The Legacy of Cecil John Rhodes: His Role in the expansion of the British Empire

¹Paul Kombo

¹Machakos University

Abstract

This paper sets out to describe the character, philosophies and guiding beliefs of the bigger-than-life personality of Cecil John Rhodes, the diamond magnate, as seen by different researchers and writers. It also explains how these were shaped by his attempts at grammar school in England and much later by his long stint due to absences in class-attendance in Oxford University. His father dispatched him to South Africa at a young age of seventeen in 1871 and on arrival he lived with his elder brother Herbert in Natal who was a cotton farmer. Both later relocated to Kimberley Diamond Fields after one year. Rhodes’ entry into diamond mining that saw him acquire complete diamond mining rights not only in Southern Africa but in the whole world with funding from the N.M. Rothschild bankers and other London financiers, is examined. The article also examines the magnate’s entry into politics and becoming Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and his convincing the Queen to grant him a charter for creation of the British South Africa Company (BSAC). For purposes of the expansion of the British Empire, the two Boer republics, Transvaal and Orange Free State, were viewed by Rhodes as a stumbling block that needed to be removed by whatever means possible with the full backing of the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Rhodes’ handling of the subsequent conflicts with the already established Boers in the light of the discovery of diamonds in 1866 and later gold in 1886 is discussed. Rhodes believed strongly that the ‘gold of Ophir’ had been mined somewhere in territory further north occupied by the Matabele and the Shona. He subsequently dispatched the Pioneer Column to conquer the territory not only driven by a desire for Empire expansion but also to discover the sources of the famed gold. His tenuous relations with the Boers and Afrikaners in the face of his expansionist schemes and confrontations are discussed and so are the so-called concessions agreements with King Lobengula Khumalo of the Ndebele who controlled these lands. A brief look is made of his duplicitous friendships with the Matabele chief in order to manipulate their good intentions towards him to acquire the land concessions in Zimbabwe. We examine Rhodes’ fervent belief in the superiority of the British race and therefore its rightness to perpetuate British hegemony throughout the world. To further these beliefs, he made elaborate plans for the creation of a secret society, carefully put down in writing in his seven Wills, aspects of which he mentions in his book ‘Confession of Faith’ as the basis for his quest to expand the British Empire in Africa and the eventual creation of a one-world government. Supporters of Rhodes such as Professor Basil Williams (Professor of Imperial History in Oxford University) and other prominent British writers and historians saw him as a great man who had rendered “good service to mankind and what was best for England and the world”. MacDonald likened Rhodes to Cromwell in that he was possessed of a singular idea-a global empire controlled by the British Empire. This overriding idea had earlier been propagated by prominent late nineteenth and early twentieth century British personalities and scholars strongly proposing the establishment of a world federation or commonwealth, ideas that gave birth later first to the League of Nations and to the United Nations. Critics of the so-called “civilizing and good for mankind’’ character of the British Empire government however, have raised issue with Rhodes’ racist and deceptive methods of wealth acquisition and colonial expansion seen as questionable at best and despotic, comparable to that of Adolf Hitler. This paper further looks at how the Rhodes scholarships and the round table movement, both of which he was the key originator and funder, have shaped the world since the beginning of the 20^st Century.

Key Words: The Cape Colony, Matabele, Shona, Kimberley, character, philosophies, diamonds, mining, Boers, expansionist, British empire, secret society, scholarships, round table movement, Milner’s Kindergarten, League of Nations.

