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The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

An African Mystery

The History Press

To Ophir Direct

Rumours were rife a century and a half ago that the unexplored hinterland of Africa hid a fabulous eldorado, a place that had provided the Queen of Sheba with the gold to seduce Solomon. The tale has been immortalised as fiction by that most exotic of African adventure writters, H. Rider Haggard, in his novel King Solomon's Mines. Actually, Rider Haggard had intimate personal experience of the territory we are about to explore. When in 1886 a small army of intrepid treasure hunters went in search of Solomon's mines this master of derring-do would be up there with the best of them. The rest of the best included Indian fighters from the American frontier wars and Baden-Powell who would go on to found the Boy Scout movement.

It is, I think, the most intriguing aspect of this story that the facts are always stranger than the fiction. For example, it is a fact that King Solomon must have acquired the gold he accumulated in vast quantities from somewhere, and it is also fact that the Queen of Sheba was a major gold dealer. Time and the explorations of people like H. Rider Haggard have revealed that the closest country to both of them where huge quantities of gold had been mined was Mashonaland.

It is agreed by all the schools of thought that this gold, sold through foreign traders, paid for the construction of at least five grand cities with massive walls of stone, one of which, a temple-city, is the largest stone structure south of the Pyramids. Aerial surveys carried out in recent times suggest lesser towns and villages of stone number more than 15,000, not counting a mountain 'kingdom' which incorporates one of the largest stone-terraced irrigation systems on our planet. 1

But the history of this lost Zimbabwe culture – even that part of its history of which we can be sure – is a good deal stranger than the fiction which has been based upon it.

The first classical mention we have of King Solomon's eldorado is a guarded reference in the Bible to a place called 'Ophir', somewhere in Africa. Ophir's exact location is never defined. It would have been surprising if it had been because Ophir, according to the Bible, was the source of the gold which Phoenician mariners, hired by Solomon through Hiram of Tyre, brought home from three-year trips round Africa in their new deep-hulled ships. These ships allowed the Phoenicians to navigate oceans of variable tides, winds and currents. They made extraordinary voyages as far afield as England and India. They went to Africa – Phoenician wrecks have been found on the African coasts – but the location of Ophir remained a well-kept secret, probably because it was the Phoenicians' most valuable piece of information regarding trade.

Advance some thousands of years to the rough frontiers of pioneer South Africa where the Dutch have established a garden in the Cape of Good Hope to victual the ships passing round it in the service of the East India trade. In a few years they will push out from these protected gardens into coastal mountains sparsely populated by a strange Asian-looking race of miniature aboriginals, the Khoi. They move these 'Chinese Hottentots' on, plant vineyards, build villages, every one with a church. They read their Bibles every day and believe every word they read, not least of the riches of Solomon and of his seduction by the voluptuous Sheba. It is an interest focused by the possibility that Solomon and Sheba's fabulous fortunes have been mined in their new wilderness homeland. But where?

A century on and these Europeans have become a deeply religious farming community, the Boers. But Britain takes over the now-thriving Cape Colony and the Boers make another break for freedom, this time trekking in their ox wagons in search of 'free' land deep in the hinterland. In Africa by now, 'free' land means land not within the 'sphere of influence' of other Europeans. Well-watered arable land is the Boers' prime objective and this they find alongside the Vaal and the Orange rivers, but the Bible is still their guidebook and Ophir has yet to be discovered. They set up the Boer states of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State and in a few years will discover beds of diamonds and reefs of gold beyond even the dreams of Solomon and Sheba. But the Transvaal cannot be Ophir either because these deposits are found under virgin land. Even so, the Boers sense they are getting warm.

The first real clue that such a place as Ophir – gold mining in the context of an ancient culture – might actually exist reaches them and soon thereafter, the British, through an unlikely source – the German pastor of the so-called Berlin Mission in the Soutspanberg, a mountain area in the Transvaal. Here resided in rather ambivalent circumstances a pioneering missionary, the Revd Alex Merensky (1837–1918) who, like other missionaries of his time, in particular the better known Robert Moffat and his son-in-law David Livingstone, shared the promotion of the Gospel with the advancement of imperialism.

