The man known to history as Cecil John
Rhodes was born on the 5th of July 1853, in the market-town of Bishop’s Stortford, England. His father was the Reverend Francis Rhodes,
the small town’s curate – he was an older father and was already in his late 40s at
the time of Cecil’s birth. Biographies of Cecil Rhodes’ life uniformly characterize
his father as an iron disciplinarian, whose brevity and gloomy nature was the
stuff of local legend - he was renowned for delivering concise, staccato s
ermons from
the Anglican pulpit at St. Michael’s Church that lasted precisely ten minutes: not a second
more or less. Cecil’s mother was Louisa Peacock, she could not have been a greater contrast from
her husband: where he was thin, tall and sombre, she was short and stout, possessing a cheerful and
loud voice, and was always the convivial centre of parish life. She was the daughter of a successful
Lincolnshire banker, and her brother Anthony was a newly elected Member of Parliament at the
time
of Cecil’s birth. Her marriage to the Reverend Francis Rhodes was certainly one of financial
equals: the Rhodes family were wealthy landowners, with interests in construction, dairy farming,
and tile-making factories and by the close of the 19th century, the Rhodes were in receipt
of rents from more than 1,600 properties. Cecil was the sixth child born to the Rhodes
household and he would be followed by five more. The middle child of a large family, Rhodes
was undoubtedly his mother’s
favourite and with her encouragement, he began to display
wilful tendencies from a young age. The Rhodes’ servant would later recall making a
batch of jam and setting it aside to cool, upon returning to it, she found it had been
eaten – and young Cecil was clearly the culprit. “Cecil – did you eat that jam?” she asked him
and he replied “Yes. I am sorry it is gone, it was very good. Make some more.”, and he walked
away whistling. However, the young Cecil Rhodes also had a more anguished an
d bad-tempered
side: he was frequently solitary and reserved, sometimes exhibiting distressed behaviour,
even crooning and rocking himself to-and-fro. Psychological portraits of the young Cecil
seek to define a childhood with a smothering, indulgent mother and an austere, uncommunicative
father, leaving the middle-child Cecil yearning for a sense of real belonging but ultimately,
Cecil’s childhood was exceptionally stable and privileged, in an England that was uprooting all
amid the tumult
of the Industrial Revolution. Mid-19th century England was a furnace
of innovation and progress where great prosperity and great poverty frequently existed
side-by-side. Sleepy medieval market towns found themselves transformed into smoggy metropolises
by cotton mills and mining. Railways and telegraph lines sprang up across Britain, forging regional
economies together into a national powerhouse. Rhodes’ hometown of Bishop’s Stortford was no
stranger to this brave new world. Its railway, c
ompleted five years before Rhodes’ birth
in 1848, triggered an industrial boom, with the malting industry, agriculture,
coal and timber businesses spawning rank after rank of brick-built back-to-back houses.
Having secured its hold over the neighbouring kingdom of Ireland in the preceding two centuries,
the 19th century saw Great Britain build a network of mercantile colonies across the world, supplying
its domestic industrial base with raw materials, and its emerging middle-class with luxur
y
imports. The Opium Wars, which were fought during Rhodes’ youth, saw the culmination of
British aims to subdue China as a trading rival, and to transform it into a lucrative junior
partner. The British concession of Hong Kong, forced by the Treaty of Nanking at the end
of the first Opium War, was a decade old in 1853. The British East India Company had
operated in India for almost a century by the time of Rhodes’ birth – and British rule
in India would enter a new phase in 1858, with the
foundation of direct British
rule over the entire subcontinent. At the age of nine, Rhodes began attending the
Bishop’s Stortford Grammar School. There was no state education provided to children in
England before the Elementary Education Act of 1870 set up the first board schools – so the
fact that Rhodes’ family could afford to send him to a fee-paying establishment already places
him far above most but Rhodes was a diligent and hard-working student, if not academically
exceptional. How
ever, by his early teenage years, Rhodes began showing symptoms of the recurrent
respiratory problems that would dog him for the rest of his life. Asthma left the young
Rhodes unable to study for long periods, and he was eventually forced to leave
school, finishing his schooling at home under the tutelage of his father. Initially, it
was feared that the boy might be showing early signs of tuberculosis – but Rhodes’ condition
did not worsen. However, it was his poor health, combined with the
comparatively limited
resources of the Rhodes household, that resulted in the decision not to send Cecil
to a public school. This would leave Rhodes with a sense of inferiority amid his upper crust peers
later in life, whose aristocratic families had been able to afford to send them to elite
institutions such as Eton or Winchester. As Rhodes’ education drew to a close in his
mid-teens, he was faced with choosing a career path. Military service was ruled out by his
fragile health, and Mrs.
Rhodes expressed concern about how well Cecil would survive
the ‘rough and tumble’ of public life. The most obvious choice would have been to follow
his father into the Anglican Church – but the young Rhodes favoured a career in the law,
to the mild disapproval of his family. Doubts remained as to Cecil’s academic preparedness
for enrolment at Oxford University – when, in 1870, a letter arrived from one of Cecil’s
older brothers, Herbert. Two years previously, Herbert had left home to begi
n a speculative
venture cultivating cotton in the British Colony of Natal, on the southern-eastern tip
of the continent of Africa. In his letter, Herbert invited the young Rhodes to join him on
the African frontier. This seemed like the ideal tonic for Cecil – the family doctor assured him
that the dry climate would be good for his lungs, and his father hoped that the young, slightly
troubled young man would have the opportunity to ‘find himself’ before his studies at Oxford.
Embarking on
the gap-year trip that would turn into his life’s work, Rhodes left England on the
small sailing bark Eudora for the seventy-two day trip to South Africa. He celebrated his
seventeenth birthday during the voyage, and he disembarked in the port of Durban on 1st
September 1870. The young Rhodes found a colony of galvanized iron buildings and dirt roads – where
White European overseers marshalled teams of Zulu, Khoekhoen and San labourers in fields of sugar
and cotton – watched over by British
redcoats. Before the arrival of Europeans in the 17th
century, the rich lands of southern Africa were inhabited by the Khoekhoen, San and Nguni. These
peoples were distinguished by their occupations: the Khoekhoen were predominantly pastoralists,
whilst the San were nomadic hunter-gatherers. The Nguni, of whom the Zulus were one ethnic
group, had a series of wealthy kingdoms on the eastern coast. The abundant livestock kept by
the Khoekhoen led to an informal trade between Portuguese and D
utch sailing vessels making
their way around the Cape of Good Hope from the 15th century onward. This was formalized
in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch initials VOC, founded a
permanent outpost at Cape Town to act as a way-station for the VOC ships travelling to Dutch
possessions in East Asia. The VOC began settling the land with retiring Company employees - these
corporate settlers were known as ‘farmers’, or ‘boers’ in Dutch. However, relations with
the Khoekho
en as well as the San deteriorated quickly as a struggle for land emerged. The
pastoralist Khoekhoen were viewed by the Dutch settlers as a readily available labour
force. They were violently evicted from their communal lands and either forced to work on
private Dutch plantations, or pushed into the African interior. The San, on the other hand,
were viewed merely as competition and because their hunting traditions made no distinction
between wild animals and Dutch-owned livestock, they were
subject to campaigns of extermination.
