Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  Rhodes’s plan was similar to the one that had succeeded in his seizure of Lobengula’s kingdom: a staged uprising calling for intervention. His main henchman in this instance was the same Leander Jameson who had led the charge in Rhodesia, and who would again lead a private force to the rescue in the Transvaal; it all would be done simply and cleanly. The British government had considered a similar scheme, but had abandoned it for various reasons, so Rhodes had reason to believe that Britain would not be averse to the operation, once it was complete. However, the raid, an elaborate plot involving journalists, industrialists and government officials, was a complete disaster. Jameson and eight hundred raiders charged into the Transvaal expecting an uprising in their support, but the revolt never materialized and the invaders were surrounded, captured and taken into custody for questioning by Transvaal forces. Though he protested his innocence, Rhodes was forced to resign as prime minister. The charter for his company was nearly revoked, and he paid massive fines. But he was never directly linked to the invasion; all his men remained silent and even went to prison without uttering a word of his direct involvement. Two years later, Rhodes tried for a political comeback but lost by one seat, despite his enormous expenditures and his ownership of much of Cape Town’s “free” press. He then set his eyes on Rhodesia—“his” north, he called it—and spent a lot of time getting railways and telegraphs built and locating and developing mines and other resources.

  The Boer War, when it started in 1899, was more or less inevitable given the glaring and increasing differences between the Boer republics and the Cape Colony, and their struggles for pre-eminance. Rhodes took an active part in the defence of Kimberley and his diamond mine during the conflict that engulfed the entire region. After suffering tens of thousands of deaths, British forces defeated the Boer republics, and eventually the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were amalgamated with Cape Colony into the Union of South Africa.

  Cecil Rhodes spent the remaining few years of his life preoccupied with rebellions in Rhodesia and with his deteriorating health. He was hounded, and probably blackmailed, by a Polish princess named Catherine Radziwill, who forged promissory notes in his name, spread rumours that they were engaged, proposed marriage to him and generally harassed him by following him back and forth from London to Cape Town several times. Eventually, when all her overtures were rebuffed, she accused him of criminal fraud. She apparently possessed documents that Rhodes did not want released to the public, and so managed to obtain large sums of money from him. Radziwill continued to haunt him until his death on March 2 , 1902 , at the age of forty-nine. He died in Cape Town and was buried in Rhodesia.

  The British South Africa Company, however, lived on, although Rhodes’s charismatic optimism had concealed the fact that the company was not profitable. The wars to subjugate the natives and reparations paid to settlers for damaged property consumed vast amounts of its wealth. And, although Rhodesia did contain mineral wealth, it never proved to be the great bonanza that Rhodes and the company’s initial shareholders imagined. Land proved to be the company’s most valuable asset, but controlling it entailed keeping the Africans permanently off of it. For years the company continued to lose money, and for the shareholders it must have been painful to learn that invading and running a country is not an inherently profitable business endeavour. There was, as well, the moral disadvantage of being implicated in human rights abuses on the grossest scale against a subjugated people.

  Nevertheless, the company organized campaigns to encourage the settlement and the sale of its land, and by the First World War the white population—the people who owned all the land in Rhodesia—had reached 31,000. Agricultural production increased dramatically, as did mining production. But the shareholders saw little profit during this time; the costs of running Rhodesia were too high, and maintaining a strong military force to keep native Africans from reclaiming their territory was a very expensive undertaking. The company’s rule in Rhodesia ended in 1923, when the settlers demanded responsible government and were granted their request by the British government.

  Britain also decided that the ownership of all unclaimed land did not reside with the company, as it was no longer the agent of the Crown. The shareholders were, however, paid several million pounds as compensation for the loss of this land.

  7

  BY THE TIME OF RHODES’S DEATH, BRITONS REGARDED his accomplishments with a mixture of distaste and admiration. The Times recorded, “He has done more than any single contemporary to place before the imagination of his countrymen a clear conception of the Imperial destinies of our race, but we wish we could forget the other matters associated with his name.”

  He and other imperialists like him, the newspaper concluded, “provoke a degree of repugnance, sometimes hatred, in exact proportion to the size of their achievements.” To some admirers he was a great visionary, a prophet of imperial expansion and destiny, working tirelessly to expand the British Empire for the benefit of less civilized peoples and achieve his noble dream of a global English-speaking empire, centred in Great Britain, that would bring peace and prosperity to the world. He was “the great white man.” Others, not quite so enamoured, saw his actions in a different light: the man used his considerable wealth and influence to acquire the veneer of legitimacy from a chartered company in order to mount a private invasion of territories in southern and eastern Africa, controlling the media through his ownership of newspapers and his bribery of officials, while his corporate mercenaries toppled governments and paved the way for land to be unlawfully seized from local peoples in order to expand his mining interests and warped neo-colonial dreams.

