Origins and lack of development

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the southern African territory lying between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, bounded to the west by the fringes of the Kalahari desert and in the east by a Portuguese presence of sorts along the Mozambique coast and its riverine interior, was the object of increasing international interest. The first successful action was taken by adventurers acting with the backing of the British government. Yet for the inhabitants of northern Mashonaland, the arrival in September 1890 of the paramilitary expedition assembled in British Bechuanaland (modern Botswana) by agents working for Cecil Rhodes, a Cape-based diamond magnate, made hardly any difference to their daily lives. Only several hundred strong, the varungu, as they were called by the local Shona people, spread out from their base at Fort Salisbury. Splitting up into small prospecting parties, they looked to the surrounding Shona for food in exchange for trade goods. They particularly wanted help in locating so-called ‘ancient workings’, evidence, the whites believed, of the Land of Ophir and King Solomon's Mines, but actually opencast pits and shafts abandoned in some instances as recently as the 1850s by the local people once gold ore down to the water table had been removed.Footnote ⁹ Many people were prepared to do this in exchange for a blanket or beads. They were, moreover, long familiar with Portuguese trading posts on the Zambezi river. Alluvial gold won from the Mazowe river and other tributaries of the Zambezi was exchanged for manufactured goods brought from the Indian Ocean coast. Firearms were much prized, and their increased import during the 1880s had helped tilt the military balance against Ndebele raiders from the west. Against this background, the newcomers were initially ignored where they were not accommodated within existing economic and political frameworks.Footnote ¹⁰

Centred on two huge precolonial Shona gold workings in the Lomagundi District some 80 miles north-west of Fort Salisbury (now Harare), what became the Ayrshire mine was pegged by a white prospector early in 1891 (see Figure 1). His claim was registered under mining laws fitfully enforced by Rhodes's British South Africa (BSA) Company, conditionally charged by a royal charter granted in 1889 to exercise ‘legislative and executive power’, as well as to maintain a police force and undertake public works.Footnote ¹¹ After changing hands several times, the property was bought in June 1894 by the London-registered Lomagunda Development Company (LDC), half of whose shares were reserved for the Chartered Company, as the BSA Company was also called. Prior to that point, development on the Ayrshire had been confined to cleaning out the old workings, but a start was now made on draining water from the smaller of two precolonial shafts. By September, an additional three shallow shafts had been sunk and a small amount of cross-cutting and driving done. Assay values ranging between 0.5 ounces of gold per ton to more than 100 ounces not surprisingly attracted widespread attention.Footnote ¹² Visiting mining experts from Europe and the Witwatersrand all included the Ayrshire on their itinerary. Notable among the latter was John Hays Hammond of Consolidated Gold Fields, who was quick to advise Rhodes that ‘the Ayrshire, Inez and Alice Mines hold out considerable promise’,Footnote ¹³ as well as J. A. Hatch and F. H. Chalmers, the Rand's leading geologists at the time. Even their otherwise non-committal report noted additional assays ‘from 2 to 20 ozs and even in parts 160 ozs to the ton’.Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 1 Map of south-central Africa, c.1890–1904. Source: created by Helen Garnett, Department of Geography, University of the Free State, South Africa.

During the second half of 1894 and much of 1895, development proceeded in a leisurely manner. This was partly due to the Ayrshire's failure to attract and retain African workers. In this respect, the mine was no different from the rest of the southern African gold-mining industry, where low wages and dreadful working conditions frequently resulted in acute shortages of unskilled black labour.Footnote ¹⁵ The local mining commissioner reported in July 1894 that ‘Very little work has been done this month owing to the scarcity of food and boys [actually adult men] … In many instances boys have deserted their work and not returned … The natives have either refused to part with their [maize] meal or have said that there is none available.’Footnote ¹⁶ But lack of mining development was attributable to more important factors. The first turned on the political and economic autonomy that the region's African inhabitants continued to enjoy, unlike increasing numbers of their fellows further south. In the words of one official,

Over the next eighteen months very little changed. Chartered Company officials hoped that once the annual rains set in they would be able ‘to induce the natives to settle down again and by degrees consent to work for prospectors and others’, but acknowledged that for the time being ‘any attempt to approach them [the local Africans] would be most injudicious’.Footnote ¹⁸ Intermittent challenges to local Shona sovereignty were repulsed. Not surprisingly, in August 1894 a policeman attempting to round up forced labourers was shot dead.Footnote ¹⁹ A visitor to the Ayrshire mine admitted in April 1896 that