Although Company charters officially prohibited the enslavement of the indigenous South Africans,
their traditional ways of life were systematically wiped out, and the Dutch imported large numbers
of enslaved people from elsewhere in their empire. The Dutch-speaking inhabitants of South
Africa increasingly began to think of themselves as ‘Afrikaners’, and they began to
speak a pidgin-language to communicate between themselves and the Khoi-San peoples
– called
‘Afrikaans’, it remains the third most spoken of South Africa’s eleven official languages.
The colony remained profitable but small, up until the French Revolutionary Wars,
which sent shockwaves through the Dutch world. The hammer blow fell in 1795: the Dutch
Republic collapsed under French invasion, and the pro-French Batavian Republic took its
place. This raised the prospect that the Cape Colony would fall into the French orbit – denying
the British access to the only colonial p
ort on the voyage between Great Britain and British
India, potentially even becoming an African outpost for the French navy. Hence, five ships
of the line were dispatched to seize the Cape Colony in the name of King George III. The Dutch
authorities and settlers put up stiff resistance, but the Colony was occupied. When the Dutch
Republic was liberated from French occupation in 1813, it was granted back most of
its colonial possessions. However, the British government had realised South Afr
ica’s
strategic and economic value in the emerging era of global geopolitics. Great Britain would retain
control over South African affairs until 1931. British rule in the Cape Colony brought
significant changes for the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners. Schools and churches were now mandated
to teach and preach exclusively in English, and the new colonial administrators were almost
all drawn from the upper- and upper-middle classes of the British Isles. The resulting hostility
between the inflexi
ble British administration and the Dutch-speaking boers resulted in a large
rapid emigration. The Afrikaner voortrekker pioneers traveled from the coastal territory
of the Cape Colony into the African interior, in a mass migration known as the ‘Great Trek’.
There, they engaged in brutal resource wars against the Xhosa and Zulu inhabitants of the
region, and carved out two independent states, known as the Boer Republics. These were: the
Orange Free State, centered around the Orange River, an
d the Transvaal Republic, beyond the
River Vaal. These states existed under the nominal sovereignty of the British Empire
– but in reality, they were self-governing. A third Boer Republic had been proclaimed in
1839 – when Boer voortrekkers had defeated a Zulu army more than 10,000 strong and proclaimed
the Republic of Natalia on the south-east coast. But the British could not countenance losing
control of its principal port, and they quickly quashed the rising, incorporating it as the Colo
ny
of Natal. Cecil Rhodes would arrive at this port, Durban, in September 1870. And, as we shall see,
an ill-judged attempt to intervene in the affairs of the Boer Republics would spell doom for Rhodes’
political career in two decades’ time. Initially, British policy toward indigenous workers was
little different from the authoritarian VOC, but as the century progressed, some improvements
were made. Britain outlawed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807, and it abolished
slavery altogethe
r in 1833 – but many freedmen found themselves locked into exploitative
‘apprenticeships’ that were periodically renewed. Some limited civil rights were extended to the
Khoekhoen, but the genocidal extermination of the San continued throughout the period,
particularly in Boer regions. Unlike the rigid caste system employed by the VOC,
British law was steadfastly colourblind: laws applied equally to all groups under
British rule, although racially-charged unequal administration of the law wa
s still
common. A homogenous class of mixed-race day wage labourers began to emerge, whose heritage was
of the Khoi-San peoples, imported enslaved people, and European settlers. These were known
as the ‘Cape Coloureds’, and they made up the vast majority of the workers that Cecil
Rhodes would employ in his business ventures. Having disembarked from the Eudora in Durban in
September 1870, Rhodes made his way inland to the Umkomaas Valley in central Natal Colony. There,
his brother Herbert h
ad planted 20 acres of cotton. The American Civil War, beginning in
1861, had interrupted global cotton supplies, and made cotton cultivation elsewhere in the
world far more economically viable. Herbert had arrived late to this prospect, only beginning
his venture in 1868, but American cotton harvests remained poor, and so there was money to be made.
The environs of inland Natal apparently suited Rhodes’ constitution – but the brothers’ business
venture was less than successful: Herbert was
a poor farmer, failing to plant his crops properly,
and, like all of the Colony’s settler farmers, he failed to utilize the agricultural
expertise of the local Xhosa. Nevertheless, this was Rhodes’ first experience of business
- he wrote home to his mother of his optimism, and the belief that cotton would prove to be the
staple of the colony. Rhodes was unusual amongst his peers in his attitude toward his African
employees. Where most colonists considered the indigenous Africans to be litt
le more than
children who were incapable of rational thought, Rhodes wrote of them with a degree of
respect. Rather than ‘laziness’, Rhodes saw ‘independence’ – and he documented his managerial
attempts to provide them with different incentives and disincentives. He believed in the honesty
of his workers and would lend small sums of money to them with little or no interest, saying
that they were “safer than the Bank of England”. But there can be little doubt that Rhodes’ racial
attitudes w
ere formed by a predominantly white society, in which he was the sole beneficiary of
his interactions with the natives. He revels in having “many black attendants”, and his writings
are scattered with slurs. Yet from the beginning, he displayed an unusual brand
of capitalistic egalitarianism, where his ceaseless drive to make money overrode
some of the more absurd axioms of contemporary racial thought. Soon after beginning
work on his brother’s cotton plantation, the Rhodes brothers dined w
ith Captain Loftus
Rolleston, a gentleman diamond prospector. Herbert had accompanied Captain Rolleston on
his last expedition and had even found a few small stones himself, but they were nothing
compared to the large glittering stones which the Captain showed them. Cecil was enthralled
– he wrote that it made his ‘mouth water’. The first diamonds had been discovered in South
Africa three years previously, when in 1867, a 22-carat stone was discovered on the De Kalk
farm on the Orange Rive
r. The diamond trade remained small, with little formal prospecting,
diamonds mostly being traded to Europeans by mixed-race Griqua farmers. But in 1869, a
large diamond weighing 83-carats was purchased from a Griqua for the price of 500 sheep, ten oxen
and a horse. The stone later sold in Britain for £25,000. By the time Cecil Rhodes arrived
in Natal, prospectors were beginning to flood into unincorporated land in search of more
deposits. South Africa’s diamond rush had begun. Having alrea
dy lost his interest in farming,
Herbert left his cotton fields in May of 1871 to pursue diamond prospecting full-time.
