he scene depicted in this panel is the Fort at Fort Victoria, the towers of which are still standing. Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’s right-hand man and the Administrator of Mashonaland for the British South Africa Company, is seen with two of his advisers parleying with Matabele Indunas on 18 June 1893.

ine days earlier the white settlers of the Fort Victoria district had been horrified to discover that a Matabele raiding party had crossed the border and the warriors were butchering the local Mashona. Several white men’s servants were killed in front of their masters and though the lives of the Europeans were spared they had been contemptuously told “we have been ordered not to kill you, but your day is coming”.

his was only one provocation among many. Ever since the occupation of Mashonaland three years earlier, friction had arisen between the Pioneers and the Matabele. The Matabele social system was based on plundering their neighbours, and Lobengula had no intention of stopping his impis raiding across the Company’s borders. A series of atrocities had culminated in the large-scale raid of June 1893.

r. Jameson at once rode down to Fort Victoria when he heard of the trouble there. His instinct was still to parley with the Matabele and to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. But he was badly shaken when he saw the dead bodies lying on the outskirts of the town and next morning when he summoned the impi’s indunas to an indaba Jameson was far less inclined to be conciliatory. After an angry altercation which lasted until 12.30 p.m. Jameson ordered the indunas to withdraw their impi from the Company’s territory and advised them that if it was not out of sight by sundown he would drive it over the border, the Tokwe River.

ost of the Matabele obeyed Jameson’s instructions, but a detachment waited to sack a kraal only four miles from Fort Victoria. A skirmish with a white patrol followed. From that moment Jameson determined that the Matabele must be punished and their country annexed. Before the rains fell that year the Company’s forces had crossed into Lobengula’s territory and the Matabele War had begun.