Lobengula: The King With a Mysterious Grave, 100 Years Hunting for His Gold
By Fanuel Viriri
King Lobengula’s final resting place remains a mystery up to this day and prospectors have spent over 100 years hunting for the King’s gold.
The second King of the Ndebele vanished under a Leadwood tree with a fortune on his back and final resting place remains a mystery.
Historian R.S. Roberts has pieced this together. His research is long and forensic. It is built from police photographs, Native Affairs files and secret syndicate letters.
The last real sighting is 4 December 1893. Roberts records it. It is near Pupu, 50 km west of Lupane. Lobengula had just seen his Imbizo regiment win. General Mtshane Khumalo led it. They wiped out Major Allan Wilson and his 34 men on the Shangani River.
The British had Maxim guns and cannon. It did not save them. After that battle the King rested under a Mutswiri Leadwood tree. Then he disappeared. From that single tree grew an industry of lies.
Roberts shows the archive records more than a dozen formal applications from South Africa and beyond. The real number is unknowable. Many digs never entered official records at all. Residents like W. Posselt in Bulawayo simply went looking. Outsiders like Rodney, Hughes, Ellis, Leipoldt and Lane did the same.
The engine was Jacobs. Roberts reproduces his Bulawayo police photograph from 1917. Jacobs wears a dog-collar. He is an ordained minister on a treasure hunt. That is incongruous. He claims Lobengula himself taught him where the royal treasury was. The treasury was in sovereigns
In 1924 a syndicate was formed. It was expanded to include Rhodesians. It is in the National Archives. They sought permission to dig. Two years later they were still asking without success. Connected to them was R. de Villiers of Bloemfontein. He said he held Jacobs’s power of attorney. The Chief Native Commissioner had a simple idea. Let a responsible person go with Jacobs. Let him be seen to fail. That would end the saga. Administrator Sir John Coghlan refused. Roberts quotes him verbatim. A confidence trickster as devious as Jacobs would always find a way out of failure. So the ban stayed. The hunts did not.
Jacobs changed the map to keep the money flowing. Roberts notes his face had become too well-known near Livingstone. So he moved the treasure far south-east of Bulawayo. He said it was below the Lundi and Limpopo junction. A hunter named Haverman had searched there in 1922. The new client was Thomas Ellis. He was a successful florist. He owned the Orange Grove Hotel in Johannesburg. He does not appear in official records at all. Roberts counts his trips. He made half a dozen expeditions between 1926 and 1930. They were disguised as hunting trips in the lowveld between Limpopo and Lundi.
In 1930 P. Chilvers published The Seven Lost Trails of Africa. Ellis was then 65. He planned one last attempt. In 1936 he admitted the truth to Southern Rhodesia. Jacobs had been with him on at least two expeditions. Jacobs had lived rent-free at Ellis’s hotel for four years, living off the connection. Ellis finally saw through him. He turned him out. Jacobs died in the Bantu location in 1937. He claimed to be 105. Roberts writes he found heaven’s treasure less arduous than bush hunts.
The most assiduous seeker was Major Johann G.W. Leipoldt. Roberts details his life. He was brother to Dr C.F. Louis Leipoldt, the famous physician and Afrikaans writer. Johann was a land surveyor by training. He had served in the South African Republic artillery. He became chief intelligence officer in the Union Department of Defence.
In 1915 he was in Windhoek. Botha’s campaign had just taken South-West Africa. Leipoldt went through German administration files. He found one entry marked von Lobengula. A German syndicate was about to search from the Caprivi Strip. He kept the file. He started writing to Lobengula’s sons and to Colonel J.H. Venning, who had questioned Jacobs in 1908-09. Back in Pretoria Leipoldt hired Jacobs. He paid him £5 a month. That was a second income for Jacobs, for an hour’s chat each week. Jacobs flattered him. He claimed he was taught by Leipoldt’s maternal grandfather, Esselen.
In 1920 Leipoldt bought a car. He was the first to drive all the way from South Africa to Angola. He thought the treasure was there. He went to Southern Rhodesia in 1921. That convinced him more. His secret and surreptitious visits into south-eastern Angola continued until 1934. That is 14 years. They ruined his fortune. He believed he had found the site. A plan was later published by Van Zyl. He could not crack the code of clues. He gave up, physically and mentally exhausted. He also feared litigation from De Beers and the London Missionary Society.
