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William Kelleher Storey, "The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with William Kelleher Story, professor of history at Millsaps College. We're discussing his book, the the Vision of Cecil Rhodes. Today, Cecil Rhodes legacy is most notably memorialized by the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. As a businessman and a politician in the British colonies of Southern Africa, Rhodes was an imperialist and white supremacist who transformed the British Empire and subjugated the Africans living in the region. As a strategist, Rhodes transformed many aspects of the African content and the global mining industry. To explore how Rhodes became such a powerful force for British imperial interests, I'm happy to be joined by William Story. William, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
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Thanks, Caleb. I appreciate the invitation.
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It's really great to have you on. Cecil Rhodes is one of those people that I've heard his name for my entire life. I feel like, you know, as a, as a kid who was a bit of a geography nerd, you know, interested in countries that, you know, don't exist anymore, whose names had been changed. I was always sort of intrigued by this country, Rhodesia. And who is this guy Cecil Rhodes, who had a country named for him? Obviously it doesn't exist anymore, but I just was very interested in him. And then when I learned too, that the Rhodes Scholarship, which, when I was 16, I thought, oh, maybe I'll get the Rhodes Scholarship one day. Of course, I didn't get it, didn't apply, who knows, but was like, oh, who is this person? Such an interesting person. So I just was fascinated to get the chance to read your book and to get to talk to you about him. But before even jumping into the book, I was wondering if you just tell us a little about yourself and introduce yourself to our listeners.
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Thanks, Caleb. I am, like I said, I'm a professor at Mills APS College in Jackson, Mississippi, and I've been here for 26 years. I started my career a while ago. I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1980s. And those were the years when there was a lot of interest in the United States, in South Africa. Those were the waning days of apartheid. There were demonstrations on, on campus, and I started to take classes about the history of imperialism. I had some very good professors when I was there who got me really fascinated with the subject of imperialism. My family, my. My ancestors were involved in the late history of the British Empire. Some were in South Africa, some were in India. My grandmother's family was from Oxford. And one of my great uncles is named Cecil after Cecil Rhodes. So I have a strong interest in imperialism and in particular in South Africa. Coming in those days, I actually worked on the history of Mauritius, which is an island in the Indian Ocean, for my PhD dissertation at Johns Hopkins. But I always kind of had it in the back of my head that I would get back into writing about South Africa. And I wrote a book about the history of guns and gun control in 19th century South Africa that crossed over into the history of, of, of Cecil Rhodes just a little bit. You mentioned that Rhodesia is named after him. And when he got the. He got the country through a shady transaction with the Andebelli chief Lubangula. And one of the things that Rhodes promised Labangula was a regular, was a big shipment of modern rifles. And that's when I first kind of started thinking about roads in the context of my, my gun book. And when that came out, I was just casting about for another, another topic. And I came across some things in the library at Oxford that interested me that related to Cecil Rhodes.
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B
You begin the book with this contemporary story of a reaction, some of the reactions to statue of Cecil Rhodes. Obviously Rhodes being someone that was very famous, of course, you know, statues built of him at the time. But there was a lot of anger and feeling that Rhodes was this extremely destructive figure in Africa, that he had done a lot to harm and subjugate the African people there. So I was wondering if you just introduce that a little bit just to, you know, give. Make people aware of just the contemporary relevance of someone like Rhodes.
