Abstract

This paper considers the ways in which The Rose of Rhodesia participates in colonial constructions of race, specifically as the latter relate to questions of land and insurrection. Drawing on a reading of British press coverage of the 1896 Anglo-Ndebele War, it argues that the film recuperates key events in Rhodesia’s early history in order to create a pro-imperial narrative. In rewriting the history of a location with which British viewers were familiar, The Rose of Rhodesia can be seen vindicate the colonizer’s good faith in Matabeleland and to justify its own underlying premise, that the Matabele people are unfit to rule their own land.

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Aside from the colony itself, only two real geographical locations are identified by name in The Rose of Rhodesia (1918): the Matobo Hills and the Karoo Desert. And yet, in splicing them together, the film can leave viewers asking where exactly this “Rhodesia” is supposed to be.[1] Elsewhere in this collection, Stefan Helgesson argues that this geographical vagueness indicates that the “setting of the film is a fictional amalgam of specifically South African spaces” and that, as such, “the ‘Rhodesia’ in the title is a red herring”. I will argue, to the contrary, that the film’s colonial setting in Rhodesia’s Matobo Hills is a specific coordinate that oriented British audiences’ responses to the film, and that this was so because of the way Rhodesia was represented to imperial and colonial audiences in the 1890s and early 1900s. This paper will focus on three key features of British media coverage of Rhodesia which, I contend, reinforced a particular image of the colony in the imperial imagination: the figure of Lobengula, king of the Matabele; the uprisings of the Matabele people against the British in 1893 and 1896-97; and the Matobo Hills themselves.[2]

Let me stress from the start that I am not claiming that The Rose of Rhodesia directly represents these historical pre-texts. Rather, my claim is that it uses them as the discursive foundations of its own fiction. As a literary scholar with a specific interest in the ways in which histories and texts construct racial meanings, I am curious about how The Rose of Rhodesia participates in the discursive constructions of race, particularly with regard to questions of land and insurrection. And so my analysis will read the film as a form of colonial projection by which these historical figures and events—all of which were overdetermined sites of meaning in the British imperial imagination—were recuperated for an imperial narrative.

Although The Rose of Rhodesia has three intertwining narrative threads, one British reviewer identified the film’s central concern as Ushakapilla’s planned uprising and the conflict over land:

The Rose of Rhodesia … is a delightful little story about the ambitions of a native chief who desired that his successor should reign over the whole of Africa and not merely a small portion of it and his amassing precious stones and money to achieve his end. His son, however, realized that such a dream was an impossibility and was quite content to live under the protection of the Great White Chief, who eventually granted the old chief an extra slip of territory. (The Times, 3 November 1919, 10)

The review makes no mention of Rose Randall and her struggling prospecting father, of Fred Winters and his theft of the rose diamond, or of Jack Morel—who will marry Rose—and his missionary father. In fact, no mention is made of any white character whatsoever, other than the mythically evoked “Great White Chief”. What does this omission suggest? It certainly strikes the viewer as strange, given that the white actors, particularly the female lead, Edna Flugrath, were professionals of some regard. Ignoring the storylines relating to love, marriage, and theft, the review focuses instead on another narrative familiar to the British public: the early years of Rhodesia. Indeed, its summary account of the film’s insurrectionary African “native chief” suggests nothing so much as a contemporary British perspective on the Matabele wars fought there twenty years previously.

The Rose of Rhodesia’s opening scenes establish the centrality of Ushakapilla’s planned rebellion and its connection to colonial perceptions of land ownership. The film opens with a panning shot of the “kraal of Chief Ushakapilla” (Intertitle 2) against an African landscape (Fig. 10.1). The next shot is of Ushakapilla himself, smoking a pipe and leisurely resting his head on his hand, followed by the intertitle: “Ushakapilla, whose greatest ambition is to see his son, Mofti, become Chief of all Africa” (Intertitle 4). Juxtaposed with the image of a languid Ushakapilla, seemingly lost in thought, it indicates from the start that this ambition, neither reasonable nor realistic, is merely a daydream.

It then becomes apparent that the elders of the tribe are gathered to discuss the issue of land with Ushakapilla. Intertitles relate that the white Governor has twice denied Ushakapilla’s request for land, and we witness a third denial of his request during the events that follow. That the film begins with these racially-defined tensions marks land ownership as central to the narrative. Moreover, the tableau of a “native” chief planning an uprising in Rhodesia—and, specifically, in the Matobo Hills—recalls the history of the Matabele uprisings, something that prompts Nhamo Anthony Mhiripiri elsewhere in this collection to call Ushakapilla a “fictional descendent” of King Lobengula of the Matabele. An outline summary of how Lobengula and the Matabele were configured in the colonial imagination will thus supply necessary background for our analysis of Ushakapilla and Mofti.

In the first British account of Mzilikazi, W. Cornwallis Harris’s The Wild Sports of Southern Africa (1839), Lobengula’s father was represented as a king with “dignified and reserved manners … capable of ruling the wild and sanguinary spirits with which he is surrounded’” (quoted in Chennells 2007, 72). And a similar admiration was later extended to Lobengula himself by the explorer and Rhodesian pioneer E. A. Maund in a paper presented to the Royal Geographical Society, as here reported by The Times:

Mr. Maund differed from those who thought [Lobengula] “deadly cruel”. We must not judge him by our standard. He had to rule a turbulent people, who do not know the value of life. He was shrewd, possessed a wonderful memory, and had sufficient intuitive knowledge to despise many of the superstitions, of which, as chief rain-maker, he was the exponent. Speaking one day of killing, he said, “You see, you white men have prisons, and can lock a man up safely. I have not. What am I to do? When a man would not listen to orders, I used to have his ears cut off as being useless; but whatever their punishment, they frequently repeated the offence. Now I warn them—and then a knobkerried man never repeats his offence.” (25 November 1890, 10)

“For a savage,” The Times’s correspondent went on, “[this] was fairly logical”: “Lobengula was very hospitable to white men, and liked them always about him. He was far too refined to ornament the approach to his kraal with human heads, as chiefs did further removed from civilization” (ibid., 10). Both representations of the two kings suggest that they have a greater refinement, dignity, and capacity for logic than the “savages” they rule, while the tension between Lobengula’s show of refinement and brutality towards his people is smoothed over by Maund’s observation that contact with whites is having a civilizing effect on the king.

A similar phenomenon has been detected by Anthony Chennells in a collection of essays by William A. Willis and L. T. Collingridge titled The Downfall of Lobengula: The Cause, History and Effect of the Matabeli War(1894), in which Lobengula’s refinement is related to his willingness to accept the superiority of British culture. The authors, notes Chennells, represented the king as having
a nobility that distinguished him from his warriors. He was described as “chivalrous and humane,” confirming reports of his being “every inch a king,” a rational man, who, realising the benefits of the British presence, had given “full permission … for the advance of the pioneer force into Mashonaland”. (Chennells 2007, 80)

The claim that Lobengula fully supported Rhodes’s Pioneer Column, which invaded Mashonaland in 1890, is, of course, highly contested. More interesting than its truth value, however, is the role played by his supposed permission in the creation of various historical justifications of colonial settlement in Rhodesia.[3]  The historic agreement between Rhodes and Lobengula, by which the latter granted mining concessions to white settlers, was the basis on which the British South Africa Company (BSAC) received its royal charter in 1889. Needless to say, it greatly suited the pro-colonial narrative to present this as an agreement between gentlemen whose benefits for both parties were quite clear.

