Cecil Rhodes never got around to visiting Ireland. The Englishman, whose name has become a byword for British imperialism, however, was also an enthusiastic supporter of Irish Home Rule. In 1888 the Africa-based mining magnate met Charles Stewart Parnell, was greatly impressed and sent him a donation of £10,000 (worth almost €1 million today).
The money came with just one condition – Parnell had to alter his Home Rule policy so that some Irish MPs would remain at Westminster even after a parliament was established in Dublin.
As William Kelleher Storey points out in this sober, heavyweight and quietly damning biography, Rhodes’s generosity towards Ireland was not so surprising as it might first appear. Along with painting the world map red, he dreamed of creating a giant federal parliament in London with representation from every British colony. Ireland should be “a stalking horse”, he wrote to Parnell, and “the stepping-stone to that federation, which is the condition of the continued existence of our empire”.
Explaining this vision is a key theme of Storey’s book, the first womb-to-tomb Rhodes biography for almost 40 years. During that time its subject has been increasingly denounced as a greedy plunderer, a white supremacist and an architect of South African apartheid. The international Rhodes Must Fall movement is still campaigning to topple statues of him at university campuses he once helped fund.
While The Colonialist is anything but a whitewash, it does not shy away from an inconvenient truth. In Rhodes’s own twisted way, he was also an idealist – and Storey argues vigorously that his record must be contextualised as well as condemned.
If Rhodes was your specialist subject on Mastermind, this book would supply the answer to every conceivable question. In painstakingly researched detail, it recounts how the sickly son of a Hertfordshire vicar was sent out to his brother’s Natalian cotton farm, built the De Beers diamond company into a massively profitable monopoly and wound up as prime minister of the Cape Colony. It chronicles his lifelong quest to unite southern Africa’s four colonies into one self-governing state, spreading white settlements while exploiting the region’s natural resources.
A history professor at Millsaps College in Mississippi, Storey has a keen eye for anecdotes that illustrate Rhodes’s distinctly odd personality. Young Cecil’s nanny sometimes found the boy hidden away and moaning pitifully, unable to tell her why. Even after becoming fantastically wealthy, he valued power over possessions and usually dressed in rough workingman’s clothes. He seems to have had a self-destructive streak, regularly consuming large amounts of rich food, cigars and alcohol, including a champagne and Guinness cocktail at lunchtime.
“I hear you are a woman hater,” Queen Victoria remarked to him over dinner, presumably because he never showed any interest in them. He gallantly replied: “How could I dislike a sex to which your majesty belongs?”
While Rhodes was not without charm or charisma, Storey accuses him of being far more devious than his upright image suggested. In one notorious episode, he effectively tricked the illiterate King Lobengula into signing a document that gave away gold mining rights across Matabeleland and other territories.
When talking failed, Rhodes turned to guns and sanctioned a raid on the Transvaal’s Boer republic that he hoped would spark a British uprising in 1895. Its failure permanently dented his reputation and he died just over six years later, aged 48.
Above all, Storey leaves readers in no doubt that Rhodes was a virulent racist even by 19th-century standards. “The natives are children … just emerging from barbarism,” he declared in a parliamentary speech described by the author as “dripping with dismissive contempt”.
He systematically deprived black people of land, finance and voting rights, telling a police officer during a rebellion: “You should kill all you can … it serves a lesson to them when they talk things over their fires at night.”
Rhodes has already inspired more than two dozen biographies, but Storey claims to go further than any of them by exploring his impact on southern Africa’s physical landscape. There are many self-contained sections about how he changed its agriculture, railways, telecommunications, urban development and diamond production. Some of this is not for the squeamish, particularly an account of the grisly methods used by mine bosses to make sure workers were not smuggling precious stones in their bodies.
It all adds up to a rich and panoramic narrative, so wide-ranging that The Life and Times of Cecil Rhodes might have been a better title.
Charles Stewart Parnell predicted that the man who was bankrolling his party “would not live in history”. On this, at least, the “uncrowned king of Ireland” was dead wrong.
“It will be much easier to remove a few statues than to reverse the legacy of Cecil Rhodes,” Storey warns at the conclusion of his often gruelling but always impressive portrait. “Understanding what he did is a first step to freedom.”
