A rare work and something of a collector's item, Eleven Years describes the founding and development of the first permanent white settlement in the land north of the Limpopo river. Thomas Morgan Thomas, together with John Moffat and William Sykes, were appointed by the London Missionary Society in 1859 to establish a mission station at Inyati, among the Matabele of King Mzilikazi. This they did, but the enterprise was not an unqualified success: the missionaries made no evident progress in the spiritual field, and quarreled unceasingly among themselves. Eventually Thomas was obliged to resign from the Society and leave Inyati. Determined to return to Matabeleland, where he was popular with the indigenous people, he wrote this work in order to raise the necessary funds. Eleven Years in Central South Africa became one of the best known books in Britain, and the author came back to the land he loved. This work is one of the earliest dealing with Matabeleland and is particularly valuable for its observations on the customs of the Matabele people, their history prior to the formal Occupation in 1893, and for descriptions of the fauna and flora encountered on his long journey from Cape Town and on his expedition to the Zambesi (Thomas is generally recognised to have been the first white man to reach the central Zambesi from the south)

 

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