Dan Snow's History Hit - Cecil Rhodes

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Duncan Clarke joined me on the pod to discuss Cecil Rhodes and the historiography of Zambesia from the San forward to the establishment of the Rhodesian state.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Cecil Rhodes is never out of the news at the moment. He was a British businessman, prospector and politician who took up residence in South Africa and was then a keen imperialist pushing the boundaries of British South Africa ever further north. Giving his name to what is now Zambia and Zimbabwe was then northern and southern Rhodesia. His gift of money to Oriel College Oxford among other places has become highly controversial and many people are demanding that his statue is torn down from Oriel as it has been removed elsewhere. I wanted to talk to a biographer of Cecil Rhodes. Duncan Clark's just written a book on his conquest of Zambesia,

where Charles talks about the man behind the first historical reputation. If you want to watch programmes, as well as listen to all the back episodes of this podcast, you can go to History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. It is a one-stop shop

for everyone who loves history. Go and check it out. All you've got to do is use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get one month for free. And then you get one month for just one pound, euro or dollar. It's pretty sweet. So please go and check that out. In the meantime, here's Duncan Clark. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you, Dan. It's a great pleasure.

It couldn't be a better time to be talking about Cecil Rhodes. Have we built this man into mythical proportions? It sounds like this one individual was hugely important in the history of Southern Africa. Well, I believe so, if you look at the true record and the historiography of Rhodes. In particular, in my book, I focus on his last 15 years in the foundation of Rhodesia that led to a fundamental transition and shift from, if you like, longstanding millennial feudalism to modernity that took 90 years and continues. He was a man of the late Victorian era. He died in 1902. His foundation of Rhodesia, well, it's actually only Mishonaland at the time, was in 1890,

was the pioneer column going up. And then Matabeleland through a war that was inspired by the Ndebele in 1893 to form Rhodesia subsequently. Right, well, let's start. He was a rural British upbringing, but he went south as a teenager, I think, and got involved in diamonds. Did he rise to the top through his own merits in that tough world of diamond mining? The reality is that he was somewhat sickly. His family's medical advice or advisors at the time of Bishop Stortford had, when he was 16, recommended he goes out to join his brother Herbert in Port Natal, a colony then of the British Empire.

And he had his 17th birthday on the boat, a 70-day voyage, and he arrived, no one there to meet him. He was alone. He went off to the Umkhamas Valley to grow cotton with his brother, who was on and off up and down to the gold fields and the diamond fields looking for opportunities. So Rhodes himself actually managed a workforce of Zulus of about 30 at that time, through a year to a year and a half, before he took off on a trek by himself

with one person coming along as a companion, a native assistant, through about two to three months to get to Kimberley, where the diamond fields were in fact found. And there he started off as a simple digger. He, through the years, managed to accumulate claims and amalgamate the holdings of various people. And it's out of that time he made his large fortune. A second one came through when the discovery of gold

took place in the Witsvatersfront and between those two, if you like, polarities was the foundation of his monies. And from there he basically had done this through a tremendous amount of work. He was no slouch, he put in long hours, he dealt with some of the toughest people in the world in Kimberley and he had a very He dealt with some of the toughest people in the world in Kimberley. And he had a very kind of early abrupt introduction to the rural farming world in the Umkhamas Valley in Natal, which was an area of no distinction of any sort for growing cotton or crops. And so, you know, as a young man in his early 20s, he did succeed.

He made money and very early on he took himself off to Oxford in over a period of about seven years and journeys from, you know, down from the Kimberley mines to the Cape and then onwards over on a boat to Southampton through about 14 journeys up and down over seven or eight years before he in in effect, got his degree at Oxford. So, you know, he was a self-made, effectively. He became a millionaire of the times and a significant fortune. But his was nowhere near the great fortunes that ultimately, you know, were made by others such as Barney Bernardo, Alfred Byte, and others of the same time. And he left a great deal of his money in his last will and testament to,

as you know very well, Rhodes scholars, but also he had invested an enormous amount in the foundation of infrastructure and Rhodesia and the pioneers and settlement. And he had made a lot of gifts and bequests to the government of the day, to various ethnicities, to the Ndebele with whom he had the war, and with whose indunas, the chiefs, if you wish, he had negotiated peace with them in 1896 after the rebellion. So, you know, he put a lot on the table. He did not live in the style to which he could have been accustomed.

