For fifty-eight hours the train from Johannesburg had travelled steadily northward, past Mafeking and on through the apparently endless stretches of Bechuanaland. Alternately frozen and baked, I had swallowed enough dust to stock a small-sized desert. Dawn of the third day broke and with it came a sharp rap on my compartment door. I had been dreaming of a warm bath and a joltless life when I was rudely restored to reality. The car was stationary and a blanketed Matabele, his teeth chattering with the cold, peered in at the window.

"What is it?" I asked.

"You are in Rhodesia and I want to know who you are," boomed a voice out in the corridor.

I opened the door and a tall, rangy, bronzed man—the immigration inspector—stepped inside. He looked like a cross between an Arizona cowboy and an Australian overseas soldier. When I proved to his satisfaction that I was neither Bolshevik nor Boche he departed with the remark: "We've got to keep a watch on the people who come into this country."

Such was my introduction to Rhodesia, where the limousine and the ox-team compete for right of way on the veldt and the 'rickshaw yields to the motor-cycle in the town streets. Nowhere in the world can you find a region that combines to such vivid and picturesque extent the romance and hardship of the pioneer age with the push and practicality of today. Here existed the "King Solomon's Mines" of Rider Haggard's fancy: here the modern gold-seekers of fact sought the treasures of Ophir; here Nature gives an awesome manifestation of her power in the Victoria Falls.

It is the only country where a great business corporation rules, not by might of money but by chartered authority. Linked with that rule is the story of a conflict between share-holder and settler that is unique in the history of colonization. It is the now-familiar and well-nigh universal struggle for self-determination waged in this instance between all-British elements and without violence.

All the way from Capetown I had followed the trail of Cecil Rhodes, which like the man himself, is distinct. It is not the succession of useless and conventional monuments reared by a grateful posterity. Rather it is expressed in terms of cities and a permanent industrial and agricultural advance. "Living he was the land," and dead, his imperious and constructive spirit goes marching on. The Rhodes impress is everywhere. Now I had arrived at the cap-stone of it all, the domain that bears his name and which he added to the British Empire.

Less than two hours after the immigration inspector had given me the once-over on the frontier I was in Bulawayo, metropolis of Rhodesia, which sprawls over the veldt just like a bustling Kansas community spreads out over the prairie. It is definitely American in energy and atmosphere. Save for the near-naked blacks you could almost imagine yourself in Idaho or Montana back in the days when our West was young.

Before that first day ended I had lunched and dined in a club that would do credit to Capetown or Johannesburg; had met women who wore French frocks, and had heard the possibilities of the section acclaimed by a dozen enthusiasts. Everyone in Rhodesia is a born booster. Again you get the parallel with our own kind.

To the average American reader Rhodesia is merely a name, associated with the midnight raid of stealthy savage and all the terror and tragedy of the white man's burden amid the wild confines. All this happened, to be sure, but it is part of the past. While South Africa still wrestles with a serious native problem, Rhodesia has settled it once and for all. It would be impossible to find a milder lot than the survivors and sons of the cruel and war-like Lobengula who once ruled here like a despot of old. His tribesmen—the Matabeles—were put in their place by a strong hand and they remain put.

Bulawayo was the capital of Lobengula's kingdom. The word means "Place of Slaughter," and it did not belie the name. You can still see the tree under which the portly potentate sat and daily dispensed sanguinary judgment. His method was quite simple. If anyone irritated or displeased him he was haled up "under the greenwood" and sentenced to death. If gout or rheumatism racked the royal frame the chief executed the first passerby and then considered the source of the trouble removed. The only thing that really departed was the head of the innocent victim. Lobengula had sixty-eight wives, which may account for some of his eccentricities. Chaka, the famous king of the Zulus, whose favourite sport was murdering his sons (he feared a rival to the throne), was an amateur in crime alongside the dusky monarch whom the British suppressed, and thereby gained what is now the most prosperous part of Southern Rhodesia.

The occupation and development of Rhodesia are so comparatively recent—(Rhodes and Dr. Jameson were fighting the Matabeles at Bulawayo in 1896)—that any account of the country must at the outset include a brief historical approach to the time of my visit last May. Probe into the beginnings of any African colony and you immediately uncover intrigue and militant imperialism. Rhodesia is no exception.

For ages the huge continent of which it is part was veiled behind mystery and darkness. The northern and southern extremes early came into the ken of the explorer and after him the builder. So too with most of the coast. But the vast central belt, skirted by the arid reaches of Sahara on one side and unknown territory on the other, defied civilization until Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and Grant blazed the way. Then began the scramble for colonies.

Early in the eighties more than one European power cast covetous glances at what might be called the South Central area. Thanks to the economic foresight of King Leopold, Belgium had secured the Congo. Between this region which was then a Free State, and the Transvaal, was an immense and unappropriated country,—a sort of no man's land, rich with minerals, teeming with forests and peopled by savages. Two territories, Matabeleland, ruled by Lobengula, and Mashonaland, inhabited by the Mashonas, who were to all intents and purposes vassals to Lobengula, were the prize portions. Another immense area—the present British protectorate of Bechuanaland—was immediately south and touched the Cape Colony and the Transvaal. Portuguese East Africa lay to the east but the backbone of Africa south of the Congo line lay ready to be plucked by venturesome hands.

