Eccentric pioneer who built an African empire

WITH his eccentric habits and rambling monologues on imperialism, Cecil Rhodes was an unlikely figure to deliver vast swathes of Africa to the British Empire.

Born in 1853, the vicar’s son from Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, attended a local grammar school and, at the age of 17, went to work on a cotton farm in South Africa.

He moved into the diamond mining industry before belatedly obtaining a degree at Oxford in 1881, where students were said to have been intrigued by his manner and monologues on the Empire.

Meanwhile, his influence in diamond mining grew. By the age of 30, he had formed the De Beers Mining Company, which brought him wealth and in a few years came to own 90 per cent of the world’s diamond production. It remains a major player to this day.

Rhodes was elected to the parliament of the Cape Colony, in present-day South Africa and Namibia, a seat he held for the rest of his life. One of his major aims was to open up the northern territories of what is now Zimbabwe, for mineral wealth, communications, and, eventually, white settlement.

Queen Victoria found his imperialism attractive, and he flattered her by saying: ‘How could I dislike a sex to which your Majesty belongs?’ In 1889, he obtained a royal charter to start mining in what is now Botswana via a new company, the British South Africa Company.

From there, Rhodes’s pioneers began their march north, where they established a fort named Salisbury after the British prime minister and named the new territories ‘Rhodesia’ in their leader’s honour.

In 1890, he became prime minister of the Cape Colony and during his five years in office introduced policies credited with laying the foundations for apartheid.

In 1892 he restricted the African vote to those with wealth and educational qualifications and in 1894 assigned an area for exclusively African development – effectively a native reserve. Rhodes described it as ‘a Bill for Africa’. In reality, it served to enforce segregation of native Africans, further disenfranchise them, and control their economic options.

In 1896, Rhodes took an active part in suppressing a revolt in what is now Zimbabwe. While doing so, he found a site in the Matopos Hills that he described as the ‘View of the World’ and chose it for his burial place.

His last years were soured by an unfortunate relationship with a Polish aristocratic adventuress, Princess Caroline Radziwill, who sought to manipulate Rhodes to promote her ideas of the British Empire.

He never married – pleading ‘I have too much work on my hands’ – and died of heart disease in 1902.