On the 11th
of November 1965, the former colonial protectorate of Britain known
as Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence from the United
Kingdom.
Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of this new and contested sovereign
nation, was the first such leader of a former British possession to
unilaterally declare independence from the empire since the American
Declaration of Independence close to two centuries prior.
Perhaps not so dissimilar as one may think, American and Rhodesian
separatism were in large part pushed to imperial defection by a
desire among certain circles of patrician elite to maintain, protect,
and/or augment their existing privileges. Both can also be seen as
party to perpetuating a cynically cavalier racial dominion over
Africans and their kidnapped American progeny in the interests of
white supremacy, though this is more often than not overlooked in the
popular history of the American Revolution (needless to say this is
not the case with the Civil War). There are very obvious historical
reasons for this as unlike Rhodesia in 1965, the American defectors
of the late 18th
century were not troubled by the rather overwhelming problem of
maintaining a form of minority rule over a massive and
racially-disenfranchised majority on the very continent they had
called home for millenia.
Alongside this, colonialism as a concept and legitimate tool of
statecraft was no longer in vogue even in the mother country of
Britain itself; this, in fact, was one of the primary reasons Ian
Smith felt compelled to sign the Unilateral Declaration of
Independence in order to veer away from Britain's post-colonial
framework for establishing genuine majority rule in the country.
Wishing to preserve white minority rule as the Republic of South
Africa was doing through the policy of apartheid, Smith and his rebel
cabal represented the last hopes to maintain this vision, one on par
with and undoubtedly deeply influenced by Cecil Rhodes, the man for
whom the region of Rhodesia was named. It gained this namesake during
the apex of British imperialism under Queen Victoria in 1895,
and part and parcel to this imperial pride and fervour for wider
domination, Rhodes wrote the following very telling words in his
final will and testament of 1902: “The world is nearly all
parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up,
conquered and colonised. To think of these stars that you see
overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I
would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes
me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
So who exactly was Cecil Rhodes and how much power and influence did
he truly wield during his time in southern Africa? As well, what
cursory effects did his legacy have throughout the period following
his death and into the present era, and what can his story tell us
about life in the Victorian age?
It would be impossible to claim
Rhodes' ambitions as the exclusive or overpowering force behind the
British colonial project on the southern half of the continent. As
with all historical leviathans, his legend obfuscates much of the
details of what he intended to accomplish as well as the key role his
multifarious influences played in shaping his worldview and
intentions. His myth is a great plume of smoke, and where there is
smoke, there is fire. Although the smoke of his popular myth is an
important subject which will be broached later in this writing, the
discipline of historical analyses demands we investigate the fire and
trace an accurately compelling sketch of all that from which Cecil
Rhodes emerged to become such a controversial force to be reckoned
with. One of his favourite books which he carried with him
practically everywhere he went was the “Meditations”
of the ancient Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Throughout his copy of
the book, Rhodes avidly emphasized the passages most affecting to him
through ubiquitous circling and underlining in such a way as to
communicate the earnest intensity of his revelations. He called
“Meditations”
his “guide in life” and his “most precious possession.”
Through an analysis of the 101 passages Rhodes particularly
emphasized (and provided by Rotberg)
the gist of the relevant themes can be broadly grouped into four
categories:
1: Death can come at any moment, thus one should live as if it were
imminent;
2: Intellect and reason take precedence over emotions;
3: “Just acts are their own reward”; in other words, do what is
seriously meaningful, and avoid engagement in all that is deemed
frivolous;
4: Success in one's life and
ventures is largely contingent on working well with others, staying
open to compromise, cultivating and maintaining the ability to
listen, and not being so prideful so as to become closed to changing
one's mind.
From this analytical
distillation, we can see that Rhodes was driven largely by a
humanistic set of values emanating from the Renaissance and its trend
towards the venerated study of ancient authors. By and large, it is
likely that Rhodes already had a sense of all he learned from
Aurelius, but found a certain confirmation of his ambitious
intentions better articulated in the words of another. However,
“Meditations”
was not the only work of literature Rhodes found himself enamoured
with at the time. Written by William Winwood Reade and published in
1872, “The Martyrdom
of Man” was a highly
controversial secular work of 'universal' history which broadly
supported political liberalism alongside a particular vision of
social Darwinism.
The section most contested by critics was one which attacked
Christian dogmas at length, and it lead many to misinterpret Reade as
an atheist when he had, in fact, believed in some sort of Creator,
just not in the set image decided upon by the established religions
of his day.
