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

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Robert is joined by again Propaganda to continue to discuss Cecil Rhodes. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hold on, let me just... Hey, catch this, I'm about to throw you a diamond through the iPad. Yeah, that's our flex. I also just ate some potatoes, I apologize. He also just ate some potatoes, he apologizes. Prop, how are you still doing? How are you feeling after part one? Um, you know, yeah, I feel the way I think everyone, every guest feels after. Slightly defeated, feeling like... I knew this, but I didn't know it and my day is great because I enjoy talking to y'all.

But also like the feeling between part one and part two of every episode of this podcast. You just know that it's gonna get worse. It's only getting worse, yeah, you're just like... Impending doom. You guys got a two day break to process. Impending doom, but also I'm still thinking about him flashing his diamonds at parties. Just the flex of that, like I can't get that image out of my head and how I feel about it. It's so hard to process how I feel about that flex.

Cause it's, he sucks, but it's so fucking cool. Yeah, you gotta respect the hustle sometimes. Gotta respect it. Like, goddamn, okay, yeah. So, in that last episode, I didn't go into overwhelming detail about all of the Cape Colony politicking that Cecil engaged in, but he was not just building a business, going to Oxford, you know, getting to know people within sort of the empire's political strata. A lot of his friends would be very influential.

The parties that they would go to when he was back, you know, home in England, were often held at like a Nancy Astor's house, Miss Astor, who was like this very fancy... She was a very big figure in sort of like the Victorian era of British high society, and later became a backer of the Nazis. If you've ever heard that story about like Winston Churchill, where like some lady walks up to him and says... You sir, are you drunk? Is that one? No, no, it's the... She was like, if you were my husband, I would do something or other.

And he says like, yeah, I'd kill you. And if you were my husband, if you were my wife, I'd let you. I'd let you, yeah. I think this is more or less how it goes, yeah. So, she's like one of his confidants when she's younger. Like a lot of people who go on to run the empire are friends of Cecil's in his younger life. So, he's politicking with that set of people. That's the way a decent chunk of them wind up backing the Nazis and the whole World War II period.

But back in the Cape Colony, he's also, he's getting very directly involved in politics. He's not just meeting people. He's getting elected to parliament. He's like, he's doing politics in the Cape Colony, and he becomes very, very successful at it. He's very good at being a politician. Surprise, surprise. That's happening during this whole period that we were talking about last episode. One of his very first political forays happened in 1883 when he was a member of the Cape Parliament.

Bowers from the Transvaal had conquered some of the land of an African chief named Menkerwane. And they proclaimed their conquest to be a new republic, Stellaland. Now, they were not the only white guys out there who were like creating countries via machine gun. Another group of Bowers conquered and declared a republic nearby a few months earlier. So like this was happening a number of times and Cecil hated it. Not because it was wrong for them to steal the land of African tribes, but because all these new republics disturbed his dream of a South Africa united under the English colors, or under British colors, whatever.

And the founder, Rottberg writes, I solemnly warn this house that if it departs from the control of the interior, we shall fall from the position of the paramount state in South Africa, which is our right in every scheme of federal union in the future, to that of a minor state. What we now want, Rhodes urged his colleagues in a memorable phrase, is to annex land, not natives. That's a key phrase. That is interesting. Rhodes made it clear that he was, quote, no Negro Philist. That is a word, because people accused him, because he wasn't like overtly physically cruel to his workers,

he was accused of being a Negro file. That was a term they used. That was like a word that you like. And here he's defending himself by saying, I'm not a Negro Philist, and I hold the distinct view that we must extend our civilization beyond our present borders. We don't need any of them on the land that they currently own, we just need the land. Dang. Hey guys, I don't want your wallets.

I don't want your, I just want the land, bro. Dang. Now he urged the parliament to basically carry out a military action against the whites of Stellaland, the Boers, who had usurped Menkerwani's land, but he didn't want to give the land back. And he wrote, or he said, the natives are bound gradually to come under the control of the Europeans, I feel, that it is the duty of this colony then, as it were, her younger and more fiery sons go out and take land to follow in their steps with civilized government. That's the purpose of fiery young men is to go out and take land.

Yeah. I still, you know, there's part of like my history that's unclear is like, you know, I knew those British colonies, I knew those Dutch colonies, but it ended up, the Dutch ended up getting it. I just don't know how that happened. This is actually a lot of that story. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So the first, first Boer war happens, I think not that long after he comes to Africa in the first place, and it's pretty small. I think like 300, 400 people die. But there is fighting on, kind of between the British and between the Boers. Yeah. And they're both really shitty to the natives. Totally. This isn't a good guy, bad guy thing.

No, you're fighting over a house that ain't yours. Yeah. I stole it fair and square. Yeah. Yeah. In this instance, like he failed, like he urged the Cape Colony to basically like send out a military force to attack these new republics. And he did not succeed in that. The government of the empire for one thing was like, we don't really want to get involved in this.

We already have enough land down there. Like, and that's one of the things you see Cecil wants more land than the people actually running the British empire wanted to have, because he's getting it too fast. He's acquiring it too quickly. And they're like, we can't like, we can't digest all of this. It's actually kind of a strain on our resources to try to govern it. His attempt to take both these republics by force fails. But the treaty that comes as a result of this between the empire and the Transvaal gives Britain responsibility for a vast chunk of land north of the Cape Colony.

A lot of what would become Zimbabwe. And this is obviously land that they get responsibility for in this treaty that other people live in and are governing themselves in. At the time. We're already a country, guys. I don't understand what's happening. Yeah. In 1890, Cecil was elected prime minister of the Cape Colony. So at this point, he's like, he is the power in southern Africa.

He controls the most powerful political entity in the region. And he also is, again, personal owner of most of the world's diamonds. So he's hit his zenith here after almost 20 years of methodically building power. Rhodes is ready to launch his first major attempt to unite southern Africa, which is, of course, a precursor to taking all of Africa for the British Empire. So in 1890, he forms the British South Africa Company, which is an umbrella business that he uses to coordinate all of his enterprises. He's one of the first guys to start setting up shell companies. Some of what he does is to make fake false competition over diamonds to drive up the price of diamonds. It also is what he does. If you think back to our Wangaku episode or anything on Eric Prince, he uses this company to buy a mercenary army.

Yeah. And I want to read a quote from a book called The Heartless Stone, which is about the diamond trade by Tom Zollner. Quote, by Rhodes' own admission, the company aimed to do more than mine diamonds. In fact, it aimed to annex other African nations, conduct diplomacy with local chiefs, build railroads, raise a standing army and even wage war. De Beers was a law to itself and accountable to no one. So again, the British South Africa Company and De Beers essentially the same thing in this period because they're run by the same guy. It's just it's a shell company. You know, it's yeah. Yeah. It's so crazy to just like, you know, why we talked in the first episode about this, like, like these people live on another planet. And in that planet, it's like controlling all of the money and resources.

