Cecil Rhodes
Cecil Rhodes monopolised the world's diamonds, governed the Cape, had two countries named after him, and said he would annex the planets if he could. He was a clergyman's son from Hertfordshire, sent to Natal at seventeen for his lungs, and he went to the Kimberley diamond diggings in 1871. He spent the next seventeen years buying out every claim on the field, with Rothschild money, until De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1888 owned nearly all of it. He took degrees at Oxford in the intervals and wrote, at twenty-four, a will leaving his fortune to a secret society for the extension of British rule over the whole world. The British South Africa Company, chartered in 1889, was the practical version: it took a mining concession extracted from Lobengula, the Ndebele king, and used it to occupy Mashonaland with a column of settlers in 1890, destroyed the Ndebele state in 1893, and named the territory Rhodesia. He was prime minister of the Cape from 1890 to 1896, cut the African vote with the Franchise and Ballot Act and the Glen Grey Act, and pushed the railway and telegraph north towards a Cape-to-Cairo line that never joined. It ended with the Jameson Raid of December 1895, an armed incursion into the Transvaal meant to trigger an uprising of the Johannesburg uitlanders and bring Kruger's republic into the empire. The uprising did not happen, Jameson surrendered, and Rhodes, who had planned it, resigned the premiership. He spent the Ndebele rising of 1896 negotiating in the Matopo hills in person, and died at Muizenberg in 1902, at forty-eight, with his heart failing, in the middle of the war his politics had helped to bring on. The will founded the Rhodes Scholarships. His statue at the University of Cape Town came down in 2015.
- Lived: 1853 CE – 1902 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: businessman, politician, head_of_government, imperialist
