Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  Many Khoikhoi had retreated with their herds far inland in the sparsely populated region, while those who remained perished from a smallpox epidemic. The deaths of so many of the herders upon whom it relied for food made the company decide to import West African slaves as labourers.

  In 1815 , as a result of the Napoleonic War with France, Britain gained control over the Cape Colony. At that time the colony hosted about sixteen thousand Europeans, mostly Boers (descended from the Dutch), and about the same number of imported West African slaves, as well as several thousand Khoikhoi and San people. In addition to taking over the resources of the colony, Britain inherited its social problems, particularly the simmering conflict between the Boers and Bantu cattle herders in the east, a problem made worse as the century progressed and Zulu raiders drove the Bantu ever farther south, which increased the competition for scarce land and evolved into a complex and continuous struggle between rival peoples. The ongoing conflict resulted in the British Cape Colony expanding its borders in an attempt to bring peace and stability to the region. The continuing migration of the Boer cattle herders culminated in the Great Trek of 1837, in which thousands of them fled the British territory and its laws and regulations. In particular, they sought to escape laws prohibiting the enslavement of imported West Africans and local Khoikhoi. Slave trading within British territories had been outlawed in 1807, and slave owning was outlawed about twenty-five years later. Without this cheap labour, the Boers faced labour shortages and discipline problems among their workers. The Great Trek led to further violence, as the Boers clashed with the various peoples whose lands they were entering. After much conflict and bloodshed between the British, Boers, Zulu and Bantu, there were three independent republics— the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal—as well as the powerful Zulu kingdom, with a population of around 250,000, ruled by Shaka.

  In 1852–53 Great Britain recognized the independence of the Boer republics: the Orange Free State and its population of around twelve thousand, and the Transvaal, with a population of about fifteen thousand. Britain also moved towards limited self-government for the much larger English-speaking Cape Colony, and a very tenuous and fragile peace took hold among the groups of quarrelling peoples. By the 1860s, before the region’s valuable minerals had been discovered, the republics’ economies were pastoral, and small railways had begun to be constructed in the western Cape and Natal. All travel to and from the interior was still done on foot or by ox cart or horse.

  The economic products of the region included wool, wine, cereal grains, cattle and sheep.

  The political situation, and the fragile peace, became more complicated after diamonds were discovered in 1867. Suddenly there was heightened interest from Belgium in the Congo, and Germany in South-West Africa and East Africa. Then as now, diamonds had enormous potential value, and the rush to find them greatly exacerbated the quarrels over land and the colonies’ ill-defined borders. The main discoveries occurred in regions not clearly within the jurisdiction of either the Cape Colony or the two Boer republics and, not surprisingly, were quickly claimed by all three governments. (The original diamond hunters proclaimed yet another local republic, which was soon annexed to the Cape Colony.) The imperialist “race for Africa” was beginning—a volatile and changing period, ideally suited to opportunists, and a time for crafty, canny and unscrupulous entrepreneurs to thrive. Luck, heady success and the intoxicating creed of imperialism fuelled the fervour and provided the justification for activities that in other times might have led to self-doubt.

  2

  IN 1870, THE YEAR IN WHICH THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY ceded its territory to the new nation of Canada, Cecil Rhodes spent seventy-two days aboard a creaking and aging sailing ship cruising south from England, past the equator and to the Cape Colony. The young man disembarked in Durban to find that his unreliable older brother, Herbert, was off adventuring in the interior with a band of diamond seekers. Left on his own, Rhodes set off for his brother’s farm in the Umkomaas Valley and began to learn about farming before Herbert returned. He built a small cabin and readied the fields for plowing, using Zulu day labourers. When Herbert returned, he and Cecil worked together for a few months, but Herbert departed again the following spring and left Cecil to take care of the fall harvest in 1871.

