Behind the Bastards - Part One: Cecil Rhodes: The First Proud Boy

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Robert is joined by Propaganda to discuss Cecil Rhodes.1.    https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/march-2016/features-march-2016-nigel-biggar-rhodes-race-history-rhodes-must-fall/ 2.    https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297a/Conflict%20in%20Sierra%20Leone.htm3.    http://www.hnn.org/article/1589874.    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328891132_Cecil_Rhodes_Research_Paper/link/5be9f2e0a6fdcc3a8dd1c13a/download5.    https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sunday-tribune-south-africa/20151108/281973196535093ced6.    https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-2/expansion-was-everything7.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vFkGtMKgB88.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL7qGroJnSw9.    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00590X5E4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What? In conquering my, dominating my colonial colony? Jesus, I don't know. We're talking, this is Robert Evans. Behind the Bastards, a badly introduced podcast about even worse people. Today, we're doing another motherfucking episode about white English dudes in Africa in the 1800s.

So strap the fuck in everybody. My guest today. Also, don't ever say you don't know how to do an intro to a podcast ever again. That was phenomenal. Continue. Thank you. Thank you. My guest today, Jason Petty, a.k.a. Pro West West. I'm coming in blind so I had no idea we were doing another white colonial in Africa. This is great.

We're not doing another white colonial in Africa, actually. We're doing the white colonial in Africa. We are talking about the guy we're talking about today. Prop might be the whitest man who ever lived. We are talking about Cecil, motherfucking Rhodes. That boy's name is Cecil. Cecil. Let's go. Cecil and he's the namesake of Rhodesia.

Oh, my God. Yeah. No, tell me it's not. Rhodesia is named after him. Yeah. Oh, Rhodesia was his personal property. Yeah. So the Cecil Rhodes is not just like an influential imperialist. He's one of like he's Hitler, Stalin, Mao level of influential in the world. Yeah.

He is in addition to owning Rhodesia and another nation as his private property. He governed a third country. He controlled 90 to 95 percent of the world's diamond supply. Oh, and by the way, he helped invent apartheid. So like this is the, that's where I know him from. Partheid. Yes. Like, oh, here we go.

That's why I didn't know he, I didn't think about the Rhodesia thing. I just know him from the apartheid stuff. Yeah. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're saying like he's bastard with a capital B, bold, underlying three exclamation points. Yeah.

He's one of the big ones. Yeah. He's one of the big ones. And he, he is like arc. Like when you see the, when you see like the fucking, like the fashy proud boy types out in the street, he's what every, every one of them wants to be. Like Cecil Rhodes lived the dream life of an imperialist.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool stuff, prop. It's cool stuff. This is one of, I can't wait, dude. This is one of those episodes where I included a bunch of quotes from him

and then I had to go through the quotes and edit out the N word repeatedly because he says it a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So like this is why I was smiling so much. I remember early on in my career, there was this like venture capitalist guy that just really took a liking to me

because he's super wealthy, super white, but he loved hip hop. So he was essentially trying to help mentor me in my business thoughts, but he would say things like, I bought that company because who says you can't. And then he would be like, and his whole thing was like, dude, that's, he's like, that's the model you got to live by. Who says you can't, you know,

you just go pursue your dreams. Who says you can't do it? And I just thought, okay, I, you're, where do I start, man? Like, you know what I'm saying? I'm like, you're, you're trying to motivate me, but you turning me to fuck off because I'm like, what do you mean?

Who says you can't? I mean, actually, I know what you mean. Yeah. And I'm like, no, I don't, I don't know, man. I don't know if I'm going to, I don't know if I'm going to go down this road. But yeah. So that's why I giggled because I was like,

yo, he was telling me this as like a good thing. Like, hey man, who says you can't? Yeah. I think it's, you got one of those, you got one of those reminders that we all get from time to time that there are, within this planet, there are multiple planets. And that guy lives on a different planet. It's on a different one.

This just, that's not ours. He's on the who says you can't planet. He's on the, yeah. And I'm just like, I just, I, God, okay. I guess. Yeah. I mean, I have the, I do have who says you can't feelings, but it's when I'm looking at like,

like, like a, like a really fancy bag of coffee, like, ah, it's $25 for this bag of coffee. Who says I can't like, I'll get, I'll get the nice coffee. I like how you translated that into like prop speech. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I love it.

Yeah. Whereas with him, it's like the company that makes the coffee. Yeah. Yeah. As you know, this is his family. Yeah. It's their granddad's plantation in Columbia, you know what I'm saying?

And he's like, I want a coffee company. You know, who says you can't, I'll just buy it from them. I'll give them a good price. And that's, it's very appropriate cause Cecil Rhodes is that guy, but he's, he's a step above that guy. So that guy's a step above you and I. We say that when we think about buying a nice product. He thinks about that when the Cecil Rhodes was that for nations.

Yeah. Who says I can't, you know what, I'm going to take it. I'm just going to take this. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. So this is the guy we're getting into. And I'm going to, I'm just going to start.

Cecil, John Rhodes was born on July 5th, 1853 in the hilariously named town of, are you ready for this prop? Here we go. Bishop Stortford in Hertfordshire, England. Probably pronounced wrong. Who cares? It's the English. Bishop Stortford.

Who cares? Not a town name, but is a town name. But that's not what you should name a town. I wish I understood that. I wish I understood more like language and homology of like British things like thornberry and. Yeah. Work and Steyer.

Like why? Yeah. Worchestershire. Wooster, I think is how you're supposed to say it. Like, yeah. Like what's the war? She's like going on with you people. Somebody said that that obviously must be 2020 safe word and nobody

can figure out how to pronounce it and that's why everything so fucked up. That's a good guess. That's a good guess. Yeah. I feel like, I feel like we just all kind of left the English alone on their island for too long and that's was a bad call. Yeah. Cause that little, that little teeny island conquered the planet.

Yeah. And they came up with some weird things to ways to pronounce words and weird ways to pronounce things. Yes. And yes, but the genocides were worse. Yeah. Can't y'all have no salt? Just add salt and stuff.

Anyway. If you're English, this might be a hard episode to listen to because we're going to be going off. But yeah. Anyway. So Cecil was the fifth son of Reverend Francis William Rhodes and Louisa Peacock. His best biographer probably, Robert Rotberg, calls the Rhodes family

circumstances modest but hardly deprived. And this is something I'll probably quibble with him on a bit because modest is not how I would describe the Rhodes family. That's relative. Both sides of his family owned a significant amount of property. As late as 1901, the Rhodes siblings were receiving rent payments from 1600 properties in Bishop's Court. Yeah.

That's not modest. That's not modest. That's not modest. Yeah. Yeah. It would be fair to say that Cecil never worried about money in his entire life. Yeah.

The Rhodes were of modest means though within the world of the British upper crust. Yeah. So within the social environment they existed in, they were middle class, but they existed in the upper like 5% of the British nation, you know? Yeah. There's the new money.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They got the C class. Yeah. Exactly. Okay.

Got it. Yeah. Like today they're the kind of family that rents yachts a couple of times a year but doesn't own one because they just can't handle those slip fees. Yeah. Got it. Got it.

So Cecil's mother and father spawned copiously. They produced nine children and very quick succession. Seven of those kids survived to adulthood, which means they were pretty good at being parents by the standards of the time. You get seven and nine to adulthood. You're doing all right in 1850s. That's a pretty good percentage because that's old, yo boy. Yeah.

It's a woof. Yeah. It's like they got your kids. No. No. Yeah. No. So Cecil was child number four, the middle kid, and he was most

definitely his mama's boy. Rickett, the family servant, and I should say that boy's name is Rickett. Yeah. They had a family servant named Rickett. His name, Rickett. That's like what you put into a show if you're making fun of the British upper crust.

Yes. If you give them a servant named Rickett. You give them a servant named after a disease. Yeah. I don't understand. It was wrong, which I'll put in use in words randomly. Very funny. So yeah, the family servant, Rickett later recalled, he was his

mother's boy. Her favorite. I mainly included that quote. Yeah. Just because I wanted to laugh at the fact that they had a servant named Rickett. So Cecil was the only one of his siblings whose mother called him my darling.

And by all accounts, she was a very nurturing mother. While her children were young, she acted as their teacher, helping them learn to read and write. Her father was a very different sort of parent. The couple had married when she was 28 and he was 36, which was unusual because that's very old for a woman to get married in this period of time. She's a spinster at 28.

So you would say that he actually... I was like, sorry, Sophie. That's just the way they talked in the back then. It's ridiculous. It makes his age and Sophie. It's awful. Low key, all of the rich people back then were into teenagers. Yes.

Like that's the way it worked in those days. Yes. And it was messed up. Not much has changed. No. Yeah. So you got to give Cecil's dad credit for marrying someone who's an actual adult.

That's good. So yeah. But this did mean that he was in his 50s by the time Cecil came into the picture. He was not a super fun dad, was a very strict disciplinarian, and the children often ran to their mother for comfort. Robert Rottberg, Cecil's biographer, or Cecil's biographer, writes, quote, Miss Rhodes was unusually skilled

in establishing supportive relations. Well-liked by contemporaries and servants, she provided an ample measure of love for her children, especially Cecil. It was that special love, which was the foundation of his invincible self-confidence, an affirmative sense of self, which was both a spur to accomplishment and a resilient buffer against the ravages of failure.

