Cecil Rhodes and British Imperial Expansion

Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) is the most controversial figure in the history of the British Empire in Africa. He was, in his own time, the most famous British imperialist after Disraeli; he was prime minister of the Cape Colony, the unacknowledged ruler of the territories that bore his name, and the model for the fictional diamond empire in Treasure Island. He was also, in his own day, the subject of intense criticism. The Matabele Wars, the treatment of the African inhabitants of Rhodesia, the colour bar of the Cape franchise — all of these were the subject of contemporary controversy, and they have been the subject of historical debate ever since. The name Rhodesia survived him by more than a century. It was removed from the maps in 1980, when the territory he had taken by conquest became the independent state of Zimbabwe. But the figure of Cecil Rhodes, with all his brilliance and brutality, has not been so easily removed from the historiography of the British Empire.

From Kimmerley to Cape Town

Rhodes was born in 1853 in Bishop’s Stortford, England, the son of a country parson. He went to South Africa at the age of 17, in 1870, ostensibly for health reasons but really to join his elder brother Herbert on the Kimberley diamond fields. By the age of 29 he had consolidated his position at Kimberley, partly through a mixture of commercial skill, partly through the use of monopoly practices that made him a controversial figure in the colonial press. By 1880 he was the leading figure in the De Beers Consolidated Mines, the diamond monopoly that he had founded in 1888.

In 1881, at the age of 27, Rhodes entered the Cape Colony parliament, beginning a political career that would end only with his death in 1902. He was prime minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896 — a position he held, with one brief interruption, until the Jameson Raid forced his resignation. He was a major figure in South African politics, and he was a major figure in British imperial politics. The British South Africa Company, the chartered company that conquered and administered the territories that became Rhodesia, was his instrument. The territory was named after him.

The British South Africa Company

The British South Africa Company was the principal vehicle of Rhodes’s imperial ambitions. The company was granted a royal charter in October 1889, authorising it to administer and develop the territory that would become known as Rhodesia. The company’s operations were financed by a combination of mining capital, the proceeds of land sales, and the revenues of the new territories. The company raised its own police force and, in the early years, its own army.

The company conquered and administered the territories of the Ndebele and Shona peoples south of the Zambezi, in what became Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and it also administered the territory north of the Zambezi that became Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). The Matabele War of 1893 and the Second Matabele War of 1896 were the major military events in the company’s history, and they resulted in the establishment of British administration in the territories. The First Matabele War, in which the company’s forces under Lieutenant Colonel Pennefather defeated the Ndebele in a campaign that the contemporary critic W. T. Stead compared to the conquest of Peru, was the founding violence of Rhodesia. The company administered the territories until 1923–1924, when Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony and Northern Rhodesia was made a British protectorate.

The Cape Franchise and the Colour Bar

Rhodes was also the principal figure in the Cape Colony’s politics in the 1880s and 1890s, and the question of the Cape franchise — the right of the black majority of the Cape Colony to vote — was the issue that defined his political career. The Cape franchise, established in 1854, was a non-racial franchise based on property and literacy qualifications. It was, in the context of late-nineteenth-century colonial Africa, unusually generous. Rhodes was a firm believer in British supremacy, and his support for the franchise was conditional. He accepted the qualified black vote; he did not accept the principle of black equality. As he put it in his Confession of Faith of 1877, “we are the finest race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”

The tension between Rhodes’s commitment to British supremacy and his acceptance of the non-racial franchise was central to his politics. In 1887 he supported the Franchise and Ballot Act, which raised the property qualification for voters in the Cape Colony and effectively restricted the black vote. The Act was a compromise — it preserved the non-racial franchise in principle while restricting it in practice — and it set the stage for the racial politics of twentieth-century South Africa.

The Jameson Raid

The Jameson Raid of late December 1895 to early January 1896 was the most serious blunder of Rhodes’s career and the event that destroyed his political position in the Cape Colony. The Raid was an attempt by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, the administrator of the British South Africa Company’s territories, to provoke an uprising of the Uitlanders — the mainly British and American gold miners on the Witwatersrand — against the government of the South African Republic (Transvaal). Rhodes supported the Raid, and he resigned as prime minister of the Cape Colony in January 1896 when the failure of the Raid became clear.

The Raid was a serious violation of international law, and it was a serious embarrassment to the British government. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a telegram to Paul Kruger, the president of the South African Republic, congratulating him on the suppression of the Raid — a piece of diplomatic pressure that contributed to the British decision to bring the matter to a head. The Raid led directly to the Second Matabele War of 1896, in which the Ndebele, taking advantage of the chaos produced by the Raid, revolted against the British South Africa Company. The revolt was suppressed, but the suppression was costly, and the company’s financial position was severely damaged.

Rhodes’s Imperial Vision

Rhodes’s imperial vision, set out most clearly in his Confession of Faith of 1877, was the establishment of British rule from “the Cape to Cairo” — a continuous belt of British territory stretching across the African continent. The vision was never realised, but it was a powerful influence on British imperial thinking in the late nineteenth century. The “Cape to Cairo” project was taken up by the British government, and it was the basis of the British claim to the territories that became the Rhodesias, the British East African protectorates, and the British control of the Nile valley.

The vision was, in a real sense, a vision of British settler colonialism. Rhodes believed that the British were the “finest race in the world” and that their expansion was providential. He was a strong supporter of the federation of the South African colonies, and he was a strong supporter of British emigration to South Africa. The British South Africa Company, in his conception, was a vehicle for the settlement of British people in the African interior, and the conquest of the Ndebele and Shona was a necessary precondition for that settlement.

The End of the Career

Rhodes died in May 1902 at his cottage in Muizenberg, near Cape Town, at the age of 48. He had been ill for some years, and his death was hastened by a series of heart attacks. He was buried in the Matopos Hills in what is now Zimbabwe, on a hilltop he had chosen for his burial site, looking out over the territory he had conquered. The inscription on his grave — “There is always something left to love” — has been a source of controversy ever since.

The career of Cecil Rhodes is, in this respect, a study in the contradictions of late-Victorian British imperialism. He was a man of extraordinary energy and intelligence, and he was the author of one of the most ambitious imperial projects in the history of the British Empire. He was also the author of policies that, in the longer run, contributed to the racial violence of twentieth-century South Africa. The historiographical debate about Rhodes has been, in many respects, a debate about the British Empire itself: whether the empire was, on balance, a force for good or a force for evil, and whether its agents can be judged by the standards of their own time or by the standards of a later era.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Cecil Rhodes has been transformed since the 1960s. The older British tradition, of which the work of J. G. Lockhart and C. M. Woodhouse is representative, treated Rhodes as a great empire-builder whose work was, on balance, beneficial. The most famous statement of this view was Lord Milner’s posthumous edition of The Speeches of the Right Honourable Cecil John Rhodes (1903), which presented Rhodes as a faithful servant of the British Empire. The African nationalist historiography, of which the work of Terrence Ranger, Christopher Saunders, and the contributors to the Cambridge History of Africa is the most distinguished representative, has been far more critical, treating Rhodes as an agent of British settler colonialism whose work in the Matabele and Shona lands was a disaster for the African inhabitants. The most recent work, of which the contributions of Shula Marks, Martin Hall, and the contributors to The Oxford History of the British Empire are representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. Rhodes was an empire-builder; he was also a man of his time. The evaluation of his work depends on the standards by which it is judged.

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