A Black, A Briton, A Boer

AGAINST THESE THREE--Stuart Cloete --Houghton Mifflm ($3.50).

The Matabele, a savage offshoot of the Zulu tribe, named their warrior king Lobengula ("He Who Drives Like the Wind"). But by 1880 the fat, short-winded monarch preferred to lie on his bed toying with the stolen diamonds he kept in a couple of kerosene cans, while his wives covered his naked body with gold sovereigns.

Lobengula was a conservative man who liked the old ways best: "making rain" out of goats' entrails, gossiping with his witch doctors, snuffing the air in the royal courtyard, where his dogs gnawed rotting carcasses (of animals, mostly). Sometimes he climbed into his throne (a wheel chair) and dispensed judgment in the good old Matabele way--flinging to the crocodiles a slave who had sipped the royal beer, or impaling an unfaithful wife. He had "a benignant smile" and was popular with his people.

But in the country south of Matabeleland, the old forms were dying fast. The inhabitants of the two principal white territories (Britain's Cape Colony and the independent South African Republic of Dutch-descended Boer farmers) were no longer surrounded by wild Hottentots, Zulus, Bastaards and Griquas. The country was yielding to an influx of foreigners who made treaties with the tribes, drove them into subjection, renamed the old lands, established new laws.

What brought the foreigners to South Africa was the discovery of the world's richest diamond and gold fields. What the new men and the new mines meant to South Africa is the theme of Stuart Cloete's book.

Author Cloete (pronounced clooty) is best known as South Africa's expatriate novelist (The Turning Wheels, The Hill of Doves). But Against These Three is no romance; it is bitter truth and hard fact. As biography, it tells the life stories of three famous South Africans: Lobengula, last King of the Matabele; Stephanus Johannes Paulus ("Oom Paul") Kruger, last President of the South African Republic ; Cecil John Rhodes, uncrowned king of the world of gold and diamonds. As history, it is a dramatic study of the beginnings of a long, drawn-out and bitter struggle for power over the last of the great open spaces.

Gifts & Signatures. Lobengula was the last South African native king to fight for his independence. He ruled a territory as large as Finland, bounded by the Zambezi and the Limpopo Rivers. But even in this large and lonely expanse of grassland he could feel the presence of Portuguese, Germans, British and Boers. These white people sent emissaries to his court bearing gifts of champagne, brandy and sovereigns. Afterwards, they always asked Lobengula if he would kindly sign a piece of paper called a "concession." which permitted them to dig in the ground like children, and to open little stores. Lobengula signed a few concessions; then he got nervous and wrote to ask Queen Victoria if it was a wise thing to do. "It is not wise," she replied, "to put too much power in the hands of the men who come first and to exclude other deserving men. . . ." Rather than reassuring Lobengula, this letter somehow made him more nervous than ever.

But he kept on signing concessions until the mounted police appeared in Matabeleland, "incidents" occurred and blood was shed. Finally the Matabele, armed with short stabbing-spears, hurled themselves against murderous lines of rifles and Maxims. Lobengula wrote his last letter to Queen Victoria: "Your Majesty, what I want to know from you is; why do your people kill me?" Six months later, his bodyguard buried his exhausted, dropsy-wasted body.

"All Red!" The new territory was named Rhodesia, in honor of the man who had planned its conquest. Consumptive son of an English parson, Cecil John Rhodes had come to South Africa for his health, carrying nothing but a Greek lexicon. At first, he commuted between Oxford and Cape Town; he took his seat in the Cape Parliament after he graduated from Oriel College. In Kimberley he built De Beers & Co., history's largest diamond monopoly, and made himself the richest man in the world. But he continued to live in a tin shack and to dream of the uses to which his money might be put.

Tall and broad, with the heavy, prominent features and classical tastes of a Roman emperor, Rhodes also combined the characteristics of an Elizabethan freebooter, a financial tycoon, and a humorless, aoth-Century dictator. "I contend," he said, "that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race." He would lay his big hand on a map of Africa, printed with the colors of many nations, and cry: "I want to see it all red, all red!" He envisioned an Anglo-North American empire that would rule the world: the now famed Rhodes Scholarships were established by him in the hope of training leaders of men. He sighed longingly when he stared up into the sky. "I would annex the planets if I could. I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and so far away."

Men idolized Rhodes, and Rhodes was fanatically loyal to his worshipers (he let the biggest gold deal of his life fall through by racing away to a dying friend). But with nonworshipers, he was utterly cynical. He named his riding horses after the men he had bribed; he "bought" the entire South African press ("There is no reason why one should not be properly reported"). When Irish Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell complained that his divorce had made him unpopular with Roman Catholics, Rhodes exclaimed: "Can't you square the Pope?"

Rhodes acquired much of his fortune by making it fashionable for lovers to buy their sweethearts diamond engagement rings. He himself avoided women. "Is it true," asked Queen Victoria, "that you are a woman hater, Mr. Rhodes?" "How could I hate the sex to which Your Majesty belongs?" Rhodes replied.

Diamonds & Taxes. "This young man is going to give me trouble," said old President Kruger, who knew that, to Rhodes, the Boers' pastoral way of life was as much out of date as Lobengula's. The gulf between the tycoon and the farmer was too wide for bridging. Rhodes admitted to only "a 50% chance that God exists" (a square deal on Rhodes's part, says Author Cloete, since it gave neither God nor Rhodes the controlling interest). But Kruger lived by the Bible. Rhodes was celibate; Kruger had 16 children. Rhodes believed that the world was an egg for his omelette; Kruger believed it was flat -- "with certain minor excep tions such as high mountains."

Kruger was a shrewd horse trader and a grasping man. But diamond-studded Kimberley and gold-booming Johannesburg (which lay in his own territory) horrified him. These mushroom cities swarmed with the world's adventurers, who swam in alcohol and commonly bid up to $100 (plus three cases of champagne) for one night with a prostitute. The invaders also overran the countryside, tapping the rocks with their greedy little prospector's ham mers and dazzling the Boer farmers with sovereigns.

By 1895, foreigners on the Witwatersrand outnumbered Boers 85,000 to 65,000. They also owned half the land and nine-tenths of the assessable property. The more their power increased, the more President Kruger sought to milk them with taxes and curb them with limited franchise; the more he succeeded, the more vengeful they became. As one old Boer summed it up: ''There are two riders but only one horse. . . . The question is which rider is going to sit in front."

Collapse of a Dream. Rhodes had no doubts on this point. In an ill-starred moment he financed and supported the famed "Jameson Raid," in which a band of armed adventurers invaded the South African Republic. The Raid failed miserably. But it shocked the world. For Rhodes, the failure of Jameson's Raid was a catastrophe. The British Government repudiated him; he resigned from the Cape Parliament, of which he was Prime Minister. His dream of all Africa as a British colony collapsed, and along with it his plans for a "secret society" of wealth and brains that would rule the world. When, in 1899, Anglo-Boer hatred flared up again into active warfare, Rhodes was a broken man. He died less than three years later.

Kruger led his handful of men against thousands of British regulars for six months, then made a desperate trip to Europe in search of aid. He died in Switzerland in 1904, and it was left to mere youths such as Smuts, Botha and Hertzog to build and shape today's Anglo-Boer Dominion of South Africa.

But Lobengula, Kruger, Rhodes--these three men are still Africa. A few miles from the site of the palace which was Lobengula's only monument stands one of the many statues of Rhodes, staring toward the north ("My hinterland," he called it). Kruger's frock-coated figure stands in dry, hot Pretoria: at his wife's request, the sculptor has left his top hat hollow, so that it will collect rain for the birds.

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