  An astute observer of trends, Cecil, still only seventeen years old, realized that the cotton boom was drawing to a close and decided to join Herbert on his diamond claim in Colesberg Kopje, a region later renamed Kimberley, after the British secretary of state for the colonies. He set off on the 650-kilometre trek in October with high hopes, which were soon dashed. His pony died during the journey, and Cecil struggled on foot for the entire gruelling distance, plodding from dawn to dusk for about twenty kilometres a day under the crushing weight of his supplies. He arrived in November at the squalid sprawl of the new mining community, then on its way to becoming the second-largest settlement in southern Africa. For a youth used to the middle-class amenities of England, it must have been an eye-opening experience.

  Thousands of recent arrivals dwelt in the blasting heat without running water or sanitation. One traveller described “dust so thick that the sufferer fears to remove it lest the raising of it may aggravate the evil, and of flies so numerous that one hardly dares to slaughter them by ordinary means lest their dead bodies should be noisome.” Hot winds swirled the dust into great clouds that covered everything so “that it would seem that the solid surface of the earth had risen diluted into the air . . . In Kimberley and its surrounding nothing was pretty.” The inhabitants, more than half of them black Africans, toiled in appalling conditions and were housed in corrugated iron sheds or dirty canvas tents that were crammed together in makeshift rows. The workers sustained themselves on rancid meat and butter and wilted vegetables. “It is like an immense number of ant-heaps covered with black ants, as thick as can be,” Rhodes wrote in a letter to his mother; “the latter represented by human beings; when you understand that there are about 600 claims on the kopje [small hill], and each claim is generally split into four, and on each bit there are about six blacks and whites working, it gives a total of about ten thousand working every day on a piece of ground 180 yards by 220.”

  Prospectors from a multitude of nations crowded the pit.

  They were tough customers, certainly not the genteel, educated middle-class individuals that Rhodes was accustomed to. (Rhodes was a “gentleman,” in the terminology of the day, though he did not yet possess a gentleman’s education.) Many of the assorted hangers-on were veterans of mining booms from around the world: tradesmen, vagabonds, shady merchants, cattle dealers, thieves, whores and gamblers. Meanwhile, most of the physical labour was done by thousands of transient Bantu labourers who were earning money to buy cattle or wives or guns before returning to their homelands. Drunkenness and gambling were the chief pastimes in the rowdy community, but apparently it suited Rhodes. He settled in, assumed responsibility for one of his brother’s three claims and got to work. Soon his ne’er-do-well brother was off again, back to the cotton farm, apparently uninterested in the tedium and drudgery of life at the mines, leaving the now eighteen-year-old Cecil in charge.

  The younger brother prospered, digging his pit ever deeper and sifting though the dirt to gain about a hundred pounds of diamonds each week. When Herbert returned some months later, with another brother in tow, he informed Cecil that he had sold the cotton farm. He was astounded at Cecil’s progress and at his force of will. Even when he was in a violent dispute with a much older prospector whose claim encroached on his a little, Cecil showed no signs of backing down. He had learned how to hire and fire workers, grade the diamonds, haul the “pay dirt,” fend off interlopers and deal with unscrupulous diamond brokers. “Cecil seems to have done wonderfully well as regards the diamonds,” Herbert reported home. Around this time, Cecil also suffered his first heart attack, and he spent some weeks recovering.

  One of the many legends about Cecil Rhodes’
s life before his rise to the pinnacle of riches and fame (or infamy, as some would have it) has the young Rhodes gazing down into the cavernous pit of the Kimberley diamond mine. His companion, seeing his far-off, distracted look, reputedly asks: “What do you see here?”

  Without taking his eyes off the scene, “with a slow sweep of his hand, Rhodes answers with the single word: ‘Power.’”

  Portraits and photographs of Africa’s greatest merchant king do not dwell on the sickly teenager who arrived to hustle a living from the diamond fields. They focus instead on the staid, heavy and ponderous mask of authority and respectability that he assumed not many years later. In his most famous formal photograph, he looks tired, world-weary. His flaccid face sags, and with the bags under his eyes he does not at all resemble the strong-featured adventurer apparent in the statues.

