Our Heritage (Sandy Grant) Gaborone and Cecil Rhodes (Part 2)

Sandy Grant | Wednesday August 27, 2014 14:53

 

Clearly it does matter if foreign visitors are misled, or if school children are given factually incorrect information. This period of history is complicated and for non-historians difficult to follow.  But it does enormously complicate matters for everyone if the National Museum, at its various sites, is unable to be consistent with the information it provides. If, as is now the case, the Museum fails to do so, it is left looking foolish and incompetent. So let’s begin.

Land adjacent to farms such as Bonnington was not handed over to Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company in 1895 or indeed at any other time.  Towards the end of their famous trip to the UK in 1895 the three Dikgosi agreed with the British Foreign Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, that they would make land available for the construction of a railway line which would be pushed through to Bulawayo, by Rhodes.

Having returned from that trip, Kgosi Sebele honoured his part of that agreement by handing over to the British government a block of land that had been previously a part of the territory that he controlled.  The British then surveyed the newly available area, split it into farms, retained for its own purposes the area which is now the city of Gaborone, and handed over the rest to the British South Africa Company which in turn sold it to individual buyers such as the first owner of Bonnington.  

The fact that that land was NOT handed over by Kgosi Sebele to Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company demonstrated that, in the upshot, those three Dikgosi had seen him off.  Of course, the full historical saga, with its whys and wherefores, is complicated - but in the upshot, Chamberlain concluded that he should give Rhodes land for his railway line but otherwise leave the three Dikgosi to rule their people much as before. Rhodes’ reaction was that Chamberlain’s decision meant that he had been defeated by ‘a bunch of niggers’.  The land which he had so much wanted, was not to be either acquired by him, or even to be given directly to him; but would come to him indirectly via the British government.

The difference was of major importance because it was now clearly shown that the interests of the British Government and those of Rhodes were not necessarily complementary. And that really is the reason why those three bronze gents now stand so proudly in the CBD.  It seems odd that the National Museum is yet to work it all out.