In this sense, he viewed the Christianity of his time as committing
conceptual idolatry, thus facilitating a general ignorance resulting
in dangerous worldly consequences as all operated on the basis of a
collective illusion within which ultimate 'truth' was thought to
reside. Rhodes, though a more traditional Christian than Winwood
Reade, was deeply influenced by Reade's book. It seemed to confirm
much of his intuitions regarding organized religion, acknowledging
that God does indeed exist, but that he is not interested in humans
as individuals, nor did he create man in his image.
By 1889, as he reached the apex of his power, Rhodes, according to
his good friend and key guarantor of his will William Stead, “neatly
reconciles the two opposing tectonic movements of the Victorian age,
science and religion, by concluding that God was supervising the
perfection of the species by a process of natural selection ... and
[that] the struggle for existence [was] recognised as the favourite
instruments of the Divine Ruler.'”
From this base of humanistic imperial thought stems the paternalistic
racism which Rhodes came to embody for many during his lifetime and
long past his death.
It
was the overtures of yet another author contemporary to his time that
many historians mark as the key and timely inspiration to Cecil's
ambitions to expand the British Empire. In a lecture at Oxford
University which is now part of school's lore, famous literary critic
John Ruskin implored his audience that “[t]here 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.”
Many previous tellings of Rhodes' life portray him as present at the
lecture itself, though this has been proven to be untrue through
later investigation. Instead, it seems he purchased or otherwise
obtained a transcript published by the Clarendon Press not long
following Ruskin's 1870 address.
The influence this lecture exerted on Rhodes, however, is
uncontested. This is evidenced in his own words when he writes that
Ruskin's “lectures made a great impression on one [and] [o]ne of
them which set out the privileges and opportunities of the young men
in the Empire made a forceful entry into my mind.”
It once again reinforced his grand ambitions and explicitly imbued
them with a sense of innate racial superiority alongside an ethereal
urgency to 'correct' the course of humanity as a whole under British
tutelage. This struggle for global hegemonic survival, a macrocosm of
the preferred 'instruments' of the Divine Ruler as Cecil believed,
seemed to precipitate a zero-sum view of politics and the proverbial
“Other” through the normalized magnifier of late Victorian
melodrama.
This
melodrama was, for all intents and purposes, the closest thing to the
language of scientific objectivity accepted in public discourse at
the time. The 'discipline' of history as we once understood it was a
melodramatic focus on an event in light of Victorian morality and/or
one actor's inflated heroics or villainy, qualifying it more as a way
for British imperialism at the time to spawn and cultivate a
mythology capable of perpetuating a dominantly coherent image and
'sensation' of the empire's powerful grandeur.
Neil Hultgren, in his book “Melodramatic
Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes,”
writes that ‘‘[t]hrough its vividness and ability to reimagine
complexities via readily accessible binaries and concepts, melodrama
made the British Empire appear unified and comprehensible. It
was one of the central fictions through which another fiction—that
of the British Empire—might be understood.’’
This last sentence of Hultgren's quote (with italic emphasis added by
the author of this paper) points to the importance of melodrama as
one of the key socially constructive pillars which permitted the
Union Jack to continue billowing listlessly in the wind across the
disparate width and breadth of the globe. To perpetuate itself across
a series of held territories and dominions whose aggregate
non-British population was beyond any doubt the very vast majority,
the empire had to make itself seem larger and more powerful than it
actually was, a purpose which this melodrama more than sufficiently
served during its time. Cecil Rhodes was no exception to this trend
as he earnestly bought into this spirit of the day through his wild
ambitions and penchant to glorify his own achievements, even if at
times this was only in the framework of the 'selfless martyrdom' of
his efforts on behalf of the British imperial project. In short,
Rhodes had a tendency—instrumental in his role as the 'Colossus of
Africa' and not unusual for his time—to self-mythologize. As his
notoriety spread for better and for worse, this process of
self-mythologizing would likely have become a recurring feedback loop
as the melodramatic Victorian press breathlessly disseminated reports
of his glorious achievements, reinforcing Rhodes own self-sense as
someone who was now larger than life, perhaps even a 'prophet' of a
secular religion of sorts coalescing around the colloquial church of
British imperial dogmas. Perhaps one of the best ways to demonstrate
Cecil's imperial melodrama is to point the reader back to his quote
provided on page two at the end of the introductory paragraph, the
last half in which he declares that “[t]o think of these stars that
you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never
reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that.
