Rhodes and apartheid

SIR – Berny Torre reports (July 29) that Cecil Rhodes, “while not a slave trader… supported apartheid-style measures in southern Africa”.

This is misleading. First, not only was Rhodes not a slave trader, but his British South Africa Company also positively supported the suppression of that trade in Nyasaland.

Secondly, the policy of apartheid or “separate development”, promoted by the South African government almost half a century after Rhodes’s death in 1902, assumed that black Africans were biologically incapable of being integrated into democratic political society. Rhodes, however, believed that any “man, white or black… who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property, or works” to be worthy of the vote. And when the government of Cape Colony proposed to disfranchise most black people in 1899, Rhodes argued that the vote should be extended to Africans under the principle of “equal rights to every civilised man south of the Zambesi”.

History is indeed a foreign country; those who venture there should avoid anachronisms.

Nigel Biggar

Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford

Robert Jackson

Former minister for higher education

Gwythian Prins

Emeritus Research Professor, LSE