Cecil Rhodes
Cecil John Rhodes was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He and his British South Africa Company founded the southern African territory of Rhodesia, which the company named after him in 1895. He also devoted much effort to realising his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory. Rhodes set up the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.
The son of a vicar, Rhodes was born in Netteswell House, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. Due to his ill-health, at age sixteen he was sent to South Africa by his family in the hopes the climate might improve his health. At eighteen, he entered the diamond trade at Kimberley in 1871 and with funding from Rothschild & Co, began to systematically buy out and consolidate diamond mines. Over the next two decades, he gained a near-complete monopoly of the world diamond market. In 1888, he founded the diamond company De Beers, which retains its prominence into the 21st century.
Rhodes entered the Cape Parliament at the age of 27 in 1881, and in 1890, he became prime minister. As prime minister, he expropriated land from black Africans with the Glen Grey Act, while also tripling the wealth requirement for voting under the Franchise and Ballot Act, effectively barring black people from taking part in elections. After overseeing the formation of Rhodesia during the early 1890s, he was forced to resign in 1896 after the disastrous Jameson Raid, an unauthorised attack on Paul Kruger's South African Republic. His career never recovered, and after years of ill health and cardiovascular issues, he died in 1902. At his request he was buried at Malindidzimu in what is now Zimbabwe. In his last will, he provided for the establishment of the international Rhodes Scholarship at University of Oxford, the oldest graduate scholarship in the world.
With the rise of international anti-racist movements like Rhodes Must Fall, Rhodes's legacy is a matter of debate. Critics cite his confiscation of land from the black indigenous population of the Cape Colony, and his promotion of false claims that southern African archeological sites such as Great Zimbabwe were built by European civilisations.
Early life
Rhodes was born in 1853 in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, the fourth son and sixth child of the Reverend Francis William Rhodes and his wife, Louisa Peacock.Francis was a Church of England clergyman who served as perpetual curate of Brentwood, Essex, and then as vicar of nearby Bishop's Stortford, where he was known for having never preached a sermon longer than ten minutes. Francis was the eldest son of William Rhodes, a brick manufacturer from Hackney, Middlesex. The family owned significant estates in London's Hackney and Dalston which Cecil would later inherit. The earliest traceable direct ancestor of Cecil Rhodes is James Rhodes of Snape Green, Whitmore, Staffordshire. Francis first wed Elizabeth Sophia Manet of Hampstead in 1833, but she died in 1835, giving birth to their daughter Elizabeth.
Louisa Peacock was one of two daughters of Anthony Taylor Peacock, a Lincolnshire banker, and came from a prominent family. At twenty-eight, she married Rhodes as his second wife on 22 October 1844. Her grandfather, Anthony Peacock, was a large landowner who helped found the Sleaford and Newark bank in 1792. He also sponsored the construction of the Sleaford canal and was one of three commissioners who administered the Lincolnshire Enclosure Acts in the 1790s.
Louisa was described as a warm, cheerful woman and had an especially close relationship with Cecil out of her sons, who was described as a serious and sombre child. In contrast, he had a more distant relationship with his father, owing to the latter's career and advanced age; when he was present, Rhodes described him as coolly pragmatic, interrogating his son's dreams and fancies and encouraging him to rebuild them on "more practical lines." He had three sisters and eight brothers, though two of them died in infancy. His siblings included Frank Rhodes, a British Army officer.
From a young age, he had a close relationship with Sophia, his mother's unmarried sister and his godmother, and spent many vacations at her manor in Sleaford or in the Channel Islands. With her help, his father sent his elder sons to prestigious public schools. However, at the age of nine, Cecil was sent instead to Bishop's Stortford Grammar School for unclear reasons, some speculating it was due to poor health or financial troubles. He was noted by his teachers to be an active but unremarkable pupil.
At the age of sixteen, Rhodes was removed from school by his father, who intended on tutoring him personally in preparation for university. However, not long after, he fell ill. There were worries that he might have contracted tuberculosis, something that had already befallen other members of the family; as treatment, the family doctor recommended a long sea voyage, and his father sent him to Natal, South Africa, where his brother Herbert had received a grant for 200 acres to farm cotton.
South Africa
Arriving in Durban on 1 September 1870, Rhodes lived on money lent to him by Sophia, who had also helped pay for his passage. His brother Herbert informed him via letter that he had left for the diamond fields in the country's interior. Awaiting his brother's return, Rhodes would briefly stay with the Surveyor-General of Natal, Peter Cormac Sutherland, in Pietermaritzburg. From there, he went out to inspect his brother's cotton farm in the Umkomazi valley and found it to be in a state of disrepair, contrary to Herbert's reports to their aunt. By mid-October, Herbert had returned; in recognition of Rhodes' help by bringing new seeds, clearing acres of dense bush, and planting the new crop, he agreed to share the land and profits. Rhodes was often left to run the farm himself, as Herbert would leave for horse-racing and cricket matches in Pietermaritzburg and Richmond. In March 1871, Herbert abandoned the farm once again in favour of the diamond fields, taking the best oxen with him. Without them, the cotton harvest was underwhelming and Rhodes was forced to sell his harvest at well-below expected price.In May 1871, diamonds were found at the Vooruitzigt farm, which was owned by Johannese Nicolaas de Beer and his brother, Diederik Arnoldus. Diamond miners quickly swarmed the site, and by October 1871, an eighteen year old Rhodes would abandon the farm and join his brother at the diamond fields of Kimberley. Here he would supervise the working of his brother's claims and speculated on his behalf, as Herbert had departed for England two weeks after Rhodes' arrival. In January 1872, he had returned to the mining camps with their brother Frank. It was during this time that he met John X. Merriman and Charles Rudd, who would later became his partner in the De Beers Mining Company and the Niger Oil Company.