  Overall, this portrait gives the appearance of a benign uncle: chubby, bland and unnoteworthy, like any number of anonymous middle managers, functionaries or agents of the era. But the unremarkable appearance concealed an inflexible core of political and social orthodoxy, one that is considered repugnant today. Rhodes was a great believer in the supremacy of the

  Anglo-Saxon race and fervently hoped for a global government founded on that supremacy. One of his old comrades, Dr. Leander Jameson, recalled that Rhodes “was deeply impressed with a belief in the ultimate destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. He dwelt repeatedly on the fact that their great want was new territory fit for the overflow population to settle in permanently, and thus provide markets for the wares of the old country—the workshop of the world.” Rhodes himself declared, “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies.”

  Arrogant, racist and insufferably smug, Rhodes embodied many of the less attractive characteristics of the expanding British Empire. Following many decades of commercial prosperity and increasing free trade in the mid-nineteenth century, when Britain truly was the master of the seas, unchallenged in military supremacy and commercial success after its defeat of Napoleon, chartered monopolies were out of fashion. There was no immediate need for commercial enterprises to be linked to national political and diplomatic interests, and indeed most of these monopolies had disappeared or lost their exalted status by the late nineteenth century. But this era, in which Rhodes grew to manhood, also saw the emergence of an imperialism and nationalism that once again created a fertile environment for the re-establishment of chartered companies as a tool to achieve diplomatic, political and strategic goals by tapping private capital. But now, for the first time, the concept of a racial hierarchy, derived from the philosophy known as social Darwinism, provided the justification for Europe’s subjugation of non-European peoples.

  Rhodes had been inundated with this potent cocktail of nationalism, racism and imperialism from an early age. He firmly believed that the extension of British rule throughout the world would be in “the best interests of humanity.” While recovering from his first heart attack in Kimberley in 1872, Rhodes read Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, a perversion and extrapolation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, wherein Reade espoused the concept of racial superiority: certain races were innately superior to others, and through survival of the fittest they would come to dominate. Repulsive, anachronistic and foolish as these notions now seem, Rhodes was inspired by these and similar ideas that flowed freely in his time, and he in turn was an inspiration for others with his speeches. Although these views were not accepted by everyone, they were certainly part of mainstream thought and public discourse.

  Britain’s trade and economy were linked through colonies around the world, went the argument, and they needed common goals and objectives to strengthen their ties. Nationalism and racism were linked with imperialism to justify the continued expansion and the governance of non-English-speaking peoples. Efforts to strengthen the relationship between the mother country and the British-dominated colonies became popular. In Cecil Rhodes: The Anatomy of Empire, John Marlowe writes: “The ideological concept of race, which was the basis of unity between the ‘white’ colonies and the mother country, was easily up-graded into the concept of racial superiority in order to provide justification for Anglo-Saxon rule over ‘backward’ peoples.” The political notions of “painting the map red”—after the colour commonly used on maps to show territories under the sway of the British Empire—and assuming the “white man’s burden” with respect to subject peoples became wildly popular among the British. The trajectory of Rhodes’s career more or less matches the three decades during which this doctrine of imperialism was ascendant. Rhodes himself came to be one of the popular faces of this movement.

