He conceived the grandiose notion of an "all-red" (i.e. all-British) route from Cairo to the Cape in Africa, but Cecil Rhodes, who died 100 years ago last Friday, was not a typical British imperialist, writes Brian Maye.
Private enterprise played an important role in 19th-century takeovers of parts of Africa that ultimately became British and Rhodes was the most important of the African entrepreneurs. Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) was born at Bishop's Stortford, the son of a vicar. He was sent for his health to Natal and made a fortune in the Kimberley diamond mines, amalgamating the several diamond companies to form the De Beers Consolidated Mines Company in 1888. A visionary who believed deeply in empire, he was convinced that the way to hold the British Empire together was by federation. Because the devolution of central power was essential for federation, he sent Parnell £10,000 in the late 1880s to further the cause of Irish Home Rule.
Earlier in the decade, he had become a member of the Cape House of Assembly. In 1884 he made a decision which almost certainly saved his life because he was invited by General Gordon to go with him to Khartoum as secretary but declined on the basis of having just taken office in the Cape ministry.
Gold in the Rand
Rhodes became rich from diamonds but the key element in his career was the discovery of gold on the Rand in the heart of the Transvaal in 1886. Almost immediately the Transvaal was converted from a poor state into potentially the richest country in southern Africa. This frustrated the hopes of federationists that the bankrupt republic would eventually have to choose union with the English-dominated colonies to the south and even threatened to shift the balance of economic power from Capetown to Johannesburg.
British policy towards the Boers had always been to force them to trade through Capetown and to prevent them from gaining independent access to the sea. The discovery of gold made the isolation of the Boers even more essential. Rhodes was on hand with his British South Africa Company, chartered in 1889 to expand Cape interests through a corridor west of the Boer republics to the vast area north of the Transvaal reaching to the Zambesi. After 1894 this area became known as Rhodesia.
The Transvaal, growing increasingly rich, wasn't likely to be conciliated. Its president, Paul Kruger, who had trekked as a boy, was a resolute Boer nationalist. As the money poured in, he bought arms and established informal but important contacts with the Germans. He was determined to have the independent access to the sea that the Cape and London wanted to deny him.
Rhodes, who in 1890 became prime minister of the Cape colony, had built his political power on the retention of Cape supremacy. The imminent destruction of that supremacy in the mid-1890s made drastic action necessary. He found a card to play in the tens of thousands of non-Boers (uitlanders) whom the gold mines had drawn into the Transvaal. They were more than twice as numerous as the Boers and paid nine-tenths of the taxes, but Kruger was unwilling to give them political rights, a fact they greatly resented.
Invasion plan
To seize power, they needed Rhodes's support and money. The British government gave control of the protectorate of Bechuanaland, which bordered on the Transvaal, to the British South Africa Company in mid-1895. From there Rhodes and his close friend Dr Jameson, the company's Rhodesian administrator, concocted a plan for an invasion of the Transvaal by a band of mounted company policemen to coincide with an uitlander uprising in Johannesburg.
But by December 1895 the uitlanders were not so sure. The realisation that the British government might not be able or willing to support them dampened their enthusiasm. The collapse of their movement only served to heighten Jameson's impatience and on December 27th he led around 500 men into the Transvaal. The Jameson Raid was foolish, badly timed and organised. The invaders were easily captured and Jameson and his lieutenants were sent back to London where, despite popular support, they were jailed for terms of up to 18 months.
The raid destroyed Rhodes's power. Because his complicity was so obvious, he resigned as premier of the Cape immediately, and also had to resign from the board of the South Africa Company. But as a symbol he remained as powerful as ever. He was censured but not punished by a parliamentary investigation of 1897. That same year he succeeded in quelling the Matabele rebellion by personal negotiations with the chiefs. During the Boer War of 1899-1902, he organised the defences of Kimberley during the siege.
Griffith's view
Arthur Griffith thought little of Rhodes. When he died in 1902, Griffith wrote: "England failed and Rhodes is dead, leaving South Africa a thousand fold worse than he found it, leaving it with the native question - its great and burning question - unsolved and pressing, and the dream of it as a White Man's country passing away in a stream of white man's blood. In a free community, this man would have been hanged after he shot down the miners of Kimberley; but he lived to help on the destruction of the Empire which has coined its gold out of the blood of peoples and is now finding its nemesis."
Rhodes's belief in imperialism would be anathema to most Irish people, but his commitment to federalism was one redeeming feature, as was his remarkable will which, as well as making great benefactions to Cape colony, founded Oxford scholarships for people from the colonies, the US and Germany.