This story began in the first half of the 19th century in the middle of the hot savanna, where the state of Zimbabwe is now spread. Then tumultuous events took place in South Africa associated with the expansion of the rule of the Zulu under the leadership of the legendary leader Chaka.
Numerous tribes of the Black Continent fought with the Portuguese, British, Boers, but more often and most willingly - with each other.
The Zulu, coming to new lands, often massacred all men and boys, so that many tribes fled from them, using, in turn, the same tactics. This "domino effect" was very widespread and led not only to large-scale resettlements, but also to the consolidation of states located even quite far from the center of events.
One of the best commanders of Chaka, Mzilikazi, with his Matabele clan moved westward, seizing villages and spreading terror. However, after being defeated in the war with the Boers of the Transvaal in 1837, the Matabele retreated to the mountainous territory lying between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Having subdued the local tribes by force, they founded the new state of Matabeleland.
In 1868, King Lobengula became the ruler of the Matabele, replacing his father on the throne, famous for exorbitant cruelty and considered the greatest military leader in South Africa after Chaka. Lobengula, of course, did not fit the definition of an "enlightened sovereign", but nevertheless, in his midst he was known as a rather peaceful person who appreciated the "joys of life."
According to the surviving descriptions, Lobengula was tall and powerful in build, weighed about 120 kg, ate mainly beef and millet beer, and had more than twenty wives.
And behind him was a shadow followed by a man who later played an important role in the history of the king's treasures. John Jacobe, the royal secretary, was an outstanding personality. The half-breed, who inherited the "white" blood from the shipwrecked European, was thrown into the street by his mother as a child.
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On the streets of Johannesburg, he was picked up by missionaries and sent to an orphanage. The clever, fair-skinned boy liked Pastor Esselen, who took him with him to Europe in order to give spiritual education. John later tried not to remember his years at the Dutch seminary. However, during his scams, he sometimes presented himself as the pastor of an Ethiopian church.
After long wanderings in Africa, during which Jacobe sold diamonds, was engaged in petty fraud and spent a couple of times in prison, he ended up in Matabeleland. The cunning and enterprising young man managed to present Lobengula with all his virtues: fluency in English and Dutch, several African dialects, knowledge of literacy, numeracy and basic economic and diplomatic norms. The king needed a man capable of negotiating with the Europeans, who were actively exploring Africa at that time.
The rich land ruled by Lobengula has always attracted Europeans. They were willing to pay in gold for certain privileges in the extraction of minerals. And for some time now, in Bulawayo - that was the name of the capital, where the king had a residence of several huts - there were frequent white traders, "Ingles", as the natives called them. They brought rich gifts to the king, and in return asked to be allowed to move freely around the country and to mine gold anywhere. Moreover, they offered Lobengule to give his country altogether under the protection of the powerful English queen.
The uninvited guests presented themselves as envoys of Cecil John Rhodes, allegedly the viceroy of Queen Victoria in South Africa. In reality, Rhodes was a well-connected adventurer who traveled to the Black Continent with the determination to cash in on diamond speculation and succeeded in doing so.
On March 13, 1888, Cecil Rhodes and his partner Charles Rudd founded the famous De Beers diamond company. It was Rhodes' intention to seize and colonize the Matabele lands, famous for their rich mineral resources and excellent climate. Therefore, over and over again he sent his negotiators to Lobengula.
The king felt that the matter was unclean, but at the same time he understood that he would not be able to resist the insistence of the British for a long time. It was only about the price at which he had to hand over his property. And in October 1888 Lobengula signed an agreement according to which Rhodes and Rudd acquired full rights to extract all minerals in Matabeleland. In return, the king received a thousand rifles, a military boat and a monthly maintenance of £ 100.
Soon, having figured it out, Lobengula began to protest and tried to terminate the contract. In vain. Two years later, the king received a gracious letter from Queen Victoria. It said that the resettlement of white colonists began in Matabela, and the British South African Company was instructed to maintain order in this country, create an administration, police and military guards, build railways, lay telegraph lines, and monitor trade.
Violent construction began. Aboriginal arable land and meadows were destroyed. The cattle were doomed to death, and the population - sometimes voluntarily, and sometimes by force - was involved in construction work.
Now Lobengula thought only about how to keep his personal wealth from being plundered. And the fact that he was fabulously rich was not in doubt. To store only a small part of his treasures, he ordered two massive safes in Europe. A good rent from diamond mining firms flocked to the chief's treasury. The monarch himself inherited from his ancestors a decent supply of expensive ivory, which he tripled during his reign. There were many rough diamonds and precious jewelry.
In February 1893, Lobengula gathered a large detachment, about one and a half thousand people, consisting of soldiers and slaves. With their help, he loaded all his wealth into three dozen vans and went north-west of his capital, presumably into the mountains in the territory of modern Angola, where the slaves buried bags of wealth.
To hide all traces of the excavation, a series of explosions were made. All the trees in the area were burned, and the stones were uprooted. The area was sown with corn to erase all possible landmarks. And for greater reliability, the tribal sorcerer, who is also the king's personal healer, enchanted the treasure so that no stranger could find it.
When all the work was completed and it was possible to return back, a detachment of fighters, waiting for the slaves behind the pass, interrupted everyone who could indicate the place of the treasure. Only four knew the place where the treasure was buried. It was Lobengula himself, his brother, sorcerer healer and secretary John Jacobs.