  3

  CECIL RHODES WAS ALREADY BECOMING QUITE wealthy by mid-1872. He worked constantly and pursued very few other interests, apart from a weekly dinner and gathering with some of the more educated citizens of Kimberley. He felt keenly his lack of formal education, viewing it as a sort of character flaw that needed to be rectified. In the meantime, he worked and saved. He made one trip away from the diamond mine, an extensive tour of the surrounding land by ox cart, since there were no real roads at the time. But even this jaunt was not exclusively for pleasure: Rhodes was always searching for new business opportunities and, perhaps without knowing it at the time, laying the foundation of a grand vision for the entire territory. He purchased a farm in the nearby Republic of the Transvaal, hired some black African labourers to work it and entered into a partnership with a friend named Charles Rudd, whom he had met in Kimberley. They pooled their resources to buy out Rhodes’s brother Herbert and gain his diamond claims for themselves. Herbert lacked the dedication to do the hard, monotonous work necessary to succeed at diamond mining and headed north for adventure. Cecil, however, plodded on with his new partner. They bought claims in Kimberley, improved them and sold them at a profit, and then invested all their profits in less expensive claims at the nearby De Beers mine, named after the Dutch farmer on whose land the mine was located. The duo was shrewd and hard-working, starting numerous businesses and then selling them when they had become profitable.

  In mid-1873 Cecil left his business operations in Rudd’s hands and sailed back to England to enroll at Oriel College, Oxford, to gain the education he coveted and complete the acquisition of his credentials as a gentleman. While studying, he hoped to keep abreast of developments at the mines, but during his first term, his mother died unexpectedly. Devastated by the loss, and suffering another illness of the lungs, Rhodes returned to Kimberley in the spring of 1874 to regain his health and resume making money. Education could wait. He was still only twenty years old. By this time he already dreamed of owning as much of the diamond industry as he could, by buying claims and consolidating them.

  Rhodes returned to Oxford in 1876 and stayed for two years, spending his vacations at Kimberley. Between 1878 and 1881 he was mostly at Kimberley, returning to Oxford for a final term to collect his degree at the age of twenty-eight. Although he was not a scholar but rather a very practical man, at Oxford he learned to dream big, to see life as an enormous canvas, with the possibility to make history. He was also exposed to the beginnings of the populist imperialist fervour that was then sweeping the land, particularly the dream of a Cape-to-Cairo corridor of British influence, an idea that would later become his passion. This dream motivated him to make even more money as a means of realizing his goal. Rhodes’s Oxford education also gave him confidence in his decision making and secured his status as a gentleman rather than as just another money grubber, if a successful one. He learned to socialize with gentlemen and perhaps to use or dominate gentlemen, to understand their motivations and their foibles. Rhodes also observed the power that his money brought him. “The Oxford system,” he wrote, “in its most finished form looks very unpractical, yet, wherever you turn your eye, except in science, an Oxford man is at the top of the tree.” His love of Oxford University, and the
life purpose he believed he had gained from that institution, remained with him his entire life.

  Around this time Rhodes wrote a paper expressing his budding ideas, which were similar to those gaining popularity in Britain. “I contend,” he wrote, “that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory provides for the birth of more of the English race, who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to which, the absorption of the greater part of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars.” By the time he had graduated, many of his philosophical ideas about the world and its relation to the British Empire had crystallized: one should, he thought, work for “the furtherance of the British Empire, the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, the recovery of the United States of America, the making of the Anglo-Saxon race into but one Empire.” It was the first written expression of what historian John Marlowe called Rhodes’s “queer mixture of intellectual immaturity and practical genius,” a sort of nationalism with pseudo-scientific race theories as its foundation. His ever-increasing wealth, Rhodes believed, would be the means of acting on these philosophies and dreams.

  During these years, the settlement of Kimberley changed.

  The streets were paved, the ramshackle tent city was replaced with more permanent structures, and law and order were smoothing the rough edges of the chaotic settlement. Some miners and citizens even had families. After years of sinking all of their profits into buying up claims on the De Beers mine, which at first seemed to be less profitable than the Kimberley mine, Rhodes and Rudd now owned a substantial portion of the mine. The easy top soil was dug down, revealing the harder blue earth underneath, and the days of small claims worked by hand were ending. Large amounts of capital were needed to purchase the expensive machinery that would be capable of digging into the harder earth. The two partners decided to take on other partners and to continue buying as many claims as they could.