The founder : Cecil Rhodes and the pursuit of power

855 Pages·1988·21.951 MB·English

by  Rotberg, Robert I.

THE FOUNDER
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T HE F O U N D ER
Cecil Rhodes
and the
Pursuit of Power
ROBERT I. ROTBERG
WITH TH E COLLABORATIO N O F
MILES F. SHORE
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1988
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1988 by Robert I. Rotberg
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rotberg, Robert I.
The founder: Cecil Rhodes and the pursuit of power / Robert I. Rotberg.
p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-504968-3
1. Rhodes, Cecil, 1853-1902. 2. Statesmen—Africa, Southern—Biography.
3. Capitalists and financiers—Africa, Southern—Biography.
I. Title.
DT776.R4R66 1988
968.04'og2'4—dc19 88-5960 CIP
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For
my parents
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"The Grandest Opportunities'
A Preface
THE AGENDA WAS defined a decade ago: "A biography [of Rhodes] ade-
quate for historians of Africa or of imperialism and a biography in its
own right has yet to be written." A wise critic, Jeffrey Butler desired a study
which would bring together "Rhodes the businessman and Rhodes the politi-
cian, Rhodes the creator and ruler of Rhodesia and Rhodes the Cape politi-
cian; Rhodes the South African and Rhodes the actor in English politics and
money markets; and perhaps above all, Rhodes the formulator of 'native pol-
icy.' " The major unfinished business for biographers, he suggested, lay in
producing a portrait that was "psychologically convincing," giving appropriate
weight "to the favorable and unfavorable aspects of his personality and con-
duct." Cornelis W. de Kiewiet, who masterfully synthesized the history of South
Africa, had earlier written that Rhodes was "not one man, but several men
who blended their dissimilar and incongruous traits into a firm and successful
union. The biographer [had not appeared who could] do justice to the con-
tradictions of the loftiness to which he could rise and the baseness to which
he could stoop." Why and how Rhodes proved so creative and effective in all
his multifarious pursuits are key questions, and the driving ones of this new
biography.1
Rudyard Kipling warned, however, that "Rhodes's personality would be
a very difficult thing to translate to a man who did not know him well. . . ."
That may be why Anthony Sampson, one of the ablest of recent writers, be-
lieves that "the character of Rhodes—with his combination of shrewdness and
adolescence, romanticism and ruthlessness, imagination and vulgarity—has
eluded all his biographers." For the same reason Geoffrey Wheatcroft, con-
cluding his study of Th e Randlords, felt that "a satisfactory life of Rhodes is
still to seek." For him, and doubtless for many others, "the looming gap be-
tween [Rhodes'] deeds and his unfathomable personality remains."2
viii / PREFACE
Part of the problem is that Rhodes wrote no revealing letters to his loved
ones. If his own speeches were the only guide, he would emerge omniscient
and prescient, with the rough edges sanded round and smooth. He copied
favorite sayings from classical authorities, but a man—particularly Rhodes—is
more than the sum of appealing aphorisms. His commonplace books and jot-
ting notebooks help a little, but nowhere are there recorded intimacies. Ne-
ville Pickering, in whom Rhodes may have confided, died young and inexpe-
rienced. Sir Leander Starr Jameson and Sir Charles Metcalfe lived on after
Rhodes and were talkative, but they loyally "protected" Rhodes' memory. Like
so many of Rhodes' less central contemporaries, Jameson and Metcalfe helped
embroider a past that had been reworked systematically by Rhodes himself.
Rhodes' psyche is not the sole puzzle, however, for after many years of
thinking about, researching, and preparing to write a long-planned interpre-
tive biography of the Founder, I realized that Rhodes' was unlike any of the
lives I had earlier examined or written about. In half or two-thirds of a nor-
mal lifetime, Rhodes had accomplished far more than most of the empire
builders, corporate tycoons, and political giants of the nineteenth century. He
had made a fortune, carved out countries, and governed an old colony and
two new ones. He was not merely an important overseas figure in the heady
last decades of Victorian aggrandizement, but a major actor in Europe as well.
It is no accident that his name lives on through the gift of his scholarships.
Nor is it surprising thai: his memory still occasions bitter controversy. Rhodes
was great and good, despite his flaws, say his supporters (as they did in his
lifetime). Rhodes was despicable and exceptionally evil—a true rogue—say his
detractors. (One of the last, more muddleheaded than most, many years ago