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Yeah. So what happened to me, Caleb, was that I began to write a little bit about the history of Cecil Rhodes in the. Around 2007, 2008. I was looking into the history of the wine industry in the Western Cape of South Africa and I, I came across the. An interesting little fact about Cecil Rhodes was that he owned about a dozen estates in the Western Cape. He was interested in agriculture. And so I started to look up his background. I read a couple of biographies of Rhodes and I noticed that even though he's been the subject of dozens of biographies starting in his own lifetime, the first ones were published while he was still alive. Nobody's really looked very carefully at environment and technology. That's a big interest of mine. So I started to look more carefully at his involvement in farming and mining and road building and telegraphs and railroads. All the kinds of things that were really important to him but that have been overlooked by biographers. So I started to develop a proposal that was accepted by Oxford University Press for a book that was. It was started with academic motives. In other words, I was going to highlight certain aspects of Cecil Rhodes career that I thought were very important, but that had been overlooked by a lot of other academic writers. So we got the book under contract and then the demonstrations started. And so what I soon realized was that I was taking on a project that was going to have not only relevance for academic historians, but possibly also for politics. There are two key statues of Cecil Rhodes. There's one at the University of Cape Town. The University of Cape Town is on land that was donated by Cecil Rhodes. And there was a big statue of him that overlooked the field where the rugby team practices and then overlooks this big wide vista. And it had lines inscribed on it by Rudyard Kipling that romanticized imperialism. And it became the focus of protests at the University of Cape Town by students who wanted the university to move away from the legacies of colonialism and, you know, have a more updated approach to the curriculum and to relations between faculty and students. The university ultimately took down the statute. The. There's a statue at Oxford University also. It's located on the high street on the facade of a building that Rhodes donated. It's right across the street from the. The University church. And it's. If you walk by it, it's up. It's up high on the third story of the building. Well, second story of the building. England, this is an aside you can just edit out. Maybe, you know, in England they have a ground floor, a first floor and a second floor. In America we have a first floor, second floor, third floor. So it kind of depends. Anyway, the statue is, is high above pedestrians. It's not as noticeable as the statue in Cape Town, but student protesters identified it. They partnered with students at the University of Cape Town as part of what was called the Roads Must Fall movement. And to this date, that statue has. Has not been removed, although it has been. Has been contested by. By many, many people. The removal of the statue was ultimately blocked by the conservative government in England. But we've just had a change of government to a Labor government. And so it could be that the statute might be removed, it might not. It all depends on how people in Oxford and how people in the British government feel. So I, in other words, I wound up with a book that is. Could be used in more contemporary context and not just in scholarly context.
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B
Absolutely. I think that the legacy of Cecil Rhodes is very much still with us today, more so than many other people of his time period. I'm wondering if you could just share a little about his early life, what it was like for him growing up, where he came from.
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Yeah. As part of the research, I went and visited the town that Cecil Rhodes grew up in. It's called Bishop Stortford. And if you take the train from London up to Cambridge, it's roughly midway on the train trip. I had a very nice visit to Bishop Stortford. I was hosted by the people who run a small museum that's dedicated to Cecil Rhodes. And it's a, it's a, it's an attractive town. Cecil Rhodes was, was. This, was the son of the, the vicar of the church in Bishop Stortford. His father was very prominent in the town. Everybody would have known who he was and who the family is and like, like the children of, of clergy, you know, they would have been watched, you know, when they were in church for their behavior and they would have expected to, you know, to, to participate in Sunday school and do their Bible lessons. Interestingly, as a, as a young adult, Cecil Rhodes stopped attending churches. He was not regular in observing religion, although, you know, in his papers and in his, his comments to various people, he did events, you know, a continued interest and understanding of, of religion. He was just not interested in, in getting to church. So in, in some ways he, he rebelled a little bit against his, his own father, his. He was close to his brothers. Cecil was in the, in the middle of a large family. He followed very closely after his older brother Herbert, who was the first family member to go to South Africa. He went first to start a farm in Natal and then had an adventure to the diamond mines and went across the mountains to the diamond mines and what is today Kimberly. Cecil Rhodes came out to Natal to follow Herbert in the farming enterprise and got interested in diamond mining through Herbert. Herbert was a restless character and wound up giving up on diamond mining and living a life of a wanderer. First in the Transvaal to the north, and later on he was on a hunting trip in Central Africa and died in an accident. Rhodes other brother Frank was close to him too. Frank was a career army officer who was later on involved in the failed coup attempt that Cecil Rhodes attempted in the Transvaal. It was known as the Jameson raid. Yeah, so he stayed close to his family over the course of his life. One of the interesting things about Cecil Rhodes that was revealed by a previous biographer, Robert Rotberg, was that Cecil Rhodes was likely a gay man. And he, like, like many Victorians, that was an uncomfortable topic to write about and to, to talk about. We don't have any documentary evidence really to suggest that, that he had gay relationships. One of. But we have a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was. So one of the reasons why we have a Rhodes Trust, the fund that, you know, does many charitable things, including the managing of the, the Rhodes Scholarships, is that Rhodes did not have any direct descendants. He did leave some property to his, his brothers and sisters on his death, but he was not, you know, motivated by, you know, needing or wanting to take care of his, his, his children. And so most of the money went, went to support the Rhodes Trust and you know, the famous scholarship scheme that you mentioned that has helped so many really bright young adults to launch themselves.
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When he went first to South Africa, what was this experience like for him? Obviously, he ends up going back. So what were these early days like?
