Books: 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.