Perhaps because of the particular importance of the civility of this agreement in the colonial imagination, Lobengula was often figured in the British press as a man who saw the benefits of colonization. One of the most persistent versions of this myth of Lobengula can be read in popular accounts of his death. Although there was no consensus on how or where Lobengula died, a commonly cited version of the scene of his death continued to circulate in the British, the Rhodesian, and the American press: “When Lobengula learned that his people had surrendered, he built a great fire and threw upon it the leather ring of his authority, his girdles, his sporran of blue monkey skin. Then he said to the chosen few who were with him: ‘Now I am an outcast…. Go now all of you to Rhodes and seek his protection. He will be your chief and your friend’” (Time 1944). The spectacular value of the dying king’s exhortation to his subjects to seek the protection of Rhodes, their “chief and friend”, clearly repeats the story of Lobengula’s free and informed transfer of mining concessions to Rhodes. Of course, this version of Lobengula is perhaps as far removed from the actual historical figure, his views of the British, and his dying words, as the Rhodesia of our film is from the actual colony. And yet it continued to dominate British representations of the king even after first Matabele rebellion in 1893.

Even as they idealized the military prowess of the Matabele, British imperialists frequently sought to present it as a manifestation of their savagery. This common colonial projection owed much to the genealogical link between the Matabele and the Zulus (see, for example, Chennells 2007, 75). Yet this romanticization of the Matabele warrior was always accompanied by what Chennells describes as a conviction that “the nobility of Lobengula’s Ndebele is demonstrated not in their capacity to resist white invasions, but in their willingness to submit to a superior moral order represented by the British South Africa Company” (Chennells, 81). These seemingly contradictory images of the Matabele represent two sides of the same imperial coin: Matabele warriors were fine and intelligent—the very qualities that led them to acquiesce to being ruled by Britain’s superior culture.

This view helps to explain why the first reports in Britain of the 1893 Matabele rebellion struck a note of surprise: “It is to be feared that Lobengula, the Matabele King, is not so politic a Sovereign as we were all anxious to think him” (Times, 24 August 1893, 7). Anxious, indeed, to sustain a particular perspective on Lobengula, even while using this perspective as a rhetorical device for proving the savagery of his impis:

Hitherto the young colony, whose pioneers Mr. Selous led some three years ago to the promised land north of the Limpopo, has been free from any molestation on the part of Lobengula and his impis. At first it was expected, if not indeed hoped, that an attack would be made on the pioneers, who were quite prepared to teach Lobengula’s ardent young warriors a lesson. But the chief loyally kept his bargain and allowed the newcomers to settle down in peace. Until the other day nothing occurred to give rise to alarm…. The truth is that old Lobengula, however desirous he may be of keeping on friendly terms with the whites, has really little control over his young warriors, whose only business is to wash their spears in blood. (Times, 17 July 1893, 8)

Though loyal to “the whites”, Lobengula is portrayed as an ineffectual leader, unable to control his rampaging impis.

After Lobengula’s allegiances became clear, The Times continued to differentiate the king from his impis but began to downplay his nobility, as in the following editorial: “Lobengula cannot be indifferent to the wishes of the youthful warriors whose spears support his throne… The presence of this armed nation of warlike savages on their borders is undoubtedly a standing menace to the Company” (24 August 1893, 7). Even while maintaining the distinction between the youthful warriors and their aged leader, The Times called on Lobengula to account for these bloodthirsty youths. Thus we see a shift in the rhetoric from loyal savages to the BSAC’s good-will betrayed. This account of betrayed hopes (itself a morality tale of imperial good faith) is infused with a tone of disappointment that serves two rhetorical functions: to sustain faith in the colonizing mission; and to ridicule hopes that the Matabele might meet British expectations of civilised behaviour, leaving in their place the enduring view of them as intrinsically uncivilizable. Such thwarted expectations, I propose, profoundly shaped the identity of the Matabele in British imperial discourse at this time.