Part 1

Rhodes Early Life

Cecil John Rhodes, the British mining magnate and politician who made great wealth in Southern Africa and became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, was one of the greatest influences that helped to shape British foreign policy and practice over time. Owing to poor health as an adolescent, the father determined that Rhodes needed a change to a better climate and hence made arrangements for him to be moved to Natal, South Africa in 1870. He landed on African soil in September of that year, at the age of seventeen, where he joined his elder brother Herbert who was already settled there. The brother was farming cotton in the Umkomazi Valley, Natal, an endeavor that soon proved unsuitable forcing them to migrate to the growing town of Kimberley where the recent discovery of diamonds in 1871 was drawing many prospectors from many parts of the world. Upon arriving in Kimberley, the young Rhodes started off amongst these small-scale prospectors by similarly engaging in small-scale diamond mining to earn a living before he grew into big business. Kimberley Mine was then known as New Rush which is in today’s Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Three years after arriving in South Africa, in 1873, he bought shares in the Kimberley Diamond Mining Company and later in De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited, being financially bankrolled by London bankers N.M. Rothschild. In the same year, he decided to enter university and therefore went to England and enrolled at Oxford University. At university he was enthralled by a lecture by Professor John Ruskin is quoted as stating the following at the end of his arts lecture:

…..There is a destiny now possible to us … We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood … We are not yet dissolute in temper … Will you youth of England make your country again a royal throne of kings? … This is what England must do or perish, she must found colonies as far and as fast as she is able.³

Control of Diamond Mining in South Africa

to migrate to the growing town of Kimberley where the recent discovery of diamonds in 1871 was drawing many prospectors from many parts of the world amongst whom the younger Rhodes did small-scale diamond mining to earn a living, before he grew into big business. Kimberley Mine was then known as New Rush which is in today’s Northern Cape Province of South Africa. In 1873, Rhodes bought shares in the Kimberley Diamond Mining Company and later in De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited, being financially bankrolled by London bankers N.M. Rothschild. However, he had serious competition from a rival, fellow Englishman, and diamond businessman known as Barney Barnato (his true name was Barnett Isaacs) who controlled Barnato Diamond Mining Company. In the end, Rhodes outwitted Barnato through financial support of the bankers N.M. Rothschild and diamond magnate Alfred Beit to buy one-fifth controlling shares in the Kimberley Central Mine and enticing Banarto’s shareholders to sell their shares to him. At this point Barnato capitulated and signed an agreement to amalgamate the two companies into De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited with Rhodes as chairman and also agreeing that profits from the company can be used for expansion of the British Empire. Rhodes went on to found the British South Africa Company, that later grew to comprise a group of companies that included De Beers Diamond Company, Rio Tinto and the Anglo-American companies through the financial support of Rothschild bankers and other financiers of London. Although there is no record of Rhodes receiving other formal education beside his early grammar school education in Stortford, he was able to later in life enroll in Oxford University presumably as a mature student, because the period when he was in the university coincides with the period he was acquiring and expanding his wealth and political life in the Cape Colony.

Being a strong believer in the rightness and infallibility of the British Empire and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, he fervently advocated for the creation of a world-wide government ruled by the British Empire. He made these views in his ‘Confession of Faith’ that he penned as a student at Oxford even as he was acquiring his great wealth. Similar strong advocacy and material support for a one-world government was shared by many notable English contemporaries, many of whom held the believe that the upper classes of the Anglo-Saxon race possessed special blood (genes) that made them to be more successful than other races, a belief that had been given scholarly underpinning by a study of genealogies of English aristocracy and upper classes by Francis Galton in 1883 (Galton, 1884). Born on 5^th July 1853 in Stortford, Hertfordshire, England in a family with strong Christian values since his father was the vicar of the Church of England in Stortford, Rhodes was equipped with religious concepts early on in life. He received his early childhood education in Bishop’s Stortford Grammar School up to the age of nine after which he joined Winchester Secondary school but also intermitedly tutored privately by his father being reported to have had health problems at the time.

