Wriggling, Wriggling

It​ is hard to look at the frontispiece of the first edition of Olive Schreiner’s short novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). Titled ‘photograph’, it shows three dead African men hanging from a tree, their legs trussed with a farmer’s rope. Enjoying the sport are Englishmen in shirtsleeves and broad-brimmed hats, their grins set off by heavy moustaches. Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cronwright, had found the photograph in the window of a barber shop in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in the north of the Cape Colony. It had been taken in Southern Rhodesia during the recent Ndebele rebellion against the British South Africa Company, when panicked settlers had laagered in Bulawayo and lynched suspected spies. Peter Halket, Schreiner’s fictional trooper, witnesses the hangings. He has raped women in the bush and machine-gunned villages, toppling rows of ‘black men’s heads’ like ‘the corn in sheaves’. When confronted at the campfire by a vision of Jesus, he hides behind his boss. ‘With Cecil it’s all right; you can do what you like … provided that you don’t get him into trouble.’

Controversy over Cecil Rhodes began long before the recent campaign to remove statues of him from the University of Cape Town and the front of Oriel College, Oxford. Schreiner’s accusations led Rhodes’s supporters to dismiss her as a vamp who had turned sour after Rhodes refused to marry her. They said he got on famously with ‘natives’ in his mines and with the Ndebele chiefs he had eventually talked into abandoning their rebellion. Civilised men must do harsh things when attacking a barbaric enemy guilty of the ultimate ‘sacrilege’: killing white children. What looked like ruthlessness was ‘vision’ – as savage Africa was bound to fall to civilised powers, Rhodes was right to urge that it would benefit not just the settlers but Africans to make as much of it British as possible. Even Schreiner had initially been taken with such grand ambitions: on her return to South Africa from London, she idolised Rhodes as ‘the only big man’ in the pettifogging Cape Colony.

The question of whether Rhodes was justified in his obsession with ‘expansion’ has long gone stale. William Kelleher Storey’s new Life turns our attention from Rhodes the visionary to the ruthless coloniser, who often pitted himself against imperial officialdom and its watery idealism. He is interested mainly in the persistence with which Rhodes created systems to command labour and extract resources. Storey is an unusual biographer in that he is not much interested in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out Rhodes, Storey considers the exploitative energies that coursed through him, and in so doing turns him from a weathered monument into a disturbingly modern specialist in the ‘disassembly’ of whole lands and societies.

Before Rhodesia, there was Bishop’s Stortford, the market town where Rhodes grew up and where his father served as vicar of St Michael’s Church. Storey, whose grip on Victorian society is a little weak, sees Rhodes as insecure about his status. He was in fact proud to belong to the middling thrusters who amassed capital, joined professions and garrisoned the expansion of the British world. 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.

Early biographers suggested that Rhodes condescended to get rich so he could fund his ‘big ideas’, but Storey shows that making a fortune at Kimberley demanded all his attention. Thousands of diggers had ‘rushed’ the best sites before the British hastily declared Griqualand West British territory in 1871. The diggers had established committees to regulate their affairs, jealously guarding the independence of the little man by limiting the number of claims individuals could own. Contemporary photographs show a neuralgic chequerboard of pits, separated by precarious roads and covered with pulleys. The boards that succeeded the committees struggled to solve problems that afflicted every claim holder, such as the need to pump out water or prevent landslides. The value of diamonds was supposed to reflect their scarcity and the difficulty of extracting them, but the passing of stolen stones from labourers to middlemen made it impossible to regulate the supply to Europe and so to set prices. Attempts to stamp out the illicit diamond trade ran up against the refusal of white workers to be frisked.

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.

Storey describes the protracted and complex process by which Rhodes and Rudd’s company amalgamated with or took over other firms that were also trying to hoover up claims. By 1889 De Beers Consolidated Mining Limited controlled Kimberley’s two major mines, which had a combined value of £23 million. The company could now switch from surface digging to sinking shafts and invest in the automated sorting of diamonds from blue ground. As well as reducing production costs, they set prices by organising a syndicate of buyers from Amsterdam and Hatton Garden in London. The savvy of London financiers and huge loans from Nathaniel Rothschild were vital to the company’s success. Rhodes had an intuitive sense of whom to buy out and when, but this touch failed him when a gold rush began at the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. He complained he could not ‘see’ the gold capriciously speckled through its rocks, and so passed on lucrative claims and bought bad ones. Although his and Rudd’s Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa made huge profits financing other miners, it never controlled the industry.

