Who was Cecil Rhodes?

UNTIL TEN years ago Cecil Rhodes was just one white British imperialist among many. Then, in 2015, Chumani Maxwele, a young black South African, gave a “poo shower” to Rhodes’s statue at the University of Cape Town, built on land Rhodes bequeathed. In doing so Mr Maxwele set off a global campaign called “Rhodes Must Fall”. The Cape Town statue did come down but others, notably one at Oriel College, Oxford, remain standing.

For many campaigners, Rhodes has become a symbol of all that was evil about the British Empire. Given his vexed legacy, and the scant understanding most have of what he actually did, Rhodes is a good candidate for a clear-eyed biography. William Kelleher Storey, a professor of history at Millsaps College, Mississippi, has produced just that.

The author is plain from the outset that his subject was a white supremacist and a believer in the greatness of the British Empire. Mr Storey makes no excuses for Rhodes, but notes that bigotry was not a minority sport in his day.

He was born in 1853, the fifth son of a clergyman. Aged 17, he travelled to what is today South Africa, mostly because his older brother, Herbert, was already there. The two started work as farmers but were also quickly drawn into the diamond-mining boom around Kimberley. The accidental death of his swashbuckling brother in 1879 was a bitter blow to Rhodes.

Helped by some dodgy financial trickery, Rhodes went on to establish a diamond monopoly for his company, De Beers, which is still one of the world’s largest producers. He also became a big investor in gold mines in the region. From an early age he was rich enough to buy out business rivals and buy off political foes.

He clearly favoured white over black employees. Black miners were subjected to horribly invasive, demeaning searches once they reached the end of their contracts. Yet, as Mr Storey also notes, his businesses generally paid black miners more than most white miners were earning in Britain at the time.

In 1880 Rhodes decided to enter politics in the British Cape Colony, with the overt goal of protecting his business monopoly and his wealth. He became the Cape’s prime minister in 1890. Black Africans were less badly treated in Rhodes’s Cape colony than in the Boer republics (which practised slavery decades after the British abolished it), or in the Congo Free State ruled by Belgium’s King Leopold II (whose overseers severed the hands of forced labourers who did not harvest enough rubber).

Nonetheless, Rhodes made dreadful, racist political decisions in office. Through dubious deals with native African kings, and helped by troops equipped with Maxim guns, his British South Africa Company managed to take over big chunks of what became Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe). Once again, Rhodes deliberately favoured white farmers in the new colonies, setting strict limits on black ownership of land.

One of Rhodes’s worst mistakes as prime minister was to become too closely involved in provocations against the Boer republic of the Transvaal, culminating in the disastrous Jameson Raid of 1895-96 which attempted to overthrow the government. It foreshadowed the outbreak of the second Boer war just three years later. The subsequent absorption of the Boer republics into South Africa ultimately led to the apartheid system, as the new country gained a critical mass of citizens adamantly opposed to letting any black people vote. The end of the Boer war in 1902 coincided with Rhodes’s death, aged 48.

His bequests were many and munificent. Along with benefactions to Cape Town University, Rhodes gave the huge sum of £100,000 ($500,000 at the time, equivalent to almost $20m today) to Oriel, his old college. He also set up the famous Rhodes scholarships at Oxford University, with the explicit provision in his will that no applicant should be disqualified “on account of his race or religious opinion”. Some of the loudest proponents of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign have been Rhodes scholars from Africa.

Rhodes predicted that what he built would last. In a baleful sort of way, Mr Storey says, this is true. Many in the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign link South Africa’s inequities to Rhodes’s racially restrictive policies. The African National Congress’s Freedom Charter of 1955 “did not mention him by name, but it amounted to nothing less than a call for the rooting out of the legacy of Cecil Rhodes”, since it was his “colonialist achievements that presented so many obstacles to those who sought a country based on equality, including equal access to land, mines and housing”. Rhodes believed his reputation would remain “fresh with the praise of posterity”. Today it carries a whiff of faeces. ■