The scramble for the whole of Africa – essentially a scramble for the natural resources of the dark continent – was well advanced by this time. There was a flush of British pink across the far north (Egypt), the north-east and central areas (Kenya and, soon, Uganda and the Sudan) and across all of the south as far north as the Boer republics. The French sphere of influence extended across most of north-west Africa, although there were solid smudges of British pink here as well (Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria). The Belgians controlled Conrad's heart of darkness (the Congo). The Portuguese had substantial domains on the east and west coasts (Angola and Portuguese East Africa). The Germans under Bismarck had interests on both the east and west coasts (South West Africa and Tanganyika) and there was still an east coast outpost of Arabs on Zanzibar island. But the south-central median of Africa – the place where all held the eldorado of Ophir to be – was ruled by a despotic regiment of refugee Zulus, the Matabele, who now stood in the way of any further exploration of the hinterland from the south.

The European powers all realised that if they could join up their territories or spheres of influence by taking over the middle ground, they would control the continent and its resources – which might include Ophir. Efforts to keep each other out often verged on the ridiculous. The British, for example, would build a railway, dubbed 'the Lunatic Line' all the way from the East African coast to the central great lakes and declare a protectorate over Uganda, because they thought the French had their sights set on the headwaters of the Nile in those same great lakes. Control the flow of the Nile and you control Nile-dependent British Egypt, it was argued.

Feeling out the ground for the 'Great Powers' were their missionaries, the harbingers, as I believe they have been rightly described, of imperialism. The British had Robert Moffat studying the Ndebele language at his Kuruman Mission. He would soon become a constant, trusted visitor to the court of the Matabele chiefs, Msilikaze and his son Lobengula. Msilikaze is said to have worshipped Moffat as an individual but never came close to being converted to Christianity. Livingstone monitored the Matabele eastern flank from Bechuanaland, where he too failed to convert almost anybody, and would later move hopefully on to a position of influence on the Zambesi river north of Lobengula's fiefdom.

The missionaries, of course, spent a great deal of time with their Bibles. Ophir for them was gospel. It was just a matter of finding it. Merensky had set up his Berlin Mission on land controlled by the British-hating Boers in the mountains just south of the land of the Matabele; indeed, he overlooked the road, known as the Missionary Road, and the Limpopo river crossing everyone had to take into Matabeleland. The Portuguese, whose colonisation of the east spanned more than five centuries, were also probing the hinterland, which in the light of their long tenure they regarded as a legitimate sphere of influence. The British, noting that the Portuguese had made little progress from the east coast in all that time, saw no immediate threat from them in the race for Ophir. Not so from the Germans, and particularly the Boers, who were known to be working together.

British fears were well founded. Boer agents – tough, bush-wise hunters – had reported that there was gold to be found deep in the hinterland behind the potent and disciplined Matabele military screen. Moreover, the land here did indeed fit the definitions of both Ophir and Shangri-La. Ancient abandoned mines with shafts too narrow for an adult European were found, and the overgrown piles of quartz beside them revealed that they had been worked for gold. These ancient workings were on the edges of a cool plateau offering verdant, well-watered arable and grazing land too high for the tsetse-fly and, most important, thinly populated by a quiescent Matabele slave-tribe, the Shona.

There was also, paradoxically, another lure. Neither the Matabele nor the Shona appeared to have any real knowledge of the value of their gold. Nor were there any legends or even myths of the ancient gold-miners.

Yet for almost a decade before the turn of the nineteenth century the balance of other political concerns in an increasingly volatile Europe confined these European powers to their existing spheres of influence. Confrontation in Africa could provoke the unmentionable but inevitable war in Europe between the aspirant Germans and the established British. For the time being, limited and probably expensive territorial gains in Africa were worth neither the risk nor the cost, even if there was, perhaps, a pot of gold at the end of it all.

This all changed when one Englishman, Cecil John Rhodes, decided he had become rich enough to implement his personal dream of a British Africa from the Cape to Cairo, and the German chancellor, Bismarck, turned 'Kolonialmensch'. But even the arrival of these two extraordinary egos would not of itself have opened up the road to Ophir had not a fateful meeting taken place in 1871 at the Soutspanberg Berlin Mission between Pastor Merensky and an itinerant German 'geologist', Carl Mauch.

This was the same year that Rhodes came to Africa to begin making what in its time would be the largest individual fortune the world had ever known. Mauch was also there to make his fortune from Africa's mineral wealth but until he met Merensky had had little luck. It is also patently obvious that both he and Merensky were furthering their national interests or, more simply, were willing agents of German imperialism.

Rhodes from the beginning was a political and financial voice to be reckoned with. Within a decade he would become a member of the Cape parliament and then its Prime Minister. At no time did he make any secret of his national interests, believing that if Great Britain did not occupy the hinterland by fair means or foul, the Germans would beat them to it.