After Lobengula’s death, which signalled the end of the Matabele kingdom and the colonial idealising of its people as refined and noble, the Matabele Rising of 1896 reconfirmed the perception of the Matabele as treacherous savages who, moreover, had now rejected the moral authority of the BSAC. This was a generation represented as rash and brutal, no longer guided by the noble principles and loyalties of Lobengula’s generation. As Annie Coombes notes: “[while] there may be points of similarity between the Zulu and the Ndebele, the latter is constructed as a complete animal by 1899” (Coombes 1994, 103).

The new tone taken by the British press in covering the 1896 uprising was clear from the outset: “The whole Matabele nation has risen, and it is known that large numbers of rebels from the west are now fighting who took no part in the late war” (Times, 11 April 1896, 7). The consolidation of Matabele forces made the “nation” a serious enemy, and such sober assessments of the uprising showed none of the descriptive freedom that had characterized press accounts of Lobengula’s bloodthirsty young impis. From 27 March, the papers referred to the insurrection as “The Matabele Rising”, a tagline that evolved into “The Rising in Rhodesia” by 23 June. Under these two headings, the story was given almost daily coverage until the end of the year. Each day’s reporting included detailed telegraph reports from troops stationed on strategic roads, descriptions of battles, details of the state of Bulawayo, information as to whether its white women and children were in laager or not; and, significantly, the names of the British dead. The tone was mostly matter-of-fact, yet the press consistently reported that Matabele planned to massacre all whites.

In its first report on the rising, titled “A Matabele Revolt”, The Times stated: “The Matabele have revolted in the Insega and Filabusi districts and have massacred a number of whites” (27 March 1896, 5). Indeed, the language of massacre and murder was pervasive—“[the enemy] evidently think the time is ripe to finish off the whites” (Times, 23 April 1896, 5)—terms unsurprisingly absent from reports of the killing of Matabele people. A correspondent for The Times referred to “murders, wholesale and cruel,” noting that “the niggers were that night on a murdering expedition,” yet blandly mentioned having “killed seven natives” in a skirmish (11 May 1896, 16). Unconstrained by the restrictions of telegraphy, the same correspondent embellished a story of encountering Matabele warriors with a gratuitously racist aside: “While we tracked we were looked on by about 300 or 400 natives, sitting like baboons on the crest of the granite kopje” (Times 11 May 1896, 16). In the extensive press coverage of the rising, such statements are rare: in most instances, war reporters and men on the ground take pains to suggest that the British continue to act honourably toward the Matabele.

British press coverage of the 1896 Matabele rising is a material site where notions of Rhodesia and British imperialism were consolidated. While the press reports of these events, which would prove momentous for the colonial imagination, were largely factual, the daily updates enabled by telegraphy served to create a sustained narrative serial, complete with cliff-hangers (the fate of a patrol or an injured settler), heroic acts of bravery (despite space restrictions, reports often made space for tales of extraordinary acts of courage), tragic losses of life, stirring battle scenes, and successive victories against the enemy. The story had appeal by virtue of being a drama of empire, and the racial tropes which evolved in this body of writing (as well as in other representational sites) had a lasting significance for public perceptions of Southern Africa. In the intersection between two imperial perspectives on the Matabele—an older generation capable of nobility and refinement, and a younger generation in thrall to barbarism—we have a useful starting-point from which to begin our examination of the treatment of race and land in The Rose of Rhodesia.

In the remainder of this essay, I will seek to show how this film can be understood as a “memory-text” of the origins of the colony of Rhodesia. A “memory-text,” writes V. Y. Mudimbe, is a “theoretical discourse which validates a human geography, its spatial configuration, and the competing traditions of its various inhabitants, simultaneously cementing them via this retelling of the genesis of the ‘nation’ and its social organization” (quoted in Lindgren 2001, 121-2). The Rose of Rhodesia presupposes or “remembers” the newspaper texts already considered in precisely this way, and, as such, did its part in justifying Britain’s imperial mission in general and validating Rhodesia and its racist social organisation in particular.

