Cecil John Rhodes, an imperial enigma

COMPLEX LEGACY

- MARK LEVIN

THE novelist Olive Schreiner, who grew to loathe Cecil John Rhodes, once criticised the dubious friends who perpetually surrounded him. Rhodes flew into a rage, exclaiming: “Those men my friends? They are not my friends! They are my tools, and when I am done with them I throw them away.”

It was a revealing indication of how Rhodes operated. When his remarkable powers of persuasion failed, he was adept at providing bribes, share options, directorships or plum positions, certain that any man had his price.

After the failure of the Jameson Raid in 1896, he was not above blackmailing some of the most senior men in British politics, not that they were blameless. If he was going to take the fall, he would not be alone.

An early biographer who had met Rhodes, wrote that his character was cast in a large mould, with enormous defects corresponding with his eminent virtues. Writing in 2005 on the cult of Rhodes, Paul Maylam observed that he was the most written about Southern African figure, attracting (by then) more than 25 biographies and many serious researchers.

His latest biographer is an American professor, William Kelleher Storey. In The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes (Jonathan Ball, 2025), Storey writes of the celebrity status surrounding Rhodes in the British Empire.

From 1890 until his death in 1902, he was featured in over 79400 British newspaper stories, with 14500 stories in 1896 alone. Hundreds of people bought shares in the British South Africa Company just to get a seat at a crowded shareholder meeting.