Wow. To his credit and discredit, Rhodes throughout his lifetime was remarkably free of both guilt and shame. So his mom is very supportive, and maybe she should have been a little less supportive. God. Let me tell you, the parent that actually cares about their kids biggest fear is that you actually showed your favorites

and cared for one more than the other, and then one of them is well-adjusted and wonderful, and then the other one's like, you know, in and out of rehab, and you're like, not to shame anybody for that, but you're just like, or the one, and then like in this scenario, the one you actually unfairly favored turns out to be the piece of crap that you was trying to avoid.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's kind of where this story is leading, unfortunately. So yeah, he grows up, yeah, very, very, very much coddled by his mama. And he grew up very entitled as a result of this, and this is particularly illustrated by an anecdote from his nurse. When he was five or six years old, she just made jam and had set it up high to cool. She left the room for a few minutes and she came back.

The jam was gone and Cecil had clearly eaten it. So I'm going to quote her relating the rest of this story. Cecil, did you eat that jam? Yes, he replied. I am sorry. It's gone. It was very good. Make some more.

I can't take any of this seriously. Yeah. That was, that was a, that this is first of all spot on. Great accent. Yeah. And this boy's like five and he's giving orders to adults. Yeah. Just, hey, make more.

I just, I wish Cecil was Caesar. So ours are Cecil. So when a nurse comes in and says, do you eat that jam? And he goes, hell yeah. Mm-hmm. Make some more. Amazing. Yeah.

If he was Cecil. Yeah. She described his attitude as superior and he just told her to make more jam and walked away whistling. Dang. The nurse went up to his mom and asked what should be done with a boy like that. And his mom said, let him alone as long as he speaks the truth.

Oh my God. Look, at that point, nurse, take your apron off. It just be like, look, it's a lot of rich people in this city. I'm finna go work somewhere else. I don't need this. Yeah. Yeah. At that point, I'm not, I will, I will not be bought.

I'm already bossed by you. I will not be bossed by a five year old. It seems like the thing that he needs is the thing that's done in some households when you talk back to your mom or your auntie and they chunk their, their sandals at you. Yeah. Like that's the kind of, yeah. It hurts, but a sandal thrown at him.

Yeah. Just a nice chocolate. Just real. Yeah. Chocolate. Exactly. Yeah. Just, you know, just let me remind you which one of us is the adult.

That's the way my parents used to say. I'm just going to remind you which one of us is the adult. Yeah. Yeah. So that should give you some ideas to the way the kid grew up seeing himself and other people. We don't know very much about like his dad personally. There are a few details that I kind of find tantalizing.

One of which is that as a preacher, he was eventually a vicar. He was famous for never delivering a sermon longer than 10 minutes. Why? That's great. Actually, I'm not going to lie. Somebody grew up, grew up in a Baptist, you know, a black Baptist church. You talk about 10 minutes. Sounds great.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That part sounds cool. And the other thing Cecil's biographer just drops this in the biography with no added context, probably because we don't have it, is that Cecil's father despised the law and raised his children to not respect the law and to abide by their own. He just hated.

He hated the idea of going to lawyers. He hated judges. He hated cops. And we don't know anything about why, but that was just something they were raised with. Little conflicted about Cecil's daddy now. You know what I'm saying? Like, wait a minute. Okay.

Hold up. You know what I'm saying? Like go money. You know, was able to keep his kids alive. Keep the speeches short. Hates the cops. I'm like, wait, ain't he married a full grown adult? You know, like he, he wasn't married.

He wasn't, he wasn't at the middle school picking girls, you know. Yeah. It wasn't getting married to a 15 year old at age 36, which a lot of dudes did. Yes. Yeah. So Cecil's first school was, was a private school rather than a public school. And that means a different thing. Actually that means he didn't go to, he didn't go to like Eaton or one of the fancy schools.

It means a different thing, I guess in England in this period. So he was always kind of insecure about the fact that he went to a private school and didn't get to go to one of the big fancy. Like he's, he didn't get to be an Eatonian. You know, we talked about that in our, our episodes on the Wongakoo, like that. He didn't get to, to get that early introduction into like the fancy pot of the, of the, of the white British boys education. So yeah, maybe that's why he thinks he's like, he's of modest. Yeah. His parents, I think kept him out because his health wasn't great, although that's even debated.

There's a lot of like argument over whether or not he was a sickly kid, which I just don't care to get into because it's boring. True. Yeah. He was studious and intelligent and he's overwhelmingly described as having been very moody. His nurse claimed that he was never like a normal child. Although the evidence she gives for this is also baffling because the thing that she, she cites is that he only laughed when he liked, which is like, when else do you laugh? Well, I mean, that's, wait.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't understand what she was going. It's just, you get reminders reading through this that like, oh yeah, this is like a, again, a different world. Like, I don't understand what the fuck these people are talking about at the time. It just sounds like she's bitter that he didn't laugh at her joke. That's what she liked to be. It was like, maybe you just not funny.

Cause like your first story. Yeah. That's a warning sign from a kid, but like the fact that he doesn't laugh when he doesn't want to laugh. You can't really. Yeah. Yeah. You can. Yeah.

Well, who does laugh when they don't want to laugh? Yeah. You don't learn that until you're an adult. So. Yeah. Of course he didn't laugh. I guess English kids are supposed to learn that early. I don't know.

But for a little bit more context on Cecil as a boy, I'm going to read a quote from the founder, which is a biography about him. When vexed, he would hide in a dark corner under the staircase, not speaking for hours. He sometimes fled to the family summer home with a book pouring over it by the hour together, resenting imperiously any attempted intrusion. He was prone to strange fits of moodiness, some vague uneasiness of spirit, whose source he was never able to properly communicate, unaware himself of whether it was melancholy or horror that seized him.

Occasionally, the young Rhodes rocked himself to and fro and kept up a low crooning, which was almost a moan, a crooning that never shaped itself into articulate words. At such times, Miss Rhodes would go to her special son and, with her arms about him, she would beg him to explain the reason of his disquiet. But he never told her, locking himself then as later in a private, possibly solipsistic world. There were similar moments when he curled up under the dining room table, remaining there, invisible behind an overflowing tablecloth, despite the frantic searching of servants.

He sat underneath, dinnerless, through many a meal of his young years, hugging his knees. Y'all, he's... Sounds... Autistic. Some of that, the moaning thing. I used to teach special ed, and I've heard a number of theories as to why it's a thing, but yeah, I don't know. You can't diagnose a guy who died decades before, obviously.

Yeah. But it does sound like he was... I don't even like the term neurotypical a lot. It sounds like he definitely had some... There's something going on there that maybe I don't have a great understanding of. Yeah, they didn't have a name for whatever that was. Well, yeah, and that's a benefit for... Seeing the world differently can allow you to see options others don't.

And I think kind of what this paragraph is getting at, and what I've experienced with a number of the autistic folks that I worked with who would have kind of coping behaviors like that, the moaning, is they're taking in too much of the world. Yeah, they're kind of overwhelmed by all of the sensory stimuli because their brain, for whatever other people, their brain maybe filters out more or something. And maybe that's part of why Cecil was able to see some of the options he was able to see.

Yeah, I don't want to psychoanalyze him too much. We can't psychoanalyze a dude, but there is something to being able to have a coping mechanism that maybe the rest of us think are weird. But we ain't got one. I bet you if we had some coping mechanisms, there'd probably be some less anger in us, you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

So yeah, anyway. But yeah, I'm able to navigate a world because his brain works a certain way, which we don't know obviously is all speculative. Yeah, it does sound like what we can say from that paragraph is that he felt overwhelmed a lot by reality as a little kid to an extent that was unusual. Yeah.

So yeah, now the author of that biography, Robert Rockberg, is very interested in developmental psychology and he analyzes Cecil repeatedly through that lens, and I think the book was written in 88, so there's not a lot of. I think if it was written more recently, he probably might have speculated more on some of the stuff that we've been talking about, but he's real into some Freudian shit.

And he notes that first and only children tend to get the most attention while middle children learn better interpersonal skills. And Rockberg basically writes that Cecil had elements of both of these things in his own upbringing. He was the middle kid, but he was also his mother's favorite, and so he got special attention. And he theorizes that this kind of might explain how he grew up into the political animal he became

because he was both kind of surrounded by a very competitive family and he learned how to do diplomacy as a result of that. But he also grew up with this kind of limitless self-confidence that comes from being, you know, the most favored child. So another major influence on the growing Cecil was the fact that his father was kind of a dick. And as Cecil later confided to a friend, quote, my father frequently, and I am now sure wisely,

demolished many of my dreams as fantastical, but when I had rebuilt them on more practical lines, he was ready to listen again. He never failed to put his finger on the weak spots, because criticism soon taught me to consider a question from every possible point of view. I don't know, sounds a little bit dickish to me to like be tearing apart a kid's dreams all the time,

but Cecil clearly was grateful for it. Yeah, he's somehow like read, like read, like little history revisionism here, like looking back going, I guess it was kind of cool that my dad was emotionally abusive and didn't let me imagine. Also, you just decided to stop doing the accent? Well, yeah, I'm not going to do it all the time, Sophie. I like to think that your cat looks at you

and you do those accents like, who is this man? I do enjoy a nice British accent. You're very good at it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I have a real racist Italian accent too. Okay, don't do it.

Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Okay, I only do it when I'm cooking pizza. Good. Which is fine. I'm Italian. Yeah.

But so, um, yeah, from an early age, Cecil's talents as a leader were evident. He loved to play soldiers, but he insisted on playing general. He was temperamental and I find it noteworthy that the main people who reported on this later were not his actual family members, but the help, all of whom seem to have stories about the fact

that he was very easily angered. Oh my God. So all of like the service workers who know this kid say like, he's, he's fucking dick. Oh my God, this kid. That's because they're just, dude, now I got a better picture. It's like the servants are action figures. They're just living action figures to him.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, and again, one of the people, a lot of people who come up later and we'll talk about this when we talk about all of the racism, because he gets defended a lot by people today by saying like, well, we can't deny that he believes things that were racist, but it wasn't out of step with the attitudes of the time,

which number one, I hate it when people bring that up because there were actually a bunch of dudes and ladies at the time who were like, hey, our society's racist. This is fucked up. It's like with slavery. There were a lot of abolitionists. Like no, that was never a thing that was just like taken for granted as, as right.

Like it doesn't make it okay. But also like, yeah, the, the treating the help shitty. That was very common among the British upper crust. Yeah. Also doesn't mean he's not a dick. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. When Cecil turned 16, he was more or less a man because again, people didn't live all that long back then. Yeah. So it was time for him to head to grammar school, which is a term for secondary school, but I think was kind of more like it was basically like he, the normal thing to have done for a boy in his, his, his,

his situation would have been to get on the track to start going to university, right? And, and to have done that and go to someplace like he wanted to go to Oxford. That was always his dream. And he wanted to become a lawyer. But yeah, he, he didn't like, he, it was kind of like a situation where he wasn't a hundred percent certain about

what he wanted to do. And he wound up picking another option, which was that his brother, Herbert had moved to South Africa and started a cotton farm and his family kind of thought that he wasn't really ready for college and he couldn't, wasn't mature enough to go to join the military or anything like that. Yeah.

They wanted to harden him up. That's what you did. If you were an upper class British family and you had a kid that you wanted to toughen up, you would send them to Africa. Yeah. It was like a, yeah. Oh my God.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And just knowing it's South Africa just even adds to you. Yes. Yeah. And at this point, South Africa is not a political entity.

It's the Cape, the Cape colony. Yes. And we'll talk a little, in a little more detail soon about like what the powers kind of in Southern Africa are at that point. Yeah. But yeah, Africa in this point for the British was seen as a place not, not just as a place where a white man could get

rich because it was obviously that, but where a white boy could become a white man by ordering, you know, black African people to work for him. Yeah. Yeah. And surviving malaria. So the primary motivating factor was probably Cecil's father who saw his son as soft and an underachiever in school as

Rodberg writes, despite the school prizes that Cecil had won, the vicar may have also had qualms about the thoroughness of his preparation in Greek and Latin. Furthermore, his father recognized that he was unfitted for a routine life in England. Sons of the sturdy Victorian middle class went overseas. They went to America and India. They were beginning to go out to Africa.

So again, sturdy, sturdy middle class, sturdy middle class. That's what a great turner. That's who builds the British empire. You know, it's not the, it's not the wealthy people. No. Like they have, they fund a lot of it. But if you're looking at like the people who actually conquer most of the land, it is these like these folks in Cecil's,

these kind of the upper classes, middle class is who actually goes out to prove themselves in these places. Yeah. It just, I just wonder what it would like honestly feel like to really believe that like the world is your playground. Yeah. And no matter where I go, I'm at home because these are our colonies.

So when you land in the Southern Cape, you're like, well, this is England. Yeah. You land in India and you're like, well, it's England. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to imagine. I mean, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, there wasn't, not anymore, but there wasn't one time when I was traveling the most, I felt kind of similar to that having a U.S. passport. Yeah. Cause you could go anywhere and everybody like, I can, I remember times in like Central America where there were,

I'd be in towns where there was a whole police force just to keep, just for the tourists. Like cops would like stop and give you rides and stuff to go get, to go to the next bar. Cause it's like our job is to make sure that the white Americans who visit have the best possible time because that's an important part of our, like it's, yeah. Yeah.

I feel that to a small extent, you know, it's not the same, but it's, yeah. And it just, both scenarios seem amazing. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Just, yeah. Blissfully unfair, but probably incredible. Yeah.

Yeah. Very definitely unfair. Yeah. So, yeah, there's pretty persistent rumors that Cecil's family sent him to Africa cause he was sick and that wandering around Africa was like a medical treatment at the time. Like, and you get that a lot in Cecil's life. He'll get ill and they'll be like, go to Africa and then he'll

get another kind of ill and we'll say, oh, you need to head back to England. That was a lot of medicine was like, go where it's hot, go where it's cold. Wow. Wow. Rotberg, who I think is probably the most rigorous biographer of Cecil thinks that this is untrue that like looking

at letters between him and his family. There's no evidence that he was sick and that he probably, his family mostly wanted him to go get hardened up and go make the family wealthier by taking other people's stuff. And his family invested a lot of money in him. His aunt gave him 2000 pounds, which was like, that's a, that's a year's worth of living comfortably at that point in time, which he could use to like fund whatever adventure

struck his fancy. So he, again, he's, his family, he's never worried about money. He always knows when he strikes out to Africa. Number one, I have a giant pile of cash and no matter what I do, my family will send more. Yeah. This is an understanding he has.

Yeah. So he lands in Africa in 1870 and at the time Southern Africa was divided between several white colonies were like the major powers in the area. There was the British controlled Cape Colony, which was roughly the size of Texas. When we call this a colony, most modern nations are smaller than the Cape Colony.

Like again, fucking Texas. It's the size. It's almost, it's like ginormous. It's the size of Europe. Basically. Yeah. There's the orange free state, which was a bunch of Dutch weirdos who really hated the Brits.

These are like the Bowers or the Africaners and there's the Transvaal, which is also, which it's run by even weirder Dutchmen and it was essentially a theocracy at this point. Yeah. And these are also Bowers. Yeah. Exactly. So between these white people controlled lands, a lot of

Southern Africa was still independent and controlled by people like the Sotho, the Nama, the Herrero, I think the Bessuto was one of them, the Nakimbe, yeah, or in the KK something. We'll get to them later. The African tribes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And these, there's still, there are still some very like the the Madabale, I think is one of them are very, have a lot of power and still control a sizable chunk of land. Yeah. I was like, I know, I know a little bit just because of my Black Panther father and then being, like I, I perform in South Africa at least once a year, except for this year.

But like, yeah. So like the Zulu region down south, you know, they're obviously very, still very tribal, but like the, the power that they wielded among even surrounding tribes was like, yeah, it was undeniable. Yeah. And their interaction with the, with the colonizers was like super crazy.

Like, you know, the whole shock of Zulu story. Yeah. Yeah. The Zulu wars and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, which is happening in this period. Like this is, this is exactly during the period where also the

Zulu wars are happening. Yeah. Which are, you know, there's, there's a, there's a phrase that sums up all of the wars between the English and, and the Bowers and, and the, the African tribes at this point. And it's, it's a phrase that was come up with by a British poet. And I believe the poem was kind of critical of, of

imperialism, but the phrase is whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not, which is like the Maxim guns, the first heavy machine gun. Yeah. That's all the wars is. At the end of the day. Yeah. A few hundred white troops, thousands of African troops, but

the white people have heavy machine guns. Yeah. The shield is still stretched like leopard skin. That's still their shield. Yeah. No matter how strange you are. Yeah. And a lot of these African tribes, they're fighting with

rifles still, but it's one, they have antique rifles and the white people have machine guns. So it doesn't, you know, it doesn't fucking matter. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Robert, Robert, you know, it doesn't matter. You know, who else has machine guns? No, no, that's not, that's not where I mean, probably, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Probably somewhere in their room. Yeah. Um, Prada. That was trash. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice

demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal

system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover

what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right.

We're back. So Cecil has just landed in Africa, Southern Africa in the Cape Colony. And the first thing he learns after setting foot on the continent is that the cotton, he'd gone there to grow cotton because his brother has this cotton farm. And this is a period where cotton's price has temporarily skyrocketed because the US has a civil war and German burns

all of the cotton fields and stuff. So there's a period. It was for the longest time not profitable for anyone but people who lived in the south of the United States to grow cotton because it's just the best region to grow it in. And they were producing so much of it that there was no point in anyone else growing it. There's this brief cotton boom in this period in like

the 1870s and it doesn't last long, but it's kind of at its height when he lands in Africa. But as soon as he gets to Africa, he starts talking with people and he learns that cotton, he hears about essentially a boom product that he finds a lot more exciting than cotton, diamonds. Yeah. So yes, diamonds.

And he starts talking like as soon as he lands, he meets a guy who just discovered a massive diamond mine in Southern Africa. And yeah. And his brother actually doesn't show up to meet him. He leaves him a note because he was scoping out diamond fields when Cecil landed and had also like kind of moved on from the cotton.

These are all speculators, right? Like they're boom chasers. It's the same basic thing going on in Africa in this period and Southern Africa in this period as was going on in California, you know, with the gold rush and shit. Yeah. So Cecil fell in love with the geography of Africa at once. And when I say he fell in love with it, I want to be really

like he didn't fall in love with Africa. He fell in love with the land in Africa. It was a possessive love and it did not include the people there. And that's a long term sort of thing with Cecil. Yeah. Having spent a decent amount of time in Africa, there is, and I say this in all honesty, there is something magical there.