Rhodes’s real genius was for people not minerals: he excelled at forcing his partnership on people, such as the Hamburg diamond buyer Alfred Beit, who should have been his rival. His determination to make friends and influence people was proof against prejudice: while his peers shuddered at linking arms with Barney Barnato, a Whitechapel Jew who had started out in Kimberley as a prize fighter, Rhodes made him a life director of De Beers. He took the art of ‘squaring’ people into politics after entering the Cape parliament in 1881. By offering shares in his companies to politicians and pliant imperial officials, he ensured they were invested in his success. Worried that Home Rule for Ireland might unravel the British Empire, he paid Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rulers ten thousand pounds in cash to guarantee they would support the principle of Irish – and by extension settler-colonial – representation at Westminster, even if they got a parliament in Dublin. When Irish bishops made the adulterous Parnell step down as leader, Rhodes asked what it would take to ‘square’ the pope. Years later, he was chipper about squaring the Mahdi, the messianic warlord who had killed his friend General Gordon, so that he could run a telegraph line through the Sudan to Cairo.

‘Wriggling, wriggling, wriggling’ was Schreiner’s description of this technique, which she felt debased public life. His boldest move involved a commercial and political partnership with the Cape Dutch. Because the memorialisation of Rhodes after his death in 1902 began just as Britain’s war against the Transvaal was ending, he was initially remembered as a prescient enemy of Afrikaner nationalism. Yet Rhodes had often denounced ‘tribal animosity’, by which he meant suspicion of the Dutch. He tried, especially after becoming prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1890, to knit the Boer republics profitably into a British South Africa, pushing a railroad to Johannesburg to boost internal trade. He knew that the Dutch farmers of the Western Cape did not see eye to eye with the Calvinist martinets of the Orange Free State or the Transvaal. What mattered to the Afrikaner Bond, the political party that represented these farmers, was railways to boost their trade and the steady subjugation of their African workforce.

Rhodes was the Bond’s man because he was ‘no negrophilist’. He saw the ‘native question’ very differently from imperial officials and missionaries who tried to restrain the exploitation of Africans. Though he’d once broken a finger heaving pay dirt at Kimberley, he was essentially an employer, always brooding over the way to get Africans to labour with satisfactory intensity. De Beers did not invent the practice of confining workers to compounds between shifts, but eagerly implemented it. Compounds were billed as humanitarian institutions, which kept drink out and boasted such amenities as swimming baths, but the netting over courtyards revealed their true purpose: to keep diamonds in. Africans could only leave at the end of a contract by submitting to gruelling searches. They might have their orifices inspected or be made to shit in buckets, which were then inspected for smuggled diamonds. As well as making workers live like prisoners, De Beers set prisoners to work: convicts were suited to the otherwise tempting job of picking diamonds out of crushed blue ground.

When the failed politician turned celebrity tourist Randolph Churchill visited the compounds in 1891, he mused that good wages must have persuaded their inmates to submit to such humiliating protocols. But Rhodes tipped the balance from persuasion to coercion. After he backed an unsuccessful Dutch proposal to let masters beat their servants – the ‘Strop Bill’, nicknamed for an Afrikaner whip – Schreiner turned on her hero for setting ‘worms of falsehood and corruption creeping’. Rhodes backed efforts to silence the political voice of Africans by stripping the franchise from land held by communal tenure and by imposing literacy tests that he imagined few Africans could satisfy. He presented the Glen Grey Act, passed by the Cape parliament in 1894, which overhauled the administration of a troubled district, as a ‘native Bill for Africa’. It promised Africans security of tenure but the small individual plots that replaced communal lands afforded them only subsistence, pushing all but elder sons off the land. A poll tax further encouraged the landless to find waged work on white farms and mines rather than hanging around canteens or missionary schools (equally deleterious institutions in his eyes). The act is now seen as a precursor to apartheid policies. Rhodes never properly articulated a theory of why ‘we are to be the lords over them,’ beyond suggesting that Africans were ‘children’ and ‘barbarians’, as backward as Britons in the days of the ‘druids’.