It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
This statement was something that even many in the 19th
century would have found pejoratively melodramatic, though as the
legend of Cecil Rhodes continued to wildly inflate, the perceived
preposterousness of this and his other similar statements
by-and-large diminished as he was informally 'canonized' as a
gloriously heroic example of British imperial virtue in the same
league as characters like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table. However, Rhodes is unique in the longevity his mythologized
idolatry has enjoyed, even up to and including the present day.
Though its origins undoubtedly reside in the British imperialism of
the late Victorian era, this longevity can largely be attributed to
the fact that Rhodes was also the founder of the modern diamond
industry.
Rhodes,
after outmaneuvering market rivals in the area of Kimberley (situated
in what is now the north-central region of the Republic of South
Africa) in the midst of a diamond rush in the 1870s-80s, established
DeBeers Consolidated Mines in 1888.
In the decades immediately following Rhodes' death, DeBeers would go
on to socially construct the modern cultural preference for diamond
rings as the new orthodox necessity to be presented when proposing
marriage.
Remarkably, it was a way of controlling not only the supply side of
the industry, but also its demand through manufacturing the
perception that the combination of diamonds and marriage was a
cultural necessity, and as such one could no longer adequately claim
to have the latter without sacrificing to gift the former.
Even the pithy maxim asserting “A Diamond Is Forever” originated
from an assertive DeBeers public relations campaign in the late
1940s,
though an investigation and assessment of Rhodes' company in the
decades and century following his passing is a topic in itself best
left to detailed treatment elsewhere as it is beyond the scope of
this essay. Regardless, such a cursory look at this aspect of his
immense legacy does indeed demonstrate his historical relevance as it
pertains to understanding the global market and cultural context of
the present day. As well, through all that has been said of Cecil
Rhodes thus far there has been, save for the introductory paragraph,
the conspicuous absence of any meaningful investigation and analysis
of his Anglophilic white supremacy. This topic will be addressed in
the following and final paragraph which will also double as the
paper's conclusion, bringing us back full circle to the 1960s, the
decade which saw the beginning of the end for the country bearing his
namesake.
In
the same final will and testament of 1902 in which he declared his
melodramatic desire to 'annex the planets,' Rhodes also wrote that “I
contend that we [the English] are the first race in the world, and
that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human
race.”
Buying wholesale into the racialization of empire—in part a result
of the force his personal interpretation of Winwood Reade's social
Darwinism had on him via
“The
Martyrdom of Man”—Rhodes
began to speak of the native African population as a rightly
disenfranchised subject peoples. In an 1887 address to the House of
Assembly in Cape Town, Rhodes explicitly stated that “[t]he native
is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a
system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South
Africa.”
Under his auspices, the taking of land from native Africans using
armed force became acceptably routine.
The prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, established through funds
authorized by his estate following his death, does curiously
stipulate that no one can be denied a scholarship on the basis of
race, ethnicity, or religion.
Educational historian Marybeth Gasman asserts this was likely not in
reference to the native black population, but rather the white Boers,
with whom British settlers and their progeny had shared a long and
mutually adversarial distrust. Eventually, however, even the Rhodes
Scholarship went the way of Rhodesia and had to capitulate to the
demography of the native majority. However, though it went the way of
Rhodesia, it did not
go
away as
Rhodesia did in 1980 when Robert Mugabe won power and re-branded the
country as Zimbabwe. Instead, as time went on and policies of
apartheid were repealed or overthrown across the southern half of the
continent, the Rhodes Scholarship simply cancelled the criteria which
had previously barred both women and black Africans from
eligibility.
Its imperial origins are still controversial among many, though just
as Cecil Rhodes himself was a product of his time (eg.: a product of
Victorian melodrama as his cultural
modus
operandi),
so too was the Rhodes Scholarship. As history has sped forward, its
context has evolved to become displaced and more just than it was at
inception, just as we have all evolved to understand that what Cecil
saw in the “Other” as embodied in the native Africans was,
perhaps, less an accurate appraisal of another than it was a
reflection of himself: an intensely driven megalomaniac who could—and
does, in many contemporary African eyes—likewise qualify as a
barbarian in his own terrible right, a self-confessed despot who
could not be trusted to rule equitably.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR A POST-SECONDARY LEVEL CLASS ON VICTORIAN BRITAIN.
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Footnotes:
