It is impossible to speak of South Africa without
awarding to Cecil Rhodes the tribute which unquestionably is due to his
strong personality. Without him it is possible that the vast territory which
became so thoroughly associated with his name and with his life would still
be without political importance. Without him it is probable that both the
Diamond Fields to which Kimberley owes its prosperity and the Gold Fields
which have won for the Transvaal its renown would never have risen above the
importance of those of Brazil or California or Klondyke.
It was Rhodes who first conceived the thought of
turning all these riches into a political instrument and of using it to the
advantage of his country—the England to which he remained so profoundly
attached amid all the vicissitudes of his life, and to whose possessions he
was so eager to add.
Cecil Rhodes was ambitious in a grand, strange manner
which made a complete abstraction of his own personality under certain
conditions, but which in other circumstances made him violent, brutal in
manner, thereby procuring enemies without number and detractors without end.
His nature was something akin to that of the Roman Emperors in its
insensate desire to exercise unchallenged an unlimited power. Impatient of
restraint, no matter in what shape it presented itself, he brooked no
resistance to his schemes; his rage against contradiction, and his
opposition to any independence of thought or action on the part of those who
were around him, brought about a result of which he would have been the
first to complain, had he suspected it—that of allowing him to execute all
his fancies and of giving way to all his resentments. Herein lies the reason
why so many of his schemes fell through. This unfortunate trait also thrust
him very often into the hands of those who were clever enough to exploit it,
and who, more often than proved good to Rhodes' renown, suggested to him
their own schemes and encouraged him to appropriate them as his own. He had
a very quick way of catching hold of any suggestions that tallied with his
sympathies or echoed any of his secret thoughts or aspirations.
Yet withal Rhodes was a great soul, and had he only
been left to himself, or made longer sojourns in England, had he understood
English political life more clearly, had he had to grapple with the
difficulties which confront public existence in his Mother Country, he would
most certainly have done far greater things. He found matters far too easy
for him at first, and the obstacles which he encountered very often proved
either of a trivial or else of a removable nature—by fair means or methods
less commendable. A mining camp is not a school of morality, and just as
diamonds lose of their value in the estimation of those who continually
handle them, as is the case in Kimberley, so integrity and honour come to be
looked upon from a peculiar point of view according to the code of the
majority.
Then again, it must not be forgotten that the first
opponents of Cecil Rhodes were black men, of whom the European always has
the conception that they are not his equals. It is likely that if, instead
of Lobengula, he had found before him a European chief or monarch, Rhodes
would have acted differently than history credits him to have done toward
the dusky sovereign. It is impossible to judge of facts of which one has had
no occasion to watch the developments, or which have taken place in lands
where one has never been. Neither Fernando Cortez in Mexico nor Pizzaro
Gonzalo in Peru proved themselves merciful toward the populations whose
territory they conquered. The tragedy which sealed the fate of Matabeleland
was neither a darker nor a more terrible one than those of which history
speaks when relating to us the circumstances attending the discovery of
America. Such events must be judged objectively and forgiven accordingly.
When forming an opinion on the doings and achievements of Cecil Rhodes one
must make allowance for all the temptations which were thrown in his way and
remember that he was a man who, if ambitious, was not so in a personal
sense, but in a large, lofty manner, and who, whilst appropriating to
himself the good things which he thought he could grasp, was also eager to
make others share the profit of his success.
Cecil Rhodes, in all save name, was monarch over a
continent almost as vast as his own fancy and imagination. He was always
dreaming, always lost in thoughts which were wandering far beyond his actual
surroundings, carrying him into regions where the common spirit of mankind
seldom travelled. He was born for far better things than those which he
ultimately attained, but he did not belong to the century in which he lived;
his ruthless passions of anger and arrogance were more fitted for an earlier
and cruder era. Had he possessed any disinterested friends capable of
rousing the better qualities that slumbered beneath his apparent cynicism
and unscrupulousness, most undoubtedly he would have become the most
remarkable individual in his generation. Unfortunately, he found himself
surrounded by creatures absolutely inferior to himself, whose deficiencies
he was the first to notice, whom he despised either for their insignificance
or for their mental and moral failings, but to whose influence he
nevertheless succumbed.
