26 March: Boreham on Cecil Rhodes

A Continental Dreamer
On this, the anniversary of the death of Cecil Rhodes, it is pleasant to reflect that South Africa is preparing worthily to celebrate the centenary of the birth of one of the most disturbing, one of the most commanding and one of the most creative figures of a singularly eventful epoch.[1] Happily, we are now able to review the extraordinary career of Cecil Rhodes in a more just and accurate perspective than was possible when, with the dust and smoke of the South African conflict still in the air, the remains of the great statesman were interred on the lonely crest of the Matoppos. Dying, not yet 50, amidst the turmoil created by the Boer War, the issues were so confused that men found it difficult to make up their minds as to his claims upon their admiration. To few men, however, are the years that follow death kinder than these 50 years have been to the memory of Rhodes.

The reading of his will was a revelation in itself. That historic instrument is the most imposing example on record of the high art of counting one's chickens before they are hatched. Rhodes drew up his famous will at the age of 22. His fame and his fortune were alike things of the future. Yet, in this breath-taking yet characteristic document, he deliberately proposes to himself, as the loftiest ideal possible of actual attainment, the world-wide spread of British culture as the most wholesome and uplifting influence in the evolution of human history; and he closes by bequeathing everything of which he shall die possessed to schemes that will further this end.

Making Life Easier For Successors
His reasons for these daring testamentary dispositions were rooted in his own youthful experience. At the age of 18 he had left England and gone out to his brother's farm at Natal. Here he dreamed a rainbow-tinted dream, and, at the same time, made two important discoveries. His dream was a dream of a newly constituted Africa—an Africa with all its jangling elements and alien territories happily united and with an open road right through to the Mediterranean. Of his discoveries, the first was that it is comparatively easy, under favourable circumstances to make money; the second was that, to make the most of one's opportunities, a man needs a first-class education. He decided that, without severing his association with South Africa, he would take a university course—and a degree—at Oxford. He dashed home in 1873, in 1876, in 1877 and in 1878 and eventually took his M.A. degree at a time when he was already chairman of the de Beers Mining Co. and a member of the Cape Parliament. To make this phase of life a little easier for other men than it had been to him, he determined to scatter scholarships like snowflakes all over the world; and, in his boyish will, he made the necessary provision.

Greatness And Gentleness Blended
No man was more misunderstood. He was regarded as taciturn, crafty, passionless, designing; a man who would, if occasion arose, gamble with the destinies of empires. People thought of him as he appeared when he sat in the witness chair before the South African Commission. He was questioned as to the Jameson Raid, the whole world waiting with tense anxiety for his answers. Munching his sandwiches in the box, he appeared unutterably bored. From time to time he lifted his tankard to his lips and, on setting it down, drawled out something that added nothing, and less than nothing, to the information of the Commissioners. He looked as stolid and as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar. But all this, Sir Henry Luy assures us, was purely a pose. Sir Henry knew Rhodes intimately. "There were tears in his eyes one morning," he says, "when he told me that his butler had been suddenly attacked by haemorrhage" and the man for whose word nations waited, spared himself neither trouble nor expense in getting his sick servant away to the healing and invigorating air of the hills.

On the afternoon of March 26, 1902, Sir Lewis Mitchell, his biographer, sat beside Rhodes' deathbed. The patient, he says, was restless and uneasy. Once he murmured: "So little done; so much to do!" and then, Mitchell adds, "after a pause, I heard him singing softly to himself, maybe a few bars of an air that he had once sung at his mother's knee"; and, within an hour, he was gone. In inaugurating the magnificent monument on the Matoppos, the work of earth's most eminent sculptors, Earl Grey described Rhodes as a statesman of exalted and noble aims who sought to substitute justice, freedom, and peace for barbarism and oppression in Africa. "The verdict of history," he added, "will pronounce Cecil Rhodes a thinker and builder who, of all his compeers, was the most powerful force for good in the 19th century." Since then his colossal personality and superlative achievements have grown upon the imagination and appreciation of mankind; yet the centenary celebrations are unlikely to elicit a loftier note of eulogy than is contained in Earl Grey's calm but glowing panegyric.

F W Boreham

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on 28 July, 1951.

Image: Cecil Rhodes