The more conscientious Cecil remained in Natal until the autumn, seeing the cotton
harvest diligently through to completion. But the siren call of the stones shown to him by
Captain Rolleston had gripped him utterly – and in September of 1871, after a year managing
his brother’s cotton plantation, Rhodes made the 400-mile trip across the Drakensberg mountain
range to join
his brother in the diamond-fields. Rhodes’ destination was the Colesberg kopje - a
small hill about thirty feet high and two-hundred feet wide, located about seventy miles east of
the confluence of the Orange and Vaal Rivers. The rock that made up the kopje was formed over
100 miles deep within the Earth’s mantle under immense pressures – a veritable crucible of
diamond formation. The diamond-rich slurry was then forced rapidly and explosively
to the surface in a volcanic eruption, cooling
to leave a vertical carrot-shaped
‘pipe’. The upper part of the ‘pipe’, where it had been most exposed to weathering, was soft
and crumbly, and was known as ‘yellow ground’, and it could be easily excavated by hand. Within
the single ‘pipe’ beneath the Colesberg kopje was the mineral wealth that would make the fortunes of
an entire colony. The kopje at Colesberg had only been discovered two months earlier, when Rhodes
was still bringing in the cotton harvest in Natal. It had been found by
a group of Dutch prospectors
on the land belonging to Vooruitzigt farm – which was owned by a pair of brothers named De Beers.
News of the diamond-strike spread quickly, and the site was divided into about 500 tiny claims,
each only 31-feet square. The resulting mine was christened ‘New Rush’. By Rhodes’ arrival in
October, over 5,000 prospectors and labourers had descended upon New Rush, living in a vast squalid
tent encampment that sprawled over the farmland. The physical process of diamo
nd mining was
simple, but brutally hard work. The ‘yellow ground’ had to be smashed up with picks so that
it could be coarsely sieved in large wire frames, and the resulting large pieces removed by
buckets to be further sieved and scraped. Diamonds were discovered at every stage of
this process: straight out of the ground, in the coarse sieves and on the scraping tables.
The overwhelming majority of the manual work was done by landless black labourers, the descendants
of the Khoisan who ha
d been stripped of their ancestral lands under Dutch rule. The
prospectors were mostly White – English, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, American and Turkish
were the chief nationalities – but there were a few Griqua and Khoisan entrepreneurs in the
early period. The raw diamonds would mostly be sold to the more established diamond traders by
the prospectors – but many were covertly bought directly from labourers by unlicensed chancers.
In total, New Rush was producing £50,000-worth of diamonds eve
ry single week – more than
$5m in today’s money. By the time that the New Rush mine was exhausted and shut down in
1914, it would become the largest hand-dug hole in the world – almost 800-feet deep – having
yielded more than 13 million carats of diamonds. The New Rush Mine was in what was known
as ‘Griqualand’ - unincorporated territory between the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics.
The Orange Free State was first to recognise the magnitude of the discovery at the Vooruitzigt
farm. It in
stituted a simple taxation system with informal regulation: no individual or consortium
could own more than two claims, and every claim had to be worked every day. The 19-year old Cecil
Rhodes immediately began wondering what would be possible if this restriction were removed.
By 1873, the British had sent a delegate to the Vooruitzigt farm, and they incorporated the
ramshackle settlement as the town of Kimberley, named for the British Colonial Secretary, the
Earl of Kimberley. After much w
rangling, the Orange Free State was partially compensated for
their loss, but this set the tone for the resource conflicts to come. It cannot be overstated the
degree to which New Rush was the embryo of the future of South Africa – its wealth positioned the
diamond magnates to be the rulers of the colony in less than a decade. Since living conditions were
so squalid, the prospectors frequently slept many men to a tent – and so Rhodes would bunk up with
future Members of the Cape Colony Parl
iament, future Cabinet members and future Prime
Ministers. One future Prime Minister was John Xavier Merriman, also the son of a rural
English curate, with whom Rhodes tented in 1872. In his first few weeks at New Rush, Rhodes made
around £100 per week – but the limits on claim ownership heavily restricted his income. Rhodes
sought partnerships to increase the efficiency of his digging – and his firmest and longest-standing
partner was Charles Rudd. Rudd was nine years Rhodes’ elder, having
been born to a London
shipbuilder in 1844. Like Rhodes, Rudd had come to the Cape Colony for health reasons, cutting short
his university studies. There, he established a merchant network, moving goods to and from
the inland trek-boers. Where Rhodes appears to have had the more free-wheeling imagination and
speculative drive, Rudd was solid, dependable and parsimonious. The combination of the two men would
be the cornerstone of Rhodes’ financial empire. Having established the footings of a
business
empire, Rhodes returned to England in August 1873, leaving his joint operations in the hands of the
capable Charles Rudd. Rhodes initially returned home on receiving word that his mother was
seriously ill – but, upon finding her some way from death’s door, Rhodes turned his attention
back to his lifelong ambition: study at Oxford University. Rhodes was admitted to Oriel College
as a late entrant in October. His career there was fragmentary: at the end of 1873, his mother passed
a
way. Ailing physically and stricken with grief, Rhodes returned to the diamond-fields to throw
himself into work after only one term of study. He would complete his degree with terms taken
piecemeal throughout the 1870s. His academic studies would advance him considerably – but the
social doors which an Oxford degree would unlock were worth immeasurably more to him. Oxford
shaped Rhodes’ worldview – hardening his deep admiration for the British Empire, and admitting
him into the social rank
s of the aristocracy. The advantage of a public-school education would
benefit all of his business and political dealings from then on. Rhodes would say later: "Wherever
you turn your eye—except in science—an Oxford man is at the top of the tree” – and in time,
he would become such a man. Whilst at Oxford, Rhodes was inducted into the Freemasons – a group
which he found surprisingly disillusioning. Whilst he coveted the network of mutual aid amongst the
elite that it represented, from withi
n he found it stuffy, in 1877, he wrote, “I see the wealth and
power they possess the influence they hold and I think over their ceremonies and I wonder that a
large body of men can devote themselves to what at times appear the most ridiculous and absurd
rites without an object and without an end.” Doubtless this would inform his lifelong
desire to found his own secret society. During his spells back at New Rush in between
his terms at Oxford, Rhodes was one of the first to recognise the pr
ecariousness of the diamond
trade. With hundreds of prospectors each with only one or two claims, uncontrolled production risked
flooding the market. Rhodes’ approach was twofold: firstly, diversifying his burgeoning wealth;
and in the long term, seeking to monopolize the diamond-fields in order to restrict
production and maintain high prices through artificial scarcity. In pursuit of the first
goal, Rhodes began investing in infrastructure, such as the Cape Colony’s project to build a
rai
lway to Durban. He and Charles Rudd also purchased a steam-powered ice-making machine
from England, which they assembled at New Rush, keeping miners supplied with cooled drinks and
ice cream. After a successful summer, they sold it for £1,500 – their first large windfall.
