Rhodes viewed himself as a dreamer, an idealist, and a loyal servant of the British Empire. He saw no conflict between his personal ambitions and what he perceived to be the general good. His earlier biographers tended to write either hagiographies or vituperative attacks. More recent authors have tended to portray him as an enigma or a bundle of contradictions. Foremost in this regard is Rotberg. His massive biography surely is definitive, despite objections to some of his interpretations.21 Rotberg concludes that Rhodes was a man “who served both god and mammon, who was as human, fallible, gentle, charismatic, and constructive as he was shameless, vain, driven, ruthless, and destructive.”22 Even in the midst of some of the most sinister episodes of his life, he was capable of accomplishing good deeds. As prime minister of the Cape Colony, for example, he worked ceaselessly for agricultural and transportation improvements. He also fought to preserve the simple yet impressive architecture of the early Dutch settlers from rampant Victorian garishness. Throughout his career he gave money or other assistance to numerous individuals, hospitals, and charities.
Somewhat controversially, Rotberg and his collaborator, psychiatrist Miles F. Shore, also posit a psychological interpretation of Rhodes' life. They assert that his tender affection for his doting mother and his alienation from a rather distant father instilled in the boy an Oedipus complex. Through his life, they contend, Rhodes unconsciously desired to conquer rivals whom he saw as father figures.
Going yet further, Rotberg and Shore demonstrate that Rhodes was homosexual. It has long been known not only that Rhodes was a bachelor, but also that he surrounded himself with attractive young men and became petulant whenever one of his “band of brothers” chose to marry. It is also known that Rhodes frequently shattered his “manly” demeanor with fits of falsetto giggles. His contemporaries never questioned his sexuality, but rather accepted his explanation that his career kept him too busy to have a family. Although Rotberg and Shore concede that Rhodes probably never became physically active in any gay relationships, they marshal a persuasive amount of circumstantial evidence to demonstrate their point. They argue that Rhodes' sexual orientation not only contributed to his choice of assistants but also that it was a driving force in much that he accomplished in his career. His feelings of inadequacy, as he compared himself to his emotionally remote and heterosexually potent father, fueled his narcissistic, grandiose ambitions.
Several reviewers have sharply disparaged Rotberg's and Shore's reliance on clinical jargon and their speculative leaps about Rhodes' motives. At the very least, however, one can agree with Rotberg and Shore that Rhodes was, and remains, a conundrum.
By the customs of his day he was not a “bad” man. In an age of robber barons and imperialists, most of his actions were acceptable. In one important respect, however, he did fall below contemporary standards – at least the standards of the British Empire. This concerns his treatment of blacks. To be sure, the vast majority of whites in Europe and the United States in that era agreed that Africans and Asians were inferior. Some held that this inferiority was biological. Others believed the inferiority was cultural, and thus that education and religious instruction could one day lift native peoples to a higher level-though not perhaps to the level of whites.
Though nearly all British people were racist to some degree, the official policy of the British Empire was, at least nominally, colorblind. In the Cape Colony, for example, the right to vote was based on property ownership. Anyone who met the minimum requirements was eligible to vote in colonial elections. In actual fact, few blacks and “coloreds” met these requirements. However, through the 1880s every electoral district in the Cape Colony had some blacks who could vote and some whites who could not. By the European standards of that day, the British Empire was fairly liberal.
As a member of the Cape Parliament and as prime minister, Rhodes worked assiduously to undercut black rights. In part this resulted from his own prejudices. He did not hate the Africans, but he thought they stood in the way of British progress. In part his actions were aimed at currying favor with Afrikaner constituents in his electoral district. The Dutch settlers had always objected to the color-blind British policy. One reason for this was that the Afrikaners tended to be poorer than the British. The small number of whites who could not vote thus tended to be the Dutch.
Rotberg persuasively demonstrates that Rhodes sided with the Afrikaners and helped lay the groundwork for the system of apartheid that took final shape in the late 1940s. In his diamond mines Rhodes callously reduced the wages and increased the hours of his black workers. He segregated them from white workers and made them carry passes. In 1887 Rhodes supported a new law that denied the vote to all persons with communal titles to land, which in effect eliminated all Africans. As prime minister he approved laws that distributed tiny, nontransferable tracts of land to Africans. Each farm was large enough to support only one family. The result was that the eldest sons inherited the property, whereas their younger siblings were forced to seek employment at white-owned mines and plantations. Repeatedly in his speeches Rhodes said that whites “are to be lords over them…The native is to be treated as a child.” He supported a law that permitted employers to flog their non-white laborers. As a young man he wrote back to his mother about how delightful it was to possess “land of your own, horses of your own, and shooting when you like and a lot of black niggers to do what you like with.”23
In 1895 Rhodes and Jameson were recalled to Britain for an official investigation of the failed raid. Rhodes spent a weekend at his old college in Oxford. At breakfast one day he chatted with an undergraduate. The young man hoped for a career in law. Rhodes asked him if there were any “coloured men” studying for the bar. The youth replied that yes, there were, and that he liked them. Rhodes' gruff response was “Well, I don't. I suppose it is the instinct of self-preservation. In South Africa we have perhaps a million or two whites, and many millions more of black people.”24
In short, when Rhodes boasted on numerous occasions that he wanted “equal rights for every civilised man” he did not intend for this to apply to blacks. Rotberg argues that Rhodes “introduced a basic realignment of black-white power relations” and produced a drastic “reordering of the prevailing psychological climate.”25 To the extent that his policies foreshadowed apartheid, Rhodes contributed to the poisoned relations between blacks and whites in South Africa and neighboring countries that have lasted through this entire century.
Several politicians and writers both in the Cape and in London objected to Rhodes' racial policies. Yet the government failed to intervene. Prior to 1895 this was partly because he was so successful in expanding the empire that no one in power wanted to throw him off course. Moreover, after his disgrace, London wished to mollify Afrikaners in the Cape and Boers in the Transvaal; hence the lack of any movement to undo those racial policies favored by the Dutch.
Rhodes was not a man about whom one could be neutral. This was true in his own lifetime and remains so today. An eight-part BBC television series entitled “Rhodes,” first broadcast in Britain in the fall of 1996, aroused yet new debates. Some commentators found it even-handed, but others condemned it as blatantly one-sided. It is interesting to note, however, that the “one-sidedness” depended on one's point of view. Rhodes House Warden Anthony Kenny observed that “the benefit of every doubt was given against him [i.e., Rhodes]” and dismissed the series as “poorly scripted” and filled with “atrocious acting” and a “baffling” story line.26 One historian who reviewed the series denounced it as revisionist muck-raking of the worst sort, because it portrayed Rhodes as a sadist, a sexual pervert, and a founding father of apartheid – rather than giving Rhodes his due as a commercial statesman and innovative colonizer. Another historian, however, asserted that the series is “almost too soft” and lets Rhodes off “too lightly.”27
The Scholarships
What prompted this man of action to establish a program of scholarships at the University of Oxford? Just as controversy and mystery continue to surround the man himself, so too there are debates about his educational bequest.
The