As far as I know, hard information about ‘the old hotel’ in the Gaborone Village or about Mr C.J. Rhodes connection with Gaborone is yet to emerge. An attempt to fill the gap the National Museum, however, has done a bit of inventing.
It states that the small ‘hotel’ in the Gaborone Village, which it also describes as a small rest camp, was built in the late 1880s in Batlokwa territory ‘under the auspices of the British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes’. It had space for storage only for ‘ the local pioneer army’. To get quite so much wrong in a couple of sentences is a truly remarkable achievement. The settlement at the Village was established by the British Protectorate Administration on land sequestered probably from the Kwena and not from the Tlokwa. It had nothing to do with Mr Rhodes although it might just be possible that he had a minor commercial interest in the place – but we do not know. What we do know, however, is that there was no such thing as far as the hotel’ is concerned, as ‘the local pioneer army’. What the National Museum was presumably intending to state, as it has done at the Fort, is that this was a base for Rhodes’ Pioneer Column of 1890 which invaded Mashonaland and established Salisbury, now Harare.