When Cecil Rhodes arrived at Kimberley he was a mere
youth. He had come to South Africa in quest of health and because he had a
brother already settled there, Herbert Rhodes, who was later on to meet with
a terrible fate. Cecil, if one is to believe what one hears from those who
knew him at the time, was a shy youth, of a retiring disposition, whom no
one could ever have suspected would develop into the hardy, strong man he became in time. He was constantly sick, and more than once was on the point
of falling a victim of the dreaded fever which prevails all over South
Africa and then was far more virulent in its nature than it is to-day.
Kimberley at that time was still a vast solitude, with here and there a few
scattered huts of corrugated iron occupied by the handful of colonists.
Water was rare: it is related, indeed, that the only way to get a wash was
to use soda water.
The beginning of Rhodes' fortune, if we are to believe
what we are told, was an ice machine which he started in partnership with
another settler. The produce they sold to their companions at an exorbitant
price, but not for long; whereafter the enterprising young man proceeded to
buy some plots of ground, of whose prolificacy in diamonds he had good
reason to be aware. It must be here remarked that Rhodes was never a poor
man; he could indulge in experiments as to his manner of investing his
capital. And he was not slow to take advantage of this circumstance.
Kimberley was a wild place at that time, and its distance from the civilised
world, as well as the fact that nothing was controlled by public opinion,
helped some to amass vast fortunes and put the weaker into the absolute
power of the most unscrupulous. It is to the honour of Rhodes that, however
he might have been tempted, he never listened to the advice which was given
to him to do what the others did, and to despoil the men whose property he
might have desired to acquire. He never gave way to the excesses of his
daily companions, nor accepted their methods of enriching themselves at top
speed so as soon to be able to return home with their gains.
From the first moment that he set foot on African soil
Rhodes succumbed to the strange charm the country offers for thinkers and
dreamers. His naturally languid temperament found a source of untold
satisfaction in watching the Southern Cross rise over the vast veldt where
scarcely man's foot had trod, where the immensity of its space was equalled
by its sublime, quiet grandeur. He liked to spend the night in the open air,
gazing at the innumerable stars and listening to the voice of the desert, so
full of attractions for those who have grown to discern somewhat of Nature's
hidden joys and sorrows. South Africa became for him a second Motherland,
and one which seemed to him to be more hospitable to his temperament than
the land of his birth. In South Africa he felt he could find more
satisfaction and more enjoyment than in England, whose conventionalities did
not appeal to his rebellious, unsophisticated heart. He liked to roam about
in an old coat and wideawake hat; to forget that civilisation existed; to
banish from his mind all memory of cities where man must bow down to Mrs.
Grundy and may not defy, unscathed, certain well-defined prejudices.
Yet Cecil Rhodes neither cared for convention nor
custom. His motto was to do what he liked and not to trouble about the
judgments of the crowd. He never, however, lived up to this last part of his
profession because, as I have shown already, he was keenly sensitive to
praise and to blame, and hurt to the heart whenever he thought himself
misjudged or condemned. Most of his mistakes proceeded from this
over-sensitiveness which, in a certain sense, hardened him, inasmuch as it
made him vindictive against those from whom he did not get the approval for
which he yearned. In common with many another, too, Cecil Rhodes had that
turn of mind which harbours resentment against anyone who has scored a point
against its possessor. After the Jameson Raid Rhodes never forgave Mr.
Schreiner for having found out his deceit, and tried to be revenged.
Cecil Rhodes had little sympathy with other people's
woes unless these found an echo in his own, and the callousness which he so
often displayed was not entirely the affectation it was thought by his
friends or even by his enemies. Great in so many things, there were
circumstances when he could show himself unutterably small, and he seldom
practised consistency. Frank by nature, he was an adept at dissimulation
when he thought that his personal interest required it. But he could "face
the music," however discordant, and, unfortunately for him as well as for
his memory, it was often so.
