Michell was confident that future generations would appreciate Rhodes’s “special genius and essential worth.” This confidence proved to be misplaced. Writing in 1974, with South Africa’s apartheid regime still securely in power, the English historian J. H. Plumb captured the contemporary historical consensus on Rhodes’s legacy in his introduction to John Flint’s Cecil Rhodes. Looking backward, Plumb saw a ruthless and unprincipled racist whose appetite for wealth and power knew no limits. Looking forward, he anticipated “death, disasters, massacres, and endless human misery,” as the segregated South Africa Rhodes helped create descended into racial civil war. As you read Plumb’s introduction, think about how the events of the twentieth century have influenced our assessment of Rhodes. Why, for so many observers, has Rhodes come to personify the great evils of the modern era?

When we look back at the past nothing, perhaps, fascinates us so much as the fate of individual men and women. The greatest of these seem to give a new direction to history, to mold the social forces of their time and create a new image, or open up vistas that humbler men and women never imagined. An investigation of the interplay of human temperament with social and cultural forces is one of the most complex yet beguiling studies a historian can make; man molded by time, and time molded by men. It would seem that to achieve greatness both the temperament and the moment must fit like a key into a complex lock. Or rather a master key, for the very greatest of men and women resonate in ages distant to their own. Later generations may make new images of them — one only has to think what succeeding generations of Frenchmen have made of Napoleon, or Americans of Benjamin Franklin — but this only happens because some men change the course of history and stain it with their own ambitions, desires, creations or hopes of a magnitude that embraces future generations like a miasma. This is particularly true of the great figures of religion, of politics, of war. The great creative spirits, however, are used by subsequent generations in a reverse manner — men and women go to them to seek hope or solace, or to confirm despair, reinterpreting the works of imagination or wisdom to ease them in their own desperate necessities, to beguile them with a sense of beauty or merely to draw from them strength and understanding. So this series of biographies tries, in lucid, vivid, and dramatic narratives, to explain the greatness of men and women, not only how they managed to secure their niche in the great pantheon of Time, but also why they have continued to fascinate subsequent generations. It may seem, therefore, that it is paradoxical for this series to contain living men and women, as well as the dead, but it is not so. We can recognize, in our own time, particularly in those whose careers are getting close to their final hours, men and women of indisputable greatness, whose position in history is secure, and about whom the legends and myths are beginning to sprout — for all great men and women become legends, all become in history larger than their own lives.

There are streets, squares, avenues, even towns named after the great figures of the last two centuries, but only one man has given his name to a huge country — Cecil Rhodes. Rhodesia lies between white-dominated South Africa and black-ruled central states. Flanked by Portuguese colonial territories, it looked comparatively safe and secure when it broke away from Great Britain in order to preserve white supremacy, but the revolution in Portugal has exposed Rhodesia to the prospect of intensive guerrilla warfare. And one can only wonder how much longer the name Rhodesia will endure. Rhodes, himself, has become a symbol of all that the black South African hates — exploitation combined with rabid racism.

There can rarely have been a more unlikely vehicle for greatness than Cecil Rhodes. He was physically weak and prone to sickness. He was not highly intelligent; indeed, the reverse: shrewd, calculating maybe, but his mind lacked power, thrust and originality: indeed, he remained locked in the fantasies of a schoolboy. Suspicious, lonely, isolated, he found it difficult to make any contact with women; occasionally he attached himself sentimentally to a good-looking young man, yet he was never openly homosexual. He trusted neither business nor political colleagues, and his suspicion of the imperial government in London was profound. Unable any clear or decisive policy, he could act, as he did in the Jameson Raid, with suicidal rashness. His life was spent in one pursuit — to amass the largest fortune ever controlled by one man in order to give reality to the dream that haunted him throughout his life.

Rhodes realized the power of money quite early in his life, and set about acquiring it with utter ruthlessness. The loot in South Africa was diamonds and gold: the diamonds present in quantities not found elsewhere on the earth’s surface, and the gold, too, abundant as nowhere else. Rhodes went for the monopoly, crushing small miners and toppling big dealers. He drove the blacks off the land, sought war with the Boers (the Dutch settlers who predated the British) when his ambitions were thwarted by them. He bullied and cajoled the British government to give him huge concessions in the north for lands that now bear his name. He butchered and dispersed the Zulus, whose lands these were. Desperate for labor as the mines grew deeper, he used blacks ruthlessly, penning them up in compounds, destroying their family and tribal life, and giving them wages that made them little better than slaves. So creating the economic base of apartheid.

Of course Rhodes was not alone, His enterprises attracted men as ruthless as himself; men as eager for riches, as eager for power. Yet it was the magic of his name that drew a hungry horde of white settlers, shopkeepers, industrialists to the get-rich frontier world that he and the gold and the diamonds had helped to create. Doubtless, however, without Rhodes there would have been a rush to southern Africa. He was only the catalyst, yet an uncommon one. His riches were so enormous, his power so vast, that no government, either South African or British, could ignore his demands or brush him aside.

And yet his huge success in southern Africa was never an end in itself — only the means to pursue the dream. And the dream was the dream of an adolescent. Rhodes conceived of a secret elite of white Anglo-Saxons dedicated, like Plato’s philosophers, to bringing authority and order to the whole world, ruling other peoples for their own good. These dedicated young men were to be drawn from Britain, North America and Germany, for Rhodes regarded these countries as being not only truly white, but also destined for world rule. This dream he embodied in wills that he wrote and rewrote throughout his life.

By one of those paradoxes of history, this unbalanced, unpleasant dream, with its overtones of fascism and racism, was translated into an entirely laudable reality — the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford. His trustees paid no attention to Rhodes’ crazier hopes, and forged a remarkable society of gifted and able men. Indeed, Rhodes scholars are to be found holding high posts in government, in industry, and in the universities of America, Canada and Britain; men whose vision and ability have often been in the service of all that Rhodes himself loathed. In one of the greatest endowments to scholarship ever made, Rhodes unknowingly helped to strengthen the special relationship between North America and Britain that has played a central role in the twentieth century. World War I, of course, struck Germany off from the Triumvirate.

Alas, the legacy of Rhodes’ rape of South Africa has been not so happy. His attitude to the blacks, his mania for exploitation at all costs, underlies the present system of white supremacy and apartheid which must, sooner or later, lead to a deadly confrontation, to death, disasters, massacres, and endless human misery. Indeed, Rhodes’ standing at the threshold of the twentieth century throws a long, dark, sinister shadow across it, symbolizing, as he does, two of the deadliest forces in twentieth-century history — racism and the wanton exploitation of resources by men of power in their own interests.

But the shadow is huge, not small, for unhappily Rhodes’ achievements were monumental. The pantheon of great lives contains, as it must, men who, like Rhodes, did evil unconsciously in the wanton pursuit of grandeur. And by that irony in which history delights, Rhodes aided humanity by his death.

Source: John Flint, Cecil Rhodes (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), pp. xiii–xvii.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER