Masvingo

A lord's son, a shop of whisky cases and No. 5 Camp

When the Ndebele war came to Fort Victoria in 1893, the man put in charge of the town’s defences had no experience of defending anything and no training as a builder either, though he had supplied the materials for the fort. Henry Paulet, known to everyone as Timmy, was the second son of the fourteenth Marquess of Winchester. He had been to a naval academy at Gosport and then had nothing more to do with the navy. Soon after he arrived in 1891 he won the Company’s tender for building materials at Fort Victoria anyway, opened a brickfield five miles out of the village and set up sawmills. The next February he married in St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town with his dog Paddy as best man, by special permission of the Dean.

The man in charge of the laager

Paulet came back to the town in mid-1893 to find the magistrate ill and armed Ndebele bands moving through the district. He was handed the defences. The fort he had helped build was, in the words of the Reverend A. A. Louw, a square of high walls with a tower at each of two opposite corners, a Maxim gun on each, and scaffolding inside so riflemen could aim over the top. The warriors who spared the farmers east of town had told them their day was coming. It did not come. Fort Victoria was never attacked, although the 200 or so people packed inside lived for three months with sickness and shrinking rations. R. R. Langham-Carter, who wrote up Paulet’s life for Rhodesiana in 1975, judged his arrangements adequate and noted that here again he seemed to have no special knowledge of the job.

The rest of his life went the same unlikely way. After the war he sat as an assessor at the trial of two troopers who had pocketed the thousand gold sovereigns Lobengula sent as a token of surrender. Then in 1899 his elder brother was killed at Magersfontein and the brickmaker became the sixteenth Marquess, and in time a director of the Chartered Company and chairman of the Victoria Falls Power Company.

Gold on Fern Spruit and a shop built of whisky cases

What filled the early town was gold. The first gold mine registered in the district, the Dickens Mine, was registered on 25 October 1891, and Henry Long registered the Victoria Mine on Fern Spruit the next day. Roger Howman, writing in 1973, describes the Fort Victoria of 1894 as the main gold centre of the country, and a strange one, because so close to Great Zimbabwe there were hardly any of the ancient workings found on the other goldfields. Little mines sprang up all along Fern Spruit, whose Shona name, the Wazanga, was said to remember an old woman called Zanga who drowned in it. Above the stream stood the massif the settlers called Mount Victoria. Howman gives its Shona name as Nyanda and glosses it as proud or conceited. Nyanda is also the name the town itself was given for a few months in 1982.

The money brought shops. Three Scottish brothers, Thomas, John and Stewart Meikle, left Natal in 1892 with eight ox-wagons and took three months over the 700 miles to Fort Victoria. Their first store was made of whisky cases and roofed with the tarpaulins off their wagons. Branches followed in Salisbury in 1893 and Bulawayo the year after, and the name went on to stores and hotels across the country. Back in the village there was a Gymkhana Club by 1895, a race course by 1902 and the first motor cars in 1913.

The train from Durban

On 23 April 1942 a train pulled in carrying 887 Italian internees, part of the wave of Italians London sent south from Abyssinia and Somalia, escorted from Durban harbour by a company of the Rhodesian African Rifles. Two had jumped from the moving train somewhere in South Africa. They were bound for No. 5 Internment Camp, planned for 1,500 people. The historian M. R. Rupiah found what a commission of inquiry made of it in 1943: the guard was 22 men short, the Europeans in charge had kept inmates in conditions that felt like a penal settlement, nobody had organised any recreation, and 31 inmates had escaped.

The chapel they built is the camp’s memorial, but most of the 71 Italians buried in it did not die here. Only five did. The rest died in other camps and towns and were laid here later: 21 in Salisbury, 18 in Gatooma (Kadoma), 16 in Umvuma (Mvuma), and a few in Gwelo, Bulawayo, Chipinga and even Lusaka. The apse was painted during the internment, the aisle paintings, from 1956 and 1957, are credited to the Italian Embassy, and National Museums and Monuments singles out its simulated ceiling. Across the airstrip a plaque on the old cemetery still calls the dead soldiers of the British prison camp of Fort Victoria.

Elephant-back roofs

The modern town keeps fewer stories on show. Mucheke, the oldest township, is known for what the council calls its elephant-back asbestos roofs, and nearby Lake Mutirikwi is where the city’s raw water comes from. The council has been sinking solar boreholes in Mucheke and Rujeko while it looks for the money to raise supply. The Zimbabwe Field Guide’s verdict is that most visitors only stop for fuel, and the Wikivoyage page has little more to say than where the buses stop and the Blue Bird Cafe, with its old film posters and a secondhand shop out the back. For the lake itself see our Lake Mutirikwi page.