Soon after his return, an incident that seemed at first curious happened. Between the English settlements of Tuli and Victoria, 10 km of telegraph cable was stolen - the aborigines used copper wire as decoration. The perpetrators from the Mashon tribe were quickly found, but when they returned the cable, they were allowed to buy off the prison with cattle.
Everything would be fine, but from time immemorial the mashona were vassals of the matabele and could not transfer cattle without the permission of the king. Lobengula sent his soldiers to teach a neighboring tribe a lesson, but during the execution they went too far and killed several whites. The so-called Matabel war began.
And although the Matabele possessed a thousand guns and a lot of cartridges, they did not know how to use them. They did not shoot at the target, but straight up, hoping that in this way they summon the spirits to their side. As a result, the white settlers completely took control of the country. Matabeleland became part of the colonial empire of Rhodes, which was named Rhodesia.
Six months after the bloody burial of the Lobengula treasure, the British besieged Bulawayo, defeated the king's troops and burned everything here to the ground. But among the burning huts, they could not find legendary treasures. The king himself fled, he was pursued to the very Zambezi River. But the rainy season began, and the British cavalry got stuck in the mud.
Lobengula, along with his entourage, left the pursuers on foot. They were broken physically and mentally. His brother was killed in a skirmish with whites. Then smallpox began to mow the fugitives, from which the sorcerer also died. In January 1894, Lobengula himself died - either from smallpox, or from some kind of poison.
Of all those who were in the clearing with treasures, only John Jacobs survived. Smallpox did not touch him either. He surrendered to the British, went to prison, but they did not judge him, but was sent to the Transvaal as a political refugee.
In 1906, when the wars in southern Africa died down, Jacobs, eking out a miserable existence in South Africa, decided to gather a group of adventurers in order to find the treasures of his former boss. At the border, they were detained and taken to the governor of the province of Balovale, who interrogated Jacobs with passion. The governor did not believe in the tale of the desire to return to his native land because of oppressive nostalgia. He himself expelled the treasure hunter from the country and took away his wallet.
But the former secretary did not give up and a couple of years later equipped a new expedition, persuading four German businessmen to go in search of the treasure. Porters were hired. The expedition moved along the Zambezi, but almost from the very beginning it was haunted by setbacks. One by one, almost all of the aboriginal porters died from an unknown disease, then two German businessmen.
Being beside themselves with indignation, Jacobs's companions tried to persuade him, then brutally beat him. But nothing helped - the former secretary did not give out the secret, and the expedition was forced to turn back. On the way back, they were again detained and interrogated. The treasure hunters talked about the unsuccessful search for treasure. Jacobs admitted that he deceived his partners, but he did so only after overhearing their conversation. They allegedly said that they were going to kill their guide when they found the treasure.
The third trip was the last for the stubborn secretary. Even the safari disguise did not help. Jacobs finally turned the power of Zimbabwe against himself, and he was put behind bars for a couple of months. Then he was finally expelled to South Africa without the right to return. There he whiled away his life. I must say, Jacobs lived a lot - 105 years.
But the search for treasures has not stopped since then. In fact, the British South African Company was considered the formal owner of the unidentified treasure, and permission was required to begin the search. And so did a young Englishman named Sydney Wilson. The permit was issued to him on the condition that only a third of the discovered treasures could go to the treasure hunter, the rest - to the company.
Wilson learned about the place of the treasure from the warden of the prison in which Jacobs was once imprisoned. But the caretaker, apparently, lied or did not have accurate information about the treasure at all. One way or another, but after many days of searching, Wilson returned empty-handed.
Meanwhile, the authorities of the German colony in South Africa became interested in the Lobengula treasures. They seriously thought about organizing an expedition to the area where the treasure was supposedly located, collected a rather detailed dossier and documented the story of John Jacobs.
The outbreak of the First World War prevented the Germans from implementing this plan. But it was he who prompted the search for another treasure hunter. This time, Major of the South African Intelligence Service, John Leipoldt. Having received the dossier, he was so carried away by the idea of finding treasures that, before reaching retirement, in 1920 he traveled all over South-West Africa on an old cart and reached Angola. There he was detained and expelled from the country.
The next year, he again set out on the path where the train with the treasures of King Lobengula had once passed. Before the trip, he even found Jacobs to find out the location of the treasure. The mulatto, falling into insanity, gave him some coordinates, sending an ambitious major into the wilds of Angola. Finally, the expedition reached a clearing - the supposed place of burial of the precious cargo. A large stone lay in the center, and some suspicious signs were visible in the trees. Alas, the excavations yielded nothing.
But the stubborn major later returned there again and again. The last time, in 1930, a large group of workers arrived with the major. They dug deep holes. The walls of one of them suddenly collapsed, and several excavators died under the rubble. The rainy season has begun and the cache has not yet been discovered. Leipoldt fell ill with malaria, which almost drove him to the grave, and, cursing everything in the world, soon left the enchanted place forever.
There were also those who assumed that the king's treasury rests with him. In November 1943, Commissioner Huxtable, along with a group of guides, found Lobengula's tomb in a cave on the banks of the Zambezi. And although the marauders had already visited the tomb, it was obvious that it was impossible to hide there those innumerable riches that the whole of Africa was talking about.
King Lobengula's treasures are now valued at over a billion dollars. And it is not difficult to understand why every year crowds of treasure hunters come out to the fields of Angola and former Rhodesia. But the treasure remains hidden in the land of the Black Continent. The spell of the sorcerer-healer still works reliably.
From the book: "The Cursed Places of the Planet." Podolsky Yu. F.