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Yeah, one of the interesting things about Cecil Rhodes is that when I chose him as a subject of a biography, I knew that he was going to be a difficult person to write about. I knew that he was. That he did some things that had very negative impact on race relations in particular and also on the environment. And I knew that most biographers write about people they admire and that this is a guy that I really, you know, did not like personally. I did notice a few things about, about Rhodes that I did admire though, and one of them was that he was, especially as a young man, physically very hardy and really loved to be in the outdoors. And even though he was from a relatively prosperous middle class family that funded his, his original efforts in farming and in diamond mining, he was still someone who was willing to get his hands hands dirty and do manual labor. So what he, what he did on that farm and in his early diamond mining in, in Kimberly was to supervise crews of laborers, most of whom were, were African men. However, he did a lot of the digging, a lot of the sifting, a lot of the construction himself. He was also capable of, you know, riding either in, you know, carts or on horseback really long distances in the outdoors in South Africa. He was capable of, you know, of hunting and cooking a meal for himself in the outdoors. I mean, a lot of things that most modern people in industrialized countries are basically not, not capable of, of doing. There's one instant in his later career when his, he was looking for gold mine prospects in the, in the Transvaal when his, his lover, Neville Pickering was on his deathbed and Rhodes was not able to get a ticket on a stagecoach to get to Kimberley. And so he rode on the top of the stagecoach for something like 300 miles in really pretty challenging dirty environmental conditions. So I mean, this is a man who, he's famous as an imperialist and as a statesman, but he is somebody who was familiar with manual labor and knew how to take care of himself in the outdoors.
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So not long after he spent his initial stint in South Africa, he then he goes to college. What was his experience like at Oxford?
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So he was very different from most undergraduates in that he was, he was older and he was wealthy by the time he went back. So he, he had a first, he had a first term at Oxford in 1873. A couple of years after he had been in South Africa, he went back to Oxford. He did not live in the college that he was admitted to, that's Oriel College. He had to take apartments on the outside of the college. He became sick at the end of his first term. The evidence is a little bit sketchy about exactly what was going on with him. And he went back to South Africa for a few years to work in, in diamond mining before returning again in the mid-1870s where he, where he, you know, continued his studies for, for two solid years. So yeah, there are stories about Rhodes at Oxford that he was, he was a little bit absent minded. He apparently did not maintain a bank account, but he, he went to Oxford with a pocket full of diamonds and occasionally he would just take them to the local jewelry store and, and cash them in to get cash to pay, to pay his bills. I'm not really sure if that story is true or not, but it's, it's kind of a nice story about, about Cecil Rhodes. While he was at Oxford, he was, he was influenced by some of the main intellectual currents of his, his day, especially the philosophy of, of John Ruskin. That being said, Rhodes was not known to have been a very good student either. And he was not signed up for an honors degree. He was signed up for what the Oxford people called a pat, a past degree. You know, just a, like a regular, regular degree getting through the university. That being said, in order to do that he still had to achieve a level of proficiency in classical languages and in history and philosophy that would probably only be attained by advanced graduate students today. Many people in those in those days looked down on Rhodes, didn't think his Latin and Greek was really that great. He was a lifelong, he had a lifelong interest in reading the classics, but he only read them in translation when many of his Victorian peers continued to read in the original for most of their lives and would quote in Greek and Latin to each Other. So anyway, he was not a great student. He was known to be a very social person. He joined the Masons when he was at Oxford. He joined a club called Bullingdons, known for rowdy parties. One of the most interesting things that I noticed in my research that I don't think other biographers have noted was that it appears that Oscar Wilde was a member of the Masons a year ahead of Rhodes. And it appears that Wild is the person who probably ran the initiation ceremony where Rhodes became a Mason. You know, Wild also, you know, was very well known too. And there's lots of evidence to suggest, you know, to establish that he was a gay man. And so they were. They. Not only do they know each other, but I think it's. It's likely that they were. They were part of kind of a. A subculture at Oxford of, Of gay people.
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That's extremely interesting and. Yeah, it's certainly unexpected, for sure.
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Yeah.
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And it's also interesting too, like that he wasn't considered an exceptional student. And now his, his name graces the scholarship, you know, arguably the world's most competitive scholarship. So it's, it's funny how those things work out, right?