He led a rather simplistic life. He was often on horseback, on trek, in small boats, in carts and wagons. He came into the country first time in Mashonaland to try to get there through the west, southwest, basically through Maklutsi, and it was swamped out and torrential rains had blocked his entry. He couldn't go there in 1890, so his next occasion was the year following through Baira, then a Portuguese holding on Portuguese East Africa, up the Pungwi River and over the flatlands

and the low felt and the tsetse fly and feverinfested areas into what was then this very small village of Amtali, now known as Mutare. So, you know, he did a number of seven other visits during that time, and he toured through the country. He had a lot to do there. And at the same time, you know, there was the ill-fated Jameson Raid in 1895 that led to his downfall as the Cape Premier. And so basically from that time,

he devoted his entire commitment to Rhodesia from 1896 to 1902 when he died. Yeah, so I'm but this one was so you go for he goes from being a self-made man in the diamond mines, he consolidates the other mines, does empire building there. But when does he go? How and why does he become a an actual empire builder, an imperialist expanding the formal British empire in Southern Africa? Well, I think you could see that in terms of the, he had this dream of Cape Tukari for the railway. It was not one that was accomplished. He funded the railways up from Kimberley through to Mafeking, up into Birch Wonderland and onto Bulawayo, and subsequently various routes coming in from the east, from Baira through to Matare. And later, after his death, his foundations and trusts committed with other colleagues like Alfred Byte and George Pauling established the railway network in the country. But his impression of the time, I think, was that he believed in the empire.

He wanted to establish Rhodesia as a self-governing colony, which it became in 1923, after the company state, the British South Africa Company, of which he had founded with many, many others, its term had expired under royal charter at that time. And he was a man of, you know, many sides. He was no intellectual, as the critics would say, but he had a library in his house, Rue de Schuur, in Cape Town, that was probably the best of any in Africa and probably one of the greatest ones in the world regarding Africana and literature of the day.

It had 2,500 books in it, and I've been through that, among other things, and seen it very carefully as a sort of form of inspiration to him. He had read a lot. He took books on his travels. He had agents scour Europe and Britain at the time for literature on Africa. He had one of the greatest collections of Africana of the day, by any means. So his imperialist interests were, in a sense, tied up with a wider British empire and colonial project. During these days, of course, you will know that the British established many colonies

in many other parts of Africa and elsewhere in the East. Rhodesia was not the same because it was a company charter estate and subsequently not managed out of London. It was always locally driven and with its own residents coming out of the company on the one hand, the settlers on the other, and subsequently, as time went by, changes in constitutional government, etc. Right. Well, that's why I just want to drill down on that a little bit more. So do we need to think about Rhodes and the establishment of Rhodesia to the north of Britain's colonial colonies in South Africa, as almost like the East India Company setting up in Bengal 150 years earlier.

Is this a kind of private enterprise empire? Not strictly. It was under royal charter, as you correctly note. It was charter given by Queen Victoria in the day. It had a 25-year tenure. It basically required roads to establish civil government. Of course, the natural institutions that were founded were completely different to anything there before in the terrain was then called Zambezia, which was really a set of Ndebele

dynasties and a whole number of smaller Shona patriarchies of limited scale and significance who had been predated upon by the Ndebele, who had slaved them for 53 years, as well as slavery in the east coming out of the old Portuguese praza systems that had penetrated into Manika land, into Mashona land, etc. So I think we've got a very different model in this particular instance compared, say, to the classical British colonial model elsewhere. So Rhodes was going in, getting mineral concessions from African indigenous ruling elites, but was he explicitly, did he want to eventually supplant them

and rule directly and also flood settlers into the area and create facts on the ground? Or how did he think his relationship with these Shona, these other groups would progress? Well, the initial concession called the Red Concession negotiated in 1888-9 that was signed by the Ndebele king of the day, Lo Magula, who succeeded his father, Mzilikazi, was a concession for the pioneers to enter as a column into Mashonaland, which was a sort of fiefdom, in a sense, partially, not entirely, of the Ndebele. But the Ndebele, in a sense, wasn't a Westphalian state.

