One of the truly unforgettable heroes of the British empire to whom I was introduced in the dying British colony of Nigeria was Cecil John Rhodes. There were several others but Rhodes stood out from the pack if only because at that time, no less than two African countries; Southern and Northern Rhodesia were named after him. No other person had the distinction of giving their name to one, not to talk of two countries. The other thing which further elevated Rhodes and caused him to be placed on the highest pedestal was the institution of the Rhodes scholarship which conferred the highest academic distinction on anyone who won it. To be a Rhodes scholar was to be highly favoured by all the gods of academia. And all the glory of that exalted scholarship was reflected in Cecil Rhodes who had bequeathed the scholarship to all capable young men associated with all the countries of the British empire, now Commonwealth, the United States and Germany. Any discussion of capitalism and government in South Africa must start with this man who remains an arch villain to many and a hero of sorts to others.
The son of an Anglican clergyman, Rhodes suffered from poor health all his life. Indeed, he had been sent to South Africa at the age of seventeen in the hope that his exposure to a heathier climate than what was available in England would improve his health status. It was soon clear that although his health was fragile, he had arrived in his new home at the most auspicious time for both his recovery and the promotion of his career as politician and businessman. His first foray into the business world was in the field of agriculture. He joined his brother in a disastrous and brief venture to grow cotton but soon switched crops and began to plant fruits trees. This led him to form the Pioneer Fruit Company which set him off on the path of prosperity. Modest prosperity. His next venture made him an enormous fortune which opened all the doors that needed to be open for him to become the imperialist he was born to be.
A couple of years before Rhodes arrived in South Africa, alluvial diamond was picked up in Kimberly, capital of the Northern Cape Province. It is not clear how Rhodes became associated with the diamond trade. What is known is that Rhodes, with the help of loans provided by the House of Rothschild, the same institution which provided the loans which made it possible for the British government to pay reparations to slave owners when slavery was abolished, began to buy up all other miners in the region to establish a monopoly of the diamond trade. He fortified his position by allying himself with a company in London to ensure that all diamond trade in the world went through De Beers, the company he founded in 1881 and which even today retains its grip on global diamond trade even if it is now no longer the monopolist that it once was. Like Clive in India, Rhodes had the power of a conglomerate of companies behind him and like Clive he worked assiduously to enhance the spread of the British empire in the theatre of his operations. At the height of his ambition he wanted to create a British railroad which stretched from Cairo in the North to the Cape in South Africa. His wish became fact when after the First World War, the former German territory of Tanganyika was handed over to the British and today, it is possible to travel down the spine of Africa on a railroad in what were parts of the British empire cobbled together by people like Rhodes.
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Rhodes was a ruthless businessman who used his companies to acquire land enough to cover three countries. Having cleaned up on the diamond fields of South Africa, he extended his enormous tentacles northwards making shady deals with all manner of chieftains all along the way. This way he laid hands on large expanse of lands in what became North and South Rhodesia, bringing them under the suzerainty of the insatiable British empire at the expense of the indigenous peoples of those lands. They were dragged willy-nilly into the strange new world of capitalism and were turned into poorly paid landless serfs in the land of their fathers. Many of them did not even attain this status as they were simply got rid of to make way for the accommodation of white migrants. This is exactly what had happened to the indigenous peoples of North and South America as well as the aborigines of Australia. The only difference in the case of Africa was that try as they did, the Europeans didn’t quite succeed in eliminating them completely. But, it was not for the want of trying. As far as Rhodes and his ilk were concerned, they were intent on emptying the lands of Africa for the benefit of emigrants from Britain. Not satisfied with that, Rhodes thought of the possibility of bringing back the USA under the British flag so that the superior Anglo-Saxon race could control the world for their own benefit alone. All other groups on the globe were to exist at the pleasure of the master race. They were to minister to their racial masters in any way they were needed. And when their usefulness was over, they were to be sacrificed to the gods of necessity.
Up till now we have dealt with Rhodes as a businessman. Time to change tack. By the time he was in his thirties, Rhodes had entered the politics of the Cape. With his humongous personal fortune, he rose quickly and was soon the Prime Minister of the Cape Province and held this office for six years. Using the power of that office, Rhodes built the foundation for apartheid in the future South Africa. In time, he excluded black people from the electoral rolls and made it impossible for them to own land as he caused legislation which made it impossible to own land to be promulgated .This is why even today, blacks own less than 10% of all land in South Africa. Between Rhodes and the implacable Boers, virtually all available land has been snapped up by Europeans and that, on the continent of Africa. The irony has become too rich when the current South African government has been labelled as racist by Trump and Musk for daring to make the first tentative attempt at some form of restitution.
Up until 1886, all South Africa was agrarian. Then, everything changed when gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand deep in Boer territory. This discovery lured gold prospectors from the Cape. This upset the Boers so much that they were forced to try to deprive the new comers of any political power within the territory they had seized from the indigenous black people of the region in the first place. They were determined to keep Britain out of their affairs. Cecil Rhodes, the unrepentant British imperialist was of course on the side of the miners and the stage was set for a confrontation between the two groups. Rhodes and his friends using troops which were raised in Rhodesia, Rhodes’ personal fiefdom attacked the Boers in what has come to be known to history as the Jameson raid. This coup attempt to undermine the Boers failed miserably and one of the fallouts of this debacle was the fall of Rhodes from political power. The other was a descent to war between the Boer republics and the mighty British empire. The Boers attacked and seized British towns to precipitate the first Boer war. They then laid siege to Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberly, an action which was aimed at the heart of British interests in the region. In coming to the relief of these towns the British empire was forced to mobilise a huge army to assert its authority. This is an episode that has turned out to be of interest not just to the British empire but to the continued growth of global capitalism.