Rhodes’s imperial drive rested on inflated legends of gold wealth in the Zambezi-Limpopo region

Evidence

The stampede for the spheres of influence that selfdetermining African polities would become after the Berlin Colonial Conference saw the land between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers falling under British colonial domination following the signing of the Rudd Concession (1888). In the provisions of that concession, King Lobengula was deemed to have ceded the territory he ruled over to Cecil John Rhodes, the British imperialist whose vision of British expansion in southern Africa thrived, in part, on “exaggerated accounts about the … legendary riches of Ophir lying between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers … [and] the myth of the Second Rand, which was linked directly to the discovery of rich gold deposits in the Rand in 1886” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, in Raftopoulos & Mlambo, 2009, p. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists, 15

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the mythic-exaggeration pattern (legendary Ophir, Second Rand) that drove colonizing claims to the territory.
• XREF: Echoes the pattern in my reading purpose: settler self-justification built on fabricated resource narratives, similar dynamic to other colonial land grabs.