Edited sentence: By the time he was in his 40s, his diet of traditional millet beer and beef had caused him to be obese according to European visitors.Early in his reign, he had few encounters with white men (although a Christian mission station had been set up at Inyati in 1859), but this changed when gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand within the boundaries of the South African Republic in 1886.His father, Mzilikazi, had around 200 wives.It is said that he weighed about.Lobengula was a big, powerful, man with a soft voice who was well loved by his people but loathed by foreign tribes.Lobengula was aware of the greater firepower of European guns so he mistrusted visitors and discouraged them by maintaining border patrols to monitor all travellers' movements south of Matabeleland