Groote Schuur, Rhodes’s stately home on the outskirts of Table Mountain, symbolised his conversion to the values of the Dutch. He hired Herbert Baker to plan an austere refurbishment; the house was filled with the teak furniture of the early Dutch. One Boer visitor watched an irate Rhodes kick an African stable lad’s behind and concluded that he was now one of them. But there was an ill omen about the house. Baker had to start over again when it burned down. The leopard in its menagerie was kept too close to the lions, who ripped off its tail. A giraffe was decapitated on its train ride to get there because no one thought to make it duck for a tunnel. Though Rhodes opened his estate to visitors, they misbehaved, vandalising monuments and invading the paddocks. One man went mushroom picking in a wildebeest’s enclosure and was recovered ‘in nineteen pieces’. Others hunted and killed the kangaroos with which Rhodes stocked the park. His imported starlings did better but made life hell for fruit farmers.

Although Rhodes​ boosted Dutch hopes for white supremacy in the Cape Colony, he was intent on a bigger prize: its northwards expansion to secure ‘the balance of Africa’. Rhodes first became prominent in politics when he helped to stop Boer trekkers seizing the ‘Suez Canal’ of South Africa: a ridge of disease-free land in Bechuanaland (Botswana) that promised a route north first for oxen wagons then later for trains. His hunger to reach and stake out all the interior from the Limpopo to the Rift Valley Great Lakes puzzled his partners in De Beers, who couldn’t see the business logic, though Rhodes always gamely maintained his faith in its mineral wealth and agricultural prospects. Later he boasted to English audiences that ‘expansion’ was creating Lebensraum for them and guaranteed markets for their manufactures, claims that encouraged J.A. Hobson to denounce his imperialism as cover for a desperate reboot of capitalism. But these seem like rationalisations of deeper needs. His ‘foible’ was said to be ‘size’. ‘That’s my dream – all English,’ he once said, gesturing at a map of Southern Africa.

Oxford often gets the blame for his cartomania. Once Rhodes got his footing at Kimberley, he decamped to the university to get a degree. Storey wonders if he might not have absorbed the teaching of John Ruskin, who had urged undergraduates to chivalric derring-do in the waste spaces of the earth. But he arrived too late to hear Ruskin’s famous lecture on the ‘imperial duty’ of founding colonies and the evidence for Ruskin’s impact on his thinking is suggestive at best. Bored in class, he would pass around a small box of diamonds to distract the other students. He saw the university as a masonic rather than an intellectual institution: a place to make connections rather than to change his mind. He became a mason there, joining the same lodge as Oscar Wilde. Although Oxford abounded with dons who represented Britain as a new Rome, Rhodes’s love of the classics creaked with autodidacticism: he carried around Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, black with underlining, and hired scholars to produce two hundred volumes of Edward Gibbon’s source materials, in handy English translations.

His desire for territory was more existential than ideological. Rhodes was desperate to leave a mark on the world and had no domestic attachments to fulfil or distract him. 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.

It was death that drove Rhodes, not sex. Two heart attacks in his twenties prompted him to write the first of seven testaments, in which he left his then modest assets to the secretary of state for the colonies to advance the empire’s aims. Yet the ineffectual response of both London and Cape Town to the Boer advance into Bechuanaland convinced him that officialdom did not share his dread of time running out. In later versions of his will, he appointed more sympathetic trustees and stipulated more clearly what he wanted them to do with his fortune: found a secret society like the Jesuits (minus God) to advance ‘the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa’, not to mention ‘the Holy Land’. But this was for the future. For now, he would create a company to drag the Cape north – a calculated act of colonial subordination that might just end up painting the map red. There were patriotic precedents for such an initiative: Canada had lately purchased the vast territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company. If this example suggested that the heroic age of company colonisation was over, German and Portuguese adventurers in Africa were carving out fiefdoms with the connivance of their sovereigns.

His British South African Company gradually became a country. In October 1889, it received a royal charter to take control of as much territory as it could ‘to the north of British Bechuanaland’. Its licence to rule was the written concession it had received from Lobengula, the Ndebele king of a warrior state (which the British called Matabeleland) that dominated other peoples for miles around. Although Lobengula had given Rhodes’s envoys ‘full power to do all things … necessary’ in his domains, this phrase misrepresented his intention, which was to fob them off with prospecting rights for minerals. The fiction that he had made a present of his kingdom was much too convenient to expose: De Beers and the Rothschilds promptly capitalised the BSAC to the tune of a million pounds. Rhodes bought out rival concessions with shares and spiked criticism by appointing aristocrats and do-gooders to his board. Neither Queen Victoria nor Lord Salisbury trusted Rhodes much, but as the government was fretting about German designs on southern Africa, it gave him his head.