Key British intellectuals of the time who were supporters of British Empire were in agreement that the British system of empire was the best that human beings had developed up to that point in history because of its ‘civilising’ characteristics. Key among them Kerr, Alfred Zimmern, Hobson argued in scholarly articles that the Empire was good for humankind and therefore needed to be expanded to cover the entire world. These arguments were justified by assertions that the British interests were the “most available and realistic system of international morality” available to mankind. As justification of these assertions, Niall Ferguson (2003) asserts that the British Empire was “the nearest thing there has ever been to a world government” based on the freeing of markets and removal of trade barriers in a process he terms ‘Angloglobolisation’. Due to this process, areas controlled (colonized) by the British Empire achieved impressive economic performance compared to those controlled by “corrupt, socialistic, protectionist regimes”. Those who questioned the British world power and its methods were often dismissed as supercilious internal liberal critics. These arguments and proposals were the background to the formation of the League of Nations in 1919 and later after World War Two, to the formation of the United Nations. compared to others notably the German Reich of the time. It is therefore natural for Rhodes to view other races as inferior based on these assumptions.

Rhodes’ Secret Society

The Society of the Elect: The Junta

Professor Quigley asserts that at the outset, Rhodes met with William T. Stead and Brett to set up the Society of the Elect. This secret organization was deliberately organized so that the very top was occupied by the Junta headed by Rhodes himself as the General of the Junta while below it was the Inner Circle and the Outer Circle members that included members from British closely-affiliated countries namely Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States of America, South Africa and Germany. It must be noted that secret societies had dominated Europe for many centuries and much later were created in the United States principally through Freemasonry. Although Cecil Rhodes was already a member of the Freemasons at the time that he was proposing for the creation of this other new secret society, it was because he wanted it to be modelled on the Catholic Jesuits society which he thought was more secretive and effective than the Freemans. The new secret society financed by Rhodes, according to author Jim Marrs in his book Rule by Secrecy (pp.83), later came to be known as the Round Table movement with chapters in the United States and other countries. A veteran of the South African Boer War, Lionel Curtis, who was a protégé of Lord Alfred Milner (member of Milner’s Kindergarten), took the lead in the 1919 Paris conference in the formation of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) with an American chapter to be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The Rhode’s scholarships under his will would sponsor the education of young men from these countries in Oxford University under the stewardship of his loyal friend Sir Alfred Milner. The plan for the creation of secret society was first sketched in his first will as follows:

…..To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.

The initial meeting for planning the form of secret society to be created was held in February 1891in which Rhodes discussed with William T. Stead, a well-known writer and editor, and drew up a tentative list of members comprising Rhodes himself, Stead and Nathan Rothschild. In the arrangement, Stead and Rothschild were made trustees of the Rhodes’ wills with the latter handling the financial aspects. At this stage of the organizing, the secret society was divided into two levels, namely the Society of the Elect, being the innermost group and the Association of Helpers, the outside circle. It was agreed that the inner level would be made up of the General of the Society (Rhodes) and three junta members namely Stead, Brett and Alfred Milner. This meeting also agreed to establish a magazine known as ‘Review of Reviews’ which would be the mouth-piece of the secret society. According to Professor Quigley, Rhodes let those present in this early meeting know that he had also intimated his plans for the formation of the secret society to some other friends notably Rothschild and Harry H. Johnston, a renowned African explorer and administrator. Johnston was involved in the curving out of parts of Kenya, Uganda and Nyasaland for the British Empire. According to A Tentative Roster of the Milner Group, which was evidently part of the will of Rhodes, the Society of the Elect comprised several levels namely The Society of the Elect, The Association of Helpers, The Outer Circle and Members in other countries. Cecil John Rhodes is listed number one on the list of the Society of the Elect suggesting that he was considered the commander of the secret society. This point is supported by Professor Quigley who asserts that Rhodes was placed in the arrangement as the general of the society with the other three as junta members as indicated above.