And then just and also the idea that like inside of the ground somewhere in Africa, I mean, the land just produces everything. Yeah. All of it is there. It's it's pretty crazy. Yeah. It's massive.

It holds. It's so much bigger. Like our maps do us a disservice. Do it a disservice. Yeah. Because again, like one of the colonies in Southern Africa is the size of Texas. And there's a bunch of other shit there still.

Yeah. You can fit all the other land. Yeah. In the world in Africa. Yeah. It's huge. Yeah. So yeah, I'm going to read a paragraph that is something

that Cecil wrote about kind of the native peoples in Africa after he first arrived there. So this is one of his first impressions. And the term he uses here. I don't know. I didn't decide like I don't I don't I don't norm. I don't read out like slurs if I can avoid it. I also don't want to say the K word, but it's it's the it's

that it's that word in South Africa. South Africa's version of the N word. Yeah. Yeah. And I should state they use both that word and the N word interchangeably. Yeah. And they are they are slurs, but they're not using them as

slurs because to them this is just what you call these people. Yeah. Like it's not it's not. Yeah. So which is time and language is crazy. Yeah. And alive. Yeah.

Yeah. So the the people here shock your modesty. Many of them have nothing on accepting a band around the middle. They are fine looking men and carry themselves very erect. They all take snuff and carry their snuff boxes in a hole bored through their ears. They also pay great attention to their hair and carry porcupine

quills in it with which they dress it. You often see them sitting down in groups dressing each other's hair and picking the fleas out. And then he talks about how he doesn't think they smell very good and he's very judgmental. Just a real judgmental dude. Yeah. So yeah, that's that Cecil's first impression of these

people. And he eventually receives a letter that his brother has sent him that included $20 in a crude map to the cotton farm. So he heads to the cotton farm and pretty soon after he arrives there the price of cotton falls. But he spends some time as a cotton farmer and he's not really interested in cotton. He really wants to get into diamonds.

But his family keeps writing him letters basically saying don't like stay stay on the cotton path. This is safe. Like this is a good investment. Diamonds are risky. And that's kind of, you know, his first year or so in Africa is him constantly getting this like this flood of information about all the diamonds people are finding in

different parts of Southern Africa. And he writes that it makes his mouth water. This might be a dumb question, but why is his family so involved? But this is like that's what they do. This is what I think that's pretty standard for an upper crust family at the time. Like this, like a child is also an investment and he reflects

on the family and you, you're, you're putting a lot of money into him to send him there. You want him to do things that will, will provide a return. I guess seems like a lot. You're still building. Yeah. You're building the empire. Remember they're like middle rich.

Yeah. So you got to build the empire. Yeah. Yeah. And empires are built by people who are building private empires for themselves, right? Like that's what makes it doable. You know, it's the Eric Prince sort of thing.

So, um, yeah, they warn him away from this path, but he keeps, he keeps like hearing all these stories. Like there's, he reads a story about how an African man found a diamond and traded it for a roll of tobacco to a white man and the white guy sold it for 800 pounds. His brother finds a couple of diamonds because he's always going off to go diamond finding some roads just keeps getting his key.

Like he's got this hunger. He does describe it as like a physical hunger to go out and find diamonds. Um, now the first diamond had been discovered in South Africa three years earlier in 1869, a black farm employee had found an enormous 88 carat diamond, the star of Africa. And I think this is neat. So the diamonds were first found as far as we can tell in

human history, um, by people in Southern India and carats are what you, you kind of measure diamonds by because those people back in like 700 BC, um, would weigh a diamond next to carob seeds. And that's why it's called carrots is like the, the, the number of carob seeds that it takes to like weigh a diamond. Like that's where that word came from. We don't use carob seeds anymore, but like anyway, I just

thought that was neat. I learned that while I was researching this. Yeah. And it's not carrots like every kid thinks. No, no, no, it's like carob seeds. So he was paid, uh, the black man who finds this star of Africa, this massive diamond. Yeah.

He was paid 500 sheep, 10 oxen and a horse for it, which actually like, if you're looking at kind of like Africans who find diamonds and sell them to white people, that's not a bad price. That's a lot of shit. Yeah. Yeah. No, he came up.

He came up found in the ground. Yeah. You know, yeah. Yeah. The star though did eventually sell for 25,000 pounds, which is like, you're very wealthy if you've got access to that kind of money in, in, in this period of time. Um, it's about the equivalent of four million modern dollars.

I was gonna say, yeah, no, that's, that's some, that's some money. Yeah. Yeah. So this does bring me to an interesting, uh, the fact that this guy, this farm worker who sold that, I mean, got paid reasonably, nothing like close to what it finally sold for, but got paid pretty good.

Yeah. Does bring me to a point about Southern Africa in this period that is important to state. It was less racist than it became. Hmm. This is actually, it, it actually started out as a much less racist as a colony than it turned into. And the guy we're talking about today is part of why it made

that turn. So obviously the British were outrageous bigots. Of course. And everybody in this period, every English person in this period in the colony is tossing around the N word like it's going out of style, but the Cape Town colony was run under British law. And the British had a whole B in their bonnet in this period

about the rights of men and British law held in theory at least that all men, even black men were equal. And this was, this was something that was enshrined in their, in their legal codes in a way that it was not in the United States. Yeah. This was a principle. It was not like a civil right in the way that we conceive of

it, but it was a principle that was abided by. And so while, while black men were very much second class citizens in the eyes of the white people who lived there, they still theoretically enjoyed full rights. If they owned property, they could vote. Segregation was not a matter of law. And this is within kind of the core of the Cape Colony. And one of the things you'll see is that like within the

core of the colony, they hold pretty strictly to these, these things that they consider proud traditions of the British empire. And the further out you get from it in the areas where they're actually extracting resources, the less and less those legal niceties apply. Right. But within the center of the colony, they make at least

an effort at that. And there are, you know, to their credit, you will find lawmakers who, when there are other people who are talking about like restricting the rights of black Africans, there are lawmakers in the colonies who get very angry about that white lawmakers. So there is, this is part of why you can condemn people like Cecil is there are white men at this time who are like,

that's not right. Like all men should be equal and they have to be treated that way under the law. And like you are, you are developing a separate legal code for them, which is just worth noting that this is not when we talk about the racism of colonialism. I do think we often, we often make it out to be something that everyone just thought was fine and they didn't.

Yeah. A lot of people pushed back, a lot of white people pushed back against it. Yeah. It's part of why you can condemn the ones who didn't. Yeah. Yeah. I would even argue that like that's like, yeah, things

don't, things don't start at the end, you know? Yeah. And that, I mean, the same happened in America, like there couldn't, without the, without the work of, you know, non-racist white people, we probably couldn't have gotten where we've gotten so far. Anyway. Yeah.

And I think for this, it's because they don't stop anything from happening in the Cape Colony, right? Yeah. Like the racism is enshrined into law despite their objections, but the fact that people objected is important, I think, for, for condemning the ones who were, who pushed for the racism, including Cecil. For sure.

At this point in our story, though, Cecil's just a 17-year-old boy learning how to become a cotton farmer, or rather, he was learning how to command the Zulu laborers who actually did the work on his farm. Learn how to run a farm, not how to farm. Yeah. Now it seems fair to say from the context that Cecil was not an excessively hateful racist in his personal

interactions with the natives. But he was in his bones a capitalist, and he was very frustrated by the fact that these people were not. Their way of life did not gel well with capitalism. He wrote, for though there are any amount of, he uses that K word out here, they are such independent fellows that the greater part of them won't work. Their daily food is mealy, maize porridge.

They grow their own mealy's, and the only thing they have must have is money for their hut tax, which is very light. And he considers this a problem. They're like, oh, I grow my own food. I don't really need money, so I'm not going to work that much, because I don't want much. I'm happy just growing my own food and living. I don't want to like labor for someone else all the time.

And he's like, this is a problem. That sounds kind of good. That actually sounds like an ideal life. That sounds pretty great. I have what I need. But he's recognizing these people are not going to be ideal citizens of global capitalism, which isn't a thing at this point, but is being born.

And Cecil is one of the people who first kind of sees what's going to be born. And he wants to build, he becomes enthralled with the idea of building a massive network of trade throughout Africa and the rest of the world. So that products can move and go, because he loves, in his bones, he loves capitalism. So he was unique among the white men in his area for

being willing to lend his black workers money. He and his brother both believed strongly that Africans were almost incapable of lying. So you could trust them with money. He actually said that he would prefer to loan them money than to have money in the Bank of England, because the Bank of England was a less trustworthy institution. So that's something.

Yeah, that's the off balance racism. Where you like, dang, I don't... I feel so weird. I've heard some descriptions that his workers were basically slaves, and it does seem like later on as the story develops, it became that way. That does happen to the people who work for him, but that doesn't appear to have been the case in this period.

