In his excellent book, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin tells the story of the early days of a certain section of Zimbabwe:
[I]n 1832, as the [followers of Nxaba, a Ndwandwe chief] fled further north, they came across the Portuguese settlement at Macequece, a gold-trading post and mission station. The Nxaba attacked it, and during the fierce battle the Portuguese ran out of bullets. In desperation, they broke out their boxes of bullion, melted the nuggets over the fire, and poured them into molds to cast bullets of gold. I had always been fascinated by that story when I was growing up. Imagine that, casting the bullets out of the gold that was your most precious possession? Literally using your riches to save your lives. And I used to think about the bodies of those Nxaba warriors felled in the bush, with gold bullets lodged in their flesh. And whenever I read in the press the phrase a silver bullet, or a golden bullet, to solve some problem, I thought of those Nxaba warriors, those Nxaba corpses, lying on the riverbank. And the fact that the golden bullets used by the Portuguese didn’t turn out to be golden bullets in a problem-solving way, after all. The Portuguese ran out of gunpowder, and the Nxaba killed them all
Do I actually believe this story? Not for a second. If one is under attack, there is no time to make bullets. Besides, if you are firing an 1830 smoothbore, and have powder, small stones will do as well as bullets, but neither will be as accurate or as quick as a bow and arrow or a pike.
But do I think this story of gold bullets was told in old Rhodesia, South Africa, and Mozambique as a warning and a lesson that all the gold in the world would not hold back the inexorable tide of Africa and majority rule?
Absolutely. In fact, I think this story still works very well on that level today.
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