PART 2

The Idea of a World Federation

In late ninetieth century and early twentieth century, eminent British personalities and scholars proposed the establishment of a world federation or commonwealth. These ideas later gave birth first to the League of Nations and the United Nations. Critics of the so-called “civilizing and good for mankind’’ character of the British Empire however raised issue with Rhodes’ racism and deceptive methods of wealth acquisition and colonial expansion Seen as questionable at best and despotic Some compared his greed for power to that of Adolf Hitler who appeared in the world scene years later Key British writers and scholars of the time who were supporters of British empire were in agreement that the British system of empire was the best that human beings had developed up to that point in history because of its ‘civilising’ characteristics that gave birth first to the League of Nations and later to the United Nations compared to others notably the German Reich of the time. It is therefore natural for Rhodes to view other races as inferior based on these assumptions. Shortly before his death in 1902, Rhodes had bequeathed his vast wealth to the Rhodes Trust for funding his secret society and the Rhodes Scholarship Fund to cater for the education of young men in universities who would later be used for furthering the aims and objectives of the secret society once they returned to their home countries. After university, majority of these young men were employed in the civil services in South Africa, Canada, United States and other Commonwealth countries. The awarding of these scholarships to eligible young men from different countries of the world was seen as the vehicle for creating a pool of like-minded point-men in those countries. These young men would in time be used to achieve the planned one-world government that Rhodes and the like-minded industrialists and magnates were looking to establish, through agitating and championing from within their own countries and governments.

Upon becoming the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1890, Rhodes introduced the Glen Grey Act that was designed to legitimize the removal of blacks from their lands to make way for white settlement and industrialization of those areas. His philosophy was that the blacks had to be removed from their traditional lands in order to transform them to conform to European habits. Rhodes applied discriminatory laws that disenfranchised Africans notably the limiting of the size of land they could own legally while greatly increasing the amount of land that whites could legally hold as noted by Richard Dowden “most would find it almost impossible to get back to the list (Cape Qualified Franchise) because of the legal limit on the amount of land they could hold”. Rhodes argued that the native African was to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. This line of thinking and action was not new since it had already been applied in the United States by President Andrew Jackson to legitimize the removal of several thousand Cherokee Indians from their native lands using the Indian Removal Act in 1829. President Jackson, who professed friendship to the Indians, justified his actions by claiming that the forcing of the Cherokee off their traditional lands would keep them free from the influences of the white man. Rhodes, like Jackson, professed friendship to the African people yet pushed for the idea that they should only be used for manual labor.

Among the original members of the Milner Kindergarten was Patrick Duncan (Sir Patrick) who had been Milner’s assistant in the Board of Internal Revenue (1894-1897) in England. He attended Balliol College, Oxford University in 1890-1894. Later he joined Milner in South Africa as private secretary, later becoming treasurer of the Transvaal in 1901, Colonial Secretary 1903-1906 and acting Lieutenant-Governor in 1906. Later he was Minister of the Interior, Minister of Mines and Governor-General of South Africa (1936-1946). During the whole period he would frequently visit England to consult with the Group. Another prominent member of the Kindergarten was Hugh A. Wyndham who in addition to his having been in the South African Union Parliament between 1910 and 1920, was previously the private secretary to Milner himself. Author of ‘Problems of Imperial Trusteeship’ (1933), and ‘Britain and the World’, among some of the books he authored, was heir presumptive to the third Baron Leconfield. Like all other members of the Milner Group, he was also both a member of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) and the secret society.

Another key Milner Kindergarten member was Richard Feetham who occupied many high and varied positions notably as chairman of Committee on Decentralization in India (1918-1919), chairman of the Local Government Commission of the Kenyan Colony in 1926 during the governorship of Edward Grigg. He was also chairman of the Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Commission (1930-1935), and Vice Chancellor of University of Witwatersrand, among others. He attended New College, Oxford in 1893-1895. Yet another important member of the Kindergarten was John Buchan who authored books such as Nelsons History of the Great War (1915-1919), The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Three Hostages and Greenmantle. He served as correspondent for The Times newspaper as well as military intelligence officer in France in 1916-1917 and as Director of Information for the War Office in 1917-1918.

