The brutal legacy of Cecil Rhodes

To his contemporaries, Cecil Rhodes was a colossus. Gold and diamond-mining magnate, railway and telegraph entrepreneur, coloniser of swathes of southern Africa, and prime minister of the Cape Colony, in the 1890s he was one of the richest and most famous men in the British empire. He was also widely regarded as a crook and a warmonger, whose fanatical pursuit of colonial expansion had an air, felt British government officials, of “palpable immorality”.

Rudyard Kipling thought he was cosmically brilliant; a king among men. “I admire him,” Mark Twain wrote of Rhodes, not entirely sincerely. “I fully confess it. And when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.” South Africa’s leading novelist, Olive Schreiner, initially thought he was a “man of genius” and counted him a friend. Later, she grew so enraged by his corruption that she excoriated him at a dinner party in front of their fellow guests, banging her head against the table in despair with a force that almost rendered her unconscious. In the House of Commons, Rhodes’s critics denounced him as a liar and a liability – a man whose paramilitary campaigns in the colonies even ardent imperialists found too vicious to be palatable. His defenders countered that it hadn’t cost the British taxpayer a penny.

Today, Rhodes is best known via the appendages of “scholarship” and “must fall”. Campaigns to remove his statue at Oxford University’s Oriel College have become a mainstay of the culture wars over Britain’s imperial history. Pro-statue arguments range from concerns about historic preservation to contextualising Rhodes as simply a product of his time. Some outriders have been moved to defend him as a force for good, as well as bad, whose railways and telegraphs laid the groundwork for modern economic development in Africa. (This was also a defence made at the time by the future prime minister Arthur Balfour; it caused the opposition benches to erupt in laughter.)

But, as William Kelleher Storey notes in this deeply researched biography, Rhodes’s material legacy will be far harder to dismantle than his statues. His most lasting impact is not the scholarship that bears his name, and which has outlived his dreams of expanding the British empire. (Rhodes did not in fact realise his vision of British imperial infrastructure stretching from “Cape to Cairo”; or indeed his dream of bringing Britain and the US into an imperial federation for global “Anglo-Saxon” supremacy, to be achieved via a quasi-masonic secret society.) Rather, it is the enduring damage caused to southern Africa.

As Kelleher Storey argues, Rhodes’s legacies are the material and geographical “constraints placed on freedoms”, which originated in the crushing of rocks, the taking of land, the movement of migrant workers, the raising of capital, and the infrastructure that funnelled wealth and resources away from African people. He sees Rhodes as a “system-builder” in the mould of Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison or Henry Ford – though unique among industrial magnates for his direct involvement in politics – whose work was to create a “social and material disassembly line” to drive southern Africa under white rule.

Rhodes was scornful of men who pursued money for its own sake. The founder of De Beers diamond mining, the Gold Fields mining company and the British South Africa Company (modelled on the East India Company, backed by paramilitary force), he was prone to lambast shareholders at general meetings for their “unimaginative” prosperity. The point, he felt, was for him to channel funds freely between companies with the goal of acquiring more land by any means necessary. His shareholders felt differently.

Rhodes also chastised the British government for its timidity and for getting in the way of his vision of empire. That gunboats might have to be deployed on account of him provoking a diplomatic incident in Angola was, to Rhodes, triflingly insignificant. The British were “the greatest people the world has ever seen”, but they did not know “their strength, their greatness, their destiny”.

Rhodes believed one way to achieve that destiny was a merger with the Belgian Congo. He eagerly sought meetings with King Leopold II, notorious even then for crimes against humanity. “Satan, I tell you that man is Satan,” Rhodes decided, having not got his way. He spent the later years of his life in political disgrace, following the disastrous Jameson Raid in 1895-96. The British operation failed in its aim of inciting an uprising in the Boer-controlled Transvaal, which Rhodes hoped would provide the chance to annex it. In a desperate bid to revive his political career, he flirted, briefly, with Pan-Africanism.

Rhodes was likely homosexual – his friendships with men were described as “absolutely lover-like” by his contemporaries. They have a splendid time riding around the veld on their manly adventures, with outbursts of shockingly violent atrocity. Rhodes hated it when men found wives to marry. At home, he collected busts of Napoleon and phalluses, and instructed visitors bringing female servants to keep them out of his sight.

Kelleher Storey does not dwell on Rhodes’s sexuality, noting the lack of clear-cut evidence in the historical record. There is little on Rhodes’s psychology in general – perhaps a deliberate decision to focus on excavating his material legacy. This is very well done indeed, conveying the sheer physicality of colonisation, the bloody-mindedness, that advanced alongside the casual redrawing of borders as if lines on maps. But I wanted more on how a vicar’s son from Hertfordshire, a quiet and sickly child, came to mine hills into craters, and then, with a monopoly on the world’s diamonds, to reshape a continent. To Rhodes, they were paltry achievements. Often, he said, he was sad when he looked up at the stars and knew that he couldn’t colonise them.

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey is published by Oxford University Press (£30.99) and available from The Observer Shop. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Rischgitz/Getty