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concession hunters there. The Portuguese had also finally decided to do something about their lapsed concessions in the region and sent envoys to Chief Mutasa whose land adjoined Mashonaland to the east. Lobengula was in no hurry to give concessions to anyone and kept Rudd hanging around for weeks until Rudd concluded that only one course was open to him – what might tempt Lobengula were rifles.
    The Matabele – a renegade offshoot of the Zulu – were famously disciplined under seasoned military tacticians. The aggressive young warriors were keen to rid their country of hungry white men and they begged their generals and Lobengula to provide them with the opportunity to ‘wash their spears’. For most concession-hunters, including the British emissaries at Lobengula’s court, the idea of a Matabele army armed with modern weaponry was enough to chill the blood and thus far they, the Germans, Portuguese and Boers, had baulked at the idea of giving Lobengula military ordnance even in return for Shona gold.
    Rhodes, as was his wont, called for an expert analysis of the problem and upon receipt of an assessment by British-trained military advisers decided on perhaps his greatest gamble. Rhodes was told that without expert weapons instruction and target practice Lobengula’s army would, quite literally, shoot itself in the foot. Issuing warriors trained in the use of the spear with modern rifles would reduce their efficiency rather than enhance it, at least in the early stages of any war. Armed with this intelligence Rhodes sent Rudd back to Lobengula with orders to offer the Matabele king 1,000 Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles, 100,000 rounds of cartridges, a gunboat on the Zambesi (or £500 in cash) and £100 a month. Rudd took £5,000 in gold coins in his saddlebag as a down payment. In those days it was a king’s ransom and it was enough. This king, who by then was weary of badgering concession hunters and worried that the Boers might just ride in and take his kingdom, accepted. Better to give Rhodes a gold-mining concession than risk all that.
    That left just one problem for Rhodes, albeit a major one. Trading guns to the natives was highly illegal under South African law, especially for a member, as Rhodes was, of the Cape parliament. The mere removal or conveyance of such articles across the Cape borders was similarly prohibited. Rhodes arranged for the rifles to be moved secretly, admitting in a letter to a member of Rudd’s group: ‘With great difficulty I have managed to get them through the Colony and Bechuanaland.’
    These rifles are pivotal to our story. Without them Rhodes would not have got his concession and his charter. Without the presence of Rhodes and his money in Mashonaland none of the three scientific investigations, which would subject the Zimbabwe culture to minute scrutiny, would ever have happened. He and the Rhodes Trust subsidised all three.
    Rutherfoord Harris, now a Cape Town merchant, applied for a licence from the resident magistrate to send a shipment of rifles to Kimberley. The licence was issued because no borders would be crossed. Once in the vast De Beers sidings – Rhodes’ very private bailiwick – they vanished, just as an even larger illicit arms shipment would vanish a few years later when the same team tried to provide supportive ordnance for Jameson’s abortive raid on the Transvaal.
    Two clandestine teams were used to take packets of 500 rifles apiece across the border under permits issued by a Bechuanaland official. This smuggling did not quite go unnoticed but another official, Sir Gordon Sprigg, who made enquiries about the shipments was urged to look the other way, or more precisely not to look ‘into matters which do not affect the Cape Colony’. The correspondence actually reached the Colonial Office in London but there they looked the other way too. A note in the file observes: ‘Sir Gordon Sprigg