As Rhodes had predicted, within a few years of free-for-all diamond mining, prices began
to slump. Not only had the market been flooded, but also the soft ‘yellow ground’ had been mostly
exhausted, giving way to harder ‘blu
e ground’ which had to be broken with machinery or dynamite.
With rising capital costs and falling prices, many miners began to leave the workings, and thus
the restrictions on claim ownership were relaxed – firstly to ten claims per individual, and then
later they were abolished altogether. This was the opportunity Rhodes and Rudd had been waiting for.
They aggressively ploughed their capital into more and more claims, betting that they could outpace
the market with efficiencies of scale.
However, Rhodes and Rudd would have foundered upon the
rocks of financial ruin, were it not for their ability to leverage debt. Instrumental in opening
lines of credit for the New Rush miners was a German of Jewish heritage named Alfred Beit.
Beit had arrived at Kimberley in 1875, sent by an Amsterdam diamond trader – he took to South
Africa like a duck to water. Through his contacts in the German and Dutch banking industries, Beit
was the financial powerhouse behind the rise of the Kimberl
ey Central Diamond Mining Company,
owned by the flamboyant prospector Barney Barnato. Barnato was born Barnet Isaacs in Aldgate, London,
exactly one year before Rhodes in 1852. Barnato’s family were desperately poor, and he scraped a
living prize-fighting, performing in music halls, and begging. When Barnato joined his brother
at the Kimberley mines, treading the same path as Rhodes, he quickly conceived of the same
goal: consolidation of all the mining claims, in order to control supply an
d maintain prices.
In the late 1870s, Barnato and Rhodes would become locked in a titanic struggle for control of the
Kimberley mines – Beit and his banking consortium behind Barnato, and the French Rothschild bankers
behind Rhodes. The deadlock was broken when Beit switched sides to Rhodes’ camp, with Barnato
agreeing to merge with Rhodes’ holdings. Upon the merger of the two companies in 1880, Rhodes,
Rudd and Beit formed a consolidated company that held an unassailable position in the So
uth African
diamond trade. They named it after the owners of the Vooruitzigt farm – De Beers Mining Ltd.
Its rise from behemoth to monopoly was rapid: by 1887, only seven years after its foundation,
De Beers realized Rhodes’ dream by acquiring all diamond mines in South Africa. Fully cartelized,
Rhodes could now artificially restrict diamond production, maintaining high prices in
perpetuity – a monopoly which De Beers retained for more than a century. As Rhodes
expanded his business holdin
gs from a handful of mining claims into a powerful industrial
combine, his sense of what was possible began to expand too. His biographers often point to
a document known as the ‘Confession of Faith’, that he wrote in 1877, as a seed-change
in the scale of Rhodes’ ambition. In it, he lays out the foundational plan for a secret
society, which would extend Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy over the entire world through
a network of closely controlled colonies. The idea for which Rhodes is most r
emembered –
the idea of a British imperial domain that would stretch from ‘Cape to Cairo’, is expressed clearly
in this document for the first time. He writes: “Africa is still lying ready for us it is our
duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we
should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more
of the Anglo-Saxon race; more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the
world possesses.” It
is this vision that he would spend the rest of his life
attempting to implement. Doubtless, this was partly the expression of a giddy youth,
flush with riches from his diamond mining, he was only 24 years of age when
he wrote it. But at the same time, it indicates a serious attempt to engage with the
practicalities of imperial rule. Therefore, it is only natural that Rhodes should have turned his
attention next to the world of colonial politics. The Cape Colony had won ‘responsible governme
nt’
in 1872, whilst Rhodes was still establishing himself as a small-scale diamond prospector.
Rather than a Crown-appointed military governor, most of the civil administration of the Colony was
now undertaken by a Parliament based in Cape Town, which elected a Prime Minister and a Cabinet.
Elections to the House were democratic – but their most interesting feature is that they
were formally colour-blind. The Cape Colony’s 1852 Constitution formally recognised that Black
and mixed-race res
idents of the Cape were “fellow subjects with white men”. Electoral eligibility
was based on a property qualification of £25 annually – known as the ‘£25 vote’. As with
many electoral systems in the 19th century, the franchise excluded all women – but the
property qualification was unusually low, and it applied to Black and White equally - it
even recognised the traditional forms of African land ownership as valid for the purposes of the
franchise. Whilst in practice the Cape Colony’s franc
hise barred more Africans from voting than
it did Whites, it was far more inclusive than almost any other colonial electoral system in
the world - and political participation of Black Africans grew steadily throughout the 1870s. The
political culture of the Cape Colony was markedly liberal compared to the Boer states, where Black
political participation had always been outlawed. The 1870s were a time of unsuccessful
expansionism by the British administration. The British Colonial Secretary
Lord Carnarvon
determined to impose a Confederation on the various Boer and indigenous states, seeking to
bring them all under direct Imperial control, and sideline the liberal Cape Colony Parliament.