Nor were the hands lacking for the enterprise. Germany started to strengthen the network of conspiracy that had already yielded her a million square miles of African soil and she was reaching out for more. Control of Africa meant for her a big step toward world conquest. Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, which touched the southern edge of this unclaimed domain, saw in it the logical extension of his dominions.

Down at Capetown was Rhodes, dreaming of a Greater Britain and determined to block the Kaiser and Kruger. It was largely due to his efforts while a member of the Cape Parliament that Britain was persuaded to annex Bechuanaland as a Crown Colony. Forestalled here, Kruger was determined to get the rest of the country beyond Bechuanaland and reaching to the southern border of the Congo. His emissaries began to dicker with chiefs and he organized an expedition to invade the territory. Once more Rhodes beat him to it, this time in history-making fashion.

Following his theory that it is better to deal with a man than fight him, he sent C. D. Rudd, Rochfort Maguire, and F. R. ("Matabele") Thompson up to deal directly with Lobengula. They were ideal envoys for Thompson in particular knew every inch of the country and spoke the native languages. From the crafty chieftain they obtained a blanket concession for all the mineral and trading rights in Matabeleland for £1,200 a year and one thousand rifles. Rhodes now converted this concession into a commercial and colonizing achievement without precedent or parallel. It became the Magna Charta of the great British South Africa Company, which did for Africa what the East India Company did for India. Counting in Bechuanaland, it added more than 700,000 square miles to the British Empire.

Like the historic document so inseparably associated with the glories of Clive and Hastings, its Charter shaped the destiny of the empire and is associated with battle, blood, and the eventual triumph of the Anglo-Saxon over the man of colour. Other chartered companies have wielded autocratic power over millions of natives but the royal right to exist and operate, bestowed by Queen Victoria upon the British South Africa Company—the Chartered Company as it is commonly known—was the first that ever gave a corporation the administrative authority over a politically active country with a white population. The record of its rule is therefore distinct in the annals of Big Business.

It was in 1899 that Rhodes got the Charter. In his conception of the Rhodesia that was to be—(it was first called Zambesia)—he had two distinct purposes in view. One was the larger political motive which was to widen the Empire and keep the Germans and Boers from annexing territory that he believed should be British. This was Rhodes the imperialist at work. The other aspect was the purely commercial side and revealed the same shrewdness that had registered so successfully in the creation of the Diamond Trust at Kimberley. This was Rhodes the business man on the job.

The Charter itself was a visualization of the Rhodes mind and it matched the Cape-to-Cairo project in bigness of vision. It gave the Company the right to acquire and develop land everywhere, to engage in shipping, to build railway, telegraph and telephone lines, to establish banks, to operate mines and irrigation undertakings and to promote commerce and manufacture of all kinds. Nothing was overlooked. It meant the union of business and statesmanship.

Under the Charter the Company was given administrative control of an area larger than that of Great Britain, France and Prussia. It divided up into Northern and Southern Rhodesia with the Zambesi River as the separating line. Northern Rhodesia remains a sparsely settled country—there are only 2,000 white inhabitants to 850,000 natives—and the only industry of importance is the lead and zinc development at Broken Hill. Southern Rhodesia, where there are 35,000 white persons and 800,000 natives, has been the stronghold of Chartered interests and the battleground of the struggle to throw off corporate control. It is the Rhodesia to be referred to henceforth in this chapter without prefix.

The Charter is perpetual but it contained a provision that at the end of twenty-five years, (1914) and at the end of each succeeding ten years, the Imperial Government has the power to alter, amend or rescind the instrument so far as the administration of Rhodesia is concerned. No vital change in the original document has been made so far, but by the time the next cycle expires in 1924 it is certain that the Company control will have ended and Rhodesia will either be a part of the Union of South Africa or a self-determining Colony.

The Company is directed by a Board of Directors in London, but no director resides in the country itself. Thus at the beginning the fundamental mistake was made in attempting to run an immense area at long range. With the approval of the Foreign Office the Company names an Administrator,—the present one is Sir Drummond Chaplin,—who, like the average Governor-General, has little to say. The Company has exercised a copper-riveted control and this rigid rule led to its undoing, as you will see later on.

The original capitalization was £1,000,000,—it was afterwards increased to £9,000,000,—but it is only a part of the stream of pounds sterling that has been poured into the country. In all the years of its existence the company has never paid a dividend. It is only since 1914 that the revenue has balanced expenditures. More than 40,000 shareholders have invested in the enterprise. Today the fate of the country rests practically on the issue between the interests of these shareholders on one hand and the 35,000 inhabitants on the other. Once more you get the spectacle, so common to American financial history, of a strongly intrenched vested interest with the real exploiter or the consumer arrayed against it. The Company rule has not been harsh but it has been animated by a desire to make a profit. The homesteaders want liberty of movement without handicap or restraint. An irreconcilable conflict ensued.