In The Rose of Rhodesia, Ushakapilla’s unreasonable ambitions and eventual capitulation to the moral authority of the British reiterate the double rhetorical function of the noble yet ultimately savage Matabele, as elaborated above. Ushakapilla’s cultural values are portrayed as slightly ridiculous. He consults a medicine man in a scene that trivializes both his ambitions of making his son ruler of all Africa and the institution of the medicine man, known as sangoma in isiNdebele. In a parody of African idiom, Ushakapilla asks the sangoma when his son will “chase the white men away and rule over all of Africa” (Intertitle 71), to which the medicine man replies in a series of intertitles that lead, in effect, to a comic punch-line: “O most mighty and most black of all the black Chiefs…”, “O finest of elephants, with the best of all trunks…”, “O great ostrich, with the tail of a peacock…”, “Never!” (Intertitles 72-5). Interestingly, the sangoma, a prominent figure in colonial accounts of “native superstitions”, tells Ushakapilla the truth, suggesting that Ushakapilla’s plan is absurd not only for white colonizers but even for the conduit of occult wisdom: in effect, the ancestral knowledge mediated by the sangoma reinforces a broader British perspective. By presenting the chief taking advice from a sangoma, the film mocks the very notion of an African ruler, a conflation of racial identity with fitness to govern that is visible in the medicine man’s exaggerated epithet “most mighty and most black” (Intertitle 72).

This scene’s dual function—validating and mocking the sangoma’s insight—continues in the scene in which Ushakapilla is presented as dreaming of his ancestors, which the film evokes by means of double-exposed images of warriors in a war dance. The ghostly trace of the warriors, apparently Matabele or Zulu, reminds Ushakapilla of his noble martial past while underscoring for the audience that these are now mere traces in his memory. Even as it recalls this heritage as a ghostly echo, The Rose of Rhodesia points out how far removed Ushakapilla has become from his ancestors, whose glorious deeds now serve only to inspire hopes of rebellion that the viewer knows to be futile: “Before the new moon rises as a crescent, the baskets will be full. Then we can buy weapons and make ready for the great attack that will free Africa” (Intertitle 92).[4]

In stark contrast to Ushakapilla is Mofti, who sees his own father as senile and preoccupied with “childish things” (Intertitle 97). As his father’s antithesis—an old head on young shoulders—Mofti is naturally represented as reasonable and honourable, and is initially presented to us in the pose of a handsome young man smiling pleasantly while (literally and figuratively) looking up to his father. This does not imply acquiescence to his father’s will, however. Shortly after, Ushakapilla tells Mofti, “The time will come when I, your father, will take the long road to the other side, and you, my son, will prove to the great white Chief that Africa belongs to our black race” (Intertitle 8), at which Mofti shakes his head in refusal. In so doing, Mofti epitomizes the noble “savage” who submits to colonial authority; not only does he betray his father’s trust by telling his friend Jack about the planned uprising, he shows Jack the sacrificial rock, a place of sacred communion with the ancestors reserved for those of royal blood (Fig. 10.2). This gesture confirms for the viewers that Mofti has rejected his own cultural past and accepted the moral and political authority of the British: “His ideas purified by Christianity, Mofti shows his friend Jack the sacrificial rock” (Intertitle 90).

By virtue of his identification with and subservience to the British, Mofti is implicitly presented as more adult than his father, making him a more appropriate leader for the tribe. In infantilising his father, moreover, Mofti symbolically denounces his own cultural lineage, an act which incorporates him into British colonial culture and inverts the story of British imperial hopes being thwarted by a new generation of unruly and “savage” Matabele warriors.

