Establishing a Presence, 1890–1904

White settlement in Southern Rhodesia was originally fired not by any sense of imperial mission, but by the prospect of a second Rand developing out of the mineral concessions Rhodes had negotiated with Lobengula, the Paramount Chief of the Ndebele.1 From the outset, the first pioneers valued their right to peg fifteen gold claims higher than their right to land and many of them had sold their land rights before they ever left the Transvaal. In any case, the search for gold had to be their first concern since Rhodes had no authority to distribute land. Archibald Colquhoun, the first Administrator, had scrupulously refrained from granting the pioneers anything other than provisional land rights so long as the British Government remained unclear about the legal aspects of the problem.2 By the end of 1890, however, Rhodes had in effect promoted the less scrupulous Jameson over Colquhoun’s head and it was not long before blocks of land had been marked off on the Company’s maps and beaconed.3 So long as Jameson was Administrator, the granting of land was both a generous and haphazard process. A splendid example of this arose in the Marandellas district where Llewellyn Meredith was first refused the right to peg out a farm and then granted that right, after he had asked Jameson whether he would be driven off the land if he just took possession of it and began to work it.