In a scrubby paddock on the edge of Bulawayo, I walked up to a half-broken leatherwood tree growing in a tangle of old barbed wire. It looked no different to a million tough trees across Zimbabwe, the still-beautiful, still-friendly country which remains the most wonderful place in Africa. But this tree is exceptional: it is listed as a national monument. Beneath it, in October 1888, a concession was agreed which led Lobengula Khumalo, King of the Ndebele, to lose his lands to a consortium led by Cecil Rhodes. It’s disputed what Lobengula thought he was agreeing to when he made his mark on the treaty. ‘I thought you came to dig gold, but it seems that you have come not only to dig the gold but to rob me of my people and country as well,’ he protested later – sending envoys to Queen Victoria. But Rhodes pressed on. Lobengula died, perhaps of poison, in exile. Rhodesia, named after its founder, took power in his place. It, in turn, gave way to Zimbabwe. Only the old leatherwood tree has lasted – at least some of it. Not long ago, squatters hacked down one of its twin trunks to make furniture from the rock-hard timber.
It is less than two lifetimes since Rhodes died, and his ghost hangs over the country he created. In Bulawayo’s railway museum his now-dusty personal carriage is preserved, along with his cutlery, bed and on-board bathtub. In the nearby Matobo Hills I watched rainbow lizards scuttle over the plain, godless plaque which marks his grave, cut high into a stack of grey rounded granite boulders of the sort which burst through the greenery all over Zimbabwe, as if some giant had been throwing pebbles.
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