Notwithstanding his obvious immaturity, Ushakapilla ultimately finds redemption in the film, a conclusion that also rewrites this larger colonial narrative by suggesting a return to an idealized version of the African as noble savage. As a result of Morel’s cultural and Christian mentorship, and the tragic loss of Mofti in a hunting accident, the chief’s belligerence towards “the great white Chief” and the “white men” whom he expects his son to eject is replaced by an attitude of hospitality: “Ushakapilla’s hopes were dashed by the death of his son, and he decides to abandon his ambitious plans” (Intertitle 118). Read as part of a broader set of representations of Rhodesia, Ushakapilla, like Lobengula, can be seen as embodying what the British saw as a chivalrous yet childlike generation of Africa’s “last black chiefs”. Just as Lobengula’s death in 1894 resulted in the end of the Matabele Kingdom, so, too, does Ushakapilla’s loss of his heir and capitulation to the British mark the end of “the reign of the black Chief, until time make him white and he prove himself worthy to rule this country as the great white Chief does” (Intertitle 119).

Historically, it was of course only after Lobengula’s death that the Matabele drew up plans for a revolt against the British in alliance with the Mashona, their traditional rivals, and various smaller tribal groups. The Rose of Rhodesia tells the story differently by suggesting that Ushakapilla’s subjects are entirely indifferent to who rules them. If we think of the film as engaging with contemporary British perceptions of insurrection in Rhodesia, we can therefore see the value of making a younger and more reasonable generation of Matabele into the protagonists of a tale of imperial revolt. Like the acquiescent children whom Ushakapilla happily sends off to Morel’s mission school, Mofti cannot imagine rising up against colonial rule. Had he shared his father’s dream, the film would have been forced to acknowledge the violent consequences of British occupation, a concession that would have undermined the idealized picture of British presence as an improving force in the lives of Africans.

This colonialist logic is precisely why Mofti must die. In effect, he is conveniently sacrificed to the greater good of the civilising mission itself, for though his qualities are highly regarded by the British as embodied in the person of jolly Jack Morel, and he is next-in-line to the chieftaincy, he is also not yet civilized (“white”) enough to be permitted rule this land. In rhetorical terms, Mofti is more useful dead than alive, as can be seen clearly in the depiction of his Christian burial and, in particular, his tomb, which stands as a marker of the success of the civilizing mission in Africa. The scene in which Rose Randall plants a memorial rose bush beside Mofti’s tomb (Fig. 10.3) is one of the most important moments in the film: the lone rose in the rugged African landscape represents a powerfully symbolic monument of the “rooting” of British culture in Africa.

The place where Mofti dies is similarly overdetermined. While we know that the film was actually shot in South Africa, its setting in Southern Rhodesia is explicitly named by Mofti when he says to Jack: “[M]ay your wife give you as many children as there are stones on the Matoppos hills” (Intertitle 89). Later, Ushakapilla reiterates this idiomatic expression at Mofti’s grave, telling Jack: “May your grandchildren be as numerous as the stones on these mountains” (Intertitle 107). Even though the landscape depicted in this scene has a very different topography, the effect of locating this space in the Matobo Hills is to orient the viewers towards a local colonial history with a very specific symbolic value in the colonial imagination.

Many of the key events of the Matabele Rising of 1896-97 took place in the Matobo Hills, which lie approximately thirty-five kilometres south of the town of Bulawayo. The terrain is comprised of unusual granite rock formations that make for easy concealment and provide excellent lookout points, making them a strategic site for the Matabele throughout the uprising, as they would later for Zimbabwean independence fighters during the war of liberation against the forces of Ian Smith. Because of their location and terrain, the Matobo Hills played an important role in Matabele military strategy from the very start of the uprising. The first news report of the rising in The Times stated: “Yesterday received report from Bulawayo stating that white men been murdered vicinity Matoppo Hills and that fears entertained of a rising of natives” (27 March 1896, 5). Subsequent bulletins confirmed that “Matabele [are] massing on Matoppo Hills” (1 April 1896, 5) and that “insurgents appear to have concentrated in large numbers in strongly-fortified positions on the Matoppo Hills” (ibid., 9). The Matobo Hills’ importance for the narrative grew as the revolt became “almost entirely confined to the rugged Matoppo Hills, where the Matabele in rebellion were concentrating” (3 April 1896, 3). A special camp on the outskirts of the hills would play a key role in the eventual crushing of the rebellion.

