Rhodes, even while he was preoccupied with his machinations to control the diamond industry, was furious at being pre-empted in 1887, though the sham document was repudiated by Lobengula and never gained wide acceptance.
Always working on more than one facet of his grand scheme at any one time, he began laying the plans for his future expansion into Lobengula’s domain. In August 1888 he sent six emissaries from Kimberley in ox carts heavily laden with gold and gifts for the king. Travelling for weeks across the plains, they arrived in Gubulawayo and sought an audience with the king.
They persuaded him to affix his seal to a document titled the Rudd Concession, whereby Lobengula was to receive many gifts including one hundred breech-loading rifles and shot and an armed steamboat, to be delivered by sailing it up the Zambezi River. Lobengula in turn granted to Rhodes and his cronies “the complete and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals situated and contained in my kingdoms, principalities and domains, together with the power to do all the things that they deem necessary to win and procure the same . . . And whereas I have been much molested of late by divers persons seeking and desiring to obtain grants and concessions of land and mining rights in my territories, I do hereby authorize the said grantees . . . to take all necessary and lawful steps to exclude from my kingdom all persons seeking land, metals, minerals or mining rights therein.”
It is unlikely that Lobengula, a shrewd and calculating ruler who maintained his pre-eminent position by manipulating and terrifying others, was given an accurate translation of the document. He later claimed that he was told the concession provided for a maximum of ten miners to operate within his kingdom at any one time. Nevertheless, as soon as the document was signed, Rhodes’s emissaries rushed south to make it public and Rhodes himself quickly boarded a ship to London on a related mission.
Rhodes wanted to secure a British government monopoly for a company to exploit the fantastic mineral resources he imagined lay within Lobengula’s kingdom. He had created a new company and called it the Rudd Concession Syndicate, whose sole asset was the dubious concession itself, and approached the British Colonial Office to obtain a charter for a company to expand telegraph and railroad lines, establish banks and exploit mineral resources in the territory. With its own capital, the syndicate would not only stimulate the commercial development of the territory but forestall other European advancement. Rhodes began the behind-the-scenes work necessary for the founding of the British South Africa Company, which would eventually raise its own police force, rule everyone within the territory and make treaties with neighbouring peoples from the Limpopo River to the Great Lakes region. He set to work talking, using his considerable charm, political acumen, money and connections to overcome the diplomatic hurdles to such an audacious request.
No accurate records exist detailing how he managed to convince so many high-placed government officials to back his plan, but Rhodes observed cynically on more than one occasion that “every man has his price.” The charismatic force of his personality and his visionary conviction probably won over just as many adversaries as his chequebook; he persuaded them that his cause was their cause, that it was all for the good of the empire and the nation.
Rhodes also used other tactics that were more subtle, such as appointments to the board of directors, selling shares at a discount to influential people and donating money to cherished political causes. A monopoly company with a government charter would not only benefit the downtrodden African people, he argued, it would advance British interests in central Africa against the encroachment of other European powers. Best of all, it would be done at no cost to the government. Soon, influential people had bought into his scheme; opposition melted as he widened the circle of those who would benefit from the company’s monopoly charter. The territory “is rich,” declared the London Times, “fabulously rich, we are told, in precious metals and half a dozen others besides, as well as being only in need of scratching to smile with corn and all kinds of agricultural wealth.” Through the shifting of shares in various holding companies before the British South Africa Company was opened up to public investment, Rhodes and his principal backers also secured a hefty profit.
The company’s charter gave it “all powers necessary for the purpose of government . . . the right to establish banking and other companies and associations; to make and maintain railways, telegraphs and lines of steamships; to carry on mining operations and license mining companies; to settle, cultivate and improve the lands; to preserve peace and order . . . and for that object obtain a force of police and have its own flag.” It was also mandated to eliminate the slave trade and restrict the sale of spirits. All the powers normally vested in a crown colony were given to the company for an initial period of twenty-five years. The board was to have seventeen directors, but Rhodes from the very start was a virtual dictator; the directors rubber-stamped his decisions, which often had been made without even consulting them.