Such dreams by a single, destitute, individual may seem extraordinary by today's standards but as early as 1872 when his fortune had yet to be made, Rhodes made a will in which he left his imagined estate to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies 'for the extension of the British Empire'. A second will in 1877 provided for 'a secret society, the true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world ... and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the island of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the consolidation of the whole empire, and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.'

The only man even vaguely in his class of imperialist was Bismarck, who took Rhodes seriously and had his Afrika agents keep a careful eye on him.

Rhodes finally found his fortune in the rich diamond mines of the Transvaal at Kimberley. The German imperialist, Ernst von Weber, came there in 1873 and wrote an article urging the colonisation by Germany of the west coast north of the Cape Colony which had a 'superfluity of mineral treasures and could support a population 50 times as large as that of Great Britain'.

In 1874, Bismarck shook Great Britain off the fence and caused all Rhodes' worst dreams to come true when he declared South West Africa a protectorate of Germany. And it did not stop there. Almost the whole of Germany's colonial empire was laid out between 1884 and 1885 and Rhodes and the British became convinced that Germany's next move would be to join forces with the Boers, block the road to the north, then move on Ophir themselves. Rhodes was by then convinced that he knew where Ophir was and he wanted it to be 'Rhodesia' (literally) not some German mining colony.

But again we must step back a few years and try to overhear the conversation which took place at the Berlin Mission between Merensky and Mauch. By 1871 Mauch had been inside Matabele territory twice, ostensibly as a member of a hunting party mounted by the legendary elephant hunter, Henry Hartley. Also by this time the Boers had launched a series of diplomatic forays to the Matabele court at Bulawayo, culminating in a dubious mutual defence 'treaty' in 1847 between the Boer leader, Hendrick Potgeiter, and Matabele indunas which was subsequently ratified by Potgeiter's son, Piet, in 1852.

It is, I think, too much of a coincidence that the Potgeiter family were the political bosses of the Soutspanberg, which commanded the road leading to the best crossing point of the Limpopo river into Matabeleland, and that Pastor Merensky, citizen of the country most opposed to Britain, chose this site for his mission station.

In those early days the only whites Msilikaze would admit were a few favoured missionaries and hunters who rewarded him with part of their bag. The most famous of these were Thomas Baines, who was also a skilled artist, Frederick Courtenay Selous and Henry Hartley, all from Britain; the brothers Posselt from the Boer Republics; and the German, Carl Mauch, who had useful geological skills other than with a rifle, even though hunting was his great passion.

The years from 1865 to 1870 were the golden age of elephant hunting north of the Limpopo river; in fact elephants were all but wiped out on higher ground where an absence of the tsetse-fly allowed pursuit on horseback. Some hunters, like Selous, who also collected 'specimens' for the British Museum of Natural History, took after their prey on foot. Others like Hartley turned their attention to clandestine hunts for another lucrative natural resource – and here Carl Mauch came into his own.

Hartley had first found gold in quartz seams when he hunted in Matabele territory in 1865. Local informants also showed him what they described as old gold workings which had fallen into disuse a decade earlier when the 'Disturbers' (Msilikaze's original refugee Zulu impi) had overrun the country. Back in the Transvaal, Hartley approached the young geologist, Mauch, and invited him to join his hunting expedition planned for the winter of 1867, an invitation which Mauch accepted with alacrity even though he must have known that there were few elephants left and, if he was caught digging for gold, Lobengula might well have him put to death. Lobengula, in fact, had a favoured clifftop for just this purpose.

The group trekked deep into Shona country with little success. As they returned, however, Hartley wounded an elephant and in the course of pursuing it through the bush, he and Mauch stumbled upon several excavations which turned out to be ancient mine shafts. Mauch took out his hammer, examined several specimens and found them to contain gold. Along the Umsweswe and Sebakwe rivers more old diggings were found and Mauch abandoned hunting in favour of prospecting to establish the extent of this ancient eldorado. To keep these activities secret he put it about that, guided by honey birds, he was searching for wild honey to supplement the party's diet.

At the end of that summer on their way out of Matabeleland, Mauch came upon another promising reef in the southern Tati area and the party hurried home to plan an expedition to exploit these more accessible Tati lodes. Negotiations were opened with Lobengula who had that year succeeded his father, Msilikaze, and in December news of the gold 'broke' in the Transvaal Argus, soon to be followed by wildly exaggerated claims in the British press, one of which was entitled 'To Ophir Direct'. But Mauch kept to himself information, indeed an introduction, to an even more exotic secret.

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Excerpted from The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba by Robin Brown-Lowe. Copyright © 2013 Robin Brown-Lowe. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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