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But he did stipulate, and he, in the scholarship design, that these scholarships would not just go to academic types. And he did say that he wanted the scholars to be people who were well rounded, who were accomplished in athletics, who were recognized leaders. And that to some extent, you know, reflects his own experiences at Oxford. He, he did know people who were very successful as scholars at Oxford. And one of his associates, Richard McGuire, a contemporary at Oxford, and another person that he worked a lot with, Viscount Milner, who was ultimately the Governor General of South Africa. These, these guys had been the top scholars at Oxford. Rhodes knew them. And he did not want for his scholarships to support people like that. You know, instead he wanted to support people more like himself. Rhodes also had a lifelong fascination with the United States. Even though he never traveled to the United States, he had a fantasy of reuniting the United States with the British Empire. Some of his key engineers and associates in South Africa were Americans. In the book I talk about Gardner Williams, the head engineer at the De Beers Consolidated Mining Company, and also John Hayes Hammond, who was principal engineer of the goldfields Company in South. In Johannesburg. And so Rhodes, Rhodes did not just want American bookworms. He wanted, you know, the kinds of Americans who might ultimately help to, you know, reunite the United States with the rest of the British Empire. And this was the means by which it would be Done.
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B
Yeah. Obviously he had certain political ideas that were certainly driving him. And when he finds himself back in Africa, he simultaneously enters politics and he enters the diamond trade in a much more serious way than before. What was the political situation like when he returns there and how, how does he stand amidst the, you know, the various conflicting groups that are trying to claim control over this region?
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Yeah, so listeners should know that the country is not called South Africa until, until the, after the Boer War. The, you know, it's now called the South African War. And there's a union of South Africa that, that forms in the wake of that war. That becomes official in 1919 13. South Africa in, in Cecil Rhodes time was made up of four principal territorial units. The biggest one is the Cape Colony. What's today the provinces of the Western and Eastern Capes. And, and that's where Cape Town is located. And also the eastern cities of, like Port Elizabeth, East London, the other white settled areas of the Eastern Cape. Then there are two independent Dutch or Boer republics to the north, the Orange Free State and then the Transvaal, and then there's another smaller British colony called Natal. Around them there are quasi independent African chiefdoms. The Germans establish a colony in what's called Southwest Africa, what's called Namibia in Cecil Rhodes's day. And so actually it's a mix of many different colonies and many different legal systems and different sorts of approaches. The ambition of British imperialists in the 1870s became to unify all of these as, as one country. And yet these, these failed, these efforts failed in the 1880s while Cecil Rhodes was, was in South Africa. And he comes to, he gets into politics in the early 1880s. He becomes elected to the Cape legislature, the Cape Parliament in the House of Assembly, really, as someone who's there to advocate for the diamond industry, which by this point is one of the most important industries in South Africa. But he's quickly drawn into the politics of imperial expansion, the acquisition of territories to the north. And he, he plays an important role from a very, a very early date in his, in his political life. By 1890, his, his political rise is very rapid. He becomes the consensus figure to be the prime minister of the Cape Colony. And he, he does that for, for five, for, for five years until the Jameson raid makes it impossible for him. So one of the things that Rhodes was known for is to be an advocate for British imperialism. But the way he stayed in power in the early 1890s was through good relationships with the Boer or Afrikaner community in the Cape who held very substantial number of seats in the Cape Parliament. And so he formed a coalition of some English speakers with the main Afrikaner political party. So he's, he's someone who is a British patriot who believed in the British Empire. But he was enough of a pragmatist to work with Afrikaner politicians in those days. But when he tried to overthrow the Boer government of the Transvaal, that burned bridges to most of those Afrikaner politicians in the Cape.
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B
Around the time too, or just before his quick ascent to political power, he also launches the De Beers company, which I feel like is, you know, De Beers. Now this might, you know, since listening to this in the future, that might not be relevant. But De Beers has been in the news a lot recently because of an attempted sale by its ownership. But obviously people identify De Vere's as being the company that has most promoted the diamond industry. And what was this founding like? How did he actually go about creating this incredible monopoly?