The full value of Rhodes’s new chartered company could not be realized, however, until Lobengula gave up his obstinate insistence on preserving his authority. The company’s charter was based on the questionable legality of its fraudulently obtained concession and Rhodes’s promises to engage in noble activities such as freeing the African people from the cruel despotism of Lobengula and other kings. The flimsy concession upon which the charter was based would never survive careful scrutiny. Since war with the Matabele was inevitable, Rhodes reasoned, the sooner the better. By December 1889 he had issued orders to “break the power of the Matebele” and depose Lobengula, and he hired a young military officer, Frank Johnson, to lead the secret expedition. The plot was uncovered, however, when someone reported it to colonial authorities, but Rhodes of course denied all knowledge of and responsibility for the affair. A different plan was soon hatched, again with Johnson as its leader. Hundreds of “good fighting men” enlisted.
Known as “Rhodes’s angels,” they were drawn “as far as possible from the sons of the leading families in each district of the Cape.” Rhodes’s backup plan was that if his men got into trouble and were “surrounded and cut off,” their families would demand their rescue. “And who shall rescue you, do you think?” he asked Johnson. “I will tell you—the Imperial Factor . . . And who do you think will bring pressure to bear on the Imperial Factor and stir them to save you? The Influential fathers of your young men!”
In the summer of 1890 a heavily armed advance force of nearly two hundred, followed by five hundred officers and men of Rhodes’s British South Africa Police and over a thousand other troops, mostly black Africans, set off for the north. The column marched around the edge of Lobengula’s territory, hoping to provoke him. Meanwhile Rhodes was busy with his duties as prime minister of Cape Colony. In his book Rhodes: The Race for Africa, Antony Thomas remarks, “It must surely have occurred to someone to question how Mr. Rhodes, the prime minister, could possibly deal with matters affecting Mr. Rhodes, the diamond monopolist, or enter into contracts with Mr. Rhodes, the Chairman of Gold Fields, or Mr. Rhodes, the railway contractor, or Mr. Rhodes of the Chartered Company.” Yet there were no objections at the time to these enormous, obvious and blatant conflicts of interest.
The British South Africa Company troops, along with miners and settlers, wound their way into Lobengula’s territory, building forts along the route and marking land for future colonization. Trade and mining were perhaps negotiable, but Lobengula had never agreed to colonization. The troops did not directly attack Lobengula; that would have been illegal. So they remained on the fringe of his kingdom, in a territory known as Mashonaland that was dominated by Lobengula but not directly under his control, and began scouring the land for evidence of mineral wealth. After one year of searching, they had not uncovered any of its much-lauded mineral resources. One report by a British mining expert was non-committal: “It cannot be denied that the high hopes which were entertained . . . as to the great mineral or agricultural wealth of Mashonaland have not been justified or
nearly justified . . . Mashonaland so far as is known, and much is known, is neither an Arcadia nor an El Dorado.”
Disgruntled, the miners and prospectors turned to land speculation and farming. Rhodes’s settlers advanced on Mashonaland’s villages and demanded at gunpoint that the people provide unpaid labour for their farms. The indigenous people were killed, their cattle were stolen and their villages torched.
Vigilante justice prevailed. In October 1891 Rhodes travelled north and entered “his” country for the first time, a territory now being called Rhodesia by the settlers. He had already begun a telegraph line into the region, and by the end of 1891 it was almost completed. Rhodes visited his new capital, Salisbury, a ramshackle cluster of rudimentary houses and stores near the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the evidence of an ancient empire that was protected by great granite walls and supported by legendary gold mines. Rhodes credited the ancient ruins to the ancient Phoenicians rather than to the local Shona people.