In fact, in this period, Cecil probably could be described as one of the better white men in the Cape Colony to the black people who worked for him. Sounds like an insult to me. Yeah, I mean, it's not a compliment. I'm just trying to make sure there's proper context of this guy's journey. He was also one of the better cotton farm managers,

but he never really liked farming cotton. He couldn't stop thinking about diamonds. And in 1871, a huge field of diamonds, the biggest diamond find in the world, was found near a town now called Kimberley. And at the time, Kimberley was part of what was called Greka land, which is an independent territory founded by a mix of some members of different African tribes,

a lot of former slaves, but also groups of kind of disaffected white men. It's actually a very multicultural group of people who all kind of reject what's going on in the colonies of Africa and move to this place in the middle of nowhere, dusty unfertil land together so that they could be kind of free of all this other. So it's almost like an autonomous zone.

Yeah, I mean, it was still like they had, I think they had kind of like, there was like a, like a, yeah, their leadership structure was, you know, somewhat horizontal, but like, yeah, it was a lot of people who were kind of rejecting what was being done elsewhere in Africa at the time and wanted to get away from it. And so, yeah, that's the Grekas. It's a very, I'm not going to do that whole story justice.

It's worth noting, as we tell the rest of the story, you, from what I've read, you will not find this story in South African history books. Greka land's been pretty much written out of the, written out of the story. Yeah. So I'm going to quote next from an article in the history news network.

Then in June 1871, a white prospector announced the discovery of an 83.5 carat diamond at the place now known as Cambridge, so named after Earl Kimberly, the British Secretary of State for the colonies. This site of the discovery just happened to be within Greka territory, but fortune hunters never did bother to raise any questions with the Grekas as to the ownership of the mining rights.

Just a few days earlier, the British colonial secretary in a dispatch dated May 18th, 1871 had already authorized the British High Commissioner in Cape Town to extend the British territory in South Africa by annexing Greka land. It seems unlikely that the close timing of these two events was purely coincidental. Yeah, of course. Yeah.

So, oh, there's diamonds. I guess this is ours now. Yeah. Yeah. And the Kimberly discovery came at a fateful time. Diamonds in South Africa then were like gold in California again. So thousands of prospectors would just swarm any chunk of

land that seems like it might hold wealth. And just before the discovery had come, there'd been a number of false finds. Generally, people would like find a couple of diamonds in like an alluvial plane, which is like land around a river. And people would swarm there, but there wouldn't actually be nearly as many diamonds as they'd anticipated. So that had happened a few times.

So a lot of these guys were very desperate. So once diamonds are found in Kimberly and it's clear that this is a real find, tens of thousands of desperate miners start swarming in to tear the whole, this big mountain that is the find apart. We're not mountain, like a hill, but like a large hill. And yeah, Greka land was brushed out of existence so that these guys could get rich.

Quote from the History News Network, Greka leader Nicholas Waterbower through a legal advocate had during all this time been importuning the British colonial authorities at the Cape to respect Greka land's sovereign independence and its ownership of the land upon which the diamond field was situated. To no avail. Finally, in May 1878, an armed rebellion broke out.

The lightly armed Grekas were no match for colonial troops armed with cannon and breech loading rifles. A massacre ensued, with the colonial forces suffering only nine fatalities. It signaled the beginning of the end for the Greka nation. Most of the survivors migrated several hundred miles to the Northwest, settling ultimately in Southwest Africa, now Namibia.

So Greka's, you know, not a great story for them. So yeah, the men, what? There's, yeah, there's just like an entire, that's an entire like, like there's, yeah, there's, they're just not in history books now. Like that's, no, where would they be? They didn't win. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so crazy that like, yeah, I guess they didn't exist, but no, they totally existed, but now they're, no, no. Yeah. Not no more. Not no more. So, yeah. The men who would come to work, the Kimberley find,

were also Africans, but they, they were not people who had lived in the Greka territory previously. They were a different group of Africans who had been dispossessed by the colonial greed of the Bowers. Most of them were refugees from areas around the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. They'd been pastoral nomads who'd had their lands seized by military force.

They were destitute, starving and homeless. And so a lot of these guys had no choice but to work the diamond mines, because otherwise they were going to starve to death. Yeah. Quote, fortune hunters from all over Southern Africa and from Europe, America and Australia fought over claims. Well, at the same time remaining united in the common

purpose of being the masters of black labor, 700 individual claims or plots of ground containing a little more than 893 square feet were marked off and taken possession of. 30,000 black laborers toiled away in that confined space, but were themselves prohibited from owning claims or dealing in diamonds. They were subjected to constant body searches and

restricted to their huts and tents by nighttime curfew. Any dark-skinned person in the vicinity who could not prove he was employed as a servant or laborer was declared a vagrant and subject to flogging. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Not a new story. Not a new story. Yeah. Yeah. Just, you know, there are places in central and South America and bring it back to coffee again. Sure. That like the locals, the farms that grow it and the

people that like harvest the coffee, they're legally not allowed to drink that. Like the beans are only for export, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. And like, it's like, tail is old, it's timed. Like this day land. Yep.

I can definitely say that one radicalizing moment for me was during the time I spent in Guatemala, hanging out with like some native Guatemalans in their homes and being given instant coffee. Yeah. In an area surrounded by and being like, oh. Wait. We're on a coffee farm.

Like there's all of the world's coffee comes from here basically. Right here. Like what is happening? Yeah. Why are we drinking Nescafe? Why do we? Does not compute.

Yeah. It's because my country has all the coffee. You walk into their village like, hey guys, I got this single origin Guatemalan guys want to try it. Yeah. Oh yeah. We grew that right here. Yeah.

It comes from here. We don't get that. We can't drink it though. Yeah. And speaking of capitalism, Robert. You know what? We'll let. No.

Okay. You know what's just going to add. Yeah. I'm no help. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest

person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Those were some good ads.

Let me tell you something. I'm about to use all those promo codes. I love promo codes because I love promotions. And it will put food on y'all's table. I love food on my table. So while the Greek territory had been annexed by the Cape Colony, it did not benefit from the same enlightened legal system as the rest of the colony, because again, it's on the periphery.

And while it's important for us in the cities to abide by these laws that we all think are very, very nice, once we get out to where the money's made, people stop talking about the rights of man. Because there's money to be made. It's the same thing as how the United States, our whole lives talks a good game about the rights of man, but also fundamentally could not exist in the same fashion

if a large number of its critical products were not made in areas without any sort of labor laws. So it wouldn't work. We've diffused the responsibility by making those be in independent countries now. So Cecil Rhodes was one of the very first white men to rush, he just kind of abandons the cotton farm, and he goes to what would turn out to be one of the world's largest

diamond mines, the Kimberley find. And at the time, the hill where the mine was centered had a Dutch name, which I'm not going to try to pronounce. I don't even know how to begin pronouncing it wrong. I don't even know how to say this wrong. All right, yes. Yeah, he was 19 when he traveled there to help his older brother who'd bought a couple of claims.

And Rhodes immediately brought his considerable gifts to bear because he's a great organizer. He's great at maximizing productivity. He's one of these people who can just like look at a bunch of people working at a task and see ways in which to make it more efficient. He's got that Henry Ford thing going on. He said you can't.

I was going to say, man, you know, the worst thing in the world is to be like in some sort of relationship with a person that's good at those things. Yeah. Because it's just like, man, can you just let me put my shoes where they go? Yeah. I mean, you're probably right, but like, damn, man.

I don't want to think about it. I just don't want to... Oh my God, Doug. When I first got married, I remember I come back from a show, like I'd be gone two days. All of a sudden, the drawer that used to have the knives and forks, now it's towels in. And I'm like, am I crazy?

It's because she didn't figure out a better way for our kitchen to function. And just, man, can you just... Okay. I don't have an argument as to why this is not... It's actually a better idea, but God. Yeah. You married up.

It's really annoying. Nice job. I did. I mean, I really did. She's much more efficient, but sometimes like you're getting all, you know, Rhodesia on me. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

I just think of all the times Robert can't find things and then we start things late because he can't find things. I have started the rebellion against capitalism early in my own life by refusing to ever know what I'm doing or have a plan. And you know what? I'm out fine. This is one of the most successful podcasts in the world.

Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. See, you don't need capitalism. Yeah. As long as you have products and services. Yes, you do. Yeah. He's a born entrepreneur.

He creates a bunch of side hustles in order to basically make additional cash to fund the expansion of their mind, to buy other claims. The probably most successful of these was he bought an ice machine so he could sell ice cream during the vicious summer months in Southern Africa. Oh my God. This guy is brilliant.

I hate this dude so much. But that's brilliant. No, you show up in like the fucking middle of like these, the dead middle of like Southern Africa, like people working in the summer on a mine and you're like, you know what'll do? Well, here's a fucking ice machine. Yo.

You remember, you remember, uh, uh, early like 2000, you know, TN 11 earlier this decade, like when the one to one model was like all like the Tom's model, right? Was all the, all the, all the rage. I saw this video was going around. It's hilarious. I think those dudes make commercials now,

but like they were totally dressed like the guy that started Tom's and they were supposed to be in Africa doing this one to one thing. And he says, you know, I never forget it, man. I had this idea where, um, I was out in Africa. We were on a missions trip and I just thought to myself, where can I get a smoothie? And he goes, he's like, I'll never forget it.

The, the, the, the, the tribe said, what's a smoothie? And he was like, and that's when I knew we want to do one to one smoothie machines. So their whole my business model was if you buy a smoothie machine, they will provide one for a tribe in Africa. I mean, I, I kind of love the idea of like hunter-gatherers, but with a smoothie machine because like everybody enjoys a smoothie.

