Cecil Rhodes

Cecil Rhodes was an English-born diamond magnate who became the leading driver of British expansion in southern Africa in the late nineteenth century. He built De Beers into a near-monopoly of the world's diamonds, served as prime minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, and used his chartered company to seize the lands that took his name as Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe and Zambia. His legacy, including the scholarships he endowed at Oxford, remains fiercely debated.

Rhodes was born on 5 July 1853 at Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire, a son of the local vicar. Fearing for his weak health, his family sent him at seventeen to Natal, where his brother Herbert farmed cotton. When diamonds were found near what became Kimberley in 1871, the two brothers moved to the diggings. Rhodes survived a heart attack in 1872 and took over his brother's claims. Through the 1870s he divided his time between the mines and studies at Oriel College, Oxford, where he absorbed a belief in the destiny of the British race and empire that he set down in writing in 1877.

With his partner Charles Rudd, Rhodes stayed on through a slump in the mid-1870s, buying up claims and winning contracts to pump water out of the flooded pits. Backed by the Rothschild bank, they formed De Beers Consolidated Mines in March 1888, with Rhodes as chairman. By 1890 a deal with a London diamond syndicate gave his group control over most of the world's supply and its prices.

Rhodes entered the Cape Parliament in 1881 for the largely Boer seat of Barkly West and, with Afrikaner support, became prime minister in 1890. His Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 tripled the property qualification for voting from £25 to £75, cutting the number of black voters, and the Glen Grey Act of 1894 limited the land Africans could hold. He openly argued that Africans should be pushed into wage labour and governed as a subject people.

Rhodes's great project was British expansion northward, part of the wider Scramble for Africa. In 1888 his agents obtained the Rudd Concession from the Ndebele king Lobengula, who later said he had been misled about its terms and tried in vain to repudiate it. On this basis the British South Africa Company received a royal charter in 1889 to govern, police and make treaties north of the Limpopo. Its police and settlers took control of Mashonaland and Matabeleland. When the Ndebele and Shona rose against the settlers in 1896, Rhodes urged his officers to show no mercy, then walked unarmed into the Matobo Hills to negotiate the Ndebele surrender. In 1895 the company's territories were officially renamed Rhodesia. Rhodes also dreamed of a British "red line" and railway from the Cape to Cairo, competing against Portuguese, German and Belgian ambitions.

Rhodes resented the independent Boer republic of the Transvaal under Paul Kruger. In 1895 he backed the Jameson Raid, a failed armed attempt to spark an uprising there. The fiasco forced his resignation as Cape premier in 1896 and helped bring on the Second Boer War, during which he shut himself inside besieged Kimberley and lobbied loudly for its relief.

Long troubled by heart disease, Rhodes died at his cottage in Muizenberg on 26 March 1902, aged 48, and was buried in the Matobo Hills near Bulawayo. His will founded the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford, open regardless of race. Admirers once saw him as a great empire-builder; critics regard him as an architect of land dispossession and racial rule, and since 2015 the "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign has targeted his statues in Cape Town and Oxford.

Our 1880 map shows the Cape before his northern ventures, and the 1900 map shows the British Empire stretched from the Cape to the Zambezi and beyond, during the war that followed his fall. Today the region is divided between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.