The following month another white miner was reported murdered.Footnote ²¹

The second reason for the slow rate of shaft sinking had nothing to do with the local situation in Lomagundi and everything to do with the speculative imperatives of the City of London's mining markets.Footnote ²² After three years, the Rhodesia Herald complained in April 1894, ‘we must ask if gambling in mining shares in London will ever be put aside for actual development of mines in Mashonaland’.Footnote ²³ Because of speculation, London-based companies ‘have thought of little save the number of square miles of territory they could get title to. The consequence is there are hundreds of mines commenced but no mines completed, there are miles of reefs, but not ten claims opened up sufficient to keep a 20-stamp battery going for six months.’Footnote ²⁴ A leading mining periodical reflected that ‘The primary object of many of those controlling … Rhodesian mining and exploration companies was not so much the production of gold at a profit but the manipulation and off-loading of as large a quantity of scrip as possible on the public.’Footnote ²⁵ The National Review acknowledged that

For the time being, though, all that was needed were sympathetic accounts by visiting journalists. A London Times correspondent who never went near the Ayrshire mine nonetheless commented favourably on its prospects. ‘Of the more distant Lo Magundi district, we shall probably hear a good deal in the near future’, he wrote in 1894. ‘Some of the shrewdest miners in South Africa maintain that the richest reefs in all the Chartered Company's territories are those of this gold belt.’Footnote ²⁷ With the fantastic boom in ‘Kaffirs’, the term for both Rand and Rhodesian gold-mining shares, still having several months to run in July 1895, indiscriminate investors were easily persuaded that fortunes awaited them in Chartered Company territory. Reassured by Rhodes's remarks at the BSA Company's Fourth Annual General Meeting that Rhodesia contained ‘hundreds of miles of mineralized veins’,Footnote ²⁸ they snapped up shares with exuberant irrationality:

‘If it can be proved to continue in depth’, concluded a report by the company's directors in June 1895, ‘the future of the mine will be all that the most exacting shareholder could ask for.’Footnote ³⁰

This was precisely what the board of directors was in no hurry to do. The rest of the year passed with little evidence of progress. For all that the Ayrshire ‘may turn out to be … a marvellous mine’, observed one mining correspondent, ‘it seems to me a great pity so little effort has been used to do work on this mine; a tremendous amount of development work should and could have been done by now’.Footnote ³¹ An editorial lamented the fact that

Orders for mining equipment eventually placed by the Ayrshire's directors were not chased up. ‘An extensive outfit, including hauling and pumping gear, trucks and rails … are now on their way from Johannesburg’, reported the African Review in January 1896.Footnote ³³ The fact that everything had to be hauled at great expense by ox-wagon went unsaid. In June, LDC shareholders were assured that ‘work on your property has been carried on with energy since the date of the last report [a year ago]’, with the mine ‘thoroughly opened up by means of shafts, drives, crosscuts, trenches etc’.Footnote ³⁴ The bottom line, however, was that, after nearly two years of development, the main shaft was only 150 feet deep, and, of that, 70–80 feet were accounted for by the depth of the precolonial workings already there. Wise after the event, observers belatedly realized that ‘the real gold mine was at Home, in the pockets of the British public’.Footnote ³⁵

That same month the Shona Uprising (chimurenga) or, rather, many local risings (zvimurenga) abruptly pricked what remained of London's speculative Rhodesian bubble in the aftermath of the failed Jameson Raid against the South African Republic (the Transvaal). Impatient for share market returns, the BSA Company and its threadbare administration in Fort Salisbury had given many local people ample cause to resist, without significantly diminishing their capacity to fight. Taken by surprise, many whites living at isolated farms and mines were killed. At the Ayrshire mine, the ten white miners employed there were warned on the night of 21 June by an African labourer from north of the Zambezi of an impending attack. Over the next five days, they slowly made their way towards Fort Salisbury. Hungry and thirsty, the survivors were eventually rescued by a BSA Company patrol 12 miles outside the town,Footnote ³⁶ while, at the deserted mine itself, machinery was wrecked and huts were destroyed by insurgents.Footnote ³⁷

It was all part of a triumphant reassertion of the old world of Shona politics,Footnote ³⁸ at one and the same time highly localized and thoroughly transnational. Two weeks after the risings began, the native commissioner for the neighbouring Mazoe District, H. H. Pollard, was caught and killed. This was done either on the orders of Charwe, medium of the Nehanda Mhondoro spirit, or by Hwata Chiripanyanga, an important chief whose western remit extended close to the LDC's claims. The eight black policemen accompanying Pollard were also captured. In office since the previous April, Pollard had become notorious through north-eastern Mashonaland for his heavy-handed methods. In the absence of any semblance of an established administration, Chartered Company raiding parties ranged far and wide extracting taxes and raising levies of forced labour. Yet Pollard operated very much within recognized political traditions. Sometimes working for himself and not for the handful of officials largely confined to Fort Salisbury, he underpinned his power with various local alliances. In the far north, he married into the family of one Vicente Jose Ribeiro da Fonseca, an African-Portuguese prazo-holder who ruled, ostensibly on behalf of the Portuguese government, at Chidima on the Mukumvura river in the Zambezi lowlands (see Figure 1). Ribeiro's economic interests in the Mazowe valley dated back to the 1880s. Pollard's other alliances took the form of supporting one Shona group against the rest, the Hwata dynasty in particular receiving favourable treatment.Footnote ³⁹

