthinkable to the king a queen could lie.
Victoria wrote a warning letter
in the Africans-speak-English language:
"A King gives a stranger an ox,
not his whole herd --
beware in placing your trust."
Her messenger, Maund, in league with Rhodes,
quietly lost this letter, and men in high places
returned the envoys roundabout
to the king via South America,
while Rhodes fineagled his Royal Charter,
an excuse for the Charter Ro law
of the sjambok and of the Maxim gun
mounted within the king's kraal,
its tripod spiked into the dung.
Yes, it was managed like that,
an excuse for wholesale invasion,
seizure of the king's maggoty garden,
slaughter of the Matabele peoples
as they fled the Bulawayo kraal.
And there was hardly any gold.
The treaty men simply settled the land.

We British of a third generation
have seen this treachery playing out
down dishonourable decades, until --
Matabele and Mashona fighting back --
colonials retired, disgruntled,
to our childhood suburb.  Sometimes,
a garden we stopped at:  
quite manic with
its lawn of absolute green.  Triangles
and crescents for flower beds held
brick-orange lumps of marigolds
and bruised-yellow pansies in military lines.
an exact border of daffodils,
blooded by tulips, green budding red,
like laughter turned tubercular.  
The ancient captain behind panes of glass
in clover-shaped concrete mouldings
glowered as we wondered why
his mind delighted in these rows of bulls' eyes
grass edges moustache-clipped,
beauty so tight-chested
that it gave a harsh cough,
opened its windows at us,
and ordered small boys to clear off,
go to the cliffs, get away from the iron gate.

© copyright 1996 Douglas Oliver