  Rhodes schemed and behaved like a politician, not a merchant. He acted with the ruthlessness and calculated brutality of a mediaeval warlord. He was a brilliant manipulator and, some would argue, swindler, his actions made noteworthy by his audacity. The legends and myths surrounding him are legion.

  He bought newspaper companies, both secretly and openly, because of his conviction that “the press rules the minds of men.”

  He has been accused of pressuring doctors to suppress information concerning a smallpox epidemic among the African labour force of his diamond mines, believing that this information would disrupt production because labourers would steer clear of the region; and it would, of course, cost money to pay for inoculations—money he did not want to spend. As a result, 751 people died before the disease was finally brought under control. Rhodes used his power and authority in government to support legislation that strengthened mine-owners’ rights and weakened native Africans’ voting and land rights. In the House of Assembly in Cape Town, he made a speech claiming that “the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa.”

  Antony Thomas has characterized Rhodes’s life as a tragic tale of idealistic youth corrupted by the pursuit of power, and it is hard to disagree. Having no family, no wife and few close friends, Rhodes devoted himself to continuous work and scheming, despite having amassed enough wealth to provide for several decades of indulgent living. He seemed to live for the chance to exercise power, never tired of it and consumed large portions of his vast fortune in promoting what he considered to be the greatest cause: the advancement of the British Empire.

  His life, like that of other larger-than-life men, is replete with myths and fantastic stories, and many of his early biographies— Cecil John Rhodes inspired dozens of them—contain variations of his rags-to-riches rise to become one of the wealthiest men in the world by virtue of his hard work and talent. For Rhodes, money was power: the ability to use it to command other men to do his bidding, to fulfill his dreams and ambitions. But he was not a philosopher; he was a man of action, a planner and a doer rather than a thinker, an actor on the ideas of others that he applied to his situation.

  Rhodes’s repulsive beliefs and actions, unlike the near-psychopathic legacy of Jan Coen two centuries earlier, we
re the product of his era, his upbringing and his sudden and early wealth. Certainly he believed in his personal greatness and destiny, in his superiority within his race and his race’s superiority within the human family—a meteoric rise in wealth and power can produce such impressions in a young man—but he also believed he was doing good in the world and a good turn for the people with whom he clashed. Although he did monstrous things, dispossessing people of their land by unscrupulous and sometimes violent means, he believed his cause would result in their eventual betterment. Deluded, and not a particularly deep thinker, he did not believe he was doing evil. Coen, on the other hand, knew he was sowing mischief and doing harm to others, but he did not care, so long as it benefited him, his company and his country—in that order. Rhodes was an arrogant, smug know-it-all who believed the ends justified the means. He had gambled early in life and won big, and was then propelled to greater success by both good timing and the gambles made possible by his impressive initial jackpot. Having always won when he made decisions, he grew to believe that others would be better off if their decisions were also made by him. To those who were killed or displaced by the corporate policies of merchant kings like Rhodes and Coen, their motivations mattered little, but their motivations speak to their character. Rhodes was like a missionary, convinced of the truth of his divine mission; Coen was a bandit and a thug, however fine his clothing and grooming.

  Rhodes was lauded as a hero by many, not only by his company’s colonists in Rhodesia, but also throughout the British Empire. Oxford University bestowed an honorary doctorate on him. When he returned to Cape Town, banners lined the streets proclaiming “Welcome Home Empire Maker,” while newspapers—some of them owned by Rhodes himself—lavished praise on his accomplishments. Rhodes added a great deal of territory to the British Empire through his British South Africa Company, and he made many people a lot of money. During one of his meetings with Queen Victoria, he proudly, perhaps smugly, responded with mock humility to her query about what he had been doing since their previous meeting: “I have added two new provinces to your possessions, Madam, since we last met.” He would no doubt have continued his bloody expansion in Africa, consolidating his gains and pushing farther north, had he not died at the age of forty-nine. Continuous expansion was something he dwelt on. “To think of these stars that you see overhead,” he observed, “these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex other planets if I could; I often think about that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”

  But Rhodes was also despised by many during his lifetime.

  Mark Twain thought that he ought to be hanged. “I admire him,” he quipped. “I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.” Rhodes was accused publicly of bribery, corruption, neglect of duty and “harshness to the natives,” as well as of being “utterly unscrupulous.” Some of his racial ideas, which were popular during his lifetime and politically championed by him during his tenure as prime minister, later found their outlet in the ideologies of the Nazis and of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Rhodes has had a lasting and continuing negative impact on South Africa as well as Zimbabwe and Zambia, the countries of the former Rhodesia, stemming from his early support for the racist policies that tore those countries apart.