The Lomagundi and Mazowe risings initially passed Pollard by. When they began, he was once again in the north of the two districts, probably on private business in what was notionally Portuguese territory. His party included carriers recruited earlier from Charwe's village. This had been done with her permission. On hearing of the risings, Pollard turned about, making his way more or less directly south towards Salisbury. Twice fired on, his group split up, Charwe's men running off and not being seen again. Soon afterwards, Pollard and what remained of his party were captured and taken to Charwe's village, close to Hwata's. According to most witnesses, Charwe first asked Pollard who he was, ‘and then, far from accusing him of having taken tax, forced labor, and flogged people since April 1895, she simply asked what had happened to her carriers’.Footnote ⁴⁰ His dismissive reply that they had run away caused great anger, but, even so, Charwe repeatedly denied that the order to kill Pollard came from her. ‘I did not give the order. Why should I hide it if I did?’. Hwata Chiripanyanga, by contrast, always admitted that he struck Pollard with an axe but insisted that he did so at Charwe's command.Footnote ⁴¹

While Hwata's motives must remain a matter of conjecture – he may opportunistically have seized the moment provided by the rising to free himself of dependence on Kunyaira (Pollard's Shona name) – it would seem that the latter had been caught up in the shifts and expedients of local Shona politics. Although the reason for Pollard's execution may have had something to do with his past actions on behalf of the BSA Company, there is no direct evidence for this. Believing that zimurenga fighting could be contained within existing norms, many people acted accordingly. Charwe herself subsequently sought and received help from Pollard's father-in-law, Ribeiro, with whom she had previously done business, but was taken in 1897 by varungu forces before his messengers could bring her to relative safety in Portuguese territory (see Figure 2). The black policemen captured with Pollard managed to buy their freedom by offering women to their captors. When Gumboreshumba, medium of the Kaguvi Mhondoro spirit, the other medium whom Chartered Company officials insisted was responsible with Charwe for the risings, eventually surrendered, he made it clear that he thought the slate could be wiped clean by the payment of compensation: ‘I only want a place where I can live. If the government want[s] me to pay for these things I will pay with a young girl.’Footnote ⁴² These were not sentiments shared by the authorities in Salisbury. Both Gumboreshumba and Charwe were hanged in 1898, even as remaining centres of local resistance were starved and dynamited into surrender.

Figure 2 Charwe, medium of the Nehanda Mhondoro spirit (front row, second from right), in Salisbury Prison, 1898. Source: National Archives of Zimbabwe.

Creating an illusion

Handicapped by its remoteness, and starved of capital and labour in the aftermath of the risings, the Ayrshire mine languished along with much of the rest of Mashonaland's gold mining industry. LDC shares, priced at £6.10.0 in 1895, were marked at 17s. 6d. in March 1898.Footnote ⁴³ Its cash reserves amounted to c.£6,000, two-thirds of which represented compensation paid after the risings by the Chartered Company.Footnote ⁴⁴ ‘Prospectors inform us’, reported the Rhodesia Herald, ‘that between the rebels and the forces sent out to subjugate them, most mining camps in Mashonaland have few or none of the assets which they had before the outbreaks.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Local newspaper reports were all that shareholders in the LDC had to go by. There was very little other information to hand. Owing to a string of misfortunes verging on carelessness, the company's accounts had not been audited since January 1896. Apparently, one auditor had ‘got very much in arrear with his work, became depressed, and shot himself’; when the accounts were finally prepared and forwarded from Salisbury to Bulawayo, ‘the coach by which they were sent was raided en route, and the accounts scattered to the winds’. Since then, the risings had prevented anything from being done.Footnote ⁴⁶

The first signs of recovery in Rhodesia as a whole had to wait until the railway was pushed beyond Bulawayo in the course of 1898 and 1899. As machinery and crushing plant could now be imported at reasonable cost at least as far as Matabeleland, some sections of the mining industry turned to the hard grind of extracting gold profitably. Others, however, clung to practices that had served them well in the past. Dozens of companies once again looked to the London stock exchange for fresh support for old fantasies and new schemes. Timing and context for both could hardly have been more auspicious. The years after the Baring crisis of 1891 had seen a dramatic falling off in capital flows but this was now beginning to change.Footnote ⁴⁷ One London-based periodical noted that

Of many such propositions, the most audacious was the one hatched by the Ayrshire mine's parent company and its largest single shareholder, the BSA Company.Footnote ⁴⁹ Because local risings persisted in parts of northern Mashonaland until well into 1898,Footnote ⁵⁰ the LDC was slower than most in starting up again. It was not until the beginning of 1899 that it signed an agreement with the Rhodesia Exploration and Development Company, a City operation in which the BSA Company and its friends were closely interested, and itself a holder of one-third of the LDC's shares,Footnote ⁵¹ to employ its well-known consulting engineer, Telford Edwards. Under Edwards’ direction, a development programme was instituted, with the result that by the end of the year approximately 2,000 feet of exploratory work had been completed. Its findings were decidedly modest, but none of them gave the company's directors pause for thought.