Ain't enough. You still got to become prime minister. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that you like how was you in college then you ain't got to be in college, you know, with pocket diamonds. Yeah. What else do you expect from pocket diamonds guy? This is this seems on par. It's very on par. That is the we know like that is the on that is the next step is you want to get in political power. It's like, why? Like do you it's never enough. It's never ever enough. Never enough. Now, here's the thing. So he this this period of time, like the 1890s, it's not popular or appropriate anymore for a corporation to have an army in the traditional sense of the word. Because the British East India Company has kind of run into some a lot of that ended very ugly in Afghanistan and in chunks of India. So but he buys an army. He just calls them police. So he gets about a 700 man army machine guns, field artillery.

It is an army, but he calls them police and he puts together a group of 200 settlers and he sends them into a place called Meshonaland, which is roughly present days in Bobway in order to search for gold. And he sends his army in not to invade Meshonaland, but to protect the settlers because that's what police do is they protect. Oh, man. This is nothing new, man. Yeah. This is nothing new. I mean, it's kind of new then, but yeah. I was going to protect you. Yeah, we're just here to protect, to serve and protect you, not them. So they picked Meshonaland because it was much more weakly defended than its neighbor to the south, Motabelle land,

which was governed by a king named Lobengula, to whom the people in Meshonaland owed fealty. So they were part of Lobengula's kind of empire, but this is not really a country in the traditional sense of the term. It's systems of influence between different groups of tribes that are mostly autonomous, but like the Meshona will pay tribute to Lobengula. And he's, yeah, like, anyway, it's, it's, yeah. So Rhodes and Great Britain successfully negotiate a treaty with Lobengula, which guaranteed them mineral rights to the territory. And this is going on for a couple of years before he becomes prime minister. And the way that the treaty is negotiated becomes a problem for Rhodes because it's only mineral rights. And his real ambition is to found a new country, which he doesn't have the right to do.

But he plays along for the sake of legal nicety. And if you've paid attention to anything written accurately about colonialism, you know what a treaty between white people and natives is. Yeah. Yeah. So they're placeholders. They're placeholders for guns. Yeah. Except for, I guess recently we did make good. The Supreme Court made us make good on exactly one of the treaties we made with the Native Americans here in the United States, which is why like half of Oklahoma is now not under federal law enforcement jurisdiction or something. I don't fully understand the situation, but it's something like that.

Like there was a treaty that they signed and they were like, look, we have this. And the Supreme Court had to be like, yeah, we have to actually take this seriously now. So good on Oklahoma. All right. So yeah, half of it at least. So the colonists quickly established a capital, Salisbury, and they found or Salisbury, whatever, and they found the land to be fertile, but they gradually realized that there was no gold there, which was a problem again, because they don't have rights to anything else, only the minerals. And it meant that because there wasn't gold, his company is burning through De Beers' capital without anything to make up for the losses.

And by the first year, they're out by 700,000 pounds. So they start taking austerity measures. He has to cut most of the police force and shutters a lot of the administrative functions, which he shouldn't have been doing anyway, because this isn't allowed to be a country, but he's treating it as one. Yeah, which were unnecessary in the first place, but go on. So everything that comes next is very complicated, which is often the case when the Britain acquired chunks of Africa. It's less often is it just naked force invading than it is a series of much more limited military engagements and then extensive treaties and then settlements come in and then there's a fight and then there's a military engagement

and they just keep eating more and more. And that's kind of what happens here. Naked force is always a part of it, but there's also a lot of political maneuvering and negotiation to make the rank theft of land seem legal, because the British are like a law-loving people. They want to believe that they're they're going about this properly. Yeah. The short of it all is that King Lobangula basically sold all of the land rights that he had to a bower named Lipert as part of a complex ploy to try to play the bowers against the British because he can't think of any other way to fight them.

And this doesn't work out. It backfires because none of the white people that Lobangula was negotiating with gave a shit about abiding by their words. So Lipert sold the claim to Rhodes, who starts selling land occupied by the Michona to white settlers and then pocketing the profit for the beers. The indigenous peoples obviously got nothing. So in 1893, this leads to an invasion of Michona land by King Lobangula. And his justification is that they'd stopped paying him tribute because the white guys had taken over. So Rhodes uses this invasion as a justification to just kind of take everything.

And the battles that followed were all absolute nightmares. So he sends an actual British regular forces to help fight alongside his police forces. And they're, you know, these are armies of modern armies with machine guns and field artillery going up against African armies with at best kind of antique rifles. Yeah. And again, it's just a nightmare. All of these battles at the battle of they're not even really battles at the battle of Ego Dodd, for example, 6,000 African soldiers attacked a column of several hundred whites.

In 10 minutes, 800 Africans were dead and three Englishmen were killed. Good Lord. And even these profoundly racist colonial soldiers were shocked by the bravery of African warriors charging these machine gun lines in the way the British soldiers would be doing a couple of decades later during World War One. One of these soldiers later wrote it was a nasty 10 minutes, especially as the Matabale shooting with the rifles was much better than it had been. And they came on with wonderful courage to within 80 yards of the wagons, because all the fighting, they're building wagon circles and just shooting out.

It made one realize what what those terrible machine guns mean. It must have required extraordinary courage to come up the hill against the fire. And again, one of the things that's interesting here is if you if you read about Western soldiers in this, there's always there's kind of in statements like this, you can read this dawning realization that like will be running into those machine guns one of these days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You can't yeah. You can't work in that field and not know someone's there's always a bigger gun. Yeah. Yeah. Which I'm sure I know a lot of US soldiers who have been in Afghanistan and Iraq know about drones. Yep. Yes. Yes.

So the times correspondent who was embedded with the British forces also hailed the gallantry of the men he'd just seen die. Quote, as showing their tenacity, I may mention that many were found 3,000 yards away from the spot where they had received their death wound. But, you know, toughness, courage, it doesn't really matter when the other side has machine guns. The end of the day. Yeah. You know, they had the Maxim gun. You know, that's what happened. Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not.

So after several bloody defeats, Lubengula eventually fled north with most of his remaining soldiers. And I think he killed himself, you know, poisoned himself. There's some debate about that. I can read. And of course, now that all of this land has been conquered, white settlers flood into the areas. They decide early that the original African names of these places were not going to do. Starting in 1891, the name Rhodesia grew increasingly popular. And Cecil encouraged this as there's evidence that had been his plan for sometimes for years before the invasion to name both of these new illegally conquered nations after himself.

By 1895, the term was in regular use and in 1897, it became official. So there's two Rhodesias actually, there's northern Rhodesia and southern Rhodesia and both become the personal property of Cecil Rhodes. When asked about this, he told a friend, well, you know, to have a bit of country named after one is one of the things a man might be proud of. You know what, bro? I don't talk with you. That's his pocket diamonds. Now he's got pocket Rhodesias. Now he's got.

Yeah. And I think he is the only person in history who has ever personally owned two countries named after him. Look, not in his honor. It's not named after in his honor. Yeah. It's mine. And I, is he is any named it? Lord, I can't.

Oh, man. I just, Lord, give me the confidence and just success of mediocre white guys. Yep. If I could just be as. Wow. That man anyway. Naked confidence. Naked confidence and yeah.

Reckless ambition. Yeah. Good stuff. Who says you can't. Yeah. You were like, what do you tell that guy? What do you tell that guy? Bro, like what if you, what if you were in seventh grade?

Who says you can't? Yeah. Would it be? Yeah. Exactly. Who says I can't? Yeah. What are you in seventh grade with him?

