Tati Concessions Land
Land and mining concession in the Matabele Kingdom
The Tati Concession was a land and mining concession created in the western borderlands of the Matabele Kingdom. The concession was originally granted by the Matabele King, Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, to Sir John Swinburne in exchange for gold and arms. It was administered by the territory known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate after 1893, but was formally annexed to it by Proclamation Number 2 of 1911 by the High Commissioner of Bechuanaland. It was locally administered by a Justice of the Peace.
The chief town of this region is Francistown, now one of Botswana's major settlements.
Chronology
1864: Gold is discovered by Europeans in Tati River area (Tati Goldfields), then part of the Matabele kingdom.
1870: Concession granted to Sir John Swinburne's London and Limpopo Mining Company.
1880: The concession was revoked for failure to pay the annual fee, and the concession was granted instead to the Northern Light Mining Company, a syndicate formed by Danial Francis, Samuel Howard Edwards (1827–1922) and others. The Northern Light Company was later renamed the Tati Concessions, Ltd.
1893: Tati Land was detached from Matabeleland and placed under the jurisdiction of the British Resident Commissioner of the Bechuanaland Protectorate.
“Tati Concessions Land” enters the record as land and mining concession in the Matabele Kingdom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tati, Concessions and Land can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tati Concessions Land” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.