Rhodes understood that law matters less than possession when it comes to land. In 1890 the BSAC fitted out and sent a column of pioneers to invade Mashonaland, a vast territory whose people, the Shona, supposedly acknowledged Lobengula’s sovereignty. The settlers parcelled out the land for mines and farms. Only resistance from Portuguese adventurers stopped them from pushing all the way to the eastern seaboard. If chicanery funded this coup, military technology reduced its risk. The Ndebele were renowned fighters skilled with their spears, but the BSAC’s tiny police force had the new Maxim guns, which automated killing. Their five machine guns could spit 4500 bullets in the ninety seconds it took a body of Ndebele warriors to make contact. Lobengula wisely left the force alone, but three years later, the BSAC attacked his capital at Bulawayo, alleging with Victorian high effrontery that they were protecting the Shona from robbery and murder. When the Ndebele charged the Maxims head on, they were annihilated. One witness called it ‘a nasty ten minutes’. Lobengula fled a burning Bulawayo and died on the run.

One of the troopers exulted that the ‘fair-haired descendants of the northern pirates’ had seized ‘the Great King’s kraal’. The brutal speed of this conquest established a settler despotism without meaningful interference from London. Leander Starr Jameson, the hero of the march on Bulawayo, became the first administrator of what was now called Rhodesia: he slashed the company’s police budget, leaving the settlers to kill and rape as they chose (the Shona had learned to run away even from policemen), took the Ndebele’s land and looted their cattle. Yet like many occupiers, the BSAC found out that winning pitched battles does not confer the right to do whatever a conqueror pleases. In 1893 most of Lobengula’s regiments had melted away unharmed. Three years later, they sensed opportunity after Jameson withdrew his police to mount a raid on Johannesburg – an operation orchestrated by Rhodes. This was supposed to trigger regime change by helping its disenfranchised British residents to rise against the Boer government, and so to bring about the fusion of the Transvaal with the Cape. The boldest of Rhodes’s forced takeovers (his codeword for it was ‘flotation’) failed when Maxims proved no good against Boer sharpshooters. Jameson was captured and sent to London for trial. The Ndebele exploited the ensuing vacuum by rising up and killing their occupiers: by the time their rebellion was defeated, they had killed one in ten white Rhodesians.

Rhodes, who lost his prime ministerial office and directorships in disgrace after the Jameson Raid, went to Rhodesia all the same, dubbed himself a colonel and led a vicious counter-insurgency. Dressed in grubby white flannels and tennis shoes, he was more Colonel Kurtz than Colonel Rhodes: he exhorted his men to ‘kill all you can.’ After they stormed rebel kraals, he laid out the corpses to tot up the dead. The South African historian William Beinart has calculated that about twenty thousand Africans died in the BSAC’s wars. If this toll seems small in the age of the quadcopter drone, the peevish righteousness with which settlers and soldiers justified their conduct is oddly contemporary. Frederick Selous, a renowned scout who bagged lions when he wasn’t hunting people, shrugged at the reprisals of ‘rough’ men who were after all the ‘avengers of the women and children of their own colour’. Robert Baden-Powell ambled back to the veldt to take a photograph of a Ndebele man he’d shot dead and later printed it in his book on the war.

Rising costs ruled out a war of extermination. Once the Ndebele withdrew to the impassable Matopo Hills, Rhodes panicked that London would want many more troops to deal with them, racking up impossible bills for the BSAC. He rode up the hills for the first and most nerve-racking of three summits to make peace. The brusque generosity with which he responded to Ndebele grievances – ‘such things will not happen again,’ he barked – once formed the redemptive core of his legend. He put Ndebele chiefs on the BSAC’s payroll, gave them farms on his estates and treated them to parties. He hung a portrait of Nyambezana, the Ndebele matriarch who had carried messages to the rebels, in his bedroom (the only other person so honoured was Otto von Bismarck). Ever mindful of death, he chose the site for his grave at World’s View, a hilltop in the Matopo, near the tomb of Lobengula’s father.