And you're just like, and he like beat you in like freaking kickball and you're like, I just, I just don't, I just want this guy to lose. And then you run into him at like a pub in London. He's got two countries. Yeah. And you're just like, yeah. And you're such a piece of shit. Yeah. God dang.

Yeah. And he, as racists like to point out, because again, this guy's beloved by racists. Of course. He did, Rhodes did a lot of lovely things to, to connect and modernize Africa. He had telegraph cables laid from Cape Town to Cairo. He had train tracks laid across the continent. There's a, the most famous illustration of him is a political cartoon that you've almost certainly seen where he's, he's standing as like a giant caricature of him is standing in the center of the continent of Africa with like telegraph cables across him and it's called the new Colossus of Rhodes.

And yeah, that's like, that's his reputation in this period of time. Yeah. And, and he's doing this, he's putting all this together to connect to the continent because connecting it will prepare it for British control and prepare it to have a unified culture under the Anglo Saxon race, which is what he wants for Africa and everywhere that's not Africa. So he conquers other peoples, including the Madabelle people. And he, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's horrible. He's doing a lot of conquering and he's, he's in the field for a significant amount of this. He's not like fighting, but he's following his armies along. He's in a tent.

He loves doing this. He loves being on the ground and being sort of feeling the dust in his lungs and being a part of it. He's a sick guy because what he is. Yeah. Yeah, he is. The name is like those people who like sat up on a hill to watch the battles in the civil war, you know? Yeah. Except for he wants to be directing that shit.

And he doesn't want there to be a chance that the people fighting back will win. No, it's, no, it's a movie. Yeah. So while all this is going on, the mighty De Beers company was still chugging right along. Cecil had gained almost complete control over the diamonds, planets, diamond supply so quickly and improved production so much that he ran into a problem. There were too many diamonds. It turned out that the little bastards are actually pretty common. In order to avoid a collapse in the value of the mineral that was funding his illegal wars of expansion, Cecil hatched a scheme.

So he starts laying off thousands and thousands of his workers and he creates a bunch of policies that inflated the price of diamonds that restricted the supply artificially. He's one of the first guys. He creates artificial scarcity. I shouldn't say he's one of the first guys because we talked about in our birth of capitalism episode. The first corporation that ever existed traveled to the spice islands, committed genocide and then killed all of the nutmeg on every island, but the one that they had their farms on in order to. That's the East India trading code. This is the Dutch, the Dutch East India company. I think it was.

This is before even that. Yeah. Okay. I may be listening to the episode. I get it right there. Word. But yeah, so he creates artificial scarcity for the diamond for diamonds because he realizes that's the only way to make diamonds profitable and this doubles the price of diamonds in a single year. So he channels he restricts the supply.

He channels the diamonds into a bunch of different diamond dealers in London who are willing to make a cartel with him. He basically he creates a cartel with the people make digging the diamonds and like the people selling them and crafting them in order to keep prices high. And the diamond industry continues to work this day into like the fucking like honestly in some ways to the present day, but it doesn't really start to get broken up until the middle of last century. Okay. Yeah. So in 1894, Rhodes was elected prime minister a second time. He was 41 years old, the owner of two private nations, one of the wealthiest men in history, the sole proprietor of the diamond trade and the elected leader of the most powerful colony in South Africa. Yeah, that's my question.

Which was almost as big as Europe. Yeah. So he's the prime minister of South Africa, quote unquote, or the colony in South Africa. The Cape colony. Yeah. He's the prime minister of the Cape colony, like duly elected according to whatever made up laws they have. At the same time, the owner of other countries. Yeah.

Not other companies, other countries. So you the prime minister one and own two other. God. He's a greedy bastard. He is. And I see how he's like the Ata Turk of. Yeah. Bastard.

Yeah, he's here, there's no, there's, I don't know, we've reached, we've reached pinnacle bastard. Yeah. Peak bastard here. Peak bastard. It doesn't, it doesn't get, it doesn't get much worse than the guy like Cecil Rhodes. This is a, I'm like, I, I grossly underestimated this guy. For sure. He's fucking Hitler level, you know, if you're talking about like the most influential pieces of shit in history, he's, there's not.

He's on the list. There's a number of folks at his level. There's a lot of people I'd put above him clearly. I don't know if you could put in a, yeah, not this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of ties for the top of that list.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there ain't own no country now. Yeah. Anyway. You know what isn't the sole proprietor of two countries illegally conquered by a mercenary police force? The products and services that support this year podcast. That's right.

None of them. None of them. Well, I conquer my own country in present day Idaho and use it as a basis from which to declare war on the FDA. That's the plan. I wouldn't mind you redeeming Idaho. Yeah. Pretty beautiful. We can do it together.

We can harness the power of Idaho to wipe out the FDA. I think actually I would have a lot of support in Idaho for taking on the FDA, mostly from people who want to sell brain pills. But anyway, we could probably ally with Utah. Anyway, here's the ads. 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.

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He turns to the thing. Are we at the part of the episode where you're like, here it is. You're at the top of the roller coaster. And he's about to just like, no. We have a nose dive yet. We're at the part where he invents apartheid. Oh, yeah. So he decides that the focus of his second term as prime minister is going to be dealing with what he called the native question. If you know fascists, you know that when people have a question about a race that they keep referring to as the blank question, it doesn't end well. Ever. Oh, man.

The trajectory is predictable. Yeah. So from the founder quote that biography of Rhodes Rhodes employed this skillfully obtained unprecedented and largely unquestioned measure of decisive political power to continue rearranging relations between blacks and whites. He had introduced radical notions in this domain during the legislative years from 1890 to 1892 from 1893 and dramatically after his electoral triumph in 1894. Much of Rhodes's considerable political energy was directed at rewriting the capes statute books in ways which might have appeared limited and parochial at the time, but which were profoundly to alter the contours and reach of discrimination throughout south and even southern Africa. He viewed burgeoning African numbers as a clear danger to white superiority and to the emergent coalition of Dutch and English speaking colonialists. Together, Rhodes and his allies acted to undercut the established tradition of Cape liberalism. That's what I was talking about earlier, the liberalism, the idea that all men are equal and we have to, even if we all don't really believe it, we have to hold to that because it's important.

Even the most antagonistic of the capes legislators and the most diehard leaders of the bond, which is one of the political sort of factions there, had hitherto been hesitant to erode the principle that all persons irrespective of color were equal before the law, when of Britain's priceless 19th century gifts to the Cape and thus to South Africa. During Rhodes's premiership, however, other more expedient objectives achieved precedence. Yeah, man. When I think about like this, it's like, it's hard to not picture Jim Crow and be like, oh, this is if you carry Jim Crow out to its logical conclusions and then leave it until the 1990s. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah, dude. Yeah. And it's like, you go, yeah, the question, the native question, it's like, of course, this is what you're going to come up with. Of course it is. Yeah. Yeah. Keep reading, Robert. So, yeah, his main objective here is white supremacy. And again, white supremacy in a very modern way. And the best thing that illustrates his drive to white supremacy and everything that like how his thought process worked and the way in which he took action to further that goal.