Lord Alfred Milner, who had been the High Commissioner in South Africa during the Boer War and a close friend of Rhodes, later made concrete steps in the realization of Rhodes’ vision by establishing the Round Table movement through what was referred to as Milner’s Kindergarten. Milner held similar views about the expansion of the British Empire advocating for “a common civilization, united, not in an alliance-for alliances can be made and unmade and are never more than nominally lasting but in a permanent organic union”. These words are contained in his farewell speech to an audience in Cape Town in March 1905 aimed especially at members of Milner’s Kindergarten. The Kindergarten refers to the pool of young men trained in Oxford University under the Rhodes scholarships, mostly Englishmen, according to the last will that the mining magnate had prepared before he died in 1902. Milner continued

“…. Our idea is still distant…. the road is long, the obstacles are many, and the goal may not be reached in my lifetime— perhaps not in that of many in this room. You cannot hasten the slow growth of a great idea like that by any forcing process……. I know that the service of that idea requires the rarest combination of qualities, a combination of ceaseless effort with infinite patience. But think on the other hand of the greatness of the reward; the immense privilege of being allowed to contribute in any way to the fulfilment of one of the noblest conceptions which has ever dawned on the political imagination of mankind”.

It is worth noting that the idea of forming a secret organization to further British imperial interests was not a new one during this time. Another like-minded British personality, Robert Talbot Gascoigne-Cecil, Viscount Cranborne and third Marquis of Salisbury (1830-1903) had already developed a similar plan comprised of three elements. The first element involved a method of the secret group penetrating politics, education and journalism. The second level of the plan was the recruitment of men of ability (mainly from Oxford University) who would be assisted to climb up the political and social ladder through matrimonial alliances, titles and positions of power. The last part involved the influencing of public policy by placing these recruited men of ability in positions of power and ensuring that they were protected from public scrutiny. This group came to be known as the Cecil Bloc, one of the factions of the secret organization established for pursuing the cause of expanding the British Empire to cover the entire world just like the Milner Bloc. To illustrate how effective, the methodology was in achieving its objectives, Professor Quigley elaborates that Lord Salisbury (Gascoigne-Cecil), utilizing a similar methodology, was able to hold high and varied positions of power that included fourteen years as prime minister of Britain between 1885 and 1902.

Rhodes Scholarships and The Round Table Movement

“Our idea is still distant…. the road is long, the obstacles are many, and the goal may not be reached in my lifetime— perhaps not in that of many in this room. You cannot hasten the slow growth of a great idea like that by any forcing process……. I know that the service of that idea requires the rarest combination of qualities, a combination of ceaseless effort with infinite patience. But think on the other hand of the greatness of the reward; the immense privilege of being allowed to contribute in any way to the fulfilment of one of the noblest conceptions which has ever dawned on the political imagination of mankind”.

As we have stated above, about the time of the death of Rhodes in 1902, there were two distinct secret groups all with very similar goals and objects and operating about the same period, namely the Cecil bloc and the Milner Group. With time however, the distinction between the two groups became blurred with the Cecil bloc apparently being swallowed by the Milner Group. These groups had created parallel research organizations for human psychology research namely the Psychical Research Institute of the Cecil bloc and the Royal Institute for International Affairs based in Chatham House at Oxford University which later moved to London. We will be looking in more detail the activities and objectives of these two organizations later in the paper. It is worth noting that all members of the Milner Group were also members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA). The first meeting of members of the Institutes of International Affairs of the Commonwealth was held in Canada in 1933 and was structured along the lines of the Chatham House model. The second conference of this group took place in Sydney, Australia under the Australian Institute of International Affairs in 1938 attended by many delegates from Britain. Canada, Australia with sponsorship of the Commonwealth Government, New South Wales government and the Carnegie Corporation. Prominent British members of the Round Table who attended were Lord Lothian, chair of the Rhodes Trust and later British Ambassador in Washington, Lionel Curtis, and Ernest Bevin. Milner had worked as an assistant editor at the Pall Mall magazine under William T. Stead in England. He had also worked in South Africa following his appointment as High Commissioner in that country. He is described as possessing a keen intellect that had been infused with the singular passion for service to the state by Arnold Toynbee, who he met at Oxford, and is said to have been his mentor and a fellow radical reformer. However, the similarities between the two seems to be in great contrast given that Toynbee was a selfless worker who championed the rights of the less privileged and by the account of Milner himself, a Bible reading person who most likely followed its teachings. Milner, on the other hand, was a member of the secret society which by its own aims and objectives was antithetical to Christin teachings. The similarities of these two Englishmen could lie in the fact that each of them concentrated almost all their mental powers on service to a particular constituency namely: Toynbee focused his energies in addressing the plight of the poor while Milner, using a similar single-mindedness, focused all his energies on service to the British Empire. John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir), who served in many high offices in the British military and equerry to three kings and one-time Governor-General of Canada, described Milner as a person who focused all his energies to the service of the British Empire once the idea was introduced to him. Buchan himself was a close member of the Milner group and therefore understood the relationships between its key members. Buchan explains that Milner’s love for the state service was inculcated in him mostly by Arnold Toynbee. But who was Arnold Toynbee and how did it come that he had so much influence in the thinking of Alfred Milner, the chief architect of the Rhodes secret society?