By the time that the results reached London, the South African War had started. The Rand was at a standstill, and as all concerned with the Rhodesian part of the mining share market realized, if ever there was a moment to coax investors into returning to local issues, this was it. In the circumstances, it was easy enough to do. Despite having very little hard evidence with which to entice shareholders at the company's annual general meeting in December 1899, the directors of the LDC had no difficulty in carrying a motion to increase its capital by £50,000 in order to buy up adjacent blocks of claims. Funds were also allocated for the purchase of a diamond drill.Footnote ⁵²

For much of 1900 progress at the Ayrshire was painfully slow. White miners dropped like flies from blackwater fever, a particularly virulent form of malaria. From near and far, African labourers gave the mine a wide berth where they possibly could. Malaria and dysentery were rife, and the number of desertions approached crisis proportions. With labour scarce, underground work had to be scaled back.Footnote ⁵³ As mining development was not taken seriously, and the actual production of gold delayed as long as possible, the Ayrshire Gold Mine and Lomagunda Railway Company had no reason to concern itself with the systematic mobilization and retention of local black labourers. Management paid little attention to the conditions in which African workers lived and sometimes died. It bestirred itself only at times of crisis. None of the extravagant spending on mine plant trickled down to the Ayrshire's African labour force. Shareholders’ meetings were routinely assured that expenditure on black workers was kept as low as possible.Footnote ⁵⁴ Known to migrant labourers as chimbadzi (meaning small portions of food and money), the Ayrshire was perpetually short of labourers.Footnote ⁵⁵ Whereas the proportion of Shona workers on mines of comparable size in Mashonaland ranged between 30% and 40%, on the Ayrshire it was 1%.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although its terrible reputation spread over an ever-widening area, the mine made no attempt to improve working conditions or cultivate relationships with the inhabitants of the Lomagundi district. It simply responded by casting its recruiting net further afield. Before the uprisings of 1896–98, a minority of people had been caught by Charted Company raiders and forced to work on the Ayrshire. But local societies were otherwise left untouched, as they had proved themselves capable of responding violently. Thereafter, mine operations barely impinged on the lives of the great majority of people. Largely encapsulated in a speculative bubble, the mine made few direct demands on the region's inhabitants.

In London, none of this was of any practical consequence. Greater emphasis was placed on the news that trial crushings of ore taken at random from the mine had returned an average of 18 dwt per ton. Readers of the African Review were assured that this was ‘very satisfactory proof of the enormous tonnage of payable rock which can be handled on this property’. Such results meant that ‘for every 100 feet of sinking on either the western or eastern old [precolonial] workings over 150,000 tons of the ore are placed overhead’. Because of this, the Ayrshire could be developed ‘as regards tonnage, in a manner almost unknown in any other South African mine. This fact of course considerably lessens the cost of working.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Only later would the ludicrous nature of these remarks become obvious to a widening audience. At the time, they were seen by small investors as identifying an opportunity to make a financial killing.

By contrast to the snail's pace of events on the ground in Lomagundi, matters now began to move rapidly in the City. The inner circle of the BSA Company became directly involved in the Ayrshire's affairs. Towards the end of the year, Edwards and Ewer Jones, the mine manager, had made the long journey to London, where they enthralled the LDC's annual general meeting with glowing reports of the mine's progress and prospects. The Ayrshire, declared Edwards, ‘contains the finest and most compact body of gold ore in Rhodesia … and is likely to be one of … [its] best gold mines … It is the class of proposition that might end up with a 200-stamp mill instead of 100.’ Both readily lent their names to the claim that in the Ayrshire the company had ‘a property that was excelled by none in South Africa, and was equalled by only two or three of the Rand mines’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Nothing was left to chance. The board of the LDC had earlier been reconstituted to include a BSA Company nominee, Hans Sauer, an intimate of Rhodes from his Kimberley diamond field days. One paper helpfully explained that Sauer was ‘a trustworthy and experienced authority … who is recognized as one of the shrewdest men in Rhodesia, and, moreover, little likely to commit himself to statements which are not of the most solid and authentic nature’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Leading articles placed in the more pliant sections of the London financial press were ‘most useful’,Footnote ⁶⁰ and by March 1901 plans to float a subsidiary, the Ayrshire Gold Mine and Lomagunda Railway (AGMLR) Company Ltd, were well advanced. ‘Sauer has just been here to lunch’, noted Wilson Fox, the BSA Company's London Office secretary, ‘and I have been discussing with him the flotation of the Ayrshire’.

A further inducement to investors was provision for the construction of a light railway line – this at a time when transport rates beyond major railheads were upwards of £100 per ton by ox-drawn wagon.

