Rhodes, Cecil

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RHODES, CECIL

RHODES, CECIL (1853–1902), British mining magnate, politician, and imperialist.

Cecil John Rhodes was born in Hertfordshire and brought up in modest circumstances as the son of an English clergyman. He migrated from Britain in 1870 to join his farmer brother, Herbert, in South Africa, a part of the British Empire about which he knew virtually nothing. After little more than a year in rural Natal, he moved on to the mineral fields of the northern Cape town of Kimberley, where diamonds had been discovered in 1867. A confident and grasping figure, Rhodes thrived in the coarse and edgy environment of early industrial colonial capitalism, advancing from being a speculative digger to forming the De Beers Mining Company and De Beers Consolidated Mines in the 1880s.

By the end of a decade of ruthless acquisitions, Rhodes and his mining associates controlled over 90 percent of world diamond production. In the course of making his pile from the Kimberley monopoly, he acquired a buccaneering business reputation that he was subsequently never able to shake off. Rhodes's ambitions as a mining magnate did not stop there. Following the discovery of gold on the Witwaters-rand, he soon acquired a stake in the new gold mines of the Transvaal, establishing the Gold Fields of South Africa Company in the late 1880s and forging ever-closer ties with influential members of the London financial elite, such as Lord Nathan Rothschild (1840–1915).

A perpetually scheming figure, obsessed with asserting his influence over Southern African affairs, Rhodes lost no time in hitching his rising financial wealth to political ambition, assiduously using that wealth to cultivate favor and preferment. Within three years of being elected to the Cape colonial parliament at the age of twenty-seven, he had wormed his way into the Cabinet. By 1890, this formidable embodiment of imperial capitalism had become prime minister of the Cape Colony, a vaulting politician determined to dash creeping German and Transvaal Boer influence in the region, and bent upon keeping open a great road to the north for a further burst of British territorial expansion.

To cap it all, Rhodes secured a royal charter for the predatory operations of his British South Africa Company (BSAC), giving him virtually unfettered rights of land acquisition and plunder northward from the Limpopo to well beyond the Zambezi river. In the early 1890s, his company troops and agents either swindled or blasted their way through African resistance and laid the foundations for the exploitation of the colony he named, with customary modesty, Rhodesia. Viewed largely as his personal fiefdom, the settler territories were left to a notably unsavory and callous administration.

An imperialist with towering faith in his own powers, Rhodes declared repeatedly that he valued wealth not for its own sake but for the idealism and strength it gave him to extend the British Empire. In this, however, he finally overreached himself in the mid-1890s. An armed plot that he sponsored to overthrow the Transvaal government of Paul Kruger (1825–1904) to force the Boer republicans (with their massive gold deposits) to amalgamate with the British colonies was bungled. The 1895 Jameson Raid was easily squashed by the Boers, leaving Rhodes with egg on his face for having implicated Britain in a grubby conspiracy against an independent white Christian state. The debacle dented him politically, forcing his resignation from the Cape premiership as well as from the board of his own BSAC.

Slinking off to Rhodesia, Rhodes regained his forceful company influence there and threw himself into imposing colonial authority, advancing settler interests, and dreaming of building a railway from the Cape to Cairo. He died in 1902 in Muizenberg, South Africa.

At his peak, his huge fortunes from diamond and goldmining made Rhodes one of the world's wealthiest men. Against the background of the "Scramble for Africa," he acted as a freelance titan of capitalist imperialism, a single individual who was decisive in shaping the destiny of Southern Africa and for whom personal gain was indistinguishable from the imperial mission. Rhodes always believed that Britons were divinely chosen for world supremacy, and fantasized that the consummation of their empire would be the recovery and absorption of the United States and the sealing of Anglo-German fraternity. This, he concluded, would end all war. With these beliefs went racial contempt for Africans in Southern Africa. Rhodes's trumpeted 1898 promise of "equal rights for every civilized man south of the Zambesi" had little meaning, given his record of smothering black economic and political rights.

Much of his lavish philanthropic legacy from 1903 was educational, including the endowment of hundreds of Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University to train male students from the white self-governing colonies and America for leadership of the imperial world to which he had devoted himself.