The best thing that illustrates that is Rhodes's plan to push through the passage of what was called the Glenn Gray Act. Now, Glenn Gray was a district in the Cape Colony that had essentially been a reservation for one group of African natives. Quote, like most reservations, Glenn Gray was overcrowded and overgrazed. Many of its male inhabitants had already begun to seek work from whites in the colony. Others, meanwhile, had crowded into Glenn Gray for more distant or less settled frontier areas. Whites, especially Dutch-seeking farmers, coveted its fertile valleys. In a microcosm, Glenn Gray presented most of the problems found in the recently if only partially assimilated frontier districts. There was a clear need to remove sources of friction among Africans and between Africans and whites. Land was at the root of most disputes. But to grant individual tenure meant at least the possibility of a flood of newly entitled black voters, conceivably less pressure on Africans to seek work, and a host of ancillary questions with local and Cape-wide budgetary limitations. There also was the danger that whites would purchase the newly salable black-owned farms and thus thrust vast numbers of landless black families onto the colony. So Rhodes was really worried that white families also would buy up land owned by Africans and move there in the middle of land dominated by Africans.

And then you would have communities of white and black people cohabitating. Rhodes also thought was unacceptable. Because if people are living in the same communities, they're going to fuck eventually. That's just the way humans are. It just is the thing that happens with people. So he had to find a solution to this problem that achieved a few goals. Number one, it had to steal back most of the land that African tribes held in common. Because at this point before the Glenn Gray Act, we're talking about communally owned land. It's like this tribe owns this parcel of land. So you have to stop that because communally owned land is not good for the kind of world that Cecil Rhodes wants to build. So you have to get most of that land back on the market somehow. You also can't make it look like naked theft.

And so that means you're going to be parceling at least a lot of this land up and giving it to individual black Africans. But that's a problem because the way the laws and the Cape are crafted, if you own property, you get to vote. So communally owned property doesn't count for that. But if you're going to be giving a bunch of Africans property, suddenly that's a bunch of new voters and Cecil Rhodes does not want that shit happening. You can't have y'all voting now. Dude, the parallel in even in that pickle of after reconstruction and all of a sudden America started electing a ton of black people. It was like, OK, wait a minute, we can't this. Well, and we have to do this. Yeah.

To today, a story just dropped today from the Cambridge Analytical Leaks that one of the things they were used for by the Trump administration was to put together a list of between three and five million black Americans that they wanted to and considered it critical to discourage from voting. Oh, my God. Because again, every couple of generations, you're able to be less naked about the racism, but the goal is the same. Stop them from having a say in their own interests. Nailed it. Yep. Yeah.

So, yeah, since Glenn Gray was representative of so many frontier parts of the colony, it was evident to Cecil that this new law would lay the basis for native and white relations across Africa for the future. This meant, obviously, that the new law would have to be constructed in a way that reinforced white supremacy and enshrined it into South African law forever, no matter what Great Britain's enlightened liberal values said. Cecil told Parliament, the legislature must adopt a system of despotism in its relations with the barbarians of South Africa. Desperate. If you're saying we have to be despots, you are the bad guys.

Yes. Like, just a smidge of self-awareness, and yeah, that's all I'm asking. Just have a little self-awareness. It's not good, by and large, to be a despot. That's why we came up with a nasty name for it, like a despot. I wish the listeners could see me flailing my arms in agreement, Doc. Yeah. The pretzel peep we bend ourselves in to protect power.

There's been a lot of head nodding, head shaking, arms flailing, and I do believe it shall continue. Yes. Speaking of things that shall continue this episode. So, Rhodes told Parliament that because of the debate over the Glyn Gray Act, the colony was in a state of racial emergency with ballooning numbers. Yeah. Well, because increasing numbers of black Africans were either filling land white people wanted, even worse, moving to cities that white people lived in.

And if you have this population of people, this big underclass who don't have enough money, all living in cities, some of them might agitate for better living conditions. And that could lead to a revolution. He was also terrified that if you gave Africans enough land, you know, enough of the land that they already owned, they might not get jobs because they'd be able to take care of themselves. And again, they're trying to induct Africa into the global capitalist system at this point. So, he's terrified that if they're able to see to their own needs in their own land, what need do they have to get involved in the system in which they will fundamentally have to be under us?

Dude, it's such a mind bender because I'm like, okay, we was taking care of ourselves before you got here. Yeah, we did it for a long time. We did it for a long time. Matter of fact, longer than any other humans because this is Africa. So, we was here the whole time. And now you're worried about us being able to take care of ourselves. And it's funny because, again, I did read some defenses, modern defenses by modern conservatives of Cecil Rhodes. And one thing to point out is that, like, he talked about, you know, he wasn't racist.

He just believed that, you know, British civilization was superior. And it was in all of these tribes that he's conquering and fighting. A lot of them do do the things like female genital mutilation, things that are very horrible. Because all groups of organized human beings do bad things. It's just a thing that people do, period. And it's like, yes, it's true, all of those tribes had problems and things that, like, were bad that they did. And the British Empire starved 30 million people to death in order to make a profit. So, let's not fucking get up on our high horses about the superiority of Anglo-Brit, like, civil fuckingization.

Like, oh, fuck yourself. Yeah, basically. You're right. Just you can't say it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

When did they start importing the Indians to, like, work? Oh, I think that's a later period. That's way later. It does not come up in my research in this. Maybe it's happening in this period. I'm sorry if I'm... I don't want to, like, make a statement on that one way or the other, because it's not my area of expertise.

Okay. Don't. None of this really is, but I at least read up on this shit. Yeah. So, Cecil claims to Parliament that without, quote, the dignity of labor Africans would live in sloth and laziness. It was thus the government's job to give them some gentle stimulants to go forth and find out something of the dignity of labor.

Oh, my gosh. And he's saying this about the people that have built his entire fortune with their blood, sweat, and tears. Oh, my, yes. That's... He's saying that, like, the men who dug my diamonds need to understand the dignity of labor. Yes. You piece of shit. You absolute piece of shit.

Like, just the largest hole in the world that we dug for you. Yeah. Tell me, I need to know the dignity of hard labor. Oh, my God. Come on. Well, and also it's really interesting to me, he doesn't consider farming to be labor, because it doesn't necessarily feed into capitalism, because you can farm and just live comfortably and share and trade with your neighbors

and not need to be a part of this global system of money, because you have food and shelter, and that's really all you need. As long as you're able to make a musical instrument, and you've got gourds and shit, you can make drums. Yes. Like, you've got music, you're fine. We did fine. You've got music, food, and shelter.

Fuck it. Yes. Like, what else do you need? Oh, man. Nothing, it turns out. Yeah. Apparently his greatest gift was stress, because that's what we needed, apparently, just to worry about collecting more things we don't need.

Thank you, Brian. Yeah. Thank you. After months of politicking and debate, Rhodes finally had a plan for this, the Glenn Gray Act that he presents to Parliament. The basics of it were this. Communal lands, these reservations, would be broken up in pieces of them given to black families as individual lots.

Now, this had been proposed before by people other than Cecil, and the legislators who had proposed it before wanted to give out one of the individual plots to be about 110 acres, which they thought would be fair, which is not a tiny chunk of land. That's big. Rhodes cut the allotments down to eight acres, because he wanted it to be impossible for these tiny farms to actually make a profit.