As Wilson Fox explained in a lengthy letter to Rhodes, the brilliance of the scheme lay in its capital structure. The nominal capital of the AGMLR was only £400,000 in £1 shares, of which £200,000 went to the LDC for the purchase of property and £100,000 to the BSA Company under Rhodesian mining law. By Witwatersrand standards this was an extremely modest capitalization. But if the Ayrshire were anything like as rich as the market had been led to believe, the dividends payable on such a comparatively small capital would be huge. The real bonus, however, was that the resulting demand for shares would massively increase the Charted Company's windfall profits, ‘as, if present market prices can be taken as a guide to the value of the Ayrshire property, the shares of the new Company should be quoted at certainly not less than £3 on the day of issue’. Certainly the parent companies of the AGMLR Company made huge profits on their vendors’ shares, the LDC declaring an interim dividend of 20% in 1902. Frequently interrupted by applause, the chairman revealed that, whereas the cost to the company of their 200,000 £1 shares in the AGMLR Company had been c.£182,000, their present market value was c.£959,000. The issue of £250,000 5½% debentures (that is, interest-bearing shares) to be used for railway construction and the equipment of the mine appeared separately. Their interest would be guaranteed for twenty years by the BSA Company and the Rhodesia Exploration Company, and they were exchangeable ‘at any time within five years for shares of the new Company at £4 per share’.Footnote ⁶²

Sections of the financial press were much taken by the scheme. ‘The arrangement by which the mine and railway company issues debentures, either redeemable in cash or convertible into shares, is a most ingenious one’, declared the African Review. ‘We may be sure the Chartered Company would not have guaranteed four-elevenths of the interest on these debentures if the venture had not been a thoroughly promising one.’Footnote ⁶³ Starved of investment opportunities by the never-ending South African War, the City snapped them up. Rhodes was told that ‘Applications have already been received for the underwriting of the whole of the debentures so that success is now practically assured.’Footnote ⁶⁴ By the beginning of April the deal was done.Footnote ⁶⁵

The prospectus was a classic of its kind, claiming that the ‘auriferous deposit is of a very exceptional character consisting of a diorate dyke of great size which has been traced through the property for a distance of 4500 feet and proved to a depth of 500 feet by boreholes … In the exploration work up to date there has been a remarkable absence of faults and throws.’ The public was further assured that while ‘the total ore developed [to date] is approximately 40,000 tons, of an average value … of 13 dwts. of fine gold’, the fact that ‘the reef more than maintains its size and value in depth’ meant that the ‘overall’ ore contents of the mine could safely be estimated at approximately 469,000 tons. Investors could also take comfort from the fact that the Chartered Company's resident engineer, E. H. Garthwaite, had pronounced positively on the mine. ‘From the foregoing data’, concluded the prospectus, ‘it will be seen that the Ayrshire is a property of immense possibilities, and from present developments offers splendid prospects of becoming a successful mining venture.’Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition to the ubiquitous Sauer, the AGMLR Company's board of directors comprised Wilson Fox, the BSA Company's manager; J. F. Jones, the BSA Company's joint manager and secretary; Leigh Hoskyns, a director on the board of Consolidated Gold Fields; and A. K. Tharp of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society.Footnote ⁶⁷

So infectious was the mood of manufactured optimism that few observers remained immune. When the second edition of J. H. Curle's highly regarded The Gold Mines of the World appeared early in 1902, the Ayrshire was hailed as ‘a fine property’. Although the book's influential author acknowledged that the claimed tonnage was ‘rather an inference of what may be there … than an estimate of ore actually in sight’, he still described the Ayrshire as ‘a mine of big possibilities’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even as Curle's international readership digested this share-market tip, others threw caution to the winds. Ignoring past warnings sounded in its own pages, the London-based African Review determined that the mine was ‘one of the best yet proved in Rhodesia’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Only the Financial Times held back. While agreeing that, of those Rhodesian gold mines that had ‘not yet reached the producing stage’, the Ayrshire seemed ‘much the best’, the paper warned that this assessment was already reflected in the company's £400,000 capitalization. Unlike the Witwatersrand's banket formation (a compact siliceous conglomerate) in which gold occurred more or less regularly, Rhodesian gold reefs were quartz. Liable to ‘pinch out’ unexpectedly, they were ‘generally narrow, or where wide mainly of low grade’. This being the case, ‘there should be a prospect of big dividends to cover risks, but on a heavy capitalization … such results are practically impossible’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Local dynastic politics

