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Since @NigelBiggar is once more rallying to the defense of Cecil Rhodes' statue in Oxford, and @DanielJHannan presumably is not far behind, it might be worth taking a closer look at who Rhodes actually was... /1
Rhodes’ modern-day supporters insist that he was a great man whose memory should be honoured, and that removing his statue would be tantamount to the erasure of history. Rhodes was furthermore no racist, we are told. /2
Yet such a claim is difficult to reconcile with his deep commitment to white supremacy and lifelong dream of Anglo-Saxon world domination. ‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world’, he famously wrote in his ‘Confession of Faith’ while at Oxford: /3
‘and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at the present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…’ /4
This was no youthful folly, as has been claimed, but a guiding principle in Rhodes’ racist creed and one that he reasserted time and again throughout his life. /5
In a 1894-speech before the Cape House Parliament, he stated that ‘if the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall be thankful that we have the natives in their proper place’. /6
Having built a personal fortune in South Africa’s diamond mines, Rhodes set up a private company to extend British control into Matabeleland, which was annexed after a brief but brutal war. /7
The Maxim machine gun was here deployed for the first time and proved so deadly that its inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim, used eyewitness accounts as advertisement: ‘We could see hundreds of niggers mowed down like wheat before a scythe.’ /8
When the Ndebele and Shona people later rebelled against Rhodes’ company in 1896, he waged a merciless war against the entire population, using dynamite from his mines to blow up caves where local civilians had taken refuge. /9
One of his men described how ‘the women and children came out, and awful sights they were. The cave was evidently a small one and they had been thrown against the rocks and were all covered with blood and the dynamite had skinned them or burned the skin off their bodies.’ /10
The indiscriminate violence unleashed by Rhodes’ forces was not so far from that which the Germans resorted to less than a decade later during the first genocide of the 20th century in present-day Namibia. /11
Even during his own lifetime, Rhodes was a highly controversial figure, and he was obsessed about securing his own legacy, which is precisely why he donated so generously to places like Oxford and established the Rhodes Scholarship. /12
When people today rally to the defense of his statue, they are accordingly doing exactly what Rhodes intended: celebrating him for his philanthropic work, while ignoring his record of racism, brutality and exploitation.
The end... /13
The end... /13