He didn't want them to be able to compete with white people's farms, which were much larger and industrial. He also banned partable inheritance, forcing the whole parcel to be passed on intact. This ensured that only the firstborn son of any family would get any land, and other children in the family would have to leave the family land to go get jobs. When it was pointed out to him that white people were able to pass down

their property however the fuck they wanted, he replied that giving Africans equal rights, quote, was not a tenable position, which it's not if you want the things he wants, you can't be giving black people equal rights. I fucking hate this guy. He's not wrong. He's so good at this.

He's very good at this. Maybe the best anyone's ever been. He's exceptional at this. He is exceptional at this thing. It is one of those things. We do talk about a lot of mediocre white men who failed upwards. He's not media. He's not.

He is actually exceptional. He knows what he's doing and he's good at it. That is a heartbreaking consequence to the entire history of the human race from this point on. In order to ensure that absolutely every single black person in the colony had to get a job, Rhodes instituted a labor tax of ten shillings per head for every African, which means you have to, we've conquered your country

and now you have to pay every year to continue existing in it. He literally checks every bastardly box. It's amazing how shit he is. I'm no longer impressed by the diamonds at the party. I just think he sucks. One of the laws he passes. Maybe the most influential, but one of them. He does a bunch of this shit.

So the tax meant that no longer could Africans just stay unemployed and live through hunting and farming like the way that people had survived for forever. They couldn't do that anymore. They had to get hard currency somehow. And the landowners that were created by this were included in this. So they couldn't just grow their own food because he didn't think that it was really labor.

He wanted everyone to have to engage with capitalism in some way and work. And it's so frustrating because he's so remarkably in charge. You have no recourse because he's freakishly in charge. One of the things, I think Rottberg's a very good biographer. One of my issues with him is he repeatedly talked about sort of Cecil's ability to convince people of things as he had this kind of remarkable ability to convince other men of his vision. And he talks about all of the racist things Cecil does,

but he doesn't lay out in a way that I find as direct as maybe at Adobe. And again, he wrote it in 1988, but he doesn't lay out very directly. The vision was white supremacy. That's why they all got on board. Yes, I am speaking to the lowest part of you that wants to believe you're better than everybody else. It's gonna work. So yeah, and again, back to sort of this tax that he institutes

to even force the landowners to work because he doesn't consider growing food to be labor. I'm gonna quote from Rottberg here. Rhodes thought that he, he being these small farmers, would spend only three or four weeks sowing maize and would truly not be working hard enough. It would be wise if such a man also went out and worked for a certain period. Now, one of his political opponents at the time,

another guy in parliament, commented to this sarcastically, no toil, however strenuous upon a native's own land, was dignified enough to satisfy the tax collector. So again, there are white guys in politics who recognize how messed up this is and do speak out, you know? He's acknowledging that like, it doesn't matter how hard they work if it's for themselves. Cecil wants them working for white people.

It's not that they're not working. It's that they're not working for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna continue to quote. Yes. So, now see some of the things that Rhodes suggested

Africans would change for the better. Every black man could not have three acres and a cow in the future, he said. Africans would have to change as a black man could not have three, Africans would have to change as the English had changed. Yes. It must be brought home to them that in the future, nine-tenths of them must would have to spend their lives in manual labor.

And the sooner that was brought home to them, the better. Spend their lives. Yes. So, now see some of the supremacy stuff is like, you start being able to follow their train of logic. He is well aware that Britannica was, at one point, a bunch of feuding tribes that were just hunter-gatherers with serfdom and feudalism.

And we have become this. So then when you look at Africa, you go, oh, yeah, we used to be like that in the 10th century. We're better than you. You know, and just so like, at least it's like you follow in his logic, at least. And I mean, that's the same. That's the proud boy logic of like, no, we used to be like this.

We're better than that. Yeah. No, you're not. No. And a lot of you were miserable because it like, the early industrial age, Victorian England, the cities are fucking nightmares. Yes.

With factories where children's hands get mangled and coal mines that kill people by the thousands. It's horrible. Fucking, the air was unbreathable. They had poisoned their own country and had left because they wanted to poison other people's country. Yes. What was the thing, the great London stink?

Yeah, yeah, the stench blossom or whatever that like made the city almost unlivable and killed huge numbers of people. Yeah. Because it was a nightmare there. It was horrible. And the fact that they were able to push their surplus population out to the colonies and also move a lot of their manufacturing

and resource extraction out to the colonies is why England's pretty nice nowadays. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So additionally, Africans would find that they were better off when they went to work. Rhodes promised to spend the funds from the labor tax

on industrial schools. Think back to the residential school episodes that we did on Canada because it's the same thing and that the US had where they put indigenous people and that Australia had where they put indigenous people. It is the same thing. Yeah. Where Africans could be taught trades and vocations,

not taught history, not taught, you know, not taught to seek their dreams out, taught how to be functional cogs and capitalism. Rhodes thought, quote, South Africa had too many schools which specialized in turning out a peculiar class of human beings, the, and he uses the K word again, person. Now the K word person was a most excellent type of individual, said Rhodes, but he belonged to a class that was overdone.

They became agitators and accused the government of oppressing the common people. They constituted a dangerous class. You remember that from the police episodes we were talking about over here? It's the same motherfucking thing everywhere it happens. Same thing. Yeah.

Yo, I, as a side note, I know people who went to the American native schools. Yeah. Jesus. And were, yeah, and told horror stories. The, and it's, yeah, it's just same things. Yeah. Kill the Indian to save the man was the term they used.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And that's what Rhodes would say. And white people say he's not racist because he said, no, I have nothing against black people. I just want to kill everything about them culturally

that is different from the way I want them to live. Yeah. Yeah. So Rhodes's new law also banned the sale of indigenous land to white people. And this was not for any high-minded reason. It was because the natives should be in native reservations and not mixed up with whites.

Yeah. Keep them away. Yeah. This is the start of apartheid. Yeah. This is the birth of segregation. Legal segregation. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. You have a place to be and it's not near us. Yeah. Yep. As cool as long as they over there. Yeah. So again, so the, and finally, after all that, the Glenn Gray Act ensured that all of these new

land-owning black people would not get the right to vote as enshrined by the law. As he told parliament, it was really ridiculous to suppose that these poor children could be taken out of this absolute barbarism and come to a practical conclusion on politics. So the act very simply banned any native enfranchised by the Glenn Gray bill from voting in Cape elections. Wow.

Rhodes justified this again by saying that because the government protected their land, they had no real right to vote on it. Black people could not be citizens as they were children. Oh. Cecil Rhodes. Dude, the he-woeva story, bro. Yeah.

This is why I'm saying he took, went a place that had been caught, like that was African land conquered and dominated by white people and he made it worse and more racist. This is where apartheid comes from. Yes. This is the legal underpinning that all apartheid descends from is the shit Cecil Rhodes was making happen in this period.

And it lasts up until what, like the late 80s, the fucking early 90s. Like 91. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Masterful. And it's still like the impacts are still seen.

It's still if you, yeah. Every year, like I said, like I performed there at least once a year, I got a homeboy on the radio in Cape town, my homeboy DJ easy. And he's, he's what they called colored under the system. Right. So we drive it through Cape town, one of the, like, this is the most beautiful, like overlooking cliffs beach.

