I greatly enjoyed seeing The Rose of Rhodesia and reading the excellent essays collected here. But my perspective is a little different from theirs. I am a historian of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and particularly of the 1896-97 uprisings and of the Matopos hills (see Ranger 1967 and 1999). So when I watched the film I read it as though it was a commentary on Rhodesian history.

I realise that this goes very much against the grain of most of the essays. Bernard Porter insists that “Harold Shaw wasn’t a Rhodesian. In all likelihood he never visited the place. The film isn’t set there, though it pretends to be …. Of course, this isn’t Rhodesia”. Stefan Helgesson insists that “the ‘Rhodesia’ in the title is a red herring … the setting of the film is a fictional amalgam of specifically South African spaces”. And I am well aware that the film not only was not made in Southern Rhodesia but that it could not have been. Nor could it have been screened there.

The Southern Rhodesian administration kept a close watch on any attempt to portray African resistance on the screen. In June 1916, a representative of “Mr Schlesinger’s cinematographic scheme” asked the administration for facilities to help make a film on Cecil Rhodes and particularly to provide Africans for battle scenes. The Administrator, Sir Drummond Chaplin, replied that

under present conditions it would be quite impossible for us to give any facilities for the reproduction of the scene of [Allan] Wilson’s last stand [in 1893] or to allow any such scene to be publicly represented in a film in this territory, even if were made up elsewhere. I also told him that we could not give facilities for the assemblage of a large number of natives to enable him to reproduce the Indaba in the Matopos [in 1896] … Having regard to the appearance of unrest among some of the Matabele … it would be highly inexpedient to do or sanction anything at the present time anything which might revive among these people memories of the Rebellion. (Drummond Chaplin to Lewis Mitchell, 30 June 1916, quoted in Ranger 1999, 41)

Ushakapilla’s planned revolt in The Rose of Rhodesia is certainly more of a fantasy than the slaughter of the Allan Wilson patrol by the Ndebele. Nevertheless, this film could not have made or shown in Southern Rhodesia, where Ndebele grievances over land were being vehemently expressed.

But this does not necessarily mean that it did not refer to Rhodesia. After all, the British television series on the life of Rhodes (BBC, 1996) certainly did refer at many points to Rhodesia even though it was all filmed in South Africa and its Ndebele roles were played by Zulus—a fact much commented upon and mocked when the series was screened in Zimbabwe! In fact, the evocation of the Matopos in The Rose of Rhodesia, with its pinnacles and waterfalls, is altogether more convincing than the TV series’ representation of fighting in the Matopos in 1896 by means of a piddling range of hills in South Africa being bombarded by guns large enough to knock them down. Obviously the aggregated landscape shown in The Rose of Rhodesia is a fantasy compilation. But in my view it does not do badly as an interpretation of the landscape of south-western Zimbabwe.

The railway, with its train shown in The Rose of Rhodesia steaming through the wilds, had reached Bulawayo in 1897—and in November of that year the Ndebele indunas were given a ride on it, to impress them with both the power of the whites and the ease with which military reinforcements could now be rushed up in the event of another rebellion (Ranger 1967, 316). The line of rail ran up through northern Botswana and entered Southern Rhodesia at the little town of Plumtree. The halt shown in The Rose of Rhodesia—where the detective disembarks and the miners carouse—might well be the next stop on the line to Bulawayo, Figtree. Figtree lies north of the Matopos and not far away from them. An imagined territory which includes a railway halt, a miners’ bar, an African chief, his sacred rocks and pools in the Matopos, and a Protestant mission station sounds reasonably Rhodesian to me. South Western Rhodesia was as much a zone of missionaries as it was of miners. The London Missionary Society ran a school in Figtree and had churches in the Matopos. Rhodes had allocated the Brethren in Christ in the eastern Matopos immediately after the 1896 rising so that they could pacify the ex-rebels—one missionary, in Rhodes’s view, was worth ten policemen. In short I don’t see that the film is specifically South African, and, whether by accident or design, it echoes many of the real concerns of blacks and whites living in Southern Rhodesia at the time it was made.

Ushakapilla’s projected rising mirrors very real white Rhodesian fears. As late as 1915, the Superintendent of Natives, Salisbury, believed that “the Mlimo in the Matopos” could “persuade the [Africans] to rise”. A Police Memorandum insisted that rebellion was not “a thing of the past … Some supposed wrong or grievance, some law that is irksome, or some fanatic with more brain than usual, may easily fan the flame of discontent into revolt” (Ranger 1967, 325-6). And Ushakapilla’s discontent over land was precisely the “wrong or grievance” most keenly felt by Africans in Matabeleland.

Much of my Voices From the Rocks (1999) is devoted to Ndebele discontent over land alienation. Briefly, Cecil Rhodes—who stood in African memory for the sort of great all-powerful authority who stands in the wings of The Rose of Rhodesia—had negotiated with the Ndebele indunas at a series on indabas in the Matopos and had made them many verbal promises, which I reconstruct in the book. He put nothing on paper because both the British army and the settlers insisted on unconditional surrender. But he entrusted his estate managers and Native Department officials with the duty of carrying out his undertakings. When he died in 1902 no written record existed, and the will to carry out his promises soon faded. Africans believed that he had promised them ample land—the whole of the Matopos, to start with. As evictions began even in the Matopos, the Ndebele felt betrayed. For years they invoked the memory of Rhodes in the hope that this would prompt the Rhodesian state to honour his memory by honouring his promises. Had Ndebele been able to see The Rose of Rhodesia they would have understood Ushakapilla and they might have rejoiced at the message from some remote authority granting him his land after all.

