The Matabele Campaign: Being a Narrative of the Campaign in Suppressing the Native Rising in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, 1896

Our lodging was next door to the club buildings, now used as a barrack for Grey’s Scouts, and defended with a small bastion of tin biscuit–cases and sacks filled with earth. By breakfast–time I had investigated Buluwayo.

A red earth flat laid out by ditches, in blocks and streets, over two miles long and half a mile wide. The centre portion of the town well filled with buildings, all single–storeyed, some brick, some tin, some “paper” (i.e. wire–wove, ready–made in England, sent out in pieces), all with verandahs. The more outlying blocks only boasting a house or shanty here and there. Most of the houses built with a view to ultimate extension;e.g. one consisted of, evidently, the scullery, back kitchen, and “offices,” the front to be added later, when better times came round. The gardens, streets, and vacant lots richly sown with broken bottles, meat tins, rags, and paper; scarcely a garden, shrub, or tree in th place. The houses generally, if they are not “Bottle stores” (i.e. public–houses), are either dry–goods stores or mining syndicate offices. Everywhere enterprise and rough elements of civilisation,—not forgetting the liquor branch.

Half a mile southward of the town lies a bush–covered rising ground, on which are a good number of “villas,” with their two or three acres of bush fenced in to form their gardens in the future. At present they are deserted, the owners living in town while the Matabele are about.

In the centre of the town is the market square with its market house—a big brick building which is now used as the main refuge and defence of the town. Round the market house is drawn up a rectangular laager of waggons, built up with sacks full of earth to form a bullet–proof wall. Outside the laager the ground for twenty or thirty yards is rendered impassable by means of “entanglements” of barbed wire and a fence of the same, as well as by a thick sprinkling of broken bottles all over the ground itself.

Up on the roof of the hall is a look–out turret, from which, by touching a button, an observer can at will fire any of the electric mines which have been laid in the various approaches to the market square.

Although most of the people who have houses in Buluwayo are now living in their homes again, there are numbers of families from suburban or outlying farms who are still living in the laager. And at the western end of the town is another smaller laager of waggons round a house, in which a number of Boer farmers, with their families, are living.

We had a very nice house “commandeered” (i.e. taken over by Government at a fair rental), and handed over to us for our use as a dwelling–house, ready supplied with furniture, etc.; and then the offices of one of the gold–mining companies were similarly commandeered and assigned to us for offices. In a very short time we had settled down and were hard at work—and there was lots to do.