Like it's a paradise. And he goes, yo, my dad used to work at this beach, but at sundown, he had to leave because colors weren't allowed on this beach. And I'm like, yo, you still, I'm like, that's your father, bro. Like this, this, it's now, you know what I'm saying? He talked about like people, you know, the police will come in and stick a pencil in his hair to make sure because if the

pencil falls, then that means he's black and not colored. And just all kinds of just like this is like he's on, he's a DJ. He's on the radio now. This is now. Yeah. And that's why Trevor Noah's biography is titled like born a crime, right?

Yeah. Because he was, he was his, one of his parents was white and one was, was, was black. And yeah, that was colored. And that's, yeah, that's illegal. And it's illegal. Like Cecil Rhodes is the guy who it's not quite banned in this period, but he's the guy who starts that process.

He starts all that. That's why he, part of his goal in this act was to make sure these people can't breed because if they breed, then they stop hating each other, right? Yes. People are falling in love. They don't want lesser rights for the people they're in love with.

And that's going to be a fucking problem for me, Cecil Rhodes. Yes. So you have to stop them from knowing each other. Speaking of knowing each other, get to know the fine products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

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And now he's left offending 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 iHeartRadio 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

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that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, uh, we're back. Oh my gosh, so good. This is the greatest white supremacist finesse. Yeah, it's amazing. Incredible.

The Glenn Gray Act did create something broadly analogous to local councils for these native reservations so that they could have an element of self-government. But even letting black people vote for their own local leaders was too much for Cecil. Instead, white people appointed all of the council members and the reservations were governed by a white magistrate. He was supposed to teach them how to take care of themselves.

Yeah. Yo. Yeah, that's the answer. They're children. You see. Yeah. Which is such a, ah, god. Damn, it's such a unique version of white supremacy.

Yeah, exactly. And Rhodes is, again, other people are having this idea. You can even probably find some people earlier who were talking about it. Rhodes is kind of the first who explains it to other white people in a way that gets them on board and then follows through in a really comprehensive fashion. And again, aspects of this are happening in the United States

at the time. Aspects of this are happening in other parts of the world. So he's not alone, but he's part of the first wave of modern white supremacists. And in some ways, he's probably the one who did the best job of defining and explaining it. Yeah. So, Rottberg writes, quote,

the glingray bill was a forerunner of the segregationist legislation of the 20th century and of the combination of laws which together constitute apartheid. But it was not so much the content of the bill as it was Rhodes' rhetoric and rationalizations which prefigured the future. What modern readers appreciate as fatuous and solipsistic arguments mere fig leaves for white supremacy and denials of African rights

were those that Rhodes and all subsequent rulers in South Africa have used to justify their departures from the natural law and political culture of the Western world. It is a testimony to Rhodes' force of character and quality of persuasion that he, alone of likely Cape leaders, was able to arrange such shifts away from previous norms with ease. It delineates his character, too, that he did so with equanimity without shame and with self-righteous determination.

God, Doug, when you swear you're right... Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I can't believe how long it lasts. Yeah. Damn. Yeah. And it goes on for fucking ever. Like, dude, you own two other countries, man.

Like, why you got to... Why did it do this? Why did you own, man? Like, why you got to do this way? Yeah. Yeah, and it's because it's not enough. It's because the world is what he wants. Oh, I forgot because this is, like, manifest destiny only to glow.

Mm-hmm. And again, he's the kind of white person who, like, is angry because Americans are independent, and they've filled the... Like, he talks a lot about how the inferior Italian and Irish races and stuff are dominating, and Germans are dominating in America. And that's why it should have stayed under Anglo control.

So he's like... He's the kind of racist who sees shades of other white people and, like, is judgmental. He's like, oh, Italians... It's like, if you look at Nazi propaganda, the degree in which I do, one of the joking things that they will do is talk about how the Axis was less racist than the Allies

because Hitler had a black friend. And when they refer to that... Oh, there's about Mussolini, right? Yeah, they're talking about Mussolini because Italians aren't white to them. Yes. And I felt so, like, knowing that. Like, once I...

Yeah, once I learned that, like, I had to take back some of my own jokes because I used to feel like, yeah, Italians were the black white people, too. I'm like, yeah, big families. I mean, they're definitely, like, close... I mean, it's basically, they're almost in the Middle East, right? Like, it's right across that fucking sea.

Yeah. Yes. That's what racists are seeing. But that's what... So I'm like, dang, I can't agree with races. Crap. No, no, no, no. No.

Because I'm saying it endearing. Like, I'm like, oh, man, like, y'all got big families. Y'all loud. Y'all gangsters. Y'all said it. Food's great. Yeah.

The things we should lovingly make fun of Italians for is all of the hand gestures that we do and the pizza pies. That's fine. Don't... The pizza pies. Don't do the races. The pizza pies.

Yeah. The pizza pies. I'm not going to do any sort of... No, I will, though, but not here. I think it's funny. Okay. Yeah. That's fine.

So Cecil Rhodes invented apartheid, and the only good news is that he didn't get a lot more time in the sun after this. After a very long stream of successes, Rhodes got cocky and he decided to deal with a problem that had vexed him for years. The existence of the Transvaal, which is this bower state, becomes like... Yeah, it's a big chunk of what becomes the culture of South Africa. These are like the Africaners. The Africaners.

Yeah, and the Transvaal is an independent white nation in South Africa. The fact that it existed fucked up his dream of unifying the whole region under British control. So in true Cecil Rhodes' fashion, he hatched a plan to steal the Transvaal. The basic idea was to disguise it as an insurrection. Johannesburg had a sizable population of British laborers and they were not content with the bower government. Through his agent, Leander Jameson, Rhodes convinced these folks

that if they recruited an army, he would send in his own army and together they could crush the boars. And army's the wrong word for Rhodes' force here. He had 600 policemen armed with field artillery and machine guns and stuff. Yeah, he did. All paid for by De Beers. Of course. Yeah, the invasion, the Jameson raid, as it's called, was a shit show from the jump.

The British expats couldn't agree on what they wanted politically after the insurrection and because they had such a disagreement about this, they asked Jameson to pause the raid because they weren't ready. And he said, fuck you, I'm going to invade anyway. And his hope was that this would spur them to act, but instead it just meant that nobody, none of his allies were ready when he invaded a sovereign nation. And then his troops were trying to cut the telegraph wires to the capitals

that no one would know they were coming, but they cut a fence instead of the telegraph wires, which let the boars organize a defense. Jameson's police were ambushed and a lot of them were shot to death until they surrendered. Now, the whole Jameson raid was an unaccountable political disaster. It blackened Cecil's name for the rest of his life. It forced him out as prime minister. It sparked the aid of his political career.

He did try to come back a few times. He had friends write defenses of him and stuff a couple of years later, but it didn't work. He got old timey canceled. Yeah, he did get canceled. For invading a white nation. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, look, for doing what he'd been doing. Yeah. Let me teach you a little thing about white people. Yeah. White people don't stand for being challenged even by other white people. Let me tell you something, brother. You should have slowed down, Icarus. You know what I'm saying?

It is one of those things you can see is just covering the Portland kind of uprising or whatever you want to call it as I have and watching my friends cover it. You do tend to see a big difference when like a black activist gets knocked down as opposed to when a white person who's not an activist gets knocked down. You see a diff. You see just a clear difference in like the number of views that that video gets. Yeah. Yeah.