Believer in Superiority of Anglo-Saxon Race over other Races

Among his many achievements are as a politician having become the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in the years 1890-1896 and regarded as the founder of modern Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia (Rhodesia, and Nyasaland then). One of his dearest ambitions, but less well known, is his earnest quest for the expansion of the British Empire to include the United States of America and encompass the entire world. In pursuit of his dream of bringing the United States back into the fold of the British Empire, Rhodes made arrangements as well as put mechanisms in place and the money for the creation of a secret society which he called “The Society of the Elect” comprising of well-educated young men from England and other countries. These men would later come to be known as the Milner’s Kindergarten tasked with carrying out his vision for the expansion of the British Empire. Rhodes so strongly believed in British imperialism and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race that he wrote in his Confession of Faith:

“…..I content that we are the finest race in the world…….just fancy those parts…….at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…..Why should we not form a secret society with one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Europe”.

This was written in the year 1875. The grammatical mistakes are in his original manuscript of June 2, 1875. During his study at Oriel College, Oxford University, Rhodes was greatly influenced by John Ruskin who established the Slade College of Fine Arts and was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. Professor Ruskin was a writer of literature and fine art, his most famous work being “Modern Painters’ which he penned under an anonymous name ‘A graduate of Oxford’. Ruskin was well-traveled in Europe accompanying his parents and later his wife Euphemia Chalmers Gray whom he married in 1848. Accounts reveal that his marriage, having been arranged by the parents from both sides who were old friends, did not have real feelings of affection leading to it being annuled since it was never consummated. Rhodes was enthralled by Ruskin’s arguments and particularly his inaugural lecture where, among other things, the professor argued that “the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues”. In order to have a good understanding of the underlying philosophies and belief system that Rhodes embraced as a student and later in his life, let us look at what Ruskin himself believed. David Icke, author, describes Ruskin as an ardent student of the Bible before he gave up belief in God and instead concentrated in esoteric writings by Plato (The Republic) and Madame Blavatsky (founder of the Theosophy (occult) society and other books on secret societies, notably the Order of the Golden Dawn. The central themes of much of these writings consist of a lack of belief in and questioning of Christian teachings and advocation for an all-powerful and controlling government through a central power base of a few elite people at the top, what can clearly be seen as a socialist or communistic type of government. These, as elaborated by Professor Carol Quigley, were the main philosophies of Ruskin that so enthralled Rhodes at Oxford University that he copied the lectures in longhand for own reference thereafter. It is noteworthy that these same beliefs form the central arguments of older and existing secret societies notably the Knight Templars, Freemasonry and the Theosophist movement of madame Blavatsky as shown by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh in their book The Temple and the Lodge. The Temple and the Lodge. Random House). The two authors also point out that since the seventeenth century, no less than six Kings and other British members of the Royal family have been members of the secret society. This is taken to be the part Rhodes assumed fitted well with his own ideas on the expansion of the British Empire as well as the unification of the whole world under the British Monarchy. Some accounts claim that Ruskin’s thesis so greatly mentally gripped Rhodes that he copied notes of it in long hand and carried it with him the rest of his life. In his Confession of Faith, Rhodes tells us that he had become a member of the masonic secret society during his stay in Oxford while attributing his acquisition of the great wealth to his membership of the secret group. Despite his masonic affiliations, he still felt that there was need to create an even more elaborate and secretive society modelled on the Jesuit system of the Catholic Church. He argued in his book, through a rhetorical question:

