As I prepare for my next group arriving over the next few days, I suddenly realized similarities between a pivotal figure in South African history and President Trump.
At 17 years Cecil John Rhodes struck his fortune in Kimberly diamonds. A few years later he was one of the richest men on earth in the 1870s. Single-minded and ruthless, he used his fortune to rise up the political spectrum before dramatically crashing, but even today his statute stands promptly in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden park.
Rhodes single-minded vision was to create a British empire from Cape to Cairo. It was as much nonsense as Trump’s notion of American supremacy.
When Britain expressed reluctance to embrace the idea, Rhodes – British through and through – won a seat in Parliament in a Boer (Dutch) constituency which launched a lightning fast but powerful political career.
Rhodes played on Boer’s worst fears, that the increasingly educated non-white population would usurp the primacy whites held in agriculture and business.
This single-minded racism increased Rhodes’ powers despite British reluctance to embrace his ideas. As Prime Minister of The Cape colony, Rhodes wrote the first laws that would later become apartheid.
Britain banned slavery in 1834 throughout the empire unqualifiedly, except in Jamaica and The Cape. Rhodes had prevailed.
When Britain refused his suggestion to annex the Boer Republics into Rhodes’ Cape Colony, Rhodes launched a coup of his own with dozens of armed horsemen. It failed miserably, perhaps because Britain tipped off the Transvaal authorities.
When Britain refused Rhodes desire to annex Matabeleland, the current Zimbabwe, Rhodes mounted another military assault combined with “diplomacy” with the king, Lobengula, which included addicting the sovereign to drugs that only Rhodes could obtain.
Rhodes was sickly throughout his life, but his death at 48 years old in 1902 was probably hastened by his well-known sexual exploits. He died in a beach cottage with his teenage boy consort.
Rhodes meteoric rise to power crashed during the 2nd Boer War at the turn of the 20th Century.
An initial supporter and original close political advisor, Olive Schreiner, summed it up beautifully at the time. In April 1897 she wrote in a letter to her friend, John Merriman: “We fight Rhodes because he means so much of oppression, injustice, & moral degradation to South Africa; – but if he passed away tomorrow there still remains the terrible fact that something in our society has formed the matrix which has fed, nourished, and built up such a man!”
Right on, Olive.