To this end, the British High Commission conducted numerous expeditions against both the Boers
to the north of the Colony, and the Nguni peoples in the East. These included a full-scale
invasion of neighbouring Gcalekaland – but the campaign was badly bungled by Prime Minister
Sir Gordon Spri
gg, who insisted on disarming the Cape Colony’s many Black soldiers. Shortly
afterward, the British launched an invasion of Zulu territory. Following a devastating defeat
at Isandlwana at the hands of the Zulu host, the British conducted the famous defence of
Rorke’s Drift, winning a Pyrrhic victory. British attempts to impose suzerainty on the
Transvaal Republic resulted in the First Boer War, during which British Colonial authorities were
comprehensively expelled from their occupation. In
all, Carnarvon’s plans for Confederation
became bogged down in expensive victories and crushing defeats. During the attempts to impose
Confederation, the Cape Colony formally annexed Griqualand West – the region containing New
Rush and Kimberley - and in 1880, the Cape Town Parliament voted to create four new constituencies
to represent its residents. It was one of these, Barkly West, that Rhodes set his sights upon – it
would return him at every election until the end of his life. He was
encouraged in this endeavour
by his riding companion John X. Merriman, himself already a former Cabinet minister
and by now a determined anti-imperialist, having led the opposition to the
Governor’s failed Confederation scheme. Another supporter of Rhodes’ political
ambitions was Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, a Scottish contemporary of Rhodes’ who had
set up a medical practice in Kimberley in 1878. The exact nature of Jameson and Rhodes’
relationship is uncertain but – he is usually described
as Rhodes’ intimate friend,
although many speculate that the two men may have been lovers. Jameson’s medical work
brought him into contact with a wide variety of the region’s political figures, and he
counted both Paul Kruger, the President of the Transvaal Republic and King Lobengula of the
Ndebele people, among his patients. As with all of Rhodes’ close personal relationships,
business and pleasure heavily overlapped. Rhodes was comfortably elected in Barkly West in
1881, and he entered
the Cape Colony Parliament at the age of 28. He cut a highly unorthodox figure
in the House, wearing his Oxford tweeds into the chamber instead of formal dress, and he frequently
forgot or ignored, Parliamentary decorum by referring to the Members directly by their names
rather than their constituencies. The Parliament was recovering from a period of intense political
crisis. Lord Carnarvon’s failed Confederation scheme left the reputation of the body in tatters:
Boer militiamen had resoun
dingly defeated a Redcoat column of equal number at Majuba Hill
only six weeks earlier. But economically, the Cape Colony was booming: the infrastructural
projects that Rhodes and other industrialists had bankrolled – including roads, railways and
telegraph lines – had transformed South Africa into an extractive powerhouse. Kimberley was
the second town in the world to install electric street lighting, with Cape Town following soon
after. The question facing the legislature was how best to
position themselves amid the states of
the region, and the emerging ‘scramble for Africa’ by the Great Powers of Europe. Whilst Rhodes
agreed with the ambition of Carnarvon’s plans, he took issue with its inept execution. One of his
first acts was to join with the anti-imperialist, Dutch-supremacist Afrikaner Bond under
Jan Hofmeyr to lever Prime Minister Sprigg out of office. A rebellion in the British
protectorate of Basutoland, known as the Gun War, had broken out over Sprigg’s enforced
disarmament
policies – and it led to his resignation in 1881. Rhodes’ maiden speech in Parliament was
a broadside against Sprigg’s leadership. It is interesting to note that Rhodes’ allegiances
were wholly flexible – in allying with the anti-imperialist cause, he could advance his own
career, and thereby the cause of imperialism as a whole. Other legislation supported by Rhodes
was a more routine matter of self-interest: the Diamond Trade Act, for example, imposed
de-facto martial law in K
imberley, with colonial police empowered to conduct indiscriminate raids
at any time in pursuit of stolen diamonds. Rhodes argued unsuccessfully that the Act should
contain a provision allowing for thieves to be publicly flogged. Whilst the Parliament
dealt with the fallout from the Basuto Gun War, Rhodes was already planning his next steps in the
interior. He raised the alarm over the foundation of two new independent Boer states – Stellaland
and Goshen – along the northward road into the
African interior, which would, he predicted,
naturally fall into the orbit of the Transvaal Republic, and threaten British expansion. But
these states were much more complex than he had assumed – they were formed by a local indigenous
leader granting territory to a collection of Boer mercenaries. Both Jan Hofmeyr and John Merriman
judged that a raid into this territory risked both destabilizing the indigenous politics of the
region and angering the Transvaal Republic. Here, Rhodes began to
part company with the two
leaders. They were both anti-imperialist, though Hofmeyr was a convinced Dutch-supremacist
and Merriman a liberal. Rhodes was most avowedly imperialist – and he expressed it in a famous
phrase in the Cape Town Parliament, when he stated baldly that the government should seek to
“annex land, not natives”. Rhodes’ project was one of lebensraum, before the concept would reach
wide currency in the 20th century: to clear land of its ‘unproductive’, ‘uncivilized’ inhabit
ants,
for colonisation by, in his words, ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Rhodes’ desire to strike northward
came from a deep-seated conviction that the subjugation of African peoples
was inevitable; the question was merely whether it would be the British or the
Boers who would do so. But fortunately, a diplomatic solution was achieved. The London
Convention of 1884 rewrote the relationship with the Transvaal Republic, keeping Stellaland and
Goshen firmly outside of Transvaal influence, securing the road n
orthward for the British – in
return for scrapping imperial suzerainty over the Republic. The London Convention also empowered
the British to establish a Protectorate over what was referred to as ‘Bechuanaland’. This
huge territory was drawn north of Griqualand West with arbitrary straight borders that paid
no respect to internal political divisions. As this Protectorate was being established, the
industrious Rhodes was invited to his first Cabinet position – that of Treasurer-General –
an
d he set to expanding his business empire into the new Protectorate with gusto. With significant
new investments in Basutoland and Bechuanaland at the periphery of British territory, Rhodes spent
much of the latter half of the 1880s extending his diamond concerns to monopolize the entirety
of the South African diamond trade. But Rhodes no longer viewed this as an end in itself. Rhodes
ensured that the corporate structure of De Beers allowed its profits to be used for a whole range
of activi
ties, such as equipping private troops, building infrastructural projects such
as railways and water infrastructure, and governing land. Rhodes was planning to use
De Beers as an engine for imperialist expansion. Gold was discovered in Witwatersrand in the
Transvaal Republic in 1886, and Rhodes was quick to capitalize on the discovery. The gold
rush in the Transvaal was very different to the diamond rush that had made Rhodes’ own fortune:
the gold was hundreds of feet underground and requir
ed large capital investments and expertise
to mine it. Thus, only a handful of capitalists as wealthy as Rhodes could afford to exploit
the opportunity. The corporate gold rush led to a class of ‘uitlanders’, predominantly British
foreigners, flooding into the territory for the gold rush. Their presence in the Republic, without
citizenship and barely tolerated by the Transvaal authorities, would become a major flashpoint
in the near future. In this venture, Rhodes and his fellow mining entr
epreneurs acquired a new
epithet: the ‘Randlords’, after the gold mines at Witwatersrand. It would also become the name
of the Union of South Africa’s future currency. It is easy to portray Rhodes as a megalomaniacal
genius, with an over-arching plan that he rigidly executed, step by step. But the reality is that
Rhodes was far more reactive, taking advantage of opportunities which presented themselves – fitting
them into his ‘Cape to Cairo’ schema as he went. Since the establishment of the
British
Protectorate over Bechuanaland, Rhodes had been very aware of the friendliness between
the Transvaal Republic and the Northern Ndbele people, also known as the Matabele. The Northern
Ndebele were closely related to the Zulu people, and had been forced out of the Transvaal by the
Dutch trek-boers in the 1830s. They had invaded the land north of the Limpopo River and formed
a powerful and sophisticated Kingdom. In 1870, King Lobengula had ascended to the throne, and
he had smartly e
xploited tensions between the Transvaal and the British Cape Colony
to secure himself. Finally, in 1888, Lobengula signed a treaty with the British,
agreeing to conduct diplomatic relations only with the Cape Colony. This was the opportunity
Rhodes had been waiting for: if he could secure exclusive mining rights from Lobengula, he
could appeal to the British Colonial Office for a Royal Charter. This was the same mechanism
by which the East India Company had justified its colonial project of
land seizures on the
Indian subcontinent – and he could use De Beers, with its permissive trust structure, to arm
and supply a ‘British South Africa Company’. Aware that Boer and British prospectors
and land-seekers were already flocking to Lobengula’s capital at Bulawayo, Rhodes sent his
right-hand man Charles Rudd in person to negotiate with the King. Racing cross-country, Rudd and
the De Beers’ delegation arrived ahead of any major competitors – and the offer they made to
King Lobengul
a could be matched by no other. King Lobengula signed a document that granted the De
Beers consortium exclusive mining rights to all of the gold between the Zambezi and the Limpopo
Rivers, in return for 1,000 breech-loading rifles, a steamboat on the Zambezi River and a stipend
of £100 monthly. But almost immediately, the document came under scrutiny. The terms of the
concession were written in obscure legal English, using concepts of property and land ownership
that were entirely alien to
the Ndebele – and Lobengula had no impartial interpreter or legal
advice beyond the Ndebele-speakers brought along by the De Beers delegation. As well as this, the
concession seemed to imply that the British could acquire land and wealth far beyond mere mining
claims, including logging, water rights and much more. Lobengula sent letters of protestation
officially suspending the terms of the agreement, pending a more thorough investigation of its
meaning. These letters were delivered to Brit
ain personally by two of Lobengula’s headmen – but
the British government’s reply was only one of vague reassurance. Meanwhile, Rhodes seized upon
Rudd’s news with both hands. Travelling to London in March 1889, Rhodes just overlapped with the
returning Ndbele delegation. Amid protests from humanitarian organizations and concerned British
administrators, Rhodes lobbied for a Royal Charter to exploit the far-reaching Rudd Concession.