The picture painted in London bore little relation to the situation at the mine itself or the area surrounding it. With Chartered Company eyes fixed on London's mining share market, little time and effort was wasted on the expensive business of establishing colonial rule in the Lomagundi district and beyond. There was no point. Once the punitive frenzy of the period immediately after the risings subsided, many chiefs were left undisturbed. The number and strength of the varungu – that is, BSA Company officials – actually declined. In 1897 they abandoned Fort Ruia near the frontier. The summer of 1898/99 saw the police garrison withdrawn from Mount Darwin. This withdrawal and the inability of the Portuguese government to establish ‘effective occupation’ on its side of the ill-defined boundary meant that at the turn of the twentieth century north-eastern Mashonaland up to the Zambezi river was as independent of foreign control as it had ever been. The administration in Fort Salisbury admitted as much. An internal memorandum conceded that so long as the boundary was not delimited, the Native Department ‘cannot undertake the proper control and protection of the natives living on the British side of it, nor collect the hut tax’.Footnote ⁷¹ Nothing had been done by the time that the South African War broke out in October 1899, and when it initially went badly for British forces, additional troops had to be withdrawn from Rhodesia. In May 1900 the native commissioner for North Mazoe reported that ‘it is a common rumour among the people that the Boers are driving us back everywhere, and that there are very few of us left’.Footnote ⁷²

Worried about African unrest while the South African War was raging, the Chartered Company Administration kept a wary eye on the region's independently minded chiefs. One leader in particular attracted their attention, Mapondera of the Negomo dynasty (Figure 3). Overlapping with the area influenced by Charwe, medium of the Nehanda Mhondoro spirit, and only recently dynamited into uneasy submission, the western reaches of Negomo territory encompassed what became the Ayrshire mine (see Figure 1). This mattered less, however, than the fact that Mapondera and his followers operated pretty much wherever they pleased during this period. At the end of the 1880s, when foreigners were taking an increasing interest in the region, a Goan trader was allowed to establish himself at Nyota, Mapondera's birthplace, and fly the Portuguese flag.Footnote ⁷³ But in September 1889, Mapondera signed a concession with the hunter Frederick Courtney Selous. In return for conceding mineral rights to a large area over which he had no control whatsoever, he obtained the promise of trade goods worth £100 p.a. and 1.5% of any profits. In doing this, he was in effect declaring himself independent of the ruling Negomo.

Figure 3 Mapondera, late 1880s. Source: National Archives of Zimbabwe.

Over the next four years or so, while the Chartered Company gradually made its presence felt in the country around Fort Salisbury, Mapondera continued to go his own way. In July 1894 he and his followers abruptly abandoned Nyota. The previous year he had staged a brutal raid against the Chipadze people, and it seems that his neighbours combined to force him to leave the district.Footnote ⁷⁴ Mapondera removed himself to the Dande river, near the escarpment overlooking the Zambezi valley, effectively beyond the reach of either the British varungu or the Portuguese vazungu. For the next six years or so, he and his followers, almost all of whom were related to him by blood or marriage, contented themselves with raids on nearby villages for women and grain. They played no part in the 1896–98 zimurenga in the Lomagundi and Mazowe districts. But in April and June 1900, two raids by Mapondera's band deep inside northern Mashonaland alarmed the administration in Salisbury. As the last of these actions had involved the defeat of a government patrol coincidentally in the area, the BSA Company determined to go after Mapondera. ‘Don't you know that they tried to make me pay hut tax [in] the Mazowe district and failed to do so but killed my son there’, Mapondera was reported as having told a Zambezi valley villager. ‘If they come and attack me again I mean to go right away north of the Zambezi to Mpuruma's kraal.’Footnote ⁷⁵

With War Office permission, battalions of the Imperial Yeomanry, then in transit through Rhodesia on their way to South Africa, were deployed against Mapondera. To reach him, they marched north-west from Salisbury to the Ayrshire mine and on to Sipolilo. ‘Black were the reports of the country where the outlaw had made his home; of the malaria that ran rampant through its wooden valleys; of the trackless hill ranges they would have to cross’, recorded one of the expedition's officers.Footnote ⁷⁶ From Salisbury it took twelve days to reach the Ayrshire and a further three to gain Sipolilo. English newspaper readers were informed that it was a

In the event, Mapondera and his followers slipped away from their lumbering pursuers, but had to abandon villages and crops which the British forces then burned to the ground.Footnote ⁷⁸

By October 1900 Mapondera was on the lower Ruya river, where he was exacting tribute from the established population as he attempted to found a new dynasty. Seemingly secure in remote country still beyond the reach of either the British or the Portuguese authorities, he and a loose coalition of local allies staged a daring counter-attack in March 1901 ‘to regain the country [the tributary area] that had been taken by the varungu, as well as certain women and cattle’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Involving several hundred men on each side, the battle of Matitima ended indecisively. For the inhabitants of north-eastern Mashonaland it marked merely the latest in a long line of inconclusive clashes between local people and outsiders, especially as subsequent Chartered Company campaigns against Mapondera all petered out once he moved in January 1902 out of what was believed to be British territory. Leaving him to reach whatever accord he could with the Portuguese, BSA Company forces once again withdrew from the region. They could only operate for a limited period of time before they were decimated by malaria or blackwater fever.Footnote ⁸⁰ To some of Mapondera's followers the source of their misfortune was increasingly clear. Two white prospectors whose camp was besieged in October 1901 recalled what was shouted at them: ‘Who gave us permission to come up and wash gold and sink pits? The gold was theirs; the district was theirs; they did not want anyone in the country sinking shafts “magodi”. Curses on the English at Salisbury.’Footnote ⁸¹ To company promoters in London none of it counted for anything. The view was very different from the floor of the stock exchange.

