Matsheumhlope: Before the Houses, the White Stones

Say Matsheumhlope, and there is a piece of landscape in the name.

The missionaries who came here in 1879 called the place White Rocks. Their diaries preserve a name for ground that people knew long before the neighbourhood took the shape familiar to its residents today.¹²

An address can become so ordinary that we stop hearing what it says. We give it to a visitor, write it on a form, explain where to turn. Yet this particular name carries us back to a time when Lobengula lived among these older places around Bulawayo, moving between his principal capital and other royal residences.

One of them was known to visiting missionaries as White Rocks.

On 2 September 1879, a party of Jesuits reached it and pitched their tent. Their account, later translated and published in Rhodesiana, records a meeting with Lobengula the following day, arranged with the help of the trader James Fairbairn.¹

The visits brought them into a royal household with a life of its own. In one passage they describe calling on the king’s sister, joining her company and sharing beer before being summoned to see her brother. In another, Lobengula visits their tent and accepts lemonade and biscuits while they discuss the work the missionaries hope to undertake.¹

These small details bring people within reach. A king receiving callers; a sister entertaining visitors; conversation passing through interpreters. The familiar name begins to hold something more than a translation.

The missionaries had their own purposes and prejudices, and their descriptions need to be read with that in mind. But their account leaves a dated record of White Rocks as an inhabited royal place.

Historian Rob Burrett’s study of the mission places that initial camp in the Matsheumhlope landscape. He distinguishes it from the premises the Jesuits subsequently acquired near Old Bulawayo. Oliver Ransford’s historical sketch also describes Matsheumhlope as one of Lobengula’s residences away from his main capital.²³

The distinction matters when we picture the past. A royal residence, the river bearing a related name, later farms and the present neighbourhood belong to different stages of this landscape’s history. They cannot all be drawn inside the same boundary simply because the name connects them.

There is another voice worth hearing beside those of the visitors.

In a 1973 interview, Majaqaba Mukangwani Ncube recalled the Umgusa and Matsheumhlope carrying water even during the dry season. His recollections were recorded through interpreters Willie Matamba and Jack Nqwele Sibindi, and published in The Pioneer two years later.⁴

That is a remembered river, rather than a measurement of its flow. It offers a glimpse of the landscape as an older man carried it in his mind. The interview does not settle when the houses came, but it reminds us that the river’s history also survives in people’s words.

For someone who grew up in Matsheumhlope, an older photograph might hold a similar kind of knowledge: a crossing before it was altered, a stretch of open ground, stones beside a childhood path. Such memories can help connect the larger historical accounts to particular places.

We do not yet have the full sequence from royal residence and farming land to every residential road. What we do have is an older name still doing its work. Each time it is spoken, something of the landscape remains in the conversation.

What do you remember of Matsheumhlope’s river, rocks and open spaces? Do you have an old photograph that helps place them?