This paper examines quantification adopted by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) in its portrayal of native peoples in annual reports. In its colonization and administration of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), through a royal charter, the British Crown outsourced government to the BSAC, a private-sector, for-profit company. The royal charter imposed non-economic, public-benefit responsibilities on the company, including duties for advancing the native peoples’ interests. The research analyzes annual-report narratives referencing native peoples extracted from a continuous collection of the BSAC’s first 29 annual reports over a 35-year period, 1889–1924. The analysis focusses on the BSAC’s quantification of the natives, their deaths, their health and their livestock, supplemented by analyzing the BSAC’s use of rhetorical framing and the rhetoric of silence in its portrayal of native peoples. The BSAC mobilized quantification rhetoric to demonstrate delivery of its responsibilities/duties to advance the native peoples’ interests. Quantification dehumanized the native peoples, sanitizing their deaths in service of the company’s profitability, for the London audience for the BSAC’s annual reports. The BSAC silenced the supposed beneficiaries’ voices, the native peoples. The findings highlight how the BSAC used supposedly neutral annual reports as an instrument to mask its exploitation of the colony’s native population. The paper contributes to an understanding of how colonialists used accounting as an instrument to promulgate colonial propaganda and ambitions and to mask the means by which they achieved their objectives.

本文研究了英国南非公司 (BSAC) 在年度报告中对土著人民的描述所采用的量化方法。在对南罗得西亚（今津巴布韦）的殖民和管理过程中，英国王室通过皇家特许状将政府外包给私营营利性公司 BSAC。皇家宪章对公司规定了非经济的、公益性的责任，包括促进土著人民利益的责任。该研究分析了从 BSAC 在 1889 年至 1924 年 35 年间连续收集的前 29 份年度报告中提取的参考土著人民的年度报告叙述。该分析侧重于 BSAC 对当地人、他们的死亡、他们的健康和他们的牲畜的量化，通过分析 BSAC 在其对土著人民的描绘中使用修辞框架和沉默修辞进行补充。BSAC 动员量化言论来展示其责任/义务的交付，以促进土著人民的利益。量化使当地人失去人性，为公司的盈利能力服务，为伦敦观众净化他们的死亡，以获取 BSAC 的年度报告。BSAC 压制了所谓的受益者，即原住民的声音。调查结果强调了 BSAC 如何使用所谓的中立年度报告作为掩盖其对殖民地土著人口的剥削的工具。