In 1896 - six years after Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company had occupied Mashonaland and three years after its military conquest of Matabeleland - rebellion erupted in Rhodesia and the small white communities retired into laager. The hostilities were bloody and protracted; many lives were lost on both sides. The following year the rebels, outmaneuvered and out-gunned (although not out-numbered), conceded defeat. Rhodes personally negotiated peace with the Ndebele chiefs at the famous Matopos Indabas of 1897, and in due course, less spectacularly but just as conclusively, Mashonaland was also restored to normality. The Company, already embarrassed by the abortive Jameson Raid and by its failure to locate the promised El dorado north of the Limpopo, was obliged to explain this latest and most devastating setback to its plans for the orderly development of the new territory. This it did in its Reports on the Native Disturbances in Rhodesia, 1896-97, compiled by Earl Grey and Hugh Marshall Hole (see back flap) and issued to shareholders in March, 1898. The Reports, published here in facsimile and re-titled The '96 Rebellions, were somewhat hurriedly put together and they tell only the Company's side of the story. Inevitably, therefore, they are neither comprehensive nor wholly accurate. Nevertheless, because much of the text is devoted to first-hand accounts of the fighting, of patrols, escapes and rescues, they have that flavor of drama and immediacy which a later and more considered analysis could not have captured. And, as Dr Beach says in his outstanding Foreword to the reprint edition, they still give us the best single volume on the military aspects of the uprisings. In addition to Dr Beach's Foreword, this edition carries a new Publishers' Introduction and a wealth of eye-catching illustrations, including some which have not previously been published.

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