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A
Yeah, so I tell this story in the book. It's crucial for understanding Cecil Rhodes. In the 1870s there were some clear environmental problems with mining. So the laws of the day stipulated that people could only own relatively small claims in a diamond mine. And as the mines went deeper and deeper into the ground, you have to imagine they're just these big open pits. As the mines go deeper and deeper into the ground, it becomes harder and harder for mine owners just to have these little claims because the dirt spills over into each other's claims. Right. And like if one neighbor digs deeper than the other, then he's going to lose, you know, some of his, his rocks, you know, which include the diamonds. And, and so there's a, there are reports that are issued in the 1818 70s that suggest very strongly that there should be consolidation on the diamond fields. That regulations about the ownership of small claims ought to be given up. So when they, when those rules change, Rhodes and many other competitors try to buy up as many claims as they could. And over the course of the 1880s there are conflicts to control each of the four main diamond mines in those days that were around Kimberley. In the final buy up, Rhodes was supported by the Rothschilds bank in London and he was able to form a, the new De Beers Consolidated Mining Company incorporating many of his former rivals. And so like, what's the funny thing about the, the process is that while it's driven by this environmental problem, right of the hole getting deeper and deeper and more and more dangerous, there's also a social dimension to it too, which is that you have to fight really, really hard with the other guys who were trying to buy up the diamond claims. But as soon as you buy them out, you've got to, you know, be partners with them and work really close with them in order to buy up the other guy's diamond claims. One of the interesting things about the De Beers Company is that Rhodes always had this vision of using the company to advance imperialism in southern Africa. And so the company papers, they're called the Deed of Trust, the papers that govern the company included unusual latitude for the directors of the company to get involved in other businesses. This is generally not done in business businesses of this sort at this time. But Rhodes insisted on it so that he could use money not only to buy, you know, other mines around southern Africa, but also to start his British South Africa Company, which is the. The company that eventually conquered the countries that are today Zimbabwe and Zambia. Roads.
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He had such incredibly large visions and expectations. It's unbelievable the amount of things that he accomplished in his lifetime. One of the things, and you've alluded to this too, he had this vision or a hope of the British Empire controlling the entire world. And one of the ways that he saw this was a railway that went. Spanned the entirety of Africa. Can you talk a little about this project and why it was something that he was so intent and keen to achieve?
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Yes, it's one of the most famous things associated with Cecil Roads, this idea of a railroad that would run from the Cape to Cairo. And it was never built ultimately, but it's a very important vision for him. So it all starts out in the. In the Cape Colony in. In the 1880s when. When Rhodes is first getting involved in. In politics. There's a big interest in. In railway construction actually going back to the 1870s and maybe even a little bit earlier in the Cape Colony to create a. A rail network in the Cape Colony that would help farmers get their crops to market. This network turns out to be, you know, very expensive to build, and Rhodes was opposed to it. His preference was to get the railway built first to Kimberley in order to facilitate, you know, not only getting the diamonds safely out of South Africa, but really getting labor to the mines and getting supplies of, you know, food and timber and coal, everything that was needed for diamond mining. And so Rhodes. Rhodes favored a network of rails that supported his own interests and his own businesses. The railway to the, you know, he envisioned building this one all the way up to Cairo. It starts in Cape Town. There are other main branches in the Eastern Cape that run to Kimberly and then From Kimberly, he was interested in building a railroad that went up through what is today eastern Botswana and across into Zimbabwe to Bulawayo, and then up to, you know, what's today Harare, and then all the way up, you know, all the way up through central, central Africa. One of the things that happened to, to, to Rhodes is that, well, he found out that building this railroad is very expensive. First of all, it takes a long time. Second of all, you need experienced, lots of experienced contractors to do this. Another thing becomes really clear in the 1890s is after the British South Africa Company conquered or took over Zimbabwe. The idea up there was to find gold and to have big mines up there and that colonial settlers would have farms to support the local gold industry. But it became clear by the mid-1890s that there was hardly any gold. And so Rhodes figured out, I mean, most people in his circle understood that this was going to have to be a colony made up of white settler farmers. Problem is, without a rail network, there was no way for these farmers to get payable crops to markets. And. And so there's an effort on roads and support to build railroads. Not only this railroad that goes all the way from Cape Town and Kimberly all the way up to Zimbabwe, but he also becomes involved in constructing railroads that go through Mozambique, which in those days belonged to the Portuguese. But it was to support a very different colony than the one that. That he intended. He was also interested in telegraphs. Ultimately, it's a telegraph line that. That makes it all the way up to, you know, what later became Uganda. And. But by the time of Rhodes death, this. This vision of a, you know, Cape Ticiro railroad is. Is one that, you know, many people still have a lot of questions about. I mean, really, even at the time, you know, people looked at a map and they thought, well, it'll be a lot cheaper just to, you know, or a lot more efficient to just build short railroad tracks that go from the interior to the coast where goods can be picked up by, you know, merchant ships and then, you know, taken places. There's really no need for, you know, a commercial rail line that goes all the way, you know, from Cape Town to Cairo. And the idea was interesting geographically and interesting from the perspective of imperialism and was a bit of a moonshot. You know, it would show just how. How powerful the technology of imperialists could be. But it was really a pretty impractical business proposition.
