Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Rhodes: Peaceful passing 113 years before he fell
Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles.
FOR ONCE, the multiple exclamation marks in the Cape Argus headline of March 27, 1869 earned their keep.
“Diamonds! Diamonds!! Another diamond found, 83½ carats!” it clamoured, bringing the news, courtesy of the Colesberg Advertiser, of the find that would trigger the diamond rush to the northern fringe of the Cape Colony, and change the fate of southern Africa.
“The whole place is in a state of excitement,” the report said. “Schalk van Niekerk has just come in, and brought with him the largest diamond that has yet been found in South Africa.” The 83½-carat “brilliant of the first water” had been bought from a man described as “Hottentot or K***** doctor (who had been) using it as a charm in his profession”.
Van Niekerk bought the stone from him for 800 sheep, 10 oxen and a horse, and sold it to Lillienfeld Brothers of Hope Town for £11 200.
The stone, once cut, became better known as the Star of South Africa, or the Dudley Diamond, the gem having been bought by the Countess of Dudley for £25 000.
The diamond remained in the family’s possession until 1974, when it was sold on auction in Geneva for 1.6 million Swiss Francs ( equivalent to about R33 million today). The gem was last exhibited at London’s Natural History Museum in 2006.
We don’t know the name of the original owner – some accounts give him as a shepherd – but what we do know is that his and his people’s world was surely turned upside down within a decade of the sale.
Conceivably – had all things been equal – the productive value over the ensuing century and a half of his 800 sheep, 10 oxen and horse might have far exceeded the R33m price tag of the diamond today. But history did not deliver the opportunities necessary to have produced anything like such equivalence. The reverse was true.
In 2017, the lightning rod for much of the anger over this modern history of exploitative industrial capitalism, founded largely on cheap labour impelled from rural kraals into the cash-and-tax economy, is Cecil John Rhodes.
It is one of those curious accidents of history that exactly 33 years to the day after the news of the Star of South Africa’s “discovery” in the veld, Cape Town and the world woke to the announcement on March 27, 1902 of the death of Rhodes the evening before.
It is a sombre page – extra leading having been added to the column borders to give it a heavier funereal look – and one that hints at an almost obsequious grief at a man so much larger than life that it was as if the colony couldn’t imagine a future without him.
The liberals could; one of them, John X Merriman, observed that Rhodes was a “pure product of the age, a capitalist politician (with) neither moral courage nor convictions, but the sort of curious power that Napoleon had of intrigue and of using men ... for his purpose which is self-aggrandisement under one high-sounding name or another”.
There was none of this, however, in the reporting on the day, under a headline that might have dealt with the demise of a Pope or a minor deity: “Cecil Rhodes. Death last night. A peaceful passing. The closing scene.”
It began: “The news of the passing of Mr. Rhodes – it was so peaceful and gentle as to be scarcely like death – has been expected for many days by all who had the slightest knowledge of the facts. Yet, when it arrived in town shortly after six o’clock last evening, it proved a very great shock to those who believed it.
“The ill news which proverbially travels so fast, reached to the remotest parts of the suburbs in an incredibly short time; and most people in the Peninsula had heard it before they retired to rest.
“In Cape Town it was proclaimed abroad in a fortuitous and singular manner. The usual promenade concert was in progress at the International Hotel when the news reached Mr O’Callaghan, who at once stopped the performance and requested the bandmaster to play the Dead March in Saul.”
At Rhodes’ cottage in Muizenberg, “it was exactly three minutes to six when the actual dissolution occurred, and Mr. Rhodes ceased to be, his end being perfectly quiet and peaceful.”.
With him to the end was Dr Leander Starr Jameson (remembered in the name of the notorious botched Jameson Raid of 1896).
An intriguing detail is that “it is well known that no female nurses were in attendance upon the patient”, yet also that the “faithful devotion of Mr. Rhodes’s coloured servants to their master during his illness was very touching.
“No fewer than thirteen of the Groote Schuur domestics were present at Muizenberg and served him to the last with the greatest zeal and affection”.
The newspaper announced that “it is understood that one clause (of his will) provides for his burial in the Matopos (the mountain range in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, named after the dead man), while another, it is said, bequeaths the Groot Schuur Estate to the public”. This was part of the origin of UCT.
The public, the newspaper reported, were at that moment “giving outward expression to their sorrow”.
“All the public offices are flying flags at half-mast, while there is scarcely a business establishment – or a private house of any pretensions in the city and its immediate environs – which does not display a similar mark of sorrow.”
Public gatherings were postponed, “while business, in the ordinary sense, is almost at a standstill; or at best performed in a listless manner. There is only one thought and one topic to-day – the death and the life of the great man who has left us for ever”.
Sacs closed for the day, and, at Bishops, the news was “received with a very marked feeling of almost personal mourning and regret”, not least in light of the fact that “one of the last topics which had occupied Mr Rhodes’s mind to within a few weeks of his death was the success of the Oxford scholarship scheme which he had initiated in connection with the College School”.
When the City Council convened, mayor Mr W Thorne declared: “As Colonists we owe much to the right honourable gentleman, for it is entirely due to his efforts that the vast Hinterland in the North has become British territory, and to his determined policy, Great Britain owes the acquisition of the enormous tracts of territory which have been added to the Empire in this continent during the past few years. But he has passed away, and his works will follow him throughout time.”
And who, in 2017, would doubt that?