On the eve of 125 years since the Mashona Rebellion, Gerry van Tonder delves into this bloody battle between British troops and African tribesmen
“A pparently no one in Mashonaland had even dreamt it was possible that the Mashonas might rise,” wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson, upon receiving deployment orders to quell a local uprising.
In mid-June 1896, Shona-speaking tribesmen attacked isolated mines, farms and trading posts, murdering all white men, women and children they could find. In the space of a week, 117 civilians had been slaughtered in Mashonaland, a large tract of real estate south of the Zambezi River, in what would become part of the colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
On June 18, word was received at Fort Salisbury that Porta Farm to the south had been attacked by a mob of armed Mashona.
Dispatched to the farm to investigate, future Victoria Cross recipient Captain Randolph Nesbitt and his patrol discovered the bodies of Mrs Caroline Norton, her baby daughter Dorothy, farm assistants James Alexander and Harry Gravenor, and nursemaid Miss L MFairweather. They had been dragged from their homestead and “hacked to pieces in the most atrocious manner”. The rem…