even argued that writing a biography of Rhodes was wrong. We should not
write about bad men!)
Was Rhodes essentially good? Was he a true benefactor who, despite de-
fects of method, not only meant well but also contributed—as he intended—
to the betterment of mankind in Africa? Or, as critics have suggested, was he
predominantly a devious power-monger who wanted riches and glory for
himself, and deliberately destroyed other individuals, other cultures, and more
promising initiatives as he cut his wide way through Africa? Choosing be-
tween or reconciling these two views, put only mildly here, is what a biogra-
phy of Rhodes ultimately should be about. But to compile a balance sheet,
and to draw an overall conclusion, turns out to have been too simple a charge.
What I discovered, and what the reader will also discover, is that Rhodes
cannot be encompassed or revealed in one dimension. Rhodes achieved as
much as he did because his energy and vision were greater than those of his
contemporaries. He was involved on a daily basis in more initiatives, more
schemes, and more dreams than most of us can juggle (or even encompass)
in weeks, if not months. His pursuits were myriad, interactive, tangled, little
recorded, and of a high and important order. In a word which cannot fully
convey the sense of what Rhodes did and thought, his life was complex. He
thought about many endeavors simultaneously, and carried within himself and
PREFACE I ix
in his head at all times the germs and the details of projects small and large
which were by turns practical and improbable, ideal and sordid, and generous
and ruthless. It is less that Rhodes' personality was enigmatic than that it was
magnificently multifaceted. He was larger than life, and the favor and enmity
that his name still evokes are appropriate responses.
For all those reasons, it became clear that the Founder required a wholly
new, complete biography which would incorporate a detailed examination of
Rhodes' personality. In order to comprehend Rhodes, everything that he
touched, influenced, meddled with, created, and destroyed had to be under-
stood. A new biography had to examine his philosophy, his life style, his sex-
ual preferences, his relations with others, and his compassion or lack of com-
passion. It had to measure his impact on his age, on the country of his birth
and on his several adopted countries, and on such epochal events as the con-
solidation of diamond mining, the extraction of gold, the start of the Anglo-
Boer War, and, implicitly, today's bitterly divided South Africa. It had to ar-
ticulate why a man of crowned glory involved himself so unnecessarily in an
exercise as destructive and treacherous as the Jameson Raid. Why did the
same man who went unprotected into the Matopos mountains to make peace
with the warring Ndebele also behave with callous contempt toward the polit-
ical rights of Africans in the Cape Colony? Jane Waterston, a missionary doc-
tor, prayed that he might be "delivered from being one of those to whom the
grandest opportunities have been given by Providence & who flung them away."
She believed that he could have success "in every right way"—that he could
be the conqueror of Rhodesia as well as "the great chief that ruled the many
thousands of natives wisely & well."3 Since Rhodes himself always believed
that he could be the man whom Waterston wanted, indeed that he wa s that
man, where, if anywhere, did he go wrong?
It is impossible to understand who and what Rhodes was without an ex-
ploration of the motivations of his life as they interacted with the events in
which he was so engaged. Historical scholarship had to be joined with psycho-
logical theory and clinical experience to provide a rounded picture of a figure
as multihued as Rhodes. The Founder thus reflects an intensive, long-term as-
sociation between the principal author, a historian and political analyst of Af-
rica, and his collaborator, a professor of psychiatry, practicing psychoanalytic
clinician, and public administrator. I wrote the biography and am responsible
for most of the prose as well as the historical, political, and economic research
on which it draws. Shore, following upon his own research on Rhodes, lead-
ership, and organizations, is primarily responsible for the biography's psycho-
logical insights, for focusing this book's conception of Rhodes' character and
his psychological development, and for much of the medical interpretation.
He joined with me in improving succeeding versions of the text. The blending
of two disciplines, two approaches to data, and two different styles of work,
enhanced what has become The Founder.
Biography is explanation and appreciation. Biography should also place
the subject in his own era and focus him in the richest possible historical