his native England. He employed maps, for which he had a great fascination. ‘I want to see all that red’, he once declared, pointing to a vast area on a map, ‘between the South African Orange river and the great lakes of Central Africa’, which area he coveted for the British Empire (Maurois 1953: 55).
Rhodes had a lot in common with all other swift-footed amakwerekwere, be they Europeans, Asians, Americans or Africans. As a determined makwerekwere, Rhodes was ‘not afraid of risks and … did not believe in chance’ (Maurois 1953: 31). ‘Many weeks of his life had been spent on voyages’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 155). Only a makwerekwere who had taken seventy days to voyage from England to Durban by ship, and who believed in the flexible mobility of people, things and information could have distinguished himself the way Rhodes did with the reputation of ‘the greatest builder of railways and telegraphs that Africa has known’ (Lunderstedt n.d.: 4). Apart from sending telegrams, Rhodes ‘was not very partial to letter-writing, and only wrote when it was absolutely necessary’ (Jourdan 1910: 55). He was a word-of-mouth sort of person, who, as a makwerekwere, would have thrived very much in the twenty-first century of the internet, cell phone, smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and kindred social media (Nyamnjoh and Brudvig 2016).
Rhodes’s single-minded devotion to his quest in a foreign land, even at the risk of jeopardizing personal comfort and health, was characteristic of the amakwerekwere of his day and still resonates with many amakwerekwere today. The arrival of fortune hunters in the diamond mines of Kimberley in Rhodes’s day is hardly dissimilar to the travel of amakwerekwere to various centres of accumulation in today’s South Africa. Rhodes may have had a heart condition upon arrival, but ‘there was profitable business to be done’ in Kimberley, and this made his heart ‘throb with eagerness’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 19).
Like many a makwerekwere I know, Rhodes’s immediate family was large: he had five brothers and two sisters – all of whom he included in his personal success (Jourdan 1910: 204–6). He rapidly established himself as a ‘superman authority’ and indeed as ‘South Africa’ prior to the ill-fated Jameson Raid of the Boer Republic of the Transvaal (Fitzpatrick 1924: viii). He apparently ‘loved property … for the power that it brings’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 106–7), and had ‘few wants’. ‘His servants found it difficult to get him to wear decent clothes, to eat proper meals or even to dress for and attend theatrical performances’ (Brown 2015: 22).
Apparently, the only thing non-negotiable about Rhodes was his whiteness and need for distinction in taste and status between whites and blacks, and among whites of different categories and backgrounds. His recognition that both the Dutch and English were dominant races, and that ‘There is always trouble when two dominant races have to live side by side’ (Stent 1924: 22), meant that he had to explore ways of legitimizing himself and his Britishness as superior to being Dutch and the whiteness that came with Dutch identity in general, and in South Africa specifically.
As soon as the wealth of diamonds started materializing, Rhodes and his fellow white amakwerekwere used their membership in the Kimberley Club to distinguish themselves. Vere Stent describes the Kimberley Club as ‘the last South African word [in] comfort and in elegance’. It was at the Kimberley Club that ‘the best of the Diamond Fields people … sought refreshments after their day’s work’ and where they went to dine and talk, and to display their satisfaction with their outlook on world affairs, and their contentment with their prospects and happiness (Stent 1924: 1). This improvisation of using the Kimberley Club to activate ideas of social distinction among amakwerekwere from Europe constitutes a key moment in, and building block of, the historical construction of whiteness with a South African flavour.
This distinction between Europeans of different origins also served to set Rhodes and his fellow amakwerekwere of European origin apart from their African counterparts, irrespective of whatever intimacies and interests they shared digging for diamonds in Kimberley. The fact that Rhodes lived among ‘black peasants’ from remote communities in ‘an environment of murder, mayhem and drunkenness’, and ‘in an unsanitary tin shack without running water’ (Brown 2015: 28), did not undo the fact that he was white and in charge. Unlike the amakwerekwere of today who are black and likely to be mistaken by black South Africans as ‘one of us’, and who also share the same underserved townships and informal settlements with mostly black South African labour migrants, Rhodes was a very powerful makwerekwere with a missionary zeal for protection and propagation of the ways and values of his people. He was above all an Uitlander, in the eyes of the Boers, meaning that although a foreigner from the very scum of the European earth, Rhodes was, however, of superior humanity to the black barbarians at the very margins of the Western civilization which the British in principle shared with the Dutch.
Of course, Rhodes did not arrive in South Africa an all-powerful individual. He earned his power and activated himself to higher levels of potency through his interactions with others on the ground and back home in Britain. His attitude, drive and vision set him apart. Unlike many other amakwerekwere of his day, white and black alike, and despite what Kruger and his Boers thought of him, Rhodes thought himself on a divine mission to change the world. He felt himself divinely ordained to ensure that ‘the English people … fulfil their divine mission of ruling the world … for the greater happiness of mankind’ (Maurois 1953: 52).
Armed with a dream to conquer and impregnate the world with the superior values of the British in God’s name, Rhodes arrived in 1870 as a poor, unknown seventeen-year-old in a ‘free-for-all of Southern Africa’ (Brown 2015: 9). Within a short time, he was ‘blessed with the gift of the Kimberley diamonds’ (Brown 2015: 21) and dug his ‘way to enormous, untold, inconceivable wealth’, just what ‘he needed to finance his dream’ (Brown 2015: 9).
Like the Boers and all other treasure hunters, Rhodes came uninvited, indulged unauthorized and conquered unprovoked. ‘Rhodes had come to believe that, unlike lesser mortals, he had the benefit of divine guidance’ (Brown 2015: 32), even if he ‘feared death, and had no hope for an existence after death except the one that history could make for him on earth’ (Flint 1974: 173). Thus, driven by ‘a concern for a heroic and immortal place in history’ (Flint 1974: 212), Rhodes ‘believed that his good fortune was nothing more than destiny justifying his messianic beliefs and ambitions’ to facilitate the governance of the world by Britain (Brown 2015: 86). He saw himself as ‘a messiah, the prophet of Anglo-Saxon dominion’ (Maurois 1953: 106; see also Marlowe 1972: 105).
Magic and terror of Rhodes’s imperial power
Instead of being defined and confined by the locals of the host communities of his encounters, the way most amakwerekwere of modest ambition and means are nowadays, Rhodes defined and confined those he encountered in his hunter-gatherer endeavours. He was on a quest for greener pastures and fresher pleasures. Armed with the powerful technologies of dominance – such as writing, books, maps, guns, ships, trains, telegraphs, cars and telephones – inherited from his forebears and perfected in the course of his own adventures, Rhodes was able to penetrate, conquer, possess and tame at will and at first contact the powerful – mind, body and soul – of the strange and distant lands of the Heart of Darkness that Africa represented to the civilized savagery of his native England.
Aided and abetted by his repertoire of perfected technologies of the self and power, Rhodes took over, ruled, developed and exploited for his personal profit and that of Britain the lands and bodies of those he conquered, turning them into amakwerekwere on their own native soil, their homeland. Rhodes was so thrilled with ‘Rhodesia’ (‘Rhodesland’ and ‘Cicelia’ were other names suggested for the new country) (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 65) as a symbol of his personal power and achievements, that he is reported to have proclaimed: ‘Has anyone else had a country called after their name? Now I don’t care a damn what they do with me!’ (Flint 1974: 156; see also Plomer 1984 [1933]: 64).
Lobengula,
