THREE Years with Lobengula is an entertainingly readable account of the personal experiences of one of those little men who helped prepare the ground for white settlement north of the Limpopo river in the late 1880s. The first part of the book covers the four years, between 1884 and 1888, that the author spent in South Africa, first as a soldier and later as an unsuccessful businessman.
John Cooper-Chadwick writes simply and with modesty about his life in the ranks initially as a member of Methuens Horse and then as one of Carringtons Bechuanaland Border Policemen, of the bustling, booming South African Rand and of the ways of prospectors and miners, surveyers, builders and speculators. In Johannesburg, Cooper-Chadwick recalls, there were good openings for anyone with a trade or profession. He had neither, and most of his ventures came to nothing.
Finally, faced with the dreary prospect of becoming a barman or a billiard marker, he turned his eyes north-ward, to King Lobengulas Matabeleland, reputed repository of unlimited gold. He mounted an expedition to the Ndebele kingdom in August 1888, and arrived there to find that `the idea was not original Bulawayo, the Ndebele capital, was swarming with con-cession-seekers. Thereafter, the major portion of Three Years with Lobengula is taken up with descriptions of the Ndebele, their military and social organisation, their customs and the character of their king (`his features were coarse, and exhibited great cunning and cruelty . . . but he was by far the most intelligent in the nation), their feasts and ceremonies, and of the competitive manoeuvrings of the rival white supplicants.
Cooper-Chadwicks is one of the best accounts of the tensions at Bulawayo and Umvutchwa in the winter of 1890 tensions which could have erupted into open warfare when, in mid-year, the Pioneer Column entered Mashona-land . Three Years with Lobengula is a work which will be welcomed both by the serious student of African history and by the interested layman.