And yeah, it's just like nobody's that's not even a conscious thing. It's just a thing. It's crazy to me too. It just this when you like I the one thing I tell any artists or anybody like trying to start a business or anything like the value of taking an L like the value of a loss. Like if you never lose if everything you step into you just all you do is when then you it will in that L is coming. It's coming boy and if you keep stacking it and just and just and just doubling down

because you'll never lose. You'll never lose. You'll never when that L comes it is going to be ginormous. So I'm like look look man just be be be aware be always cautious to somebody that don't ever lose because it's coming. Yeah. Yeah. Stay away from those people.

Yes. So the whole Jameson raid again just a horrible political disaster. It also played a key role in sparking the Second Boer War which is the Boer War that everybody hears about. This led to the first modern use of concentration camps by the British Empire against the Boer people and against black Africans who lived in Boer territory. 30,000 soldiers died. 26,000 Boer civilians were starved to death and 20,000 African natives were starved to

death in British concentration camps. Thanks in part to Cecil. So that war ended in 1902 and so did Cecil Rhodes. He was only 49 years old but he packed centuries of being a piece of shit into his life and he was ready to go. Efficient bastard. He was 49. That's it.

49. And he always knew he was going to die young. He has his first heart attack in like 1872. Like yeah. So he's throwing everything he can into being garbage. Now at the time he died he was a rather marginalized figure within the British Empire. The times wrote in his obituary, he has done more than any single contemporary to place before our imagination, before the imagination of his countrymen, a clear conception of the

imperial destinies of our race. But we wish we could forget the other matters associated with it. That is the most British answer. I know he did a lot of whack stuff. But he was really good but let's not talk about all the bad stuff. It got kind of weird for a little bit but he was great. He died thank god so he doesn't get to fuck up anymore. Oh man.

Yeah. So the good news for Rhodes is that a number of people have forgotten all the other matters associated with his name today and he's increasingly being praised as a hero on the right wing. He was the absolute archetype of a white supremacist imperialist. He stated at one point late in his life that I would annex the planets if I could. And if you read the full quote, he seems really sad that he can't annex the planets. This guy is ready for space imperialism. And we're almost there now.

We're working on it. We're working on annexing Mars right now. And we'll find a way, there's not native people on Mars but we'll find a way to fuck them up. We'll make an indigenous Martian population and then screw them over. So we will fight wars over something that come out the ground in Mars. Darn right we will. Yes. We're totally going to do it.

We're going to draw an imaginary line on a planet and be like, this side's ours. Let's be angry about it forever. Let's be angry forever. God. What is it? Freaking species man. I had to read, I couldn't end this without talking about some defenses of Cecil Rhodes. So I found one published back in 2016, not coincidentally, by standpoint magazine.

Now a sizable chunk of their defense is related to probably the most prominently, the quote most regularly attributed to Cecil Rhodes. I prefer land to inwards. Now Cecil did not say this exact quote. It's actually kind of people merging two things. He said, including like, you remember that quote I said earlier that he wants to annex land, not natives. He said this. He just didn't say it exactly that way.

And he said the inward a lot constantly. He just didn't say it exactly that way. So it's not much of a defense that he said something slightly different, but meant the same thing in my fucking book. Yeah. Again. In the right book. Yeah.

The defenses get funnier and funnier from there on out. And I'm going to read one. Besides Rhodes, besides Rhodes is early, arguably racist reference, arguably racist that the Anglo Saxon races superior to all other races and should rule them. Arguably racist. You could argue that. Maybe. I might debate that. Yeah.

It's debatable. But they say this has to be weighed against all the other things he said and did. From first to last, he had a record of good relations with individual Africans. His primary biographer, Robert Rottberg, who is generally critical of the subject writes that as a young man, he had related directly and well to unlettered Zulu throughout his life. He remained sympathetic and responsive to the needs of individual persons of color, not your stereotypical racist. Then to which I say, yes, your stereotypical motherfucking racist. Yes.

And this is going to bring me. Yeah. You have black friends. I can't be racist. Yeah. My son has a black friend. This is going to bring me to, do you know who Louis Theroux is? No.

He's a British documentarian, a very, very popular one. And I quite like a lot of his work. In the 90s, the late 90s, he did a series called Weird Weekends. We would go spend time in mostly, I think, American subculture. So he spent a lot of time with Nazis. And one of the Nazis, he hung out with this guy named Tom Metzger. Now, Tom Metzger was the head of a group called White Aryan Resistance or War. He was the guy if you're an Oregonian whose members were responsible for the murder of

Mulu Geddesurah in Portland, which is like one of the kind of big, yeah, a very important thing to understand. He is one of the most famous racists there's ever been Tom Metzger. In the documentary where Louis spent several days just kind of living with him to get an understanding for the guy's personality, he notices that Tom has a Mexican-American neighbor and is friendly with him and they'll like help each other out and stuff. And Tom differentiates between this individual person who he knows and thinks is OK and Mexicans in general, with whom he had nothing but like racist bile.

Yeah, the concept of Mexican. The same thing for the Nazis. If you read internal Nazi discussions as they were planning the Holocaust, one of the problems for them was that in kind of the terms they would use is everyone has their own, their own, like, favorite Jew that they think is different from the other Jews. And that's why we have to develop a legal code to oppress these people because otherwise individuals will be slipping through the cracks. Even Hitler, even Adolf Hitler, rescued one Jew from the Holocaust that he orchestrated,

the doctor who had tried to save his mother when he was a child. He got that guy out of the country because he knew what he was about to do. So yes, it is stereotypically racist to be nice to individual people who are of the races you hate. It makes racism even. It makes it more exhausting and that much more stupid because it's like, oh, you hate a concept. Yeah, that's exactly it.

You hate a concept. Yeah. And the proof that your concept is wrong is that there are individual people who are part of this concept of yours that you are able to like and get along with because they're people and so are you. Like just yeah. Yeah. At what point do you get tired of being on the wrong side of history?

Yeah. The point at which I don't know. I don't know, man. Yeah. Well, I can't get it emotionally. Yeah. So to continue this conservative writer of this very bad article, I think it's funny that he uses this argument that he argues that like, well, he was nice to individual Africans

and this argument that he made to defend this guy in 2016 is the same that Leander Jameson used to defend Rhodes from charges of cruelty to natives in 1897. So after Rhodes has his disastrous raid, he's trying to do a comeback tour, his friends defend him. They use the same defense, which is that he's nice to individual Africans. Leander Jameson noted, quote, his favorite Sunday pastime was to go to the De Beers native compound where he segregated them away from the white workers, where he had built them a fine swimming pool and throw in shillings for the natives to dive for.

Oh, man. Just the white nonsense, boy. Yeah. He loved them. He threw money at them. This is nonsense. Yeah. Man, how you say this with a straight face?