By July, the British press had firmly linked the uprising to its geographical terrain in the minds of its readers, freely using phrases such as “The Matoppo Rebels” and “The Matoppo insurgents” (29 August 1896, 3) in reports on events in Matabeleland. And the experiences of settler troops in this striking terrain were to become even more famous, thanks to the memoirs of colonial heroes Frederick Burnham, Frederick Selous, and Robert Baden-Powell, all of whom were stationed at the “Matoppo Camp”. Indeed, Baden-Powell’s sketch of a Matabele warrior (Fig. 10.4), which he used as the frontispiece to The Matabele Campaign 1896 (1897), bears a resemblance to Mofti. Both figures are adorned in ways that approximate characteristic markers of the impi’s battle dress. The caption accompanying Baden-Powell’s sketch, which further illustrates my argument, reads: “A Matabele warrior making disparaging remarks. The enemy would come out on the rocks before a fight, and dance and work themselves up into a frenzy, shouting all sorts of epithets and insults at the troops” (n.p.).

The Matobo Hills were also cemented into the mythos of the war in other important ways. The M’limo, an oracle figure reputed to have been instrumental in mobilizing the Matabele, was reported as inhabiting a cave in the region: “The Matoppo cave seems to be a sort of resonant one, like the ‘ear of Dionysius’ at Syracuse. People come to consult the oracle, and, listening at a hole in the wall, they hear the M’Limo’s answers and orders, and have full faith in him” (Times, 4 September 1896, 6). Note here how the M’limo and the cave jointly constitute the oracle, the Matobo Hills, in effect, becoming a kind of topographical wellspring of insurgency—violent and unruly by nature (see Ranger 1999).

It is, thus, unsurprising that The Rose of Rhodesia should present the “wilderness” of the Matobo Hills as metonymic of Ushakapilla’s unreasonableness and barbarism. From this colonial perspective, the most dangerous rock in the film is not the one that claims Mofti’s life but the sacrificial stone of Ushakapilla’s ancestors. It is an important detail, then, that Mofti denounces the sacred status of this granite outcrop, and that Ushakapilla comes here to cleanse himself of his insurrectionary ambitions and throw away the gold and diamonds which he has been accumulating. The uprising is here symbolically sacrificed, just as the narrative has earlier “sacrificed” Mofti in order to cause Ushakapilla to abandon the uprising. In having Ushakapilla destroy his war-chest in this simulacrum of the Matobo Hills, The Rose of Rhodesia seeks to bring a very different kind of ideological closure to the real history of revolt and insurgence in this location. No longer the site of the Matabele’s last stand, the Matobo Hills are incorporated into a picture of civilized and reasonable British rule. By the end of the film, Ushakapilla and the land have both been tamed: Ushakapilla literally so by capitulation to the British; and the Matobo Hills figuratively by cultivation of the rose on Mofti’s grave.

The Matobo Hills also played a significant role in white settler memory-texts relating to Rhodesia’s origins, above all, because the colony’s founder Cecil John Rhodes is buried there, as the film’s director Harold Shaw would have been well aware. Numerous commentators have remarked upon the arrogance and ambition which prompted Rhodes to give the name “The View of the World” to the granite outcrop where his body now lies. (He also commissioned the building of a memorial in the Matobo Hills to the Pioneers of 1890.) To this I would add that a burial monument to Rhodes in these hills surely represents an attempt to discipline for the colonial imagination a mountainous wilderness that had briefly defied the might of the British empire. Mofti and Ushakapilla’s allusions to the Matobo Hills can thus be understood as a way for the film to represent this location whose violent history posed a real problem for the colonial narrative.

