26 BOERS AWAITING ORDERS OUTSIDE THE GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, PRETORIA. (Photo: Arthur Elliott, Pretoria.)

CHAPTER II.

THE JAMESON RAID.

seasons there was a drought in manydistricts ; andtheninthebeginningof 1890thecattleplague, which had broken out in North-East Africa in 1893, and spread gradually down to the east coast,reached Rhodesia andinfectednot only the herdsbut also the deer and antelopes. In order to check the plague, infected herds were killed off by order of the police; and to the natives, who could not understand the reason for such action, however necessary, it seemed that their white rulers wereworking out a plan for utterly ruining them, by killing all their cattle that the plaguehad spared. Driven to desperation, they lent a ready ear to the wizards, whopredicted that their gods would work miracles for them if they would only venture on another fight against the whites,and to the chiefs, who told them that in the war of 1803 they hadresigned themselvesall too soon to defeat. They began to prepare secretly for a rising against the whites, and an unhoped-for opportunity was soon given them by the folly of the new rulers of Rhodesia. The Jameson Raid was the prelude of the secondMatabele war.

Great Britain had annexed the Transvaal ill 1877,only to give it up again in 1881, after the brief insurrection of the Boers that triumphed at Laing's Nek and Majuba Hill. The Con-FOR more than two years— from the beginning of1894 till the spring of 1896— there was peace in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, or as the two countries were re-named in 1895, " Rhodesia." It seemed as if the once warlike Matabele had accepted the new state of affairs, but under the surface there was a growing discontent. They had hardly realised at the outset that the white conquerors had come to take permanent possession of their country*. They regarded the invasion as a raid, and they only felt all that defeat signified for them when they saw wide tracts of landassigned to white proprietors, and whole herds of cattle confiscated by the victors on theplea that by the law of the Matabele all cattlebelonged to the king, andcould therefore be made good prize of war as public property. Old chiefs and warriorsfound themselves ordered about by the white police and their black subordinates, someof them Matabele,others the despisedMashonas. The new regulations under which the natives were to live were not always either wisely or gently enforced, and the white folk generally had to share the ill will against them generatedby the overbearing acts of some among them, Then, niL>,t unhappily for the immediate future of Rhod two successive