Fortunes made and lost

Most of what the AGMLR Company prospectus had claimed was nonsense. The BSA Company's Resident Engineer's Office was later discredited when a case of fraud was exposed,Footnote ⁸² and disinterested geological opinion soon established how exceptionally complex the Ayrshire's ore body actually was. Faulting encountered in the mine's western section became ‘intensive’ as the eastern section approached the sixth (600 feet) level.Footnote ⁸³ But outsiders could not have known this. An injudicious admission some years previously that the ore body was not all it was cracked up to be had been silenced.Footnote ⁸⁴ Prudent investors doubtlessly avoided Rhodesian shares in any case; the less cautious went on regardless. Heavy expenditure on the main shaft and surface plant was taken as proof of the Ayrshire's extraordinary richness rather than evidence of reckless extravagance. With the exception of the railway where the BSA Company discreetly recycled two-foot track from the recently upgraded Beira–Umtali [Mutare] line, money was lavished on equipment. The main shaft, named in memory of Edwards after he too succumbed to blackwater fever in July 1901, comprised four compartments, each 4 feet 6 inches by 5 feet 6 inches. It ultimately cost over £30 per foot to sink, an unheard of sum for the place and time.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nor was any expense spared on the mine's surface layout and equipment (see Figure 4). At a time when second-hand crushers were readily available, all the Ayrshire's machinery was imported brand new. When the property was visited towards the end of 1902 by local journalists, they were shown around smiths’, fitters’, and carpenters’ shops equipped from top to bottom with modern tools and appliances, and told that all mine buildings and underground shaft stations would be lighted electrically.Footnote ⁸⁶

Figure 4 Ayrshire mine, main shaft headgear. It was 68 feet high, built of imported pitch pine, and equipped with three-ton and one-ton skips. Source: National Archives of Zimbabwe.

South African contractors, originally engaged to erect the prefabricated sections of the mill, had gone on to build a spacious hotel to accommodate visiting dignitaries (Figure 5). It also served as a place of relaxation for the dozen or so white miners then employed on the Ayrshire. Under the management of Mr ‘Ballyhooly’ Kerr, it offered a billiard room with two tables, as well as other forms of entertainment. For a brief interlude it housed a diminutive exotic dancer, one Fanny Marks. Reputedly trained in Cape Town by the notorious impresario Joseph Silver, whose activities had come to the attention of police forces on several continents, her display of ‘cigar rolling’ lingered in the memories of those privileged to witness it long after the mine had closed down. The hotel, reported Salisbury's daily paper, ‘is a veritable palace on the veld, as one would expect from the large amount of expenditure involved in its erection. It occupies a pleasant site, is surrounded by a fine verandah, and in appearance generally, as well as internal equipment, is equal to anything in town.’ This outlay alone was in the region of £10,000, ‘bringing the grand total of [surface] expenditure to £250,024’, or so it was claimed.Footnote ⁸⁷

Figure 5 Ayrshire Mine Hotel. Source: National Archives of Zimbabwe.

If the AGMLR Company could afford to spend money on this scale, it was clearly a good bet. At the London Wall head office of the BSA Company it was noted with satisfaction that ‘all good Rhodesian stocks … participated in the rise’ after Sauer had ‘talked Lomagundas up to fabulous prices’. Still better was the news that ‘they propose with the assistance of L. Hirsch and Co. to make a market in Ayrshires after the New Year’.Footnote ⁸⁸ A boom ensued. ‘All our subsidiary companies are raising money’, Wilson Fox informed the administrator of Southern Rhodesia in February 1902, ‘and Sauer as you may imagine is in the thick of it’.Footnote ⁸⁹ AGMLR Company shareholders were reminded that

No-one outside the Chartered Company's inner circle knew that Ewer Jones, Edwards’ successor, had long since curtailed the mine's drilling programme.Footnote ⁹¹ Development proceeded at a leisurely pace in order to take advantage of a rising market. Paulings Ltd, the railway contractors, took eighteen months to lay 80 miles of minimally ballasted light line. By December 1902, the much-vaunted Edwards Shaft was only 260 feet deep.Footnote ⁹² It all meant that the moment of truth was postponed for as long as possible, because, as well-informed visitors to Southern Rhodesia had discovered on other occasions, ‘when output begins, speculation ceases’.Footnote ⁹³ Until that moment arrived, however, the game went merrily on. The LDC, the parent company from which the AGMLR Company had been spun off, declared a dividend of 20%. Other associated exploring and subsidiary development companies followed suit.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the last few months of 1903, the Ayrshire's own issued capital nearly doubled, an increase all the more remarkable at a time when the market was generally ‘in no mood to absorb fresh issues of speculative capital’.Footnote ⁹⁵ These developments followed closely on Sauer's well-publicized visit to the mine earlier in the year. All was well in the best of all possible worlds. Developments were progressing ‘most favourably’; the railway was ‘running well’; work was being ‘pushed on with energy’; and African labour was ‘plentiful’. Best of all, pay ore had been struck in the central section. As the area had previously been thought to be ‘practically worthless’, this discovery would ‘appreciably increase the value of the mine’.Footnote ⁹⁶

