THE MANGWE PASS MONUMENT

 This monument was erected by the Bulalima-Mangwe Road Council, to honour the memory of those who, headed by Robert Moffat in 1854, paved the way to Rhodesia during the last century. Graves dating back to 1873 are to be found nearby in the old Mangwe Cemetery and ruins of Lee's Castle are also to be found. Lee was the agent for Mzilikazi circa 1870.

 This memorial was unveiled on July 18th, 1954, by Sir Robert Tredgold, C.M.G., Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia, great-grandson of Robert Moffat.

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The diary of Edwin Clarke, A police officer in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), 1906

Edwin Clarke abandoned his comfortable, middle-classed life as the son of a bank manager to become a mounted trooper in the British South African Police (BSAC) in Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe in 1901.

When he died in 1955, Clarke left behind a unique handwritten diary of his service, which is published here over 110 years later. Vivid diary entries bring to life a cast of characters: gold prospectors, legendary farmers and settlers telling yarns around a camp fire at night, friendly African chiefs, and Clarke and his fellow police officers bringing criminals to justice.

For the first time, read his account of horseback safari across miles of unspoiled African landscape in rural Matabeleland; stalking and hunting big game; illness, brutality and tragic death; all part of his fascinating account of the daily life of a colonial police officer in a remote African district in 1906.

At the time he began this diary, Edwin Gulliver Clarke was 22, and had three years’ service as a trooper in the British South Africa Police BSAP). Clarke came from an middle-class English background: the son of a bank manager from Aylesbury, he joined the 21st Lancers in 1900 during the Boer War, and was discharged as medically unfit less than a year later, most likely in Cape Town. He applied to join the BSAP, and attested as a trooper for an initial three-year period in November 1901, aged 18, with the regimental number 245. He signed on for another two years in 1904, when he was serving in Gwanda, and another two-and-a- half years in November 1906, in Bulawayo. However, Clarke bought himself out just seven months later, leaving the service in June 1907.
 
After Rhodesia it seems that Clarke emigrated to Canada in around 1910, living in Calgary, where he married, and soldiered part-time in the 19th Alberta Dragoons militia regiment; at some point he was joined in Canada by one of his younger brothers, Arthur. On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, both brothers joined Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and embarked for Europe in October 1914 with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Edwin Clarke was then 31 years old, while Arthur was 23. Arthur was killed in France six months later, and a third brother, Cecil, died in Flanders in 1917.

In 1915 Edwin Clarke transferred to Lord Strathcona’s Horse, and in 1916 he was given a commission in the British army as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars. Research by the historian Philip Walker shows that Clarke subsequently transferred to the Imperial Camel Corps, serving with them in Palestine and the Western Desert. It is possible that he landed this transfer by citing his experience with camels in Gwanda while serving there with the BSAP.

Following the war Clarke went back to Canada, for a while at least, hunting down draft evaders in the wilds of Manitoba for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His marriage ended and his wife and children moved to the United States. He remarried and eventually returned to the United Kingdom, where after a thouroughly unconvectional life he died in a red-brick semi-detached house in a Southampton suburb, aged 71.

Edwin Clarke's unique journal of a young, British colonial police officer in a remote outpost in southern Africa in the early 1900s. Malaria and its effects are a constant theme in the book. Clarke frequently complains of colds and chills, and throughout this diary he reports himself in bed with fever for about one day in ten. The 27 year old magistrate, Henry Greer, is taken ill with malaria and dies three weeks later, and Greer is the first in a sobering tally of the attrition rate of European settlers through disease, murder, or suicide. A police NCO is reduced to the ranks and burns to death in his bed the following month. James Dalton, an itinerant traveller, turns up at the police camp and begs for food and a bed for the night, before trying to cut his own throat with a pen-knife (“we could see the back of the tongue, but he had missed the jugular...”) and stays in Victoria Falls until he is well to be sent with police escort to the asylum in Pretoria. White, a ganger at the mine, kills himself in his cottage.

An unexpected revelation of the diary is how little of Clarke’s time as a police officer he actually spent on police duties. Apart from several mounted tours of several days apiece around Hwange, his days on dutv seem typically to have been spent parading the native police officers; looking after horses and cleaning his kit; and meeting the trains pulling in at Victoria Falls station. He describes making only one arrest and mentions fewer than a dozen days in court. This apparently left plenty of time to pursue photography and handicrafts, and flirt with young female visitors to Victoria Falls.

Clarke’s use of racist language in his diary is offensive by present day ards, but it accurately reflects the typical attitudes of an early twentieth-century white colonist.