Other historical information (Trivia)
First white child born in
Bulawayo
Nada Burnham (May 1894 – May 19, 1896), daughter of the celebrated
American scout Frederick Russell Burnham, was the first white child born
in Bulawayo and died of fever and starvation during the Siege of
Bulawayo in the Second Matabele War. She was buried in the Pioneer
Cemetery, plot #144, in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Nada
is the Zulu word for lily and she was named after the heroine in Sir H.
Rider Haggard’s Zulu tale, Nada the Lily (1892). Three of Haggard's
books are posthumously dedicated to her: The Wizard (1896), Elissa: The
Doom of Zimbabwe (1899), and Black Heart and White Heart: A Zulu Idyll
(1900). Haggard's dedication reads: To the Memory of the Child: Nada
Burnham, who "bound all to her" and, while her father cut his way
through the hordes of the Ingobo Regiment, perished of the hardships of
war at Buluwayo on 19 May 1896, I dedicate these tales—and more
particularly the last, that of a Faith which triumphed over savagery and
death.
The birth of the first white child is a widely used concept to mark the
establishment of a European colony in the New World, especially in the
historiography of the United States. In Texas, the birth of the first
white child is recorded in local histories on the county level.