As for the Matopos, essays in this collection emphasise how the events which took place in them in 1896 were commemorated both in the British press at the time and in later imaginative fiction. There is no mention, though, of the great event which made the Matopos a place of southern African pilgrimage. During 1896 Rhodes had visted the first Ndebele King’s cave tomb in the Matopos; had entered it and secretly taken away Mzilikazi’s skull so that it could be measured. Rhodes enjoyed a fantasy that he and the Ndebele king would have been soul-mates—both big-headed men. Alas, the skull turned out to be small. But Rhodes was nevertheless impressed by Mzilikazi’s vision in choosing so grand a place in which to be buried. From then on he determined to find a burial place for himself in the hills. He came across a summit which commanded a wide view and which was, as Rhodes said, easy enough for even a white grandmother to ascend. From the beginning he envisaged the site as a place of settler pilgrimage. He ordered that the bones of the Allan Wilson patrol be transferred there from Great Zimbabwe. And when he died in 1902 Rhodes himself was carried there, first by train to Bulawayo and then by ox-cart. Kipling’s ode hailing him as the spirit which now animated “great spaces filled with sun” was read by the Bishop of Mashonaland. Catholic missionaries declared that Rhodes had displaced Mzilikazi. In his will Rhodes made provision for a railway to be built from Bulawayo to the Matopos and for a hotel to be erected. Very soon, Rhodes’s grave became both a place of white pilgrimage and a tourist destination. White Rhodesians appropriated the landmarks of the Matopos through nicknames (Ranger 1999, 40). Touring sports team were given picnics in the Matopos; visting royalty made the obligatory journey to Rhodes’s grave.

It seems unlikely that Harold Shaw visited the Matopos, but he easily could have done. By contrast to the claims his film’s publicity made about the adventurous travels needed to shoot its scenery, all a visit to Rhodes’s grave required was a train journey to Bulawayo and an hour’s drive from there by car. Well before the First World War, Bulawayo hotels were advertising an expedition to the Matopos in their comfortable cars. Reverend G. E. Bolt, a missionary travelling from Cape Town to North Western Rhodesia in 1909, recorded in his diary that on 3 August he was taken to Rhodes’s grave by “a fine 16 horse power car, driven by a man who had been at the business for many years” (Bolt 1909, 33). It was, he added, a pilgrimage that everyone should make. And very many people did, including visitors from South Africa. Thus quite apart from British and imperial memory the Matopos had become a Southern African reference point.

It was almost essential, then, for Shaw to seek to represent the Matopos in a film “about” Rhodesia. And given the notoriety of the oracular cave shrines in the hills and their asserted connection with rebellion—“the Mlimo in the Matopos”—it was almost essential to show Ushakapilla consulting his priest-diviner. So I think that Shaw was seeking to represent the Matopos. But in doing so he committed one dreadful solecism, worse than the casting of Zulus in the TV series on Rhodes: Shaw’s pretend Ndebele were M’fengu. Now, the M’fengu were certainly present in the Matopos in 1896 but they were present as part of the “Cape Boys” who fought on the British side. And after the rebellion was over, in 1898, Rhodes tried to re-settle the Matopos with four thousand M’fengu peasant farmers. In November 1898 most of the Ndebele indunas attended a secret meeting in Bulawayo with a white lawyer “to discuss that the Government were about to introduce a large number of Fingoes into the country and that the latter were to occupy the lands now inhabited by their people”. They planned to send a delegation to the queen in England to protest against the settlement of the M’fengu (Ranger 1999, 72). Any Ndebele who happened to see Shaw’s film would have been outraged to see M’fengu actors masquerading as Ndebele and claiming back the land.

But if The Rose of Rhodesia was in the end a gross distortion I nevertheless found that it raises interesting new questions. I have space to discuss only one of them here. In the film, Prince Mofti reacts with extravagant joy to the sight and smell of a rose. This made me wonder for the first time what was the Ndebele response to flowers. Roses are presented in the film as the very sign of white civilisation. In the end, though, they have been thoroughly indigenised in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwean African nuns experienced miraculous manifestations of roses when they took their vows, in honour of their patron saint, whose special flower was the rose. And in contemporary Zimbabwe the remarkable women’s movment, Women of Zimbabwe Arise, marches every Saint Valentine’s Day in the streets of Bulawayo offering roses to the indignant police who beat them in return. The WOZA slogan is “Bread and Roses”—“bread represents food and roses represent lasting dignity”. I would like to know the process by which roses came to signify black dignity rather than white privilege. For these and other questions I am grateful to have seen The Rose of Rhodesia.
May 2009

Works Cited

Bolt, G. E. My Travels in North West Rhodesia, London: Dalton, 1909.
Ranger, Terence. 1967. Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-7. London: Heinemann.
———. 1999. Voices From the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe. Oxford: James Currey.

Created on: Tuesday, 18 August 2009 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 26 August 2009