Roberts shows the fever did not die. J.D. Hughes went up the Zambezi in 1930. He went into the Matopos without permission. In 1936 a descendant of Lobengula living in Britain wanted the gold to save Empire Africa. He had been in touch with both Ellis and Jacobs. In 1944 the Vicomte de Parcevaux, living in Buenos Aires, used aerial photographs and radiesthesie – dowsing – to pinpoint the exact spot between Tokwe and Lundi rivers.
Government viewed him as a crank. Chilvers’s book was followed by Rosenthal in 1936 and Green in 1962. Journalists kept mining these easy sources. Popular articles continued regularly in Zimbabwe’s press. Latterly Africans find the subject as irresistible as their European predecessors.
What did government do about this 100-year hunt? Roberts gives two phases. The first is colonial. In 1943, after more than 20 years of silence, the supposed grave at Mlindini on the Manyanda River was declared a National Monument. Papers were lodged with the Historical Monuments Commission in Bulawayo. Roberts says why. It was partly to prevent desecration. It was partly to avoid upsetting the Khumalos. It was also a new mood. The National Archives had been established in 1935. There was a new emphasis on conserving the landscape. There was a desire to domesticate history itself.
Until 1943 the Native Affairs Department had resisted attempts to erect a memorial to Mzilikazi. Yet within six years the Mzilikazi Memorial had been erected near Usher. Entumbane was also declared a monument.
Then came 1967. ZIPRA incursions were just beginning. The District Commissioner went with Dr Ransford to the cave. Then a team from the Ministry of Internal Affairs went with archaeologist C.K. Cooke. Ransford removed a tibia. Roberts calls the circumstances suspicious. Ransford never gave a straightforward answer. Was it officially approved? Where did the bone go? Cooke’s 1970 article in Rhodesiana lists only a femur and a clavicle. Later it refers to examination and measurement of a tibia.
The second phase is the Zimbabwe government. In 1992 Heroes Day was marked at Pupu. Ex-ZIPRA combatants wanted to build a shrine to ZIPRA at the site. Local elders and spiritual leaders refused. They insisted a shrine had to wait. First there must be proper ceremonies for the dead of 1893. First there must be umbuyiso for the return of Lobengula’s spirit. Nothing was then done.
In 1998 a monument to the Unknown Soldier was unveiled by the Provincial Governor at Lupane administrative centre. Roberts records the reaction. People saw it as irrelevant. Ex-combatants saw it as irrelevant. The battle and the grave had more resonance. While in the past Europeans tried to appropriate and co-opt history with a specific memorial as atonement for events of the 1890s, now government was disrupting history with a memorial that was both vague and begrudging, an occlusion of the events of the 1980s.
Meanwhile a tree near the battlefield became the real shrine. It was reputed to be Lobengula’s last resting place before he disappeared. Guerrillas visited it during the war for ancestral support.
Why was no gold ever found? Roberts cites Zimbabwean scholar Kahari. Kahari told him buried treasure does not occur at all in African folklore, unlike the European pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He revives E.C. Hole’s guess from 1906. Hole said Nyamande and Lozikeyi were the only people who knew where sovereigns were. They would have retrieved and spent them quickly by 1906. The files prove it.
From 1915 to 1921 Nyamande complained to the Administration. He demanded more land, cattle and status. His nephews did the same in 1926-1932. They never mentioned treasure. One Khumalo did mention treasure. He was Thomas Ndaba Khumalo. He owned a store in Ndabeni location in Cape Town in 1923. He claimed to be true heir. He knew the location but feared Nyamande would kill him. The High Commissioner exposed him as a fraud prompted by Jacobs’ reports in the South African press in 1922.
What about the body? Roberts quotes an anonymous Ndebele informant who told Cooke before 1970. Like Mzilikazi, Lobengula had a temporary grave after December 1893. Later skeletal remains were removed to Entumbane to lie with ancestors. The Mlindini cave was left with unimportant possessions and the remains of a slave. That slave was Ransford’s tibia. That explains how Nyamande dared rifle his own father’s grave taking one or two rifles.
Roberts’ conclusion is therefore that both grave and treasure have remained a white affair veiled in deception if not deceit for over a hundred years. They are stuff for a fireside story on a winter’s night, not part of any historical narrative, neither Ndebele nor national. That is why after 100 years the King’s final resting place remains a mystery.