“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race but one empire?……..such a scheme……what a splendid help a secret society would be (that) is not openly acknowledged but who work in secret for such an object”.

Rhodes Pushes Northwards: The Anglo-Boer Wars

The Anglo-Boer wars have been characterized as coming out of the desire of the British government to annex and expand the empire into the southern African territories under the Afrikaner/Boer governorship, namely the Transvaal and Orange Free State, which were up to that point independent republics. The first Anglo-Boer war, also known as the First Transvaal War of Independence (1880-1881), resulted from several causes namely, a strong desire by the Disraeli conservative government to expand the British Empire and unite all southern African colonies into a federation, weak governance in the Boer government in Pretoria, poverty, and strong resistance by Boers against British annexation of their country. The attempt to annex Transvaal (also known as South Africa Republic) by Theophilus Shepstone, formerly the Secretary for native affairs in Natal, under instructions from British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Henry Herbert (Lord Porchester), 4^th Earl of Carnarvon, was initially successful for a few years up to 1880. Utilizing the conflict raging between the Transvaal government and the Pedi King Sekhukhune I over the latter’s refusal to pay taxes, Shepstone declared annexation of Transvaal Republic in Pretoria in 1877 amid protests albeit peaceful in nature by Boer leaders. In the next three years, Boer leaders led several delegations to Britain to plead for restoration of their independence but these were all in vain being turned down by the British government which maintained that the republic should remain a colony of the British Empire. This British obstinacy in maintaining a position of a clear breach of Boer right of their own country, eventually persuaded them that only war would bring back their independence. In deliberate moves designed to provoke a war with the British authority, Boers met and chose their leaders namely Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert, and M.W. Pretorius to their campaign to reclaim their country back from the British. And soon after on 13^th December 1880, they proclaimed the restoration of their Transvaal Republic and raised their flag at Heidelberg rejecting British authority. The resulting war between the Boers and the British ended in total defeat for the latter and cost them two hundred dead soldiers and a similar number injured compared to only a few dead and injured Boer commandos at the battle of Majuba Hill. The Boers on this occasion were able to restore their independence from the onslaught of British empire through the signing of the Pretoria Convention of August 1881. But this gave them only a temporary reprieve for their independence from British colonialism.

Under a decade later, and with better scheming against the Boer republic, the British took charge of the second Anglo-Boer war (1899-1901) resulting in a very different outcome. A desire to control not only the southern African Boers Republics but also the native local tribes notably the Zulu in Natal and the Pedi in the north, the British government now headed by Gladstone, was even more determined to actualize their long-held ambition of control of the whole of southern Africa. With the discovery of gold in Witwatersrand in Transvaal in the early 1886 making it the single biggest gold producer in the world, the South Africa Republic under Paul Kruger, was attaining a new economic clout in the eyes of international business and seemed set to upset the international monetary system controlled by the British Empire. In a related development, the discovery of gold fields in Transvaal Republic had brought international speculators into the country who were from outside Southern Africa, called Uitlanders, who in time started to demand their rights to vote. Believing that the Uitlanders (immigrants) had ulterior motives and were a threat to Transvaal independence, the government tried to control their voting rights by allowing only those who had been in the country for 14 or more years these rights. About this time, it must be noted, Cecil Rhodes had become a very wealthy politician from diamond mining in Kimberley in the Cape Colony and was soon to become the Prime Minister in 1890. Being a strong supporter of British imperialism and holding a fervent believe in the superiority of the British race and empire, Rhodes felt that allowing the South Africa Republic to control the biggest gold wealth in the world would undermine British expansionist aims in southern Africa and hence needed to be stopped.