  Rhodes’s most enduring positive legacy, perhaps his only positive legacy, was his donation to Oxford University of an enormous sum of money to fund the scholarships known as the Rhodes Scholarships. Rhodes had been meticulously planning his legacy for decades. “What is life worth with no object, no aim?” he wondered as an Oxford student in the 1870s. Like another nineteenth-century titan of industry, Alfred Nobel, who left his vast estate resulting from the invention of dynamite to fund enormously prestigious prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace, Rhodes had been thinking of sponsoring scholarships for many years. He wrote seven different wills during his lifetime, each one refining the details of the distribution of his vast and ever-expanding estate. He provided annual funding for three years to a select number of students from the British colonies of Rhodesia, the Cape Colony, Natal, New South Wales, Tasmania, New Zealand, Newfoundland, Bermuda and Jamaica as well as the Canadian provinces of

  Ontario and Quebec. He also included among the beneficiaries students from the United States, perhaps to further his avowed hope that the nation would eventually be rejoined with Great Britain. And he added as an addendum the inclusion of five German students per year: “The object is that an understanding between the three great Powers will render war impossible and educational relations make the strongest tie.”

  Rhodes had specific criteria regarding the eligibility for his prizes, and academic achievement was not foremost. He did not want the beneficiaries to be “merely bookworms.” Rather, he stressed athletic ability as well as nebulous traits such as “fondness for and success in manly outdoor sports such as cricket, football and the like; his qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship, and his exhibition during school days of moral force of character and instincts to lead and to take an interest in his schoolmates, for these latter attributes will be likely in after life to guide him to esteem the performance of public duties as his highest aim.” Many of the altruistic and perhaps even chivalrous characteristics that Rhodes deemed necessary for receipt of one of his scholarships were traits that he did not possess himself. His criteria seem out of line for someone whose own career can be summed up in one word, “unscrupulous”; he would never have qualified for one of his own awards and certainly was aware of it. Was he trying to protect the world from the depredations of others like himself? Or was he so compelled to win at all costs that during his own life his competitiveness negated or dominated his other, moral traits?

  Interestingly, Rhodes also specified that “no student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a Scholarship on account of his race or religious opinions.” He only stipulated that the scholarships go to men. Considering his prominently racist views, indeed his introduction and support of racist policies during his tenure as prime minister of the Cape Colony, this qualification seems unusual. There is evidence that Rhodes’s views had begun to change as he grew older, and perhaps, with no further need for the political support of the Boers in Parliament to further his unification agenda, he abandoned those views that were most dear to the Boers: racial hierarchy and segregation based on skin colour. Near the end of his life, Rhodes described to a journalist his views on human rights. “My motto,” he claimed, “is equal rights for every civilized man south of the Zambezi. What is a civilized man? A man whether white or black, who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property or work, in fact is not a loafer.” Unfortunately, his earlier political support for racist policies had set the entire region on the disastrous path towards the institutionalization of racial hierarchy. Perhaps Rhodes died before he could work towards undoing his earlier policies, if indeed he ever would have done anything about them.

  A conflicted and complicated colossus, Rhodes cast a huge shadow on the history of the era. His varied commercial interests and near-monopoly of the diamond industry made him one of the richest men on earth. He lived a sober and quiet life, never marrying or having flashy affairs, yet he had the pride and arrogance to name a medium-sized country after himself when his company conquered it. Variously lauded and loathed for his ambition, ruthless tactics, belligerence and abuses of other people and cultures, he and his companies brought chaos and upheaval to southern and eastern Africa in ways that have not been resolved today. Through the British South Africa Company, he ruled conquered lands as virtual fiefdoms. He was alternately a charming and charismatic host and orator, and a domineering bully. He inspired great numbers of people into action in his interests, and in what he believed to be the interests of the British Empire. Even his harshest critics conceded that he wasn’t motivated by money for the sake
of conspicuous consumption or display. It was this widespread belief in his higher, more noble motives that caused the actions of his company to be condemned while Rhodes himself seemed to float above the dirty dealings done in his name or at his command.

  As John S. Galbraith has written, “In an age when doubts had begun to intrude as to the permanence of British supremacy, the exploits of Rhodes were a reassurance that the great days were not yet over. He asserted the superiority of Britons, and he extended the empire at no cost to the British taxpayer.”

  Although the assessment of his accomplishments was mixed during his lifetime, he was elevated to near-demigod status by the mid-twentieth century as a tamer of savages and promulgator of “white” culture. Now, however, he is regarded as faintly embarrassing, one of those men whose actions and views are so out of step with contemporary thought that they are best forgotten. But his actions and legacy, and those of the British South Africa Company, can hardly be forgotten in the place where his impact was the greatest: southern Africa.