Given that the phrase “the stones of the Matoppos” is less African idiom than colonial ventriloquism, we may close our enquiry by considering more closely the specific contours of this metaphor. In both instances, the phrase is applied to Jack’s future progeny. In the same way as Rose Randall’s rose bush is an emblem of the rootedness of British culture in African soil, the phrase serves to domesticate the threatening Matobo Hills, now reduced to a mere backdrop for a vision of British reproduction. As such, it parallels the medicine man scenes mentioned above, one of whose functions is precisely to dismiss Ushakapilla’s culture and assert in its place the superiority of British colonial order. Here, too, the expression of African hospitality in an approximation of its idiom suggests that British occupation and its so-called civilising mission is sanctioned by the subjects of empire themselves.

We could argue, then, that the “taming” of Ushakapilla on this spot, like Mofti’s Christian burial, performs a kind of ideological containment of the Matabele’s heroic and doomed uprising against the British, allowing the film’s setting to function both as a metaphor for the “wild” Matabele and as a mnemonic or codeword for a particular version of this history. Reduced to subservience, the Matabele now recognise the futility of revolt and the absurdity of imagining themselves owners of the land. For this reason, the film has to end with a shot of Jack and Rose’s progeny. In this mawkish realization of Mofti’s “blessings” (Intertitle 120), the stony wilderness of the Matobo Hills is transformed into a symbol of permanent British presence. The Rose of Rhodesia’s evocation of this uniquely Rhodesian landscape is crucial to how we understand Ushakapilla’s planned uprising and its pathetic conclusion. In rewriting the actual history of a location with which British viewers were familiar, his story vindicates British good faith in Matabeleland and justifies the film’s ultimate claim, that Ushakapilla cannot rule this land “until time makes him white”—which is to say, never.

Illustrations

Fig 10.1.

Fig 10.2.

Fig 10.3.

Fig 10.4. Cartoon of Ndebele warrior. Robert S. S. Baden-Powell, The Matabele Campaign 1896 (1897), frontispiece.

Works Cited

Baden-Powell, Robert S. S. 1897. The Matabele Campaign 1896: Being a Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland. London: Methuen.
Chennells, Anthony. 2007. “‘Where to Touch Them?’ Representing the Ndebele in Rhodesian Fiction.” Historia52, no. 1: 69-96.
Coombes, Annie. 1994. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lindgren, Björn. “Representing the Past in the Present: Memory-Texts and Ndebele Identity.” In Encounter Images in the Meetings Between Africa and Europe, ed. Mai Palmberg, 121-34. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute.
Maund, E. A. 1890. “Zambesia, the New British Possession in Central Africa.” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 12: 654.
Mudimbe, Valentin Y. 1991. Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ranger, Terence. 1999. Voices From the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Endnotes

[1] Matobo is variously spelled Matobo, Matopos, and Matoppos. The latter two spellings are English approximations of Matobo, the name given to this geographical formation by Mzilikazi, the first Matabele king. Meaning “the bald heads,” it aptly describes these granite outcrops.
[2] Matabele is an Anglicization of amaNdebele. I will use the word Matabele in the interests of consistency, and also clarity since most of my sources use this formulation. Furthermore, the terms “Matabele rising” and “Matabele revolt” are used throughout this paper of the wars between the Matabele and the British, which culminated in the 1896-97 war known in Zimbabwean history as the First Chimurenga.
[3] Zimbabwean historians such as Pathisa Nyathi have challenged the claim that Lobengula willingly signed away land to the British South Africa Company (see Lindgren 2001, 125).
[4] As unrealistic as Ushakapilla’s ambitions seem in context, his plan to buy weapons for his uprising is entirely credible. During the second Matabele rising in 1896, the British were shocked to discover that the Matabele had managed to acquire Maxim machine guns, making them infinitely more dangerous opponents than in 1893, when they had been armed only with assegais.

Created on: Saturday, 15 August 2009