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

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.