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B
Another, you know, thing that. That Rhodes is famous for, it, as I mentioned at the beginning, was the creation of Rhodesia, which is Just remarkable that, I mean it sounds crazy today to think that a company could found a country. Obviously it was much more common back then. But how did Rhodes use his wealth and power to form Rhodesia? And what was, you know, what was it like for the, for the people that were living there, for someone to, for him to come in there and essentially conquer this new territory?
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A
It's a pretty grim story and it's narrated in two chapters of the book. Yeah. So Rhodes originally became interested in what was called Rhodesia, what later became called Zimbabwe and Zambia through his brother Herbert, who had been hunting up in that region. And Rhodes had heard stories of people traveling there, other people as well. And you know, Rhodes was friends with one of the great big game hunters, Frederick Courtney Sluice, who later helped Rhodes in his efforts to conquer Zimbabwe and Zambia. So the, the British South Africa Company was founded to take over this territory. And it's a, you know, it's a funny thing to hear about in, you know, modern day United States or United Kingdom. Like, you know, we don't just go out and have companies, you know, gobbling up countries and naming them after the founder of the, the company. You know, in fact, what, what's unusual about Rhodes is that, you know, not only did he have his own personal imperialist company, but you know, at the same time he's head of a real, a really big business De Beers. He's got interesting, he's got interests in gold fields, just a major mining company. He's the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. You know, it would be a little bit like, I don't know, some major capitalist of the modern day era, like, you know, Jeff Bezos not only running Amazon, but also, you know, having his own personal country and being the President of the United States. You know, it's, it's really kind of a, it's a remarkable achievement when we reflect on it today. But from the perspective of those days, people were aware that sometimes empires were needing to be built on the cheap. And so in the past the British government had turned to what are called chartered companies to administer territories that would be nominally British and that would be folded into important trade relationships with, with, with Britain, but that were run by corporate entities. And you know, some of the, some of the more famous ones are the British East India Company which ran most of India up until 1857. There's the Hudson's Bay Company which was very important in, in Canada, in fact remained a company into the 1950s, I believe. I'd have to check that. And there were, you know, many other companies that were important for, for imperialism too, that folded like the South Sea Company in the early 18th century was important in the slave trading. So so anyway, this was an approach that was, that was known to people in the 19th century but still uncommon. And in the, in the 1880s, the British government was generally reluctant to pay more money for imperialist expansion. They had consolidated a great deal of. Of territory in the early 1880s through the Scramble for Africa. But by the late 1880s, there's kind of a reluctance to to spend all this, all this money. And so Cecil Rhodes proposal for a private company was appealing to people in London to some extent. But by the 1890s, by the time colonization, you know, got fully rolling, it became clear that the Rhodes was, was causing problems. In particular, in 1893 and again in 1896, Rhodes Company, well, it had a private army and it ruthlessly suppressed rebellions, justifiable rebellions by the many African people who lived in this territory. Rhodes's settlers claimed that Andebele and Shona people in Zimbabwe did not technically own the land, even though everybody knew that, you know, customarily they had been here for a very long time. And settlers were supported by Rhodes private army to go out and do what they, what they used to call a thing called pegging a claim. In other words, just marking out, you know, the thousands of acres of land that you were going to take. And this land grab was, was supported by, by Rhodes's army. Rhodes. At the end of the wars in 1893 and 1896, Rhodes's armies took a lot of the cattle that belonged to these African people and in addition to taking their land and so made them dependent on the company under the leverage of the company for, for their livelihoods. And and so it. Rhodes himself in 1896 rode out with his army and encouraged the, the mercenaries to engage in atrocious acts. Rhodes became known for making peace with the Endebele people with the end of Valley leadership and was very proud of the way in which he negotiated the end of that conflict at the end of 1896. He, however, was involved in so many negative things with so many negative results for, for people in Zimbabwe that it's, it's just really hard to look away from, from, from that that record and give, give Rhodes, you know, credence for, for, you know, that that particular accomplishment. He did it because he, he knew that since the British army had gotten involved in helping him to suppress the rebellion, he was, he was going to be on the hook to pay for the British army's campaign and he didn't want to spend any more money on their campaign even though the British generals were encouraging him to keep the war going for another year. So he had pretty pragmatic reasons for making peace with Andebele people. And it wasn't because he was being nice or a wonderful peace negotiator or anything like that.
