Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [81]
But empire was the thing. After Kimberley, Rhodes ensured his fortune by investing in the newly founded mines which began to extract gold from the massive deposit discovered in the Transvaal. He parlayed his wealth into political power, untroubled by too many worries on such questions as whether it was entirely proper for him to buy secret control of southern Africa’s leading newspaper, the Cape Argus. The stones which had made him rich had a value entirely dependent upon the absurd enthusiasms of human fashion, but Rhodes claimed to see permanent, practical benefits for the world in bringing as much territory as possible under British rule. It was, inevitably, a highly selective vision which even he acknowledged came at a cost: land was a great deal more important to him than any nonsense about human rights. In 1887, for example, he told the House of Assembly in Cape Town that ‘the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise … We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa.’ It is as redundant to wonder whether Rhodes was a racist as to question whether he wore a moustache on his self-satisfied face, for the evidence is overwhelming. When he plotted his Cape-to-Cairo railway or, as prime minister of the Cape, cast lustful imperial eyes on the lands beyond the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers he was not thinking of the welfare of anyone but ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’.
Rhodes – whose African ambitions meant he acquired the inevitable nickname ‘Colossus’ – was an empire-builder on the scale of Clive of India, and when he wanted to exploit the mineral rights obtained from the Matabele king, Lobengula (in exchange for a promise of money, a thousand rifles and a boat), the British government gave him a chartered company similar to the old East India Company. Under the motto ‘Justice, Commerce, Freedom’, with a couple of dozy dukes on the board, the British South Africa Company, with Rhodes at its helm, could do more or less as it pleased in southern Africa, seizing land, making treaties, laying down the law and running its own banking system and police force. Rhodes promised that the firm would people the territories it acquired with settlers whose loyalty would be to queen and country. By the end of 1890, he was the most powerful man from the southern Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, running the company, Prime Minister of the Cape and chairman of the diamond business. The great tracts of land about to fall under the sway of his company would become known as Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe), and he was not yet forty. The American writer Mark Twain was unable to decide whether Cecil Rhodes was a lofty patriot or the devil incarnate, but observed that, either way, ‘When he stands on the Cape of Good Hope, his shadow falls to the Zambesi.’ True to form, the British Establishment laid aside worries about Rhodes, elected him to membership of the Athenaeum Club and in February 1895 had him sworn of the Privy Council.
But then this Napoleonic figure stumbled. Rhodes’s vision of an Africa dominated by Anglo-Saxons was threatened not by the poorly armed, comparatively unsophisticated tribes who had lived there since before the days when the British wore woad, but by the Boers, the descendants of Dutch settlers who in the middle of the seventeenth century had established a colony at the tip of southern Africa. To escape the British they had for decades been migrating further and further away from the coast. Rhodes now cooked up a plot to seize by force the goldfields of the Boers’ colony in the Transvaal. The man he chose for this task was an old friend from Kimberley, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, an unscrupulous, socially ambitious gambler. One of the reasons for Dr Jameson’s presence in southern Africa was his belief that the drier climate would be good for his health. He stayed because the living was comparatively easy and the wealth he accumulated great. Just after Christmas 1895 the doctor launched his raid into