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Rhodes redux?
“Iam sure that Cecil John Rhodes would have given his approval to this effort to make the South African economy of the early Twentyfirst Century appropriate and fit for its time,” said Nelson Mandela in August 2003, during a talk to business and social elites at Rhodes House in Cape Town.1 Is this chilling historical comparison apt? We do have much to learn about today’s conditions if we revisit late Nineteenth Century Africa, in part because no other buccaneer did as much damage to the possibilities for peace and equitable development as Cecil Rhodes. First a diamond merchant, then a financier and politician (governor of the Cape Colony during the 1880s to 1990s), Rhodes received permission from Queen Victoria to plunder what are now called Gauteng Province (greater Johannesburg) after gold was discovered in 1886, and then Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi; his ambition was to paint the map British imperial red, stretching along the route from the Cape to Cairo.
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