In May 1904 the first thirty stamps started crushing (Figure 6). They did so accompanied by a barrage of publicity. ‘From the Ayrshire the latest news received is most satisfactory’, declared London's Sunday Times. ‘The mine is two years ahead of the mill, and the fourth level has shown great improvement over the third level, some very rich ore having recently been met with in the western section.’ In the eastern part of the mine, continued the newspaper, ‘the pay chute has been found to extend considerably further than in the upper levels … Richer ore has also been encountered in this section.’Footnote ⁹⁷ The African Review declared that ‘Under these circumstances the mine will have started producing under very fair conditions indeed.’Footnote ⁹⁸ What more could be asked of a mine that it become richer as it went deeper? The Ayrshire, it was widely reported south of the Limpopo, ‘is responsible for most … of the record output in Rhodesia. Improved returns are expected for June, and again for July, after which steady normal figures will be maintained.’Footnote ⁹⁹

Figure 6 Ayrshire mine, general view, c.1904. Source: National Archives of Zimbabwe.

That day never dawned. As early as 1902, proven ore reserves had already fallen behind target. Over the next two years the gap between what was actually underground and what investors were told there was widened inexorably. Once the mill started running it soon outpaced the mine's reserves. Equally bad news soon followed. Within months, the average grade of ore recovered fell away dramatically. Only later did it emerge that the Edwards Shaft had been sunk in the worst possible place. By stopping the diamond-drilling programme, Jones failed to pick up the barren area between the mine's western and eastern sections. Consequently, there was a large amount of dead footage required on each level before any ore was reached. The surface layout, once praised as ‘picturesque’, was found in practice to be thoroughly uneconomical. The ‘unnecessarily long’ surface haulage was prone to break down and expensive to run.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

For a brief period, the AGMLR Company brazened it out. Appearances were everything and lost nothing in their presentation to local and international audiences: ‘A few years ago, where these splendid engines so handsomely housed stand, was nothing but bare veld, and the former night haunts of wild beasts is now occupied by brilliantly lit up buildings … all tend to give the Ayrshire a prosperous and important appearance.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ But rumours that things were not what they seemed soon reached an ever-widening circle. The first hard figures quickly followed: ‘Crushing with 30 stamps in May, the recovery was equal to £1 1s 8d per ton, while the working costs (including charges for development and depreciation of plant) were £1 3s 3d per ton – loss, 1s 7d per ton. In June, with 60 stamps running, there was a slight improvement. … These are not exactly exhilarating results.’Footnote ¹⁰² Even this disappointing output could not be sustained. With each passing month it worsened, causing the South African correspondent of The Economist to fulminate in December 1904 that

By then it was too late. Those in the know had long since gone indoors.

If the world constructed by London was coming to a close, so too was the one made in Lomagundi. While never entirely free to make their own history in circumstances of London's choosing, Mapondera and his followers enjoyed considerable autonomy for extended periods of time precisely because share-market speculation and company-mongering had no immediate need for thoroughgoing colonial conquest. This permitted the pursuit of local dynastic interests in Lomagundi, even as it made possible occasional clashes with colonial and imperial forces on more or less equal terms. The inconclusive outcome of the battle of Matitima one year previously was evidence of this. At the same time, Mapondera and other local rulers made skilful use of emerging imperial rivalries and ill-defined colonial boundaries to move from one side to the other. Change was coming but it did not happen overnight.

One report in April 1902 concluded:

Mapondera was subsequently employed by the Portuguese in their campaign against the Makombe dynasty of Barwe. It appears that he was taken prisoner at some stage by Makombe, but got away in the general confusion that accompanied the end of the Barwe war in October 1902. ‘The rebel Mapondera … is reported to be serving the Portuguese government’, the authorities in Salisbury were informed, ‘and narrowly escaped with his life recently when sent to Makombe to demand his surrender – one of his party having been shot.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ With his remaining followers starving and desperate to plant crops for the coming season, Mapondera returned to Negomo's territory, where in September 1903 he surrendered, much to the surprise of the Chartered Administration (see Figure 7). In the event, he treated his trial with ‘a degree of levity, and danced on hearing his 7 year sentence’. Yet less than two months later, on 20 June 1904, he died in Salisbury prison. His family believed he had committed suicide: ‘though I may serve that sentence and go out of gaol, what am I going to do, the chieftainship has gone, the country has gone’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Figure 7 Mapondera as a prisoner, 1904. Source: National Archives of Zimbabwe.