They're all, yeah. They're all you need is like ice, milk and running water. I'm sure they can get that. Right? Yeah. They're good. Right? They're selling smoothie machines and they did totally shot it.

Like one of those commercials where like, you know, he got this white lady, this really nice white person handing the smoothie to like the smiling African and then the machine, the guy, little African boys holding it like, what do I, is one kid just dragging it by the power cord? Right? Just do that. They're putting rocks on the inside.

Like, what do I do with this? Right? Anyway, that's what everybody be up. But anyway, hey, this fool's brilliant. Sell ice cream. Sell ice cream. Yeah. Sell ice cream.

Um, smart, smart guy. Um, so yeah. Uh, now when he first arrived at Kimberly, he described the site of this, this hill that's because, like is the center of the mining claim as looking like a giant anthill covered in thousands of scurrying black shapes. And he predicted in this turn out to be very accurate that one day the hill would be completely dug away and replaced by a

giant hole in the earth itself. And he was completely right about this. Um, if you go to Kimberly today, you can go visit the big hole, which many suggest it's not confirmed, but many suggest is the largest pit ever dug by human hands. And if you look up the photos of this, it's astonishing. It is, it is a really big hole. Yeah.

That's crazy. Man. Okay. Yeah. It's right. Yeah. Cause they just dug, they dug so deep into the ground to get all the diamonds.

And then they, there's this giant hole. Nobody's going to fill it up. What are you going to do? Right? Yeah. What are you going to do after? Yeah. Now we have a hole in our town.

Yeah. Hey guys. Hey now. Hey look, capitalism. Hey, come see the hole. Come see the hole. We dug a big hole. We dug a big hole.

I'm trying to do. Let's monetize it. Yeah. You're, you're, I'm trying to do your some time, your old guy is going to hold this big. Like look at this hole. Only white men could make a hole this big. That's it.

There it is. So the year after Cecil arrived, the population of diggers in Kimberley swelled to as many as about 50,000. And at first most of them operated independent claims, finding diamonds, cause it required nothing more than hand tools, right? You were just kind of digging and like running water through it and with oil and I don't know.

It's a, it's a process, but it's pretty simple and it didn't require heavy equipment. But as these claims were found more profitable and as the digging got deeper, eventually like you started turning it into a big hole and that becomes too much of a process for small independent diggers to be a part of. So things start getting consolidated and people start abandoning it too.

Cause there's a period when you're mining diamonds where you strip away like the surface level and it looks like you're done and Cecil and a number of other like smarter, well, I guess like just more intuitive guys understood that no, no, no, there's going to be more diamonds underneath that, but we need to be, we need to build larger companies to buy larger equipment to go deeper and extract those. So he starts investing his money into buying up individual

mines and adding them to he and Herbert's claims. And the process started slowly. It took years and years and years. And it was a time that Cecil would remember fondly this like 16, 17 year period where he's kind of building the foundation of what would become his empire. In 1872, when he's about a year into this process, he's a very happy guy. His only frustration came from the

fact that he wasn't able to go back to Oxford. As Rottberg writes, quote, roads may have continued dreaming of a university education and of life as a professional, probably a barrister, but these would have been dreams with utilitarian motives. For the moment, he was content to have land of your own, horses of your own and shooting when you like and a lot of black inwards to do what you like with apart from the fact

of making money. So that's his attitude. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, it's, it's, yeah. And again, the ease with which he could kind of talk about how happy he was probably had something to do with the fact that his parents were backing him and would continue to do it. So he never had to like, he had this, he had a cushion, you know, that's the thing.

Yeah, yeah. He had a cushion where it's like, it's really not a risk because if all else fails, you could just go back to, you just go back to England, you know what I'm saying? And, and metaphorically and quite literally just leave a hole in Africa and just, and just, you just go back home like, well, it was fun. I guess it didn't, you know, whatever, you know, and, and

that like knowing that it's like, it makes the, the, it's, it's, you gamify like it's a video game now. So it's like, this is fun building an empire, building an industry, it's fun because if it, if it fails, it's just like, oh, it's like a video game. Just hit the reset button and start over. Don't save it. You know what I mean?

And just start over. Yeah. Like the thing that you like, I enjoy, I don't know, maybe, I don't know if this impulse is, is coded in white dudes socially or if, or if there's, there's something deeper to it, but like the only video games that I play are games where you, you build an empire, you, you like build like cities or countries and you like, you know, it's all about expansion

and all of that stuff. And I, you know, I feel that impulse and I get to play video games about it. I suspect if I'd been raised in Cecil's time in the culture he did, I probably would have done some, some fucking imperialism. Probably, man. Yeah. I mean, and it's like, who could blame you, you know,

because you could, but I do think I find, and I mean, I mean, you've joked about it a few times about like starting a cult, you know, and the first time I heard you quote it, talk about it. I thought to myself, I have imagined often building a culture from scratch. And I'm like, well, I mean, that's what it is. And I'm like, I guess essentially a cult is just a small culture. And in my head, I'm like imagining the thing and making it up would be so much more fun than running it, you know.

So when I see dudes like, like this, that's like, yo, no, let's figure out how to do this, consolidate the thing, do the thing. And it's like, I start, okay, we did it. But now you got to maintain it. Then you're like, damn, that's a drag. You know, well, let me go start another one. You know, and then you start another business. And then you go because, because the building, the things fun.

So I just think about that, like, even if I was going to, you know, I would love to just like, you know, if I'm everybody on Tuesday nights, we sit in a circle and you have to drink, you know, green tea specifically only with your left hand at 542 p.m. That's the rule in our cult. And I just think that like making up stuff like that just seems fun. You know, so in him, yeah, figuring out the best way to make this thing work and then shoot, shoot, shoot messages back to his brothers and his

family like, suck it. I'm living out here. Y'all sent me out here because you thought I couldn't do it. Check this out. I'm winning. You know, I could see the psychology developing again. Yeah. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. I get, you know, and this is kind of when it where I land on like, thank God for video games. Yes. And also like, I don't know, like this is something I wrestle with. Like if I can be completely honest with you, like part of why I moved out

to the West is I want to own land. I want to buy, I want to buy a chunk of land that, that feels wild to me and get to live on it and roam around. Yeah. And there's certainly conversations to be had about how ethical that is. Yeah. It's a powerful desire and it's coded in me as is, as is finding romance and things that I know are not romantic.

Like the, like, like, like the cowboy or like the age of exploration. Yeah. Which is like, I was reading those books when I was like five years old and you know, I've gone out of my way to educate myself about the reality. But you never quite fully break that spell. Nah. Yeah. You can't help but be like, and product's not the right word, but,

but yeah, like you are influenced by the era you're in and you can't not be what you are. So yeah. And I think about that when we talk about reparations with black people, you know, hey, where's our 40 acres in a mule and you turn right over to your indigenous friend that goes like, wait, they finna give you land. It's not theirs. Like, you know what I'm saying?

So you're like, ah, yeah. Yeah. Dang. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah.

And there's a, I don't know, there's a good conversation to be had in dimming things that are bad like imperialism and also understanding the, the extent to which we're all products of this system so that we can have forgiveness for each other when people realize they've been wrong. Yeah. Dude. Collect offering. That's, that was, that was the sermon right there.

Yeah. Time to collect offering. That was good. All right. So in 1873, he returned to Britain or England or whatever. People always yell at me for calling it one or the other. His purpose here was twofold to take care of his ailing mother who died the next year.

He was very sad and to return to his education. He applied to Oxford because a degree at Oxford would mark him out as an English man of distinction, but he failed the entrance exam. And so we had to ask a family friend who was a graduate to use his influence with the school to get Cecil admission. Again, always has help earning the things that he gets. Plan B, baby. Who says you can't?

Yeah. Plan B, I'm white. Yes. So for most of the next decade, Cecil would switch between summer semesters at Oxford and he takes some years off in between. It's not every year. And winters in Africa, seeing to the expansion of what was becoming a mining empire.

He initially funded his education by the money his dad had set aside for it. But as he and Herbert's business expanded, he was able to pay his own way through Oxford and he was very proud of this. He was not a good student and he was regularly in trouble for failing to attend lectures and not doing the reading that he was ordered to do. It seems like most of his time at school was spent at fancy parties making connections. He was always careful to make sure everyone knew how wealthy he had

become. Generally by carrying a box of diamonds with him wherever he went. Oh my God. You imagine pulling up to the frat party with a box of diamonds. I was just thinking this guy is so stereotypical white male privilege, but then you were like, oh, no, no, no. But also. No, no, no, no.

Let me let me dial this up a bit. There's like, yo, there are things that just like I like we just said being gracious with each other and understanding that we're all products at the same goulash. There are parts of me that like deeply admires what he just explained right now that like, what's the 2020 equivalent though of showing up for a frat party with a box of diamonds? Like I'm trying to flex.

You gotta flex. The flex. Yeah. That is the greatest flex I've ever. I have walking around diamonds. Yeah. I gotta play with diamonds. I keep pocket diamonds.

Pick up chicks diamonds. I don't even need these diamonds. I don't even need these. I got a whole field of them in Africa for which I spend my winters because London is cold out here. He has fuck you diamonds. He has fuck you diamonds. There's a part of me that like, and that you ain't got a really,

I'm going to Oxford literally for the flex because I don't have to care. It's just a brag about it. And I don't even do the work. I hate him. I hate him. Like he stands for everything that I hate, but also that's the, that's the style. You did it.