Back in Southern Africa, in his endeavor to bring under the British sphere new territories, Rhodes worked tirelessly through coercing and cajoling treaties and concessions from the local Ndebele and Shona chiefs in what was then called Zambesia. Early on after arriving in the Cape Colony where he found a resurgent Boer army under Kruger having beaten off a British effort to annex the Transvaal, Rhodes at first kept his feelings to himself because he had a bigger vision of a much bigger and expansive British Empire. But first there were lands to be conquered or somehow brought under British control. These were the territories further north of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in the area that was at that time known as Zambesia. These comprised lands between the south and north of the Zambezi River which would soon after be called Southern and Northern Rhodesia by the white settlers. Despite this strong desire of Rhodes to expand control of more and more territories for the British Empire and hence the need for him to work closely with the local British administration (controlled by the Colonial Office in London), he never-the-less wanted the control of local matters be exercised by the settlers and politicians like himself. It is quite clear that the Rhodes’ scheme for the expansion of the British Empire was intended to be carried out through surreptitious ways given that it was to be actualized secretly and in ways designed to be unnoticeable by the ordinary people.

To start with, the plan required the influencing of people without them realizing that they were being fed with information prepared in advance to make them see things in the way of those behind the scheme. Passionately believing in the virtues of British values, culture and ideals, he wanted to spread these far and wide especially to the African natives whom he considered to be like children. At the same time, he was always on the lookout for commercial opportunities that would become available particularly from mining of gold and diamonds in the hinterlands of southern Africa (Green, 1936). Key British writers and scholars, supporters of British empire, agreed that the British system of empire was the best that human beings had developed up to that point in history. Arguments that it’s ‘civilizing’ character gave birth first to the League of Nations and later to the United Nations. Better than others notably the German Reich of the time.

Conclusion

We see the lowly beginnings of Cecil Rhodes as a sickly young Englishman shipped to Natal to join his elder brother Herbert, a cotton farmer, and his meteoric acquisition of wealth after moving to Kimberley. In a short period, he become very rich through gold and diamond mining with financing of the Rothschild bank and other London financiers. In the midst of expanding his diamond mining business, he enrolls as a student in Oxford University in 1873 determined to secure a degree, an endeavor that takes about seven years to attain his bachelor’s qualification. He enter politics after winning the Barkley West constituency in the Cape Colony. Later he became the Prime Minister of the Colony. In a series of wills before his death in 1902, he bequeathed the entire wealth to the realization of a global British-controlled empire that that he hoped would regain the United States of America. His plans were to utilize the two vehicles for the achievement of this grand idea namely the Rhodes Scholarships and the Round Table Movement. His singular purpose in life was the expansion of the British Empire by whatever means as was fond of asserting to friends and the realization of a world-wide British empire. As Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, he trampled upon African land and voting rights in the Cape Colony.

At the period when he was attending Oxford University, Rhodes appears to have metamorphosed to embrace extreme views of the urgency and right of the British Empire to rule the entire world and also about his own love relationships. From the literature, it is apparent that he came under strong influence of at least one of his lecturers in Oxford, Professor John Ruskin, and also the ideas he gleaned from writings by Marcus Aurelius, Winwood Reade, and other classics, influenced and shaped his thoughts and views about life, love and spirituality.

His critics have accused Rhodes of using unscrupulous methods of wealth acquisition and land concessionary rights to control Ndebele and Shona lands. Lands from Shona and the Ndebele renamed Rhodesia after himself. Rhodes never married but had close relationships with many young men among whom were Hawkins, then Pickering whom it seems was very close to him and the Band of Twelve. Later he also was lose to General Gordon of Khartoum who wrote him several revealing love letters.

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