The means by which Cecil Rhodes contrived to acquire so
unique a position in South Africa would require volumes to relate. Wealth
alone could not have done so, nor could it have assured for him the
popularity which he gained, not only among the European colonists, but also
among the coloured people, notwithstanding the ruthlessness which he
displayed in regard to them. There were millionaires far richer than himself
in Kimberley and in Johannesburg. Alfred Beit, to mention only one, could
dispose of a much larger capital than Rhodes ever possessed, but this did
not give him an influence that could be compared with that of his friend,
and not even the Life Governorship of De Beers procured for him any other
fame than that of being a fabulously rich man. Barney Barnato and Joel were
also familiar figures in the circle of wealthy speculators who lived under
the shade of Table Mountain; but none among these men, some of whom were
also remarkable in their way, could effect a tenth or even a millionth part
of what Rhodes succeeded in performing. His was the moving spirit, without
whom these men could never have conceived, far less done, all that they did.
It was the magic of Rhodes' name which created that formidable organisation
called the De Beers Company; which annexed to the British Empire the vast
territory known now by the name of Rhodesia; and which attracted to the gold
fields of Johannesburg all those whom they were to enrich or to ruin.
Without the association and glamour of Rhodes' name, too, this area could
never have acquired the political importance it possessed in the few years
which preceded, and covered, the Boer War. Rhodes' was the mind which, after
bringing about the famous Amalgamation of the diamond mines around
Kimberley, then conceived the idea of turning a private company into a
political instrument of a power which would control public opinion and
public life all over South Africa more effectually even than the Government.
This organisation had its own agents and spies and kept up a wide system of
secret service. Under the pretext of looking out for diamond thieves, these
emissaries in reality made it their duty to report on the private opinions
and doings of those whose personality inspired distrust or apprehension.
This organisation was more a dictatorship than anything
else, and had about it something at once genial and Mephistophelian. The
conquest of Rhodesia was nothing in comparison with the power attained by
this combine, which arrogated to itself almost unchallenged the right to
domineer over every white man and to subdue every coloured one in the whole
of the vast South African Continent. Rhodesia, indeed, was only rendered
possible through the power wielded in Cape Colony to bring the great
Northward adventure to a successfully definite issue.
In referring to Rhodesia, I am reminded of a curious
fact which, so far as I am aware, has never been mentioned in any of the
biographies of Mr. Rhodes, but which, on the contrary, has been carefully
concealed from the public knowledge by his admirers and his satellites. The
concession awarded by King Lobengula to Rhodes and to the few men who
together with him took it upon themselves to add this piece of territory to
the British Empire had, in reality, already been given by the dusky
monarch—long before the ambitions of De Beers had taken that direction—to a
Mr. Sonnenberg, a German Jew who had very quickly amassed a considerable
fortune in various speculations. This Mr. Sonnenberg—who was subsequently to
represent the Dutch party in the Cape Parliament, and who became one of the
foremost members of the Afrikander Bond—during one of his journeys into the
interior of the country from Basutoland, where he resided for some time, had
taken the opportunity of a visit to Matabeleland to obtain a concession from
the famous Lobengula. This covered the same ground and advantages which,
later, were granted to Mr. Rhodes and his business associates.
Owing in some measure to negligence and partly through
the impossibility of raising the enormous capital necessary to make anything
profitable out of the concession, Mr. Sonnenberg had put the document into
his drawer without troubling any more about it. Subsequently, when
Matabeleland came into possession of the Chartered Company, Mr. Sonnenberg
ventured to speak mildly of his own concession, and the matter was mentioned
to Mr. Rhodes. The latter's reply was typical: "Tell the ― fool that if he
was fool enough to lose this chance of making money he ought to take the
consequences of it." And Mr. Sonnenberg had to content himself with this
reply. Being a wise man in his generation he was clever enough to ignore the
incident, and, realising the principle that might is stronger than right,
he never again attempted to dispute the title of Cecil John Rhodes to the
conquest which he had made, and, as I believe, pushed prudence to the extent
of consigning his own concession to the flames. He knew but too well what
his future prosperity would have been worth had he remembered the document.