That's what I was trying to say. Respect. My first year of teaching. I never forget this. My first year of teaching, there was this little, I taught 11th graders, which was crazy because I was like maybe four years older than him. But like I, this kid, this was like eBay time, right? So this kid was selling these like paint guns on eBay, you know,

and I remember being like, first of all, how do you know how to do this? Number one. And number two, where do you keep them? He was like, oh, they, I never get them. They don't, I don't have them. I just, they don't come to me. I buy them and then sell them. And then this little dude will show up late because he was working the German stock market,

11th grader. And I was like, if this fool never turns in an assignment, I don't blame him. I don't blame you for not taking high school serious. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck it. Yeah.

Exactly. Like he knows he has this thing that you have to have to be truly successful within a society, which is knowing that all of the conventions of your society are bullshit. Yes. And Cecil Rhodes knows that. Cecil Rhodes understands that it's all, it's all a dumb, bullshitty grift. And like he will, he will refuse to do work. And then his, like his friends at school will be like, the Dean's going to kick, like you're

going to get kicked out of school. And he has a number of meetings with them and they, they never do. And he knows they're not going to, because they know that he's going to be extremely wealthy and powerful. And they want to be able to brag that he's an alumni. Yeah. Exactly. So when I sit down in this meeting about you, about to expel me, I'm just going to be

expel me. I'm just going to put my backpack down and just let a diamond roll. Oh, you don't want a guy with a diamond mind. Yeah. And then let you tell me, so tell me, so tell me how, tell me how this goes. Yeah. Excuse me. Let me get my diamonds.

Imagine his pickup lines. Like what? Yeah. Well, we'll talk about his romantic life a little bit in a moment. So. Oh, does he treat women really well? Is he just not an astounding guy? Is that what I should be expecting?

No, he doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't even think about women. He's, he's, again, he's, he's, he's gay. Well, we'll be talking about this in a little bit. But yeah, he's not, he has no interest in women. Love it. Yeah. So. There's a slight turn of events.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a bit because there's some things to say about it. I don't want to, like a lot of people talk about it too much because I don't think it's that big of a thing. But there's some areas in which it impacts kind of other things that he does. I still want to know what his pickup lines were.

Well, we'll talk about that too briefly. I mean, even if it's gay or straight, you walk into a party with some girls. That you just playing around with shaking them like dice. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So, uh, once a classmate, and this is back to the story about his diamond box, a classmate reported, quote, when he condescended to attend a lecture with, which proved uninteresting to him, he pulled out his box and showed the gyms to his friends.

And then it was upset and diamonds were scattered on the floor. And the lecturer looked up, asking what was the cause of the disturbance and received the reply. It is only roads and his diamonds. Oh, God. Oh, I hate this guy. He was bad at being the professor. Just look at it.

This like, yeah. Oh, this little prick, you little prick. Yeah. Damn. One of those rocks is my year salary. Yeah. He's probably like that guy, that guy that was viral on social media. The, the guy who salts the meat.

Do you remember that? Oh, Salt Bay. Yeah. Salt Bay. He was probably dying. Yeah. Just up like that. Yeah.

That's who I am. Yes. So let's talk a little bit about what it took for Cecil to get those diamonds. So right before leaving for his first turn at Oxford. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

None of it is ever. So right before he left for Oxford, Cecil and his brother Herbert moved most of their operations to a new set of claims at a mine named De Beers. Huh? Yeah. That's where the story is going. So if you want an exhaustive account of every blow and play, you can read Rotberg's biography, The Founder.

The short of it is that Cecil came to own the entire mine and he didn't buy it all. In fact, he, he convinced a number of investors, many of whom were like men in and around his age group, ambitious younger guys to invest. And he had, he's noted as having this superhuman ability to convince primarily other white dudes to work towards his vision. He was able to get people to buy into a vision and give him full control of achieving it. That is his gift. That's his, his real talent.

Cause he's not using all of his own money for this. He's convincing other people to pay and let him run things. Freaking brilliant dude. Yeah. And he's very good at that. Starting in the mid 1870s, he began collecting a group of mostly young men around him. And to these most trusted acolytes, he would reveal what had become his true goal. The creation of a secret society aimed at furthering the spread of the British empire

over the entire world. The first people he collected for this grand endeavor were co-investors in his mining operation. Men with money and influence that he welded with the power of his dreams into what essentially functioned as a fanatically loyal board of directors for his business. They were so devoted to Rhodes and his goals that many in the Cape Colony began referring to these men as the apostles. Wow. Yeah.

In 1877, after just six years in business, Rhodes had accrued an estate worth about 10,000 pounds, which did not make him super rich, but he was very comfortable. And it was enough that he wrote his first will, which listed his wish that all his possessions go, quote, to and for the establishment, promotion and development of a secret society. The true aim and object whereof would be for the extension of British rule throughout the world. Rhodes went on, went so far as to specify that he wanted the society to ensure the spread of British rule too, quote, the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of

the Pacific, not here to for possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the, uh, the seaboard of China and Japan, and the ultimate recovery of the United States is an integral part of the British empire. Yo. Yeah. I am so glad he added that last part. Yeah. Because that's gotta be a, that's gotta be a freaking thorn in your flesh.

Yeah. He hates that the U.S. left the empire. Yeah. I can't believe we lost this. Yeah. Yeah. He's very frustrated by that. Yeah.

So the very next year in 1877, while he's at Oxford, Rhodes published what he called his confession of faith. Now, he picked that title because by this point, years of ruling over black African servants and workers and extracting the wealth of their homeland for his own benefit felt so right to him that he considered imperialism to be his religion. When he's saying confession of faith, he's literally saying, this is, this is my God. This goal is my God. Um, so he opened the statement by noting that he did not care about marriage.

He didn't care about having a family and he didn't even care about attaining personal wealth. The only name that interested him was the furtherance of the Anglo-Saxon race. Quote, I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts of the world that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings.

What an alteration there would be if they were brought under the Anglo-Saxon influence. Look again at the extra employment of a new country added to our dominion gives. That every acre added to our territory means in the future birth of some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. He's a white supremacist. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people were early.

You can sit, talk about like there's again, I don't want to like get too into the birth, the invention of the white race because that is a story I want to, I do want to tell at some point. Yeah. But that's, but he is, he might be the first modern white supremacist, the first proud boy style white supremacist. Yeah. Yeah.

I was going to say that there's this, and it's crazy like how, you know, this is that intermingling. I would say like you don't see a lot of this stuff in Christian literature until about now, where like this like intermingling of, yeah, this is our mandate on the planet from our maker. Like we are, we're helping. This is what God wants for us. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Cecil's modern defenders will often bring up like things he said about believing that, you know, black people are inherently the same as white people. It's a cultural problem. And as soon as they fully embrace Anglo-Saxon culture, then I think they deserve to be treated equally. And they'll say like, no, he wasn't racist. He had beliefs about like he thought that he wanted to, it was just a cultural thing

for him. And that is, that's why I say, I think he might be the first that I've come across really, truly modern white supremacists, because he's a white supremacist in the way that the proud boys are. We're like, they've got black members, they've got Pacific Islanders, they have Latino members. But their whole thing is their Western chauvinist. Yeah, exactly. They believe that the West is best and that as long as you buy into that, it doesn't matter

what color you are. And that Cecil, that Cecil Rhodes, yeah, yeah. But he's writing this shit out in 1877, when most races are much cruder. Yeah. And we're still like suffering from those writings to this day anyway. Yes. Now, like all arch-imperialists, Cecil attempted to justify his mad ambition on humanitarian grounds, lamenting that if the empire had not lost the United States, it would have

been able to stop the Crimean War by denying both sides money and arms. Now, Crimean River. Yeah. That was good. Yeah. I appreciate that. Yeah. What it really was, yeah, again, naked white supremacy, Rose lamented that secret societies

of the day like the Masons didn't direct their wealth and power towards a clear aim. Quote, why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the United States and for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race, but one empire. What a dream. But yet it is probable. It is possible. I once had it argued by a fellow in my own college, I am sorry to own it by an Englishman,

that it was a good thing for us to have lost the United States. There are some subjects on which there can be no arguments, and to an Englishman, this is one of them. But even from an American's point of view, just picture what they have lost. Look at their government. Are not the frauds that yearly come before the public view were disgraced to any country, but especially theirs, which is the finest in the world. Ooh.

Yeah. I mean, you're not wrong. All of our politicians have always been frauds. You get that correctly, but you had a king, like, come on, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not wrong, but you can't say that.

Yeah. You're not wrong, but you're wrong. You're not wrong, but you're not better either. Like, so go fuck yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Takes one of no one. Yeah.

As that, you know. He went on to express a desire to see the entire continent of Africa, not just under British rule, but filled with English settlers. Quote, Africa is still lying ready for us and it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory. And we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory means simply more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses, the most human.

The thing that I still can't get my wrap my brain around, especially from writings like this, I'm like, y'all ain't invented sewage in there. Yeah. Y'all still, you still throwing human shit in the street and don't know why you sick. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like this, how you fit to tell me y'all so you carry smell things because you don't bathe. I'm like, why are you tell?

