| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018382)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018382" |
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| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
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| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| Chapter Nine |
| Inside and Out |
| In which the Seventh Sense brings us face to face with the most powerful feature of our |
| age - and perhaps of any age. |
| The Shangani River runs in a small, green vale through some of Southern Africa's |
| most remarkable nature. It marked, a bit more than a century ago, the northernmost |
| line of the British presence in Africa. If other parts of Queen Victoria's colonial |
| empire crackled with desert harshness, the mountains and hills rolling up from the |
| Cape and down to the Shangani were notable for a pleasing softness, a shading |
| towards pastels in the changeable light of the region. For London's colonial |
| mapmakers, South Africa was a long-eyed treasure, an ideal restocking and transfer |
| point for British ships headed for Lombok, Calcutta, Pondicherry and beyond. "We |
| have lost America," the explorer William Dalrymple wrote Prime Minister William |
| Pitt in 1785. "An halfway house would secure us India, and an Empire to Britain."218 |
| The African Cape would be that halfway house. |
| Following the 1814 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, which gave the British control of the Cape, |
| the English pressed into Africa and found each newly opened district delivered |
| more wealth than the last. A colonialist's dream: Diamonds. Gold. Endless fertile |
| fields. The efficient engines of industry and exploration (and exploitation) of the |
| British African Company chewed easily, profitably, into the land. "Having read the |
| histories of other countries, I saw that expansion was everything," the mining baron |
| Cecil Rhodes wrote in 1875. "The world's surface being limited, the great object of |
| present humanity should be to take as much of the world as it possibly could." 219 |
| And so the British did. |
| If there was a moment that showed the tenor, the power of this ruthless asymmetry |
| most clearly, it was the battle that exploded along the Shangani in 1893. The |
| Matabele, a powerful local tribe had been smash-and-run fighting the colonists for |
| years. The British had tried to charm, pacify and bribe the Matabele and their Chief |
| Lobengula with money and land. None of it worked. They tried threats. That did not |
| work either. "The Chief has had all your messages," an imperial adjutant reported |
| back to Cape Town after another frustrating, pointless discussion in late 1892. "But |
| he has the art, not unknown to civilized despots, of ignoring what is not |
| convenient."220 Or perhaps the instinct of knowing what to avoid. One Boer |
| 218 "We have lost America": David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History, |
| Literature, and the South African Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, |
| 2012), 67 |
| 219 "The world's surface being limited": F. Vershcoyle Cecil Rhodes: His Political |
| Life and Speeches, 1881-1900 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1900) 7 |
| 220 "The Chief has had": Copies and extracts of further correspondence relating to |
| Affairs in Mashonaland, Matabeleand, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Nov 1893, |
| 150 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018382 |
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|
