Cecil Rhodes

from Michael Ledger-Lomas’s review of The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey in LRB.

The Rhodeses were farmers turned developers who had grazed cows on what are now Bloomsbury squares before building terraces in Islington and Hackney. Rhodes’s father attended Harrow and Cambridge before taking orders. His maternal grandfather was a provincial banker who had built canals in the Midlands and got into Parliament. When ill health caused young Cecil to join his brother Herbert in growing cotton in Natal, he went with two thousand pounds from his aunt, which cushioned the brothers against their amateurism. While African labourers hoed rows for them, they wandered into the interior, looking for gold and diamonds. Herbert could not stick at anything for long. In 1879 he died when a barrel of spirits exploded at his campfire and burned him to death. Cecil had by then settled at Kimberley, a town which had sprung up around the ‘dry diggings’ for diamonds.

Picks and shovels -> amalgamation and capital.

Rhodes and his first employer, Charles Rudd, found it easier to make money on side ventures, such as buying a steam-powered ice machine to sell refreshments to miners (Rhodes scooped the ice cream). But when colonial officials grudgingly decreed that diggers and miners could buy one another out and so concentrate holdings, Rhodes and Rudd founded a company to buy up claims in what had come to be known as the De Beers mine. The colony’s policy change reflected the diminishing viability of small-scale mining. Though the diamonds appeared inexhaustible, at deeper levels they were embedded in rock – the ‘blue ground’ – that required costly processing. Tottering over every claim was ‘reef’, friable rocks that often collapsed and buried the diamonds for months. Rhodes’s occasional trips to Britain reassured him that the demand for diamonds was buoyant enough to make it worthwhile to tackle these difficulties, but only if companies could supply capital and machinery, such as steam-powered pumps, at scale.

Personal life:

In the 1970s, the Tory historian Robert Blake dismissed speculation on his sexuality with the testy claim that he was simply one of those men who find getting married too much hassle. Rhodes would probably not have declared himself a homosexual, if he had known the word: he did not need to, living on the macho frontier. No one found it odd when he set up house at Kimberley with Neville Pickering and cradled him in his arms as he grew sick and died. Rhodes filled the void at his loss by hiring dashing young men as secretaries (shorthand not required), who borrowed his clothes and took his cheques but were cast adrift when they got engaged. No women worked at Groote Schuur, which was decorated with stone phalluses from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (supposedly Phoenician relics that illustrated the ancient colonisation of Africa). He built up a coterie of unmarried thinkers and publicists, whose childlessness heightened their devotion to the Anglo-Saxon race.