Why do you think I'll give this in Cecil's defense? He was known and it was odd in this period that he bathed every day, even when he was on campaign in the woods, he had like a bath taken around with him that his black servants filled up for him and stuff because he had the wealth to bathe every day. He had the wealth to bathe. I'm like, have y'all, have y'all seen, have you seen everyone? Yeah. Yeah.

Do you know the rest of y'all? Like, yeah. Yeah. So the secret society Rhodes proposed sounds almost more like a precursor to the CIA, a handpicked group of ambitious and talented young men who would dedicate their whole lives to this cause. When he actually started inducting more men into this society, he tended to restrict his members from marrying and starting families so that they would have no priorities before

the empire. And this is where we talk about Rhodes' sexuality because he himself never married. He expressed repeatedly that he was too busy to do so and everyone pretty much agrees that he was gay. Yeah. Now, this was illegal at the time. You can just ask Oscar Wilde that, but men of means and stature, it was impossible to be poor and gay pretty much because, I mean, I'll say you'd probably be killed by a lot

of like your father. Wow. Poor people, right? Like, cause it's very bigoted at the time. Or you'd have to keep it completely secret and yeah. If you were rich, you could be gay and most people would know it like Rhodes is gay. It's illegal to be gay. Everyone in British society knows that he's gay.

He brings these white South African boys back to England with him, these younger men and he takes them to parties with him. Yeah. This is my assistant. Yeah. Well, and there's like, he's even more blatant than that. There's one story I heard about him where essentially like he's at a party with this young rude South African boy and like the guy hosting the fancy British person, hosting

the party says, Rhodes, I can't invite you to parties anymore if you're going to bring boys like this around. Like he almost broke my hand with his handshake. And Rhodes said something along the lines of, you should see how hard he bucks. It's like a mule. Like so he's not super coy, right? No, he's not playing around, but I'm like, I got pocket diamonds, so what you gotta say? Yeah.

And it's worth noting that a pretty high and oddly high number of British imperial icons of specifically this period were gay or some of them were, they're called gay a lot, but I think it might be more accurate to say they were kind of romantic asexuals where they had these very strong, very clearly romantic relationships with men that they probably never had sex with, but they would be inseparable and it was just like a thing in imperialism. I just feel like statistically speaking, it's impossible that there's any less amount of gay people there. No, no, no, no.

It's now. You know what I'm saying? And there's, yeah. Yeah. There's a reason why, there are some reasons why they're probably overrepresented within sort of the subset of the English population that's doing the imperialist shit. Some of it is that like we talked about earlier. If you're gay in a majority straight in a society where it's legal to be gay, you fundamentally

see the world differently and that can first certain advantages. You are able to perhaps, especially since a lot of the other men doing this might be gay, build stronger, more emotional relationships with them, which leads to more loyalty, which means you have this, this loyal band of like people who you can work with to accomplish these goals. It also means that like you probably find the culture back home stifling and you want to get out to a place where there are fewer rules and where you can, you can get away with living being the kind of person that you are.

There was a quote from Ruyard Kipling's poem, one of his poems about imperialism that I think was about, I'm forgetting the name of it now, but the line is, send me somewhere east of Suez where the best is like the worst where there ain't no 10 commandments and a man can raise a thirst, right? So that there's, you come across this a lot and I think it's just because I think there's probably a number of reasons for it. But yeah, this is a thing about Cecil and I'm not going to talk a whole lot more about it because I don't think it has all that much of a bearing other than to the extent that

it kind of forms him into the man that he is. But yeah, one of the men he brought into his scheme was a physician named Leander Jameson and he recalled that as early as 1878, Rhodes had formed the idea of doing great work for the overcrowded British public at home by opening up fresh markets for their manufacturers. As his business had expanded, so too had British colonial possessions in Africa and Cecil noticed that when the empire grew, unemployment back home went down and average income went up. Things got better for the average people in his country because they were getting worse for the average people in other parts of the world.

Yeah, so he recognizes this and he sees this as like a fundamentally positive thing. And these other white people that he's gathering him to himself at the time, they're deeply impressed and moved by his belief in the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. And that's what he's able to get them to buy into. That's why they put so much trust and so much of their wealth in Rhodes. And it's his biographer, Rodberg, kind of compares a lot of what Cecil's talking about in this time to Hitler's concept of Leban's realm, living space, right? And it is very similar.

You can trace the birth of these ideas or at least the birth of these ideas as a written down conception because they'd certainly been pursued earlier to Cecil. And he has British imperialism had a massive impact on Hitler. And in fact, he would constantly talk about both the United States and the British Empire and the land that they had for their people to move in. It's part of why he wanted Eastern Europe, why he wanted Russia and Ukraine and Poland because he wanted the same thing for the Germans that he saw these other empires getting. So yeah, it is worth like he definitely Rhodes is talking early about what will become these

concepts that we recognize as key to fascism. Yeah. Now, I think, yeah, it's interesting and Rhodes is also while he's kind of laying some of the intellectual foundations for what will become fascism, he's also laying a lot of the intellectual foundations for the system of global capitalism that we live under today. This idea that you can have a whole world united in mass resource extraction and trade. In 1888, after 16 years of building up his business holdings and a network of loyal totes, Rhodes amalgamated all of these mines that he had and that his friends had accrued and

he formed them into a single corporation, De Beers amalgamated mines. So this is the De Beers corporation is birthed now. He's the first head of it. He's the chairman of De Beers. Now in short order, De Beers swallowed up almost the entire diamond trade in Southern Africa and as they gobbled up more and more mines, Rhodes streamlined the mining process, killing off the old way of diggers and diamond booms and refashioning the whole industry into a precise engine that ran on human misery.

And I found a paper from an economic student at the University of Boulder that I think sums up what happens very well and I'm going to quote from that now. Rhodes' colored workers were oppressed by his white managers and impaired by the atrocious living conditions. Once Rhodes had his miners, he and his British colonial authorities proclaimed a pass law in Kimberley. Black workers had to possess a document that stated their right to employment and at the end of shifts, white policemen stripped the colored miners nude and probed their orifices

for stolen diamonds. This indignity, however, was not forced upon the white laborers. To distinguish the managers' fear of theft, the blacks also had to live in prison-like compounds on site for the length of their contract. De Beers paid its colored workers an average of $97.50 per month while the whites were paid an average of $480.00 and to break even, the laborers needed to make it at least $120.00 monthly. It comes up with this idea of amalgamating, streamlining, and then getting this workforce

that you have total control of in the same way that a lot of those factory workers in Shenzhen, China making our iPhones are. You keep them locked into a cycle of near poverty, forcing them to live in these compounds that he could control. He basically succeeded, as De Beers takes off, in re-enslaving a chunk of the black African populace for the benefit of the British Empire. This plan worked marvelously. In a few years, De Beers controlled between 90 and 95 percent of the planet's diamond

supply. Wow. Yeah. And then they cracked open a bunch of De Beers. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's too... No, it was good.

At frat parties where he was just like... At frat parties. Yeah. Diamond. Yeah. He's like, I got diamonds. Popping atop with his diamonds. All right.

Yeah. Well, Prop, that's the end of part one. Oh, great. There's so much more of this guy to go, but that's what we've got time for now. Oh. Boy, this has gone on a bit. You want to plug your plugables, man? Yeah, I do.

And I also want to just... Diamonds are forever. Diamonds are forever. That's that. Look at the entire time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that's after his time, but he sets up a lot of the things that make the diamond

trade what it is. Yeah. We'll talk about this more at the end, but blood diamonds are a thing because of Cecil Rhodes. Yeah. And that's what I was like. That's where I would like, when you started the thing, that's what I was preparing myself for.

Like, we're going to get to blood diamonds pretty soon. Well, let's talk about that at the end. We're not going to talk about it enough because there's so much of Rhodes to talk about. And he's not the... He starts the process that leads to the creation of blood diamonds. There are a number of other men over decades who are like responsible for bringing us all down that path. We will talk some about that at the end.

Yeah. Prop.com and Prop Hip Hop's all my handles, my social media. I just announced a not a blood coffee, but a real coffee collaboration with a company called Onyx, where I got a special single origin Ethiopian blend, Demigee Real Nerdy with y'all. We'll not blend a single origin Ethiopian, it kind of tastes like dried pineapple. It's pretty bomb. And in the spirit of what we're talking about right now, like, it's three brothers that

own the farm, they're born and raised in Ethiopia. One of them lives in LA and the fair trade price for the bean is a buck 50 per pound. But me and Onyx paid nine bucks a pound because we believe in supporting real folks. So that's the biggest thing I plug right now is I got a coffee and if you're into like drinking good coffee, please order outside. Yeah. And it's ethically sourced and we paid the people well. We are not no Cecil Rhodes.

Yeah. Don't be Cecil Rhodes in your own life. No. And don't come after me for calling him Cecil and Cecil interchangeably. I know it's Cecil. Whatever. That's my fault. Cecil.

Yeah. Yeah. Fuck it. Respect this man enough to pronounce his name right. No. No. He got enough respect while he was alive and fucking up the world to hell with him. Right.

And to hell with all of you, my beloved listeners. No. I thank you for listening. Come back for part two where we'll talk about how he conquered two countries just for fun and did some other messed up stuff. Prada. Wait. Well, no.

That's true. We love about 40 percent of you. Statistically. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Find Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.