their subjects. What the amaNdebele were reluctant to acknowledge the Native Department later confirmed in an official census conducted soon after the occupation, that the majority of amaNdebele were in fact abeTshabi and amaHoli.[vi]
Mashonaland, which can be defined broadly as those parts of present day Zimbabwe not at that time physically occupied by the amaNdebele, was raided regularly, while the immediate hinterland of Matabeleland was completely razed. Raiding was selective and defined by an annual rotation in order that it remain sustainable. Those groups that enjoyed sufficient numbers or political cohesion, and who might muster practical resistance, as well as others who lived in difficult or unhealthy terrain, became subject groups and paid tribute rather than suffer the direct impact of raiding.
Mzilikazi had in the meanwhile not dispensed with the notion of grand campaigning, and neither had he reached a point where he was content to let other powerful leaders go about their business without trying to bring them under the amaNdebele heel. Thus Mzilikazi brooded over the repulse he had suffered at the hands of Sebitoane and the Makololo living along the upper reaches of the Zambezi and Chobe Rivers. The land approaching the Zambezi Valley was prone to Tsetse fly which precluded any settlement on the part of cattle loving people, however Mzilikazi was determined to stamp his mark on the Makololo, and to this end he mobilized and impi of several thousand men and sent them north to engage and scatter the sons and daughters of Mantatisi.
By then Sebitoane had abandoned the unhealthy countryside spanning the Zambezi/Chobe confluence in favour of the highlands of the Kafue where he was effectively beyond the reach of amaNdebele force. In days before bridges and ferries a river the breadth of the Zambezi was a significant obstacle, and although a nation could traverse piecemeal by canoe the transportation in unified formation of a large expeditionary force such as amaNdebele impi could not be undertaken with any sort of tactical security. This was particularly so when, upon hearing that the amaNdebele had arrived in a mood for war, the Makololo army rushed to the north shore of the Zambezi and confront the amaNdebele with a barrage of lively insults.
Confronting this problem the amaNdebele contracted the local river dwelling baTonka communities to ferry the army across the river by canoe. This extremely unsound plan was devised to be conducted in stages. Most were transported across to a island midstream and left there for the boatmen to return for the next party who were to join their comrades the following day. The stranded men where abandoned overnight, however, and with no means to get back to shore they began to starve. After the death of almost all, the survivors were rescued by the Makololo and returned to Sebitoane as recruits. The significantly weakened impi on the south bank turned for home, but was now a target for lesser tribes, and unable to plunder arrived back to report on the disaster in a state of utter depletion.
This ill fated expedition, defeated without a drop of enemy blood being spilled, was a reverse on the scale of the defeats Mzilikazi had been delivered by the hand of the Griqua and the Boer. This was the last of his great military adventures, and a somewhat chastened despot settled into the security and plenty of his new situation with never a thought being given to territorial expansion beyond what currently existed as occupied territory and vassal states.
[i] Child, Harold, History of the amaNdebele, (Department of Internal Affairs, Rhodesia, 1968) p1
[ii] Rayner, William. The Tribe and Its Successors: An Account of African Traditional Life and European Settlement in Southern Rhodesia. (Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1962) p71
[iii] Child, Harold, History of the amaNdebele, (Department of Internal Affairs, Rhodesia, 1968) p1
[iv] Shattered Nation p26
[v] Ranger, T.O. Nature & Culture in the Matopos, (James Curry, Oxford, Baobab Books Harare, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1999),