Like Rhodes, the British government was focused only on be
ating other regional powers – and so,
Rhodes’ British South Africa Company was granted a Royal Charter in August 1889. Its wording
was extremely vague: it set no northern or western boundary on the Company, giving Rhodes
near-limitless authority to exploit the land north of Bechuanaland and west of Portuguese
Mozambique. From a limited concession to exploit mineral wealth, acquired with questionable
legality, Rhodes seized his own personal empire. Returning to the Cape Colony, Rhodes receiv
ed
a rapturous welcome from the Cape’s Afrikaner population. When Sir Gordon Sprigg’s second
ministry foundered in mid-1890, Rhodes was perfectly positioned to assume the premiership.
A muscular advocate for the extension of the Colony’s control over the interior, Rhodes had
based his power on an ideological justification of minority rule. He appealed to both the Cape Dutch
with his patronage of Hofmeyr’s Afrikaner Bond, and to the British colonists and business
interests with his steadfas
t pro-Empire stance. He was made Prime Minister in July 1890, at the
age of just 37. By the time Rhodes became Prime Minister, his preparations for a private invasion
of Mashonaland were already well underway. If there was any doubt as to whether the Rudd
Concession was merely a pretext to acquire the official gloss for an invasion of Lobengula’s
territory, it is belied by the outfitting of this invasion force. The British South Africa Company
equipped 250 colonial policemen with Martini-He
nry rifles, Maxim guns, and a powerful electric
searchlight – as well as brand-new British South Africa Company uniforms. The colonial
police accompanied a column of 62 wagons and civilian colonists deep into Mashonaland, founding
three settlements at Lowveld, Fort Victoria and Fort Charter (now Harare, Zimbabe). In time, these
colonists would follow the path trod by the Dutch in the early years of the Cape Colony: forcibly
dispossessing indigenous people, forcing many into exploitative wag
e labour in the mines and on
farms, and massacring those who were deemed unfit. Administration of Mashonaland was given to
Rhodes’ close personal friend Dr. Leander Jameson. Jameson sought to avoid confrontation
with Lobengula, his old patient – and Lobengula, for his part, sought to restrain the impulse
of his vassals to confront the invasion - but, with more and more White colonists flocking to the
region, confrontation became inevitable. In 1893, hostilities broke out into the open. Thou
gh
Lobengula’s troops were highly trained warriors, the British Maxim machine gun had forever
changed the calculus of colonial warfare. The First Matabele War resulted in more than
10,000 Ndebele dead, with the British South Africa Company losing only a hundred men.
Lobengula died of sickness during the war, and his kingdom disintegrated. The regions of
Mashonaland and Matabeleland would bear a new name: Rhodesia, officially named in 1897.
As Prime Minister, Rhodes took the first serious st
eps towards undermining the Cape
Colony’s colourblind franchise. As we saw earlier, the Cape Colony’s electoral system was unusually
egalitarian for a 19th century colony, with the ‘£25 vote’ and a growing Black electorate.
Attempts to restrict the franchise had been unsuccessful until the mid-1880s, when White
anxiety about Black electoral participation began to tip the balance. Rhodes’ premiership would
introduce two pieces of landmark legislation aimed squarely at turning the vote into a
n exclusive
right of White South Africans. The first of these was the 1892 Franchise and Ballot Act, which
raised the property qualification from £25 to £75. Although this legislation was not directly
‘racial’, its intent was clear. The Parliamentary recess of 1891 to 92 was dominated by explicit
discussions of restricting the Black vote, and Rhodes openly courted the Afrikaner Bond’s
proposals, whose members now publicly referred to Black Cape citizens with exterminationist
language. Rhod
es’ solution of an increase in the property qualification was a neat one: it
neither violated the colourblind language of the 1852 Constitution, nor was it objectionable enough
to alienate all of the Parliament’s progressives. The second franchise-restricting policy was the
Glen Grey Act. Although initially applied only to the small mountainous county of Glen Gray, it
outlined an ‘African policy’ which would prove the model for the future South Africa. It effectively
abolished communal owne
rship altogether in the region, dispossessing a large number of Xhosa,
and instituting a labour tax to force them into White-owned businesses. Although in practice
this added many land-owning African families to the voter rolls, it struck directly at the
foundation of Black participation in politics: communal land ownership. The approach that
Rhodes took to legislation during the Glen Grey Act is a demonstration of his ethos. He
introduced the bill at the very end of the 1894 Parliamentary
session and barraged the house with
an hour-and-forty-minute-long speech containing a huge amount of detail, much of it only finalized
hours before its final drafting. Onlookers were alternately impressed and alienated. What
appears to be a masterful step-forward in Rhodes’ overarching plan, when examined closely, appears
to be ad-hoc and invented on the fly. Rhodes, it seemed, was secure and popular amongst his
supporters, and was also building a powerbase that excluded his opponents among
st progressive
and non-White South Africans. But his ambitions would come to a crashing halt over the issue of
the Transvaal, and the disastrous Jameson Raid. As we have seen throughout Rhodes’ life,
the Transvaal Republic had always been a determined opponent of British
interests in the region. Indeed, its foundation by consciously anti-British
voortrekkers fundamentally shaped its political constitution. We have seen the
Transvaal actively oppose the Cape Colony, first over Confederation
, then over the road
into the interior, as well as over indigenous policy. But the gold strike of 1886 put the
two states into a fatal collision course. The large community of gold-mining uitlanders
posed a serious political problem for the Transvaal government: the 60,000-strong
ex-patriot community outnumbered the 30,000 Boers by two-to-one. Extending the
franchise would mean political oblivion – and so the Transvaal President Paul Kruger denied
citizenship to the uitlanders, and heavily
taxed their mining operations, particularly the sale
of dynamite. Denied political representation and taxed to the hilt, leaders amongst the uitlander
community began covertly planning a coup against Pretoria, the Transvaal’s capital, in 1895.