It didn't have clear boundaries, et cetera, and the concession was to, of course, to both exploit or to rather prospect for minerals and to establish a settlement, et cetera. So the effect of that was that that's where the concentration of the interests of Rhodes at the time was. And it was like that untrammeled for three years until the conflict was materialized between the settlers of Michonland and the

King and his impis or his warriors of about 20,000 on the western side of what is now Zimbabwe. So the minerals, the El Dorado, the myths of fear, these were sort of well thought and widely presented concepts in the sort of romantic literature of the times. But it didn't prove to be a second Rand, a la the Fitzportus Rond in South Africa, with the kind of gold nuggets falling from the trees as if gooseberries, as it were.

of gold nuggets falling from the trees as if gooseberries as it were and this meant that you know the initial expectations and hopes were dashed and the country had to survive it happened to be cut off at the time of the initial establishment in september 1890 for three or four months by an absolutely torrential set of downpours that cut the wagon trails and people were succumbing to black fever and malaria and a number of other maladies. The settlers and the turning towards agriculture and land as an agrarian economy was built up initially and subsequently investment came in for mining. But it was not the old style mining of the ancients that had been there sort of 1500 years before. That were rather shallow mines and surface and alluvial mining.

But it was a full on mining enterprise. It wasn't restricted to gold. It went into a range of minerals, chrome and other ultimately. What did Rhodes think of these African societies that he was encountering? Initially, I would have thought he, in my mind, and from what I read in all his speeches and the literature, he was clear that, from his point of view, the British were the best medicine, if you like, for Africa's feudalism, recidivism. And he was definitely opposed to the behavioral characteristics and predation of the Ndebele that would slave Shona and the Levanika across the river in what other Zambezi. in what other Zambezi, but his intention was to have one type of society with a basically meritocratic system.

There were ideas for qualifications to vote, and they were clearly not in the likelihood to be met by very many of the elements in the native societies that were around at the time. But they did keep that for quite some years, and that became a point of contention in the late 60s, ultimately, when there were matters arising about federation and independence for Rhodesia or not between London and Salisbury. independence for Rhodesia or not between London and Salisbury.

But his mind was that, you know, basically the local or top-down societies would have to be brought on progressively over time, and this is in effect on the economics of it is what happened. Precipitating the Boer War, is that his fault? And was that a disaster that also tarnishes his legacy? Simple answer is no. That is a claim made in several biographies. Don't forget that he had to resign as Premier of the Cape Colony in 1896,

immediately in the beginning of 1896 after the failure of the Jameson Raid. The Boer War, I think if you look at it, all the stuff i've read and um everything clear to me is it was a confrontation between effectively london and pretoria and between the afrikaners the boer as they were called and known and kruger on the one hand and milner in the south um as premier of the cape and others in that domain. So to many today on the streets with Roads Must Fall, and Roads represents imperialism, racism, exclusion of native peoples from their own sovereignty,

running themselves, some sovereignty in the parts of Africa in which he operated. What should, do you think, how should we remember him? What should his legacy be today? I do address that in the parts of Africa in which he operated. What should, do you think, how should we remember him? What should his legacy be today? I do address that in the book. I deal a lot with a lot of the comments and critics made, both the old historical ones and biographies going back even before his time ended and subsequently to now in the modern era.

And his intention was to have basically a self-governing colony or country. As it turned out, there were provisions made under the arrangements for the protection of native interests, for the continuity of customary law in certain domains and not in others, obviously. Those would fall under the juridical realities of the central state that was set up. Well, thank you very much. The book is called? It's called Rhodes' Ghost, The Conquest of Zambezia.

And I put that subtitle in, Dan, because the book is about all the different forces that came into play from the origin of the sand, the Khoi and the sand people of the very tens of thousands of years ago who were pushed out of the Heifelt and the Zambezi area by incomers from the north. And ultimately, there were several of these lords of the savannah that came and went in different kind of mini empires over time.

And if you look at the long arc of history, my point is that the Rhodes and Rhodesian era was another one, but it fell as well. It went to its demise and it was in effect brought to an end by civil war, ended in 1980, and now the new regime has taken over, or did take over then, and you have a second republic in place today.

So it looks at a long span of history and tries to situate it in that context as well. Well, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review.

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