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By Root 1198 0

were to be kept exclusively for white settlers. This tiered idea of citizenship more or less pacified the white settlers, and was grudgingly accepted by many Indians. But it did nothing at all for the indigenous African population, and, unsurprisingly, when independence came to Kenya in 1963 the Asians felt the force of their resentment. As the first President, Jomo Kenyatta, implemented a policy of ‘Africanization’ they were increasingly resented, treated as scapegoats and forced from their businesses. Many decided to take at face value the promise that those who held British passports were entitled to live in Britain. Between 1965 and 1967 over 20,000 Kenyan Asians arrived in Britain. A few years later, in 1972, Uganda’s home-grown tyrant, Idi Amin, decided to exploit African resentment at the commercial success of the Indian community, and gave Ugandan Asians ninety days to leave the country. About 30,000 emigrated to Britain and began to rebuild their lives, in many cases from scratch. They took their work ethic with them, rejuvenating some decaying British businesses and often starting small, family-run corner shops, open for long hours every day of the week, which transformed the high streets of Britain in a way the empire-builders could never have anticipated.

In the summer of 1877 a young Englishman sat down at his desk in a small corrugated-iron shack in a mining town in South Africa and wrote his will. This was an odd enough thing for any twenty-four-year-old to do. Even odder was what he proposed to do with his worldly goods. In a four-page, handwritten letter, Cecil Rhodes left everything he had for the creation of a world government.

In an accompanying ‘Confession of Faith’ Rhodes explained how this would be done. A Secret Society would be formed, which would eventually ‘render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity’. World peace is the dream of children or idealists and – as the failures of the United Nations and the proliferation of wars across the globe testify – has never been achieved. But Cecil Rhodes’s plan had one practical mechanism. It would be a racial rule, to be achieved by exporting settlers from Britain across the world. Global government would then be exercised from a parliament in London, to which the settlers would send representatives. The scope of his ambition was breathtaking. The territories to be colonized included ‘the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia [Crete], the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan’, and, for good measure, ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’.

The man who saw this colour-saturated vision of imperialism had been born the fifth son of the vicar of Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, and his own life bore witness to the possibilities that empire offered those with the nerve to seize a chance. Rhodes’s father had evidently no great expectations of him and packed the boy off as a gangling teenager to South Africa in 1871. Here he soon joined the torrent of chancers, roustabouts, remittance men and ne’er-do-wells pouring on to the dusty fields near the Orange River where a fifteen-year-old farmer’s son had picked up a curious-looking stone one day and set off a diamond rush. Rhodes and his brother staked a claim on a little flat-topped hill soon to become what was reckoned to be the biggest hole in the ground ever dug by hand. A fellow digger describes a thin, fair-haired, blue-eyed young man seated on an upturned bucket, gazing down on the spectacle beneath him, as uncountable numbers of other young men (most of the really hard work was being done by the black labourers) tore into the ground and hoisted buckets to the surface on a spider’s web of wires. The settlement which grew up around the hole, soon to be named Kimberley (after the Colonial Secretary) was a dusty, drab place of open drains,