- [47:28]
B
How would you describe his racial views in general? You know, whether or not when I started my introduction introduction, I was kind of torn between describing him as either an Anglo Saxon supremacist or a white supremacist because he obviously fought with the Dutch speaking people in southern Africa as well. How do you understand his racial views and then also just his views about the Anglo Saxon's place in the world.
- [47:59]
A
Yeah, so he did believe that these so called Anglo Saxon peoples or superior in certain respects to other Europeans. But he did for his entire life respect people who were of Dutch ancestry or of German ancestry or Scandinavian or. He, he even worked with Irish nationalists and he, many of his white Laban minds and in Johannesburg were white people from many different backgrounds. And I really don't think that we could call him, we could sort of call him out as an Anglo Saxon supremacist or something, something like that. However, he thought, you know, England was better than these other countries. But you know, he, he was not. He did not have like harsh or judgmental views toward other Europeans. One of the, one of the interesting asides I can make in answer to that question is that he, he also had many Jewish business associates and there were, there was a great deal of anti Semitism in, in England at the time. And yet he, he worked really regularly with, with Jewish people. And I did not detect very many, you know, negative things that he said about Jewish people when these sorts of statements would have been common among his peers at the time. Turning to African people, however, his, his views are quite negative. He did not view African people as, as fully human beings like white people were he, he regarded African people as, as instrumental toward his, his prosperity, his diamond mining and his farm. Farm mine. His farm enterprises up in, up in Zimbabwe. He had, I mean there are numerous quotations in the book, you know, where he, he uses language that was, you know, racially offensive, certainly offensive to people today. One of the things I want to make clear in, in this interview is that there are still some people who support Rhodes and think he's been treated too harshly. I think he should be judged not so much for some of the racist remarks that he said. Because these sorts of statements might be characteristic of the times that he lived in, that, you know, many white English people might have said these sorts of things. One of the things I try to make clear in the book is that there were many Victorians who found Rhodes's views to be objectionable. He was resisted by people in the clergy, by faculty at Oxford, by numerous politicians, people in the British Parliament. Members of Parliament were, were known to have laughed out loud when his supporters spoke about the charitable work of the British South Africa Company. So I mean, one of the things I trying to get across in the book is that we're not just making retrospective judgments about Rhodes's racial views. In fact, there were many people in Rhodes's day who thought that his treatment of African people was exceptionally bad.
- [52:20]
B
Yeah, I know there's, there's some quotes that you have like, I can't remember exactly from memory, but Mark Twain quote and a few other quotes showing criticism of his even calling to essentially be hung.
- [52:35]
A
Yeah, Mark Twain is a famous anti imperialist and he's American, of course, and he resisted the American conquest during the Spanish American War, the conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. But he did, he did write a travel book about southern Africa. He did visit there. Don't, don't quote me on this. I think he did meet Cecil Rhodes as part of that trip. I'd have to look it up in his, in Mark Twain's book. But yeah, he did, he did have a negative view about Rhodes's enterprises in South Africa. And, but I mean, many, many other people, many other people did too. It was, it's not just making a retrospective judgment. This is one of the ways in which a book like this, it sometimes feels as a scholar that a book just kind of writes itself sometimes, you know, that you find these quotations and people made impassioned statements about what Rhodes was doing in Africa and you know, called him out for it. And I didn't really feel like I had to be very judgy as a historian so much as I just needed to let his contemporaries speak out against him.
- [53:57]
B
Rhodes died relatively young and I wonder if you'd just share a little bit the end of his life and his legacy, both his global legacy, but also his legacy in Africa, the long run effects, you know, that he of, of essentially promoting, you know, inequality, promoting the basis of apartheid and other and other issues that have plagued, plagued Africa. So what do you see? How did he die and what were some of, some of his legacies that you see?