Yet both the settlers who craved revenge and officials who wanted to investigate the company’s maladministration understood that these feudal gestures were just the latest attempt to square his critics. When the Shona, whom Europeans despised as a cringing people in comparison with the martial Ndebele, joined the rebellion, they earned no such quarter: they were dynamited in their cave refuges and starved into surrender. Their prophetic leader was hanged, after first being forcibly converted to Christianity at the foot of the scaffold. The Ndebele on Rhodes’s farms found that his promises evaporated once more settlers arrived after his death, hungry for land and intent on building a segregated society, one which banned Africans from even walking on the pavements of Bulawayo until the 1930s. No wonder Schreiner lamented that Trooper Peter Halket was a ‘dead failure’ that had not saved the life of a single African. To her dismay, Rhodes sloughed off the disgrace of the raid. His nonchalant apologies to an inquiry at Westminster saved his company’s charter, while the disgust of Oxford’s liberal dons could not prevent him from taking an honorary DCL. With much chutzpah, he created a new progressive party at the Cape, promising ‘equal rights for civilised men’. In her desperation, Schreiner moved to the Transvaal, hailing the ‘guns and fists’ of its racist farmers as South Africa’s only hope against his ‘international capitalist horde’.

By this point,​ Rhodes was in terrible health and out of ideas. The economy of Rhodesia, which now came under tighter imperial oversight, was ticking along rather than booming. It got a rail link to the Cape, but Randolph Churchill’s snap judgment that most of it was better for shooting antelope than growing crops seemed right. Rhodes accordingly turned to a new dream to push British rail all the way to Cairo. ‘All red’ infrastructure of this kind caught the public’s fancy in an age of imperial paranoia, but the route would have to pass through the territory of Britain’s rivals. It also made no economic sense, because settlers wanted access to the nearest coasts, not slow coaches to the Mediterranean. Although Kaiser Wilhelm II – another violent fantasist – agreed to let him pass through German land, the plan fizzled out. Rhodes was reduced to yawning over the ‘clockwork’ prosperity of De Beers and investing its profits in fruit farming and the cold storage of meat – projects hardly worthy of a colossus.

His last will of 1899, which established the Rhodes Trust and its scholarships at Oxford, betrayed his shrinking reach: instead of creating a secret society of world-changers, he now settled for polishing existing elites and encouraging them to ‘maintain the imperial thought’. Rhodes was just a bystander when Lord Milner, an Oxford contemporary and the new high commissioner of South Africa, engineered a war with the Transvaal in 1899. Having rushed to Kimberley to take charge during its siege – he offered white civilians shelter in his mines from Boer shelling, while starving redundant Black workers into leaving town – he died of heart failure a few months before peace.

Rudyard Kipling, who began spending restorative winters at the Woolsack, an old Cape Dutch property that Rhodes had fitted out as a guest house for artists, was one of the last people he squared. Kipling repaid him for the use of this jingo Yaddo with the verses read out at Rhodes’s deliberately ‘barbaric’ funeral at World’s View.* He avoided the bromides of the bishop of Mashonaland, who took the service: there was no need to pretend Rhodes was headed for a heaven in which he did not believe. His worldly immortality arose from the friction between his ‘all mastering thought’ and the brief ‘term allowed’ for its realisation: his soul would linger in the ‘great spaces washed with sun’ until they filled with people. Rhodes remains at World’s View, but no longer looks out over ‘the world he won’. Rhodesia lasted only decades before giving way to Black majority nations, which suggests how slight his impact was on Africa, for all its violence. Yet Kipling, who was often wrong about the British Empire, was usually accurate about its psychic wellsprings. Although Rhodes talked of securing the future, power for him was not a means to an end but the expression of a need to treat people as objects to ‘quicken and control’.

Rhodes has not fallen: his monuments stand in Britain, ranging from Physical Energy, George Frederick Watts’s buccaneering equestrian statue in Hyde Park, to the professorships that still bear his name. We should look for his ‘immense and brooding Spirit’ today not in the sunken centre of a vanished empire, but in the activities of the oligarchs who no longer serve queens or wave flags, but are equally intent on breaking and reassembling societies to serve their fierce and strange urges to self-realisation. Beware dreamers devout.