In July of that year, Rhodes suffered his first heart attack, and could not help dig for almost eight months. When he'd recovered enough to travel, his brothers took him on a long northbound journey by ox-wagon, both to aid Rhodes' health, and to pursue news of gold discovered in the general area. On this journey, Rhodes would also purchase a 3000-acre farm in the Transvaal, which qualified him for voting rights in the Boer republic. By the time they reached their destination at Marabastad, the gold was already washed out, but there were rumours of more gold discovered in the eastern Transvaal. Herbert accordingly sold his diamond claims to Cecil and left to mine gold; the two never saw each other again.
Oxford
In July 1873, Rhodes and his brother Frank left South Africa and sailed for England. There, Rhodes was admitted to Oriel College, Oxford, but stayed for only one term. On 1 November 1873, his mother died and he left to attend the funeral. Soon after his return to Oxford, he caught a severe chill while rowing and the doctors recommended he immediately return to the hot dry climate of Kimberley. By January 1874, he was back in South Africa and would not return to Oxford until 1876.Among Rhodes' Oxford associates were James Rochfort Maguire, later a fellow of All Souls College and a director of the British South Africa Company, and Charles Metcalfe. Due to his university career, Rhodes admired the Oxford tutorial system and was eventually inspired to develop his scholarship scheme: "Wherever you turn your eye—except in science—an Oxford man is at the top of the tree".
Rhodes is said to have been greatly affected by John Ruskin's inaugural lecture at Oxford, which expounded upon the responsibility of the British to rule as a guiding light of civilization, and went so far as to own a longhand copy of the speech. While attending Oriel College, Rhodes became a Freemason in June 1877 and was initiated into the Apollo University Lodge. Though he found their rituals to be frivolous, he continued to be a South African Freemason until his death in 1902. Rhodes would later write of creating a new secret society that worked to advance British interests and rules.
Diamonds and the establishment of De Beers
During his years at Oxford, Rhodes continued to prosper in Kimberley. Before his departure for Oxford, he and C. D. Rudd had moved from the Kimberley Mine to invest in the more costly claims of what was known as old De Beers. After purchasing the land in 1839 from David Danser, a Koranna chief in the area, David Stephanus Fourie, the predecessor to Claudine Fourie-Grosvenor, had allowed the de Beers and various other Afrikaner families to cultivate the land. This region extended from the Modder River via the Vet River up to the Vaal River.In 1874 and 1875, the diamond fields fell into depression, but Rhodes and Rudd were among those who stayed to consolidate their interests. They believed numerous diamonds could be found in the hard blue ground that had been exposed after the softer, yellow layer near the surface had been worked away. At the same time, the question on how to remove all the water flooding the mines became more pressing; Rhodes and Rudd were able to obtain a contract to pump water out of the three main mines. Upon Rhodes' return from his first term at Oxford, he lived with Robert Dundas Graham, who later became a mining partner with Rudd and Rhodes.
On 13 March 1888, Rhodes and Rudd launched De Beers Consolidated Mines after the amalgamation of several individual claims and with the funding of N.M. Rothschild & Sons. With £200,000 of capital, or $28.5 million today, the company owned the largest interest in the mine. Rhodes was named secretary and chairman of De Beers at the company's founding in 1888. Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes and his brother spent the next seventeen years buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area, and in 1890, their monopoly over the world's diamond supply would be sealed through a strategic partnership with the London-based Diamond Syndicate; all parties agreed to maintain high prices.
During the 1880s, Cape vineyards were devastated by a phylloxera epidemic and the diseased vineyards had to be dug up and replanted, leading farmers to seek alternatives to wine. In 1892, Rhodes financed The Pioneer Fruit Growing Company at Nooitgedacht, a venture created by Harry Pickstone, an Englishman with growing fruit in California.
Meanwhile, the shipping magnate Percy Molteno had just undertaken the first successful refrigerated export to Europe. In 1896, after consulting with Molteno, Rhodes began to pay more attention to export fruit farming and bought farms in Groot Drakenstein, Wellington and Stellenbosch. A year later, he bought Rhone and Boschendal and commissioned Sir Herbert Baker to build him a cottage there. The successful operation soon expanded into Rhodes Fruit Farms, and formed a cornerstone of the modern-day Cape fruit industry.