Yeah. Well, the article is very long and a lot of it's funny. I'm just going to read one more quote trying to justify Cecil's bigotry. And again, this is from that article. Yes, Rhodes thought that black Africans were generally inferior. But in terms of cultural development, not biology, he believed they could become civilized. This is important because if one regards a people as biologically inferior and incapable of development, then that's a reason to exclude them permanently from participation in their

own government. But that wasn't how Rhodes saw things. In a speech of 1894, he made this quite clear when he said, now I say the natives are children. They are just emerging from barbarism. They have human minds. We ought to do something for the minds and the brains that the Almighty has given them. I do not believe that they are different from ourselves. But you acted that way and enshrined a set of laws that lasted a century after your death

enshrining those differences. Yeah. I don't believe they're any different than us except that you absolutely believe they different than you. Yeah. When you're as a white person, when you're trying to justify, when you're trying to talk about and equivocate on racism, you should think about whether or not you would be comfortable saying that to the face of a person of that race.

Yeah. How would you feel walking up to a black person and saying, I'm not racist or this guy wasn't racist, he just thought that your entire race was children? Yeah. Would you feel fundamentally guilty saying that? Would you feel too ashamed to say that? Yeah. Then perhaps it's racist as fuck.

Yeah. I'm coming out of your mouth. That didn't sound like you didn't hear yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So at the end of this, I want to spend a little bit of time yet. Not quite yet because we need to grapple with the last part of Cecil's legetry. The thing that he left us that continues to kill people every year, the blood diamond trade. Now, again, by 1888, he had basically complete monopolistic control over the diamond market. He made a monopoly.

He formed a cartel called the London Diamond Syndicate, which were all of the biggest people actually selling diamonds to consumers. And this allowed him to match supply with demand artificially and keep value high, even though there were actually a shitload of extra diamonds. Yeah. They're everywhere. Yeah. They're fucking everywhere.

They're not precious. Yeah, so he builds this thing and it becomes the model of the diamond industry for forever. His descendants, the people who take over De Beers after him, follow in his footsteps and continue to maintain the monopoly using these same tactics, controlling 90 plus percent of the global diamond market. In the 1930s, the people who follow after Cecil Rhodes and De Beers start the mining campaign Diamonds Are Forever in the United States. Oh, God.

Sorry, 1947 is when that starts. 1939 is when they start marketing diamonds to the middle class because they had been like a rich person thing. They start trying to get across. Everyone needs a diamond to show that you love your spouse. Diamonds Are Forever starts in 1947 and De Beers becomes an even bigger marketing empire than it had already been. So there they die for what we buy from drugs.

That's a kind of reference. And it's it's it's it's yeah. So they they just they expand demand and they also create a permanent they create a permanent market for diamonds in Africa and it's not a good market. In 1935 De Beers takes complete control of mining prospects in Sierra Leone and their contract gives them control for 99 years. Now this opens up a black market in Lebanese traders in Sierra Leone discovered that you can make a lot of money by smuggling diamonds out of the country, illicit mining and training

increased throughout Sierra Leone by the 1950s. The government had given up any chance of policing the diamond industry. Foreign investors had to supply their own security, which was done generally by mercenary forces. And yeah, so these by creating this very, very valuable legitimate diamond trade that the government doesn't control. You also create an illegitimate diamond trade that the government doesn't control. And that provides a way for insurgent militaries to fund themselves.

And this is what starts happening all over Africa in this period of time. You have these massive wars over over minerals, wars funded by minerals with diamonds chief among them. And it's it's it's a nightmare every single place that it happens in Sierra Leone. They're fucking cutting off hands. I was often to say just armless kids. Yeah. Yeah.

They kill 75,000 people, half a million people become refugees. And that's not the worst that it gets. Have you you've heard about the Great African War? I think it starts in 1998. Some people like it's the biggest war after World War Three. It's the biggest war we've had since almost no one in in in the Western world has has ever heard about it. It's also sometimes called the Congo War.

It happens in the late 90s. It kills five million people. And it is a war over minerals over gold, diamonds, tin, ivory and coltan, which I think is used to help make computers. Yeah. And it's it's one of those wars where there's like millions of people who are raped systematically in like an industrial fashion. You have millions more who die from lack of medical care.

And again, the war is able to continue on because rebels are because these different sides are able to take control of diamonds and mine diamonds and sell them for guns to commit these massacres. And a lot of other part of the reason where I'm not going into much detail about this here is that a lot of other people, of course, are involved in this like Cecil Rhodes, his Mededa while he starts the chain of events that makes the Great African War and the Sierra Leo and everything that's happening in all of these countries over diamonds, over conflict minerals.

Yeah. He is the origin point. Yeah. I know if you're in the hip hop, you've heard the phrase conflict diamonds. Yeah. This is what we're talking about. If you don't know. Yeah.

And it's like, it's the, among the, at least, at least in my opinion, among the African American community, this is the, the cognitive dissonance that we have to deal with of like our hand in upholding this like diamond trade. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like what if we as a culture, as American culture, we love to shine. I get it. We decided like, yo, we're not touching diamonds anymore, you know what I'm saying?

In solidarity to our African brothers and sisters, it's something I feel like we need to at some point reckon with, you know, but yeah, yeah, it's, it's a hard topic, man. And that then, and I've made a reference to a Kanye song from the college dropout album, which are not for the late registration album called diamonds are forever or conflict diamonds. Yeah. And it's, you know, one of the things I guess I can say to that is Cecil's goal was to kill the culture the Africans live under and make them all live under the rules and culture that Anglo Americans.

Yeah. And the great African war is some evidence that he succeeded to an extent because what he did leading in mercenary armies to take over mining areas in order to extract minerals and using that to fund the conquests of more of these mercenaries is exactly what all these wars are. What happened? Yeah. It's what happened.

He succeeded. Yeah. They adopted that part of British culture. Yeah. Yeah. Well, great. Thank you for it. Thanks for that, buddy.

You know, exporting Western culture. We're now mutilating each other. Yeah. For more information on the topic, see the Warren Zevon song, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. Yes. So, Prop, you got some plugs to plug in. Now I can plug my plugs.

Yeah. Let's do it. Great. Capitalism. Well, I'm selling music and coffee, but it's just prophipop.com and that's all my ad mentions too. And it just all feels so trivial. On the other hand, my children like to eat, so, yeah, check out the music, check out the

poetry. I got a copy collab coming up, what's up now, where this is ethically sourced. I feel like it's important to say it now. Company called Onyx who pays 500% higher than market price because we believe in farmers and supporting and it's a good drink. Yeah. And I'm finishing an album. And at some point, I'll give that links to that.

Yeah. Hell yes. Hell yes. Well, check all that out. Check me out somewhere on the internet. No one's quite sure where. And that's all. That's everything.

Well, a lot of people do because I've seen your followers grow. Okay. Well, yeah. I'm not even going to plug your plugables for you, Robert. Thank you, Sophie. I will. I'll plug it for you. You could find him at I write okay, I think, allegedly, allegedly, cannot confirm or deny

the I write okay-ness. Yeah. And you write better than okay, man. You're a great writer. Oh, thank you. It was actually like, I think it's very unclear because I wasn't always as good at writing as I am now. Of course.

My meaning was that was not that I write okay. It was like it came from like years of frustration of explaining what I did for a living because I had a bunch of different weird freelance jobs online. Yeah. Like I write. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

That was why. Punctuation matters. All righty. All right, guys. Product. Wait. Shit. No.

Probably. That's capitalism for you. Could be. All right. 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.

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