retained his seat in the colonial parliament as well as his diamond and gold interests, but a cloud hung over his name thereafter.
There are deep ironies about the ignominy in which Rhodes spent his final years. He might have emerged a hero after the raid if the enterprise had succeeded. After all, successful revolutionaries usually become heroes; the unsuccessful ones are branded as rebels and traitors. Britain did want to expand its control over all of South Africa, either peacefully or by force. The Anglo-Boer War that eventually erupted in 1899 ended with British conquest of the independent Dutch states of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The 1895 raid thus was in harmony with general British aims. Nevertheless, the fact that it was premature and a disaster contributed to unfavorable press commentary around the world. The government in London thus repudiated both Jameson and Rhodes.
By the late 1890s Rhodes was a bloated, pasty mess. Years of smoking, drinking, and eating to excess, plus several falls from horses and a series of heart attacks dramatically altered his appearance. The news of his death, at the age of forty-eight, came as no surprise to anyone who knew him. His body was buried in the Rhodesian mountains, in a favorite spot of his called “The World's View.”
Historian David Cannadine has aptly concluded that “in an age of imperial titans, Rhodes was the most titanic imperialist of all.”15 Few of Rhodes' contemporaries or later writers would disagree about the magnitude of his accomplishments. Where they do differ markedly is in their evaluations of the man and his deeds. The passages quoted at the beginning of this chapter give some indication of the extremes of opinion. Rhodes generated love or hate, never ambivalence. To his friend Jameson and his architect Herbert Baker, he was the greatest man they had ever known. In their later writings they rhapsodized over his charisma, his charm, his vision, and his generosity. Upon the death of his friend and business associate, Lord Rothschild asserted that Rhodes:
…was a very great man, he saw things as no one else saw them and he foresaw things which no one else dreamt of…his great generosity bewitched those who came in contact with him…his loss would be irreparable, were it not for the fact that he put in motion ideas which have taken root, ideas firmly established…which will continue to grow and flourish.16
To others he was the devil incarnate. The great South African novelist and feminist Olive Schreiner went from liking and admiring Rhodes to despising him. She concluded that “the man's heart…is corrupt.”17 Novelist and essayist G. K. Chesterton believed that:
…Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the world…. What he called his ideals were the dregs of Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous…. it was exactly because he had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and ruined republics to spread them.”18
Sometimes contemporaries could not even agree on his appearance and speech. The journalist Sydney Low knew Rhodes and once wrote that a belief in him “became a substitute for religion…[He was a talker] of more compelling potency than almost anyone.”19 Rudyard Kipling, on the other hand, lauded Rhodes' imperialist deeds but thought that the man was as inarticulate as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy.20
Rhodes viewed himself as a dreamer, an idealist, and a loyal servant of the British Empire. He saw no conflict between his personal ambitions and what he perceived to be the general good. His earlier biographers tended to write either hagiographies or vituperative attacks. More recent authors have tended to portray him as an enigma or a bundle of contradictions. Foremost in this regard is Rotberg. His massive biography surely is definitive, despite objections to some of his interpretations.21 Rotberg concludes that Rhodes was a man “who served both god and mammon, who was as human, fallible, gentle, charismatic, and constructive as he was shameless, vain, driven, ruthless, and destructive.”22 Even in the midst of some of the most sinister episodes of his life, he was capable of accomplishing good deeds. As prime minister of the Cape Colony, for example, he worked ceaselessly for agricultural and transportation improvements. He also fought to preserve the simple yet impressive architecture of the early Dutch settlers from rampant Victorian garishness. Throughout his career he gave money or other assistance to numerous individuals, hospitals, and charities.
Somewhat controversially, Rotberg and his collaborator, psychiatrist Miles F. Shore, also posit a psychological interpretation of Rhodes' life. They assert that his tender affection for his doting mother and his alienation from a rather distant father instilled in the boy an Oedipus complex. Through his life, they contend, Rhodes unconsciously desired to conquer rivals whom he saw as father figures.
Going yet further, Rotberg and Shore demonstrate that Rhodes was homosexual. It has long been known not only that Rhodes was a bachelor, but also that he surrounded himself with attractive young men and became petulant whenever one of his “band of brothers” chose to marry. It is also known that Rhodes frequently shattered his “manly” demeanor with fits of falsetto giggles. His contemporaries never questioned his sexuality, but rather accepted his explanation that his career kept him too busy to have a family. Although Rotberg and Shore concede that Rhodes probably never became physically active in any gay relationships, they marshal a persuasive amount of circumstantial evidence to demonstrate their point. They argue that Rhodes' sexual orientation not only contributed to his choice of assistants but also that it was a driving force in much that he accomplished in his career. His feelings of inadequacy, as he compared himself to his emotionally remote and heterosexually potent father, fueled his narcissistic, grandiose ambitions.
Several reviewers have sharply disparaged Rotberg's and Shore's reliance on clinical jargon and their speculative leaps about Rhodes' motives. At the very least, however, one can agree with Rotberg and Shore that Rhodes was, and remains, a conundrum.
By the customs of his day he was not a “bad” man. In an age of robber barons and imperialists, most of his actions were acceptable. In one important respect, however, he did fall below contemporary standards – at least the standards of the British Empire. This concerns his treatment of blacks. To be sure, the vast majority of whites in Europe and the United States in that era agreed that Africans and Asians were inferior. Some held that this inferiority was biological. Others believed the inferiority was cultural, and thus that education and religious instruction could one day lift native peoples to a higher level-though not perhaps to the level of whites.
Though nearly all British people were racist to some degree, the official policy of the British Empire was, at least nominally, colorblind. In the Cape Colony, for example, the right to vote was based on property ownership. Anyone who met the minimum requirements was eligible to vote in colonial elections. In actual fact, few blacks and “coloreds” met these requirements. However, through the 1880s every electoral district in the Cape Colony had some blacks who could vote and some whites who could not. By the European standards of that day, the British Empire was fairly liberal.
As a member of the Cape Parliament and as prime minister, Rhodes worked assiduously to undercut black rights. In part this resulted from his own prejudices. He did not hate the Africans, but he thought they stood in the way of British progress. In part his actions were aimed at currying favor with Afrikaner constituents in his electoral district. The Dutch settlers had always objected to the color-blind British policy. One reason for this was that the Afrikaners tended to be poorer than the British. The small number of whites who could not vote thus tended to be the Dutch.
Rotberg persuasively demonstrates that Rhodes sided with the Afrikaners and helped lay the groundwork for the system of apartheid that took final shape in the late 1940s. In his diamond mines Rhodes callously reduced the wages and increased the hours of his black workers. He segregated them from white workers and made them carry passes. In 1887 Rhodes supported a new law that denied the vote to all persons with communal titles to land, which in effect eliminated all Africans. As prime minister he approved laws that distributed tiny, nontransferable tracts of land to Africans. Each farm was large enough to support only one family.