One such leader was Colonel Frank Rhodes, one of Cecil’s older brothers. Getting wind of these
rumblings of discontent, Rhodes, now 43 years old, saw it as the perfect opportunity to stamp British
authority onto the Transvaal once and for all. He set
his close ally Jameson onto planning an
invasion in support of the uitlander uprising, with the aim of seizing the Johannesburg
goldfields for the Cape. Jameson assembled 400 British South Africa Company Police at the border,
along with Maxim guns, artillery, and several hundred volunteers. However, at the last minute,
political differences arose within the coup plotters’ camp, and the uitlander uprising was
delayed. Jameson, exercising the faulty judgment of a surgeon acting upon inadequa
te information,
elected to invade anyway, hoping to force the uitlanders’ hand. British colonial authorities had
been supportive of intervention into Transvaal, but when they discovered Rhodes’ and Jameson’s
intent to invade without an uitlander coup, they were deeply concerned. They sent telegrams
ordering Jameson to abort - but Jameson’s men had already cut the telegraph wires south.
However, mistakes quickly began to mount. Jameson failed to cut the north-bound telegraph
wires to the Tr
ansvaal capital at Pretoria. The invasion column was quickly bogged down by Boer
roadblocks, who alerted the capital immediately. A large Boer force armed with field guns hurried
down to Doornkop, where Jameson and his colonial police were surrounded. Jameson surrendered in
the early hours of the morning of the 2nd of January 1896. The leaders of the Johannesburg
uitlanders, including Col. Frank Rhodes, were imprisoned and quickly sentenced to death.
A combination of poor preparation, inade
quate intelligence work, and blustering ego from its
planners, had doomed the raid from the start. News of Jameson’s failed raid detonated
like an exploding bomb in Cape Town. As the conspiracy unravelled, Rhodes’ position
as ringleader was entirely untenable, and he resigned the premiership just ten days after
Jameson’s surrender. The British prevailed upon the Transvaal to commute the death sentences
of Rhodes’ brother and the other uitlanders, who were handed over to British authorities
in
exchange for a ransom of £400,000. They were later prosecuted in Britain – each received
15 months imprisonment. These light sentences were informed by the outpouring of British public
jingoism against the Boers, further inflamed by a brazen telegram of congratulations sent from the
German Kaiser Wilhelm II to President Paul Kruger. Rhodes’ biographer Robert Rotberg wonders:
“why a man of crowned glory involved himself so unnecessarily in an exercise as destructive
and treacherous as th
e Jameson Raid.” Rhodes’ dream of uniting all of the White races of South
Africa went up in smoke – he had burned whatever possibility there was of a peaceful incorporation
of the Transvaal into a South African Union. The Jameson Raid was one of the major causes of
the Second Boer War, which broke out after the failure of negotiations in 1899. Both Rhodes
and Alfred Beit were compelled to resign from the board of the British South Africa Company. It
was stripped of its monopoly in Matabelel
and, and it was indemnified by the Transvaal for the
sum of £1 million. As well, Rhodes was the subject of a personal injury lawsuit by one of Jameson’s
volunteers who contended that Rhodes had lied in order to gain men for the adventure. Rhodes
lost and was forced to pay £3,000 of his own money in damages. However, Rhodes came through
the political fallout remarkably unscathed. The House of Commons’ official inquiry into the
Jameson Raid was a whitewash – although it held Rhodes personally
responsible, it made
no recommendations of punishment, and it also glossed over the role of the British South
Africa Company and the British Colonial Office. The Westminster Gazette published a memorable
cartoon of the Parliamentary Committee members wearing blindfolds, seated upon a prostrate
figure of Rhodes, with the legend ‘Well, if we can't safely do anything else, we can all
sit on Rhodes. That won't hurt anyone.’ Much could be forgiven against the backdrop of escalating
tensions wi
th the Afrikaners in the Transvaal and the Ndebele in Rhodesia. By the end of 1896,
Rhodes had recovered much of his political cachet. He would never return to frontline
politics, having permanently lost the goodwill of the Afrikaners, but he never
lost his seat at the Cape Parliament, and he would even quietly re-join the board
of the British South Africa Company in 1899. The expansion of company territory northwards
from the Cape had made it a possibility for the British Empire to potenti
ally control a
corridor of land stretching all the way from the Mediterranean coast in Egypt, down the Nile,
through central Africa and into the Cape Colonies, Rhodes aforementioned dream, of a Cape to
Cairo railway. Railways were a vital aspect of British rule across its larger territories
as until the advent of automobiles and aircraft, it was the only way to transport large numbers of
troops, fuel and commodities across land quickly, as well as being the best way of transporting
resourc
es to the coast to be sent overseas. Therefore the Cairo to Cape railway was
not simply a single project or line, but the gradual linking up of different railway
networks in different colonies over time, indeed the railway is seen by some as one of Rhodes’ evil
machinations to extend his power over Africa, but in truth the attempted realisation of the Cairo
to Cape railway was a gradual, organic process, which became more likely over time as British
rule was extended down through the spine
of Africa from the mid to late 1800s to the 1920s.
Although Cecil Rhodes is largely remembered for his dream of building such a pan continental
railway, like so many of his plans, it was not his brainchild, as various British newspaper
editors, politicians, and colonial officials had proposed such an undertaking for some time.
