• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1143 0

dead animals and drunks. For most of the prospectors the vision of sudden, immense wealth remained no more than a dream – it was said that the only people who made consistent money were the dealers who came into town with wagon-loads of water. But the earth did contain great quantities of diamonds – by the time the mine was worked out the Big Hole would yield nearly 3,000 kilograms of them. Rhodes had a natural talent for mining, acute commercial sense (for example, getting hold of a pump to empty the mine of water) and a good measure of luck. So the will that Rhodes drew up in South Africa was not quite the parcelling out of a few books and trinkets which might be expected from most twenty-four-year-olds.

The oddly schizophrenic life Cecil Rhodes led at this time – long university vacations in the single-minded frenzy of Kimberley and misty term-times in Oxford mingling with the men who would run the country – moulded his view of the world. In his first year in Kimberley, Rhodes had read Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, a sweeping analysis of how, by a process akin to evolution, mankind might be perfected. Rhodes later declared, ‘That book has made me what I am.’ Rhodes was struck by the power in the world of certain religions, especially ‘the Romish Church’, of which he observed that ‘every enthusiast, call it if you like every madman, finds employment in it’. In place of religious mumbo-jumbo, Cecil Rhodes preferred racial mania. ‘I contend’, he wrote, ‘that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’ When he returned to South Africa, Cecil Rhodes soon had the chance to put his convictions into action, and in so doing became the most sabre-toothed of all empire-builders. ‘It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory,’ he had written, ‘and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.’

Rhodes was an unusual advertisement for this exemplary, honourable breed. As ruthless in the political career he now sought as he was in his business dealings, he displayed that hypocritical talent for concealing self-interest behind high-mindedness that England’s enemies so despise. He used his position in parliament to advance his own business interests and played so fast and loose in his dealings with African rulers that it is remarkable any of them ever trusted a white man again. By the late 1880s, an increasingly fleshy Rhodes was in control of most of the output of the Kimberley diamond mine, having bought out his rival, Barney Barnato, a one-time music-hall entertainer, boxer and bouncer who had schemed and cheated his way from birth in Whitechapel to immense wealth and some eminence in South Africa.* Rhodes’s tactics in creating an effective monopoly were more grey than white, but it is unarguable that he did in the end make out what was believed at the time to have been the largest cheque ever written, for ‘Five Million, Three Hundred and Thirty Eight Thousand, Six Hundred and Fifty Pounds Only’ – to take control of the company.* After more frenetic digging, the hole in the ground in Kimberley continued to grow, eventually reaching a depth of nearly 700 feet, with a circumference of almost a mile. Though the drains of Kimberley still stank, the diamond barons built themselves fancy mansions and the place had the wealth to become the first city in the southern hemisphere to install electric street lights. A fortunate 250 citizens of this fur-coat-and-no-knickers settlement were members of the squat two-storey Kimberley Club, at whose bar it was said that you could find more millionaires per square foot than anywhere else on earth. Here men who could have given the term nouveau riche a bad name attempted to ape the behaviour and prejudices of the exclusive gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s: Rhodes’s offer to put Barney Barnato up for membership of this parvenu paradise is said to have been