- [54:31]
A
Yeah, he was very young when he died. He was only 48 years old. He had a, he had a heart disease. He had heart disease when he was in his 40s. And at the age of 48, he died from what we think was heart failure. And so there are two autopsy reports, one in the Cape archives and the other I think I found in Oxford. I'd have to check about that. There are autopsy reports, but they're not really conclusive about what are the underlying causes of Rhodes's ailments anyway. So in the last couple of years of his life, he really struggled with heart failure. He was not as robust physically as he used to be. It's very tiring to walk around and be active if you, you know, body's not getting, you know, oxygenated in the way it's supposed to be. So he's, he also became, because, because the heart failure, he also became kind of obese looking at the end of his life. And he's often, you know, caricatured or portrayed that that way. So physically, physically, he declined a great deal at the end of his, at the end of his life. He, he would have gone on to, you know, 20, 30, 40 more years of a, as a politician and as a business leader in South Africa and possibly back home in England. But it just, you know, it just. His disease at that time was nothing that anybody could really diagnose or do anything about. So Rhodes, he. The argument the book makes is that over the course of his lifetime, Rhodes is one of the principal architects of segregation in South Africa. Through his actions in the Cape Parliament and also in some of his business practices like in the development of the, the mine workers compounds in Kimberley that later become really important for the gold mining industry in South Africa too. He's important for the negotiation of the boundaries of the countries of southern Africa. He was important for the design and construction of major infrastructure like railways and telegraphs and also deep level mines. It's his engineers who figure out ways of building mine shafts and mine tunnels and stopes under the ground to get the diamonds and the gold out. And so the physical infrastructure of southern Africa is designed to advantage imperialist capitalists like Cecil Rhodes and his colleagues. Meanwhile, they're designing laws and regulations and practices that put very harsh restrictions on African people who remain the vast majority of the population of southern Africa. So it's really a remarkable, remarkable story. There are other ways in which roads influence the landscape and the appearance of southern Africa. For example, his, his architect, Herbert Baker, who's discussed got his first, he's discussed in the book. Baker got his first commissions with Rhodes and you know, later on he's, he goes on to design some of the most famous, you know, buildings in, in South Africa and in the British Empire and ultimately to design Rhodes House in Oxford, which is the, the big monument, monumental building that, that Oxford University has to Rhodes. So there are many aspects of the appearances of things that were influenced by Rhodes and Rhodes's hiring decisions and Rhodes aesthetic discussions with his, his, his architect, not only Baker, but others like Sidney Stant, who helped to design parts of the city of Kimberley where, where workers lived. So Rhodes is, Rhodes is really important for the development of infrastructure in southern Africa. But it's always got in the background the notion that the infrastructure is designed to get the resources out of the ground to make white businessmen like Rhodes rich and to keep black African people in designated places and spaces where they would be segregated off and treated as second class citizens in their own country.
- [59:53]
B
And obviously the legacy persists in many ways. De Beers is still a company that's, I don't know the exact ownership, but it's still largely owned by, it's not owned by Africans largely. I think Botswana is like a 15% share or something. So there still is this legacy that persists even to this day of essentially white European owners extracting wealth from Africa.
- [60:22]
A
Yeah, I can't really comment too much on De Beerus's modern day practices. The businesses stretched in many different directions. They're much more multinational than they ever were in Cecil Rhodes's time. And that sort of goes well beyond the scope of the book or even of my own expertise. But yeah, the, you know, and thankfully the politics of, of southern Africa has changed a great deal. Especially since the, the time when I started to get interested in South Africa in the 1980s. And thank goodness, thank goodness for that. Yeah. But the legacies of infrastructure being developed in a colonial situation are quite apparent. I start the book with the, the protester at the University of Cape Town who, who throws the poop all over the statue of Cecil Rhodes. And that was generally taken as an anti colonial gesture by people who wanted to, you know, remove the legacies of colonialism from the curriculum. However, you know, as a, as a historian who's interested in, in technology and environment, I also knew that there was a certain amount of truth in that protest and that it highlighted infrastructure inequality as well.
- [61:49]
B
There's obviously so much in this book that we really weren't able to cover in really a short 48 years. Rhodes seem to have done more in one lifetime than most people do in, you know.
- [62:04]
A
Yeah.
- [62:06]
B
At all.
- [62:07]
A
It's.
- [62:07]
B
It's just remarkable what he accomplished. I think, like you. You summarized it correctly, that it's like. It's like if Jeff Bezos had his own. His own country, in a way, and, you know, we still, like, live in the shadow of. Of, of him, even though he's. He's since died. So I really do, if people found this conversation interesting and want to learn more about Rhodes, like, really was a lot that we were just were not able to cover. So I do recommend people go and pick up the Colonialist, the Vision of Cecil Rhodes. William, it was really wonderful to have you on as a guest.
- [62:37]
A
Thank you, Caleb. I enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to talking in the future.
- [62:44]
B
Absolutely.