However with the gradual British expansion northwards from the Cape and Southwards from
Egypt through Sudan, it was now within reach, the only problem being other po
wers such as France
were planning their own east west railway line, connecting its possessions across the continent,
and in 1885 German East Africa, which encompassed much of present day Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania
was established which was now the main obstacle in the realisation of the British railway. Thus,
it would not be until long after Rhodes’ death, with the defeat of Germany in World War One and
the seizure of its colonial possessions that a continuous stretch of territory from No
rthern
to Southern Africa was finally realised. However ironically it would be both World Wars and the
colossal expense in manpower and riches that were needed to fight both conflicts, that would
eventually bankrupt and bring down the British Empire. Thus with Britain greatly weakened after
World War One and further undermined by the Great Depression and World war two, the Cape railway
would never be fully realised, sections of which are still in use today, it stands as a fully
functional
relic of Britain’s Imperial dreams. At the end of 1894, Rhodes and the British
South Africa company held concessions over territories stretching between the Limpopo River
and Lake Tanganyika, originally known as Zambesia after the Zambezi River which flowed through the
middle of it. In May 1895 the name of the region was officially changed by the British South Africa
Company to Rhodesia in honour of Rhodes, following the use of the term by local settlers from 1891
for whom Rhodes was a popu
lar figure. Southern Rhodesia, originally Matabeleland and Mashonaland,
later became Zimbabwe and Northern Rhodesia was renamed Zambia. Rhodes built a sprawling home in
Bulawayo, one of the first permanent buildings built in Rhodesia and which is now used as the
Bulawayo residence for the President of Zimbabwe. Each territory within Rhodesia was administered
separately but with a legislative council in Southern Rhodesia from 1898, made up
of company nominated representatives as well as elec
ted members. The transition to
self-government happened gradually with the increase in the number of white settlers in
the region and the increase in the number of elected officials to the legislative council and
the formal change to a self-governing colony of Britain happened in October 1923 for southern
Rhodesia, while northern Rhodesia became a British Protectorate on 1st April 1924 with Sir
Herbert Stanley appointed as the first governor, ending the jurisdiction of the British
South Af
rica Company in Rhodesia. Although only in his mid-40s, Rhodes had a sense
of his deteriorating health. His premiership had been exhausting, and he spent long periods in the
late-1890s travelling the world, visiting Cairo, Constantinople, Rome and Zanzibar. But he
certainly never relaxed – even from afar, Rhodes was constantly telegraphing
his numerous concurrent ventures: the diamond mines in West Griqualand, the gold
mines of Johannesburg, the fruit farms on the Cape and the administratio
n in both North and
South Rhodesia. Perhaps the last great moment of Rhodes’ career came during the Siege of Kimberley,
during the Second Boer War. The city had always been vulnerable to attack from the Orange Free
State – but instead of abandoning it to its fate, Rhodes instead moved into the city, despite the
protestations of its mayor. Rhodes’ motivation was likely twofold: firstly, to keep the diamond
mines producing, and secondly to force the British to divert military resources in def
ence of his
property. Rhodes would end up trapped in the city, under bombardment by the Boers, for 124 days. In
typical Rhodes fashion, he clashed frequently with the commander of the city’s garrison, repeatedly
publishing military secrets in his newspaper. But Rhodes was doubtless instrumental to the
defence of the town: he organized earthworks, water supplies, and even the production of a
rifled field-gun, nicknamed ‘Long Cecil’. After the town was relieved by a cavalry division,
Kimberl
ey became the site of one of the largest concentration camps of the Second Boer War,
interning Boer civilians and Black refugees. By early 1902, Rhodes’ health was failing badly.
His lungs were ‘barely working at all’, in the words of his long-time physician Dr. Jameson, and
his regular doses of blasting gelatin were helping little. Rhodes retired to a pleasant cottage south
of Muizenburg, overlooking False Bay where he had ridden with John Merriman many years before. He
planned to recupera
te for his final voyage back to the land of his birth, but he would never
recover enough to make the journey. Two months before the Boer surrender at Melrose House in May,
Rhodes passed away at 6pm on 26th March, 1902. His autopsy confirmed his doctors’ fears –
an expanding aneurysm in his chest cavity had compressed his lungs, and eventually
caused the failure of his heart. Rhodes’ persistent respiratory problems, exacerbated by
rich food, endless tobacco and strong alcohol, ended his life
at the age of only 48. His funeral
on which no expense was spared was akin to that of a King, with his body being carried through
the streets of Cape town, before slowly being taken by train to Rhodesia, until his remains
were interred on a rise named World’s View, where his grave remains to this day. There
have been numerous attempts by Zimbabwean politicians to exhume his body and return it
to Britain, however his final resting place is still seen by some as being an important
reminder
of the country’s as well as Africa’s colonial past, which cannot be erased,
and should be remembered warts and all. He left behind him a financial legacy that
was large, but not enormous. Whilst his mining ventures had proved highly lucrative,
Rhodesia had been an expensive misadventure, as had his infrastructural investments.
In total, his estate was worth around £5 million. He had no heirs, and no children. The
trustees of his estate followed his wishes and gave the majority of his wealth
to his beloved
Oxford University, to fund scholarships “for the development of the Anglo Saxon race”. This
uncomfortable legacy still divides public opinion: a public campaign has grown to demand the end
of ‘Rhodes scholarships’, and the divestment of Oriel College from their ongoing association
with the man. Oriel College agreed in 2021 that the statue of Rhodes on the frontage of the
college building was no longer appropriate, but the statue remains in place due to
concerns about the co
st of its removal. A large bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes was erected
in 1934 outside the University of Cape Town. Calls for its removal date back to the 1950s, when
Afrikaner students felt his associations with British imperialism were distasteful. It was
removed in 2015, following years of campaigning by the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ group, headed by
Black South African students. There can be no doubt that Rhodes was the architect of South
African apartheid. The Union of South Africa would unite
all of the South African states in 1910,
finally fulfilling Rhodes’ vision of a united, White nation. The Union would build on
Rhodes’ franchise-restricting legislation, and formally ban Black political participation
in its founding Constitution. It would gradually implement the complete separateness of White and
Black over the first half of the 20th century. The Rhodesian government would remain a British
dominion until 1964, and following its unilateral declaration of independence, would
fight the
15-year-long Bush War against its Black majority. But Rhodes’ racism was of a uniquely modern
variety. As we have seen, Rhodes treated individual Black workers with respect, and
saw Black African leaders as intelligent, rational political actors. Formed by a world of
irrational, frequently self-defeating racism, Rhodes formulated a capitalistic, industrialized
form of racism – which was perfectly capable of respecting Black Africans as individual actors,
whilst engineering the cu
ltural supremacy of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’. As such, he was a precursor
of the pseudoscientific race sciences of the 20th century. Rhodes’ vision for a permanent secret
society, governing Africa from Cape to Cairo, would die with him. But there can be
little doubt that Rhodes’ genius had an enormous impact on the development of South
Africa and the African continent as a whole: unlocking unimaginable mineral wealth
from the soil, developing infrastructure, and plotting a course through chop
py colonial
waters. Yet indigenous Africans were largely locked out from the wealth that his genius
created – and the policies he enacted to achieve his short-term political objectives
sowed a century of misery for the continent. For some, Rhodes’ imperialism was itself a
justifiable end, in and of itself. Basil Williams, Beit Professor of Imperial History at Oxford,
wrote in 1921: “with all his grievous faults, a great man, and that at the root of his
imperialism were qualities that have
done good service to mankind”. But in recent years, writers
have excoriated him as a greedy, violent colonist. Indigenous Canadian writer Julian Brave Noisecat
describes Rhodes as ‘a decidedly terrible man who profited unequivocally from the colonization and
exploitation of African peoples and territories’. Mark Twain summed up the duality of feelings
towards Rhodes when he said: “I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes,
I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake”. W
hat do you think of Cecil Rhodes? Was
he purely greedy and exploitative or was his legacy more nuanced than
this? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime,
thank you very much for watching.
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