Rhodes, Cecil John

Rhodes, Cecil John (b. 5 July 1853, d. 26 Mar. 1902). British Imperialist Born in Bishop Stortford, Hertfordshire (UK), he went to South Africa to work on his brother's cotton farm in Natal in 1870. He returned to study at Oxford in 1873, from where he graduated in 1881, while he used his vacations in South Africa to dig in the diamond fields with increasing success. By 1880 he was able to found the De Beers Mining Company, which in 1888 expanded to become De Beers Consolidated Mining Company. At the same time, his growing familiarity with the prosperity and beauty of the Afrikaner-dominated Transvaal made him one of the prime movers towards a Federation of South Africa under British sovereignty. Elected to the Cape legislature in 1880, he secured the annexation of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) to the British Crown in 1884–5. To secure control and mineral rights in Matabeleland (now Zimbabwe), his agents secured a treaty with the Ndebele King Lobengula.

On 13 July 1889 he founded the British South Africa Company, which subsequently administered and colonized the territory named Southern Rhodesia in his honour in 1898. As Prime Minister of the Cape (1890–6), he carried out local government reforms and ended some forms of racial discrimination. However, he had to resign following his encouragement of the disastrous Jameson Raid, when his friend Leander Starr Jameson (b. 1838, d. 1917) unsuccessfully tried to trigger an uprising in the Transvaal to establish British sovereignty over it. This venture destroyed the coalition between Afrikaners and English-speakers upon which his support had rested, and destroyed his chances of renewed political leadership. He subsequently divided his time between the management of his affairs in Southern Rhodesia and the Cape. He supported the South African War, hoping for subsequent reconciliation between English-speakers and Afrikaners once British sovereignty had been established in all South Africa. The trustees of his will, in which he bequeathed his vast fortune to further the imperialist cause, established the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships for scholars with outstanding intellectual and leadership qualities to study at Oxford for two years.