Lobengula

Lobengula was born around 1845, the son of Mzilikazi (also placed in this archive). He acceded to the Matabele throne in 1870 after a two-year succession crisis following his father's death. He ruled the Matabele Kingdom from his capital at Bulawayo for the next twenty-four years until 1894.

His reign coincided with the consolidation of European colonial pressure on southern Africa. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 — and the unconfirmed but widely circulated rumors of larger gold deposits in the Matabele tributary territory of Mashonaland — produced intense Cecil Rhodes-organized commercial and political pressure on Lobengula across the late 1880s.

The Rudd Concession of 1888 — which the Rhodes-organized delegation under Charles Rudd presented to Lobengula in October 1888 — was a substantial fraud. The document Lobengula signed (witnessed by an English missionary and his own indunas) granted exclusive mineral rights in his territory to the Rudd party in exchange for one thousand rifles, an annual payment of one hundred pounds, and a steamboat on the Zambezi. The English-language version subsequently presented to the British Crown and to the public — and used by Rhodes to obtain the 1889 royal charter for the British South Africa Company — claimed unlimited governance and settlement rights across Matabeleland and Mashonaland. Lobengula attempted to repudiate the concession in 1889 through correspondence with Queen Victoria. The British government did not respond substantively.

The First Matabele War of October-November 1893 followed. Rhodes's BSAC private army under Major Allan Wilson defeated the Matabele in four engagements over six weeks. Lobengula burned Bulawayo himself rather than permit its surrender and retreated north toward the Zambezi.

He died in flight in late January 1894, age approximately forty-nine. The cause was either smallpox or self-administered poison. The Matabele Kingdom was dissolved; the BSAC named the territory Rhodesia after Cecil Rhodes.

He is honored here as the last King of the Matabele.