Undoubtedly, admitting that the structure had been built by local peoples would have undermined his conviction that they were in need of civilization.
The gold of ancient Great Zimbabwe proved elusive, however, and soon the settlers of the shabby little outpost were eyeing the territory closer to Lobengula’s fort—perhaps the gold and diamonds were there. But Rhodes was faced with the same problem that had stalled his advance earlier: declaring war and invading Matabeleland was illegal and would endanger the company’s charter. The company had spent a great deal, including money it had borrowed from De Beers Consolidated and Consolidated Gold Fields, but it had not yet discovered anything of value to justify either its initial investment or the ongoing expense of maintaining the expeditionary force. And the labour problems for Rhodes’s settlers persisted because of Lobengula’s raiding forays against the Shona. The Shona were afraid to work, even when their villages were threatened, for fear of Matabele reprisal. How could company settlers improve the land without cheap and plentiful labour? The relations between them were becoming more strained, and violence was more common. Something had to be done, but the British South Africa Company would remain stalled in its advance so long as Lobengula united the Matabele.
Perhaps sensing this drift in Rhodes’s strategy, Lobengula consistently refused to be provoked into an outright attack.
He resisted the urgings of his warriors to retaliate even when he was publicly insulted. Around this time, Rhodes received a missive from one of his agents suggesting a way of solving the problem: “Rhodes might consider the advisability of completing the thing . . . We have the excuse for a row over murdered women and children now and the getting of Matabeleland open would give us a tremendous lift in shares and everything else.”
The company would use a perhaps fictional raid on women and children by a band of Lobengula’s warriors as an excuse to invade his territory. So the company army advanced, a ragged band of irregulars, prospectors and prospective settlers who would be guaranteed their pay in the form of loot from the sacking of Lobengula’s stronghold. Half of the plunder would go to the company, while the remaining half was to be divided among the officers and men, according to their rank. Lobengula reputedly had a vast trove of gold, guns and diamonds, as well as over 300,000 head of cattle. Rhodes also promised land to the company’s army.
Rhodes’s propaganda campaign for this major offensive included the use of his own newspapers in the Cape Colony, particularly the Cape Argus, to spread false rumours of Matabele warriors massing for an attack on the English settlers, in defiance of the Rudd Concession. One of Rhodes’s long-time lieutenants, Leander Jameson, readied 1,400 men in October and, using rumours of the Matabele attacks on white settlers as his justification, marched on Gubulawayo. When the two forces converged, the 5 ,000 Matabele warriors were devastated by the modern cannons and machine guns. Over 3,000 Matabele perished in this short battle while only a handful of company men died. Jameson then marched on Lobengula’s now-burning capital and planted the company flag in the smouldering ruins.
Rhodes, who had been standing by, entered Gubulawayo soon after the battle to celebrate his victory. As the prime minister of Cape Colony he was far to the north of any territories that he officially governed, but as the managing director of the British South Africa Company he was right in the heart of his new, ill-gotten domain. He proceeded to build himself a house on top of the ruined foundations of Lobengula’s royal compound and then spent several days overseeing the staking out of the business district for the new capital, which was to be called “the new township of Bulawayo.”
Faced with public criticism and attempts by a small contingent of British troops to halt the settler army’s plundering and pillaging of Lobengula’s realm, Rhodes immediately launched another press campaign. This one warned Great Britain not to interfere in the company’s activities, lest it have to face “a new Republic, which would cause more blood . . . than the whole Matabele nation is worth.” On July 18, 1894 , Britain acknowledged the British South Africa Company’s jurisdiction over the newly conquered territory. The founding of Rhodesia was complete, and the company’s stock skyrocketed to eight times the value it had before the battle. Rhodes, now a hero to the savage band of Rhodesian “pioneers” as well as to the company’s shareholders, exulted that the company “possessed a very large piece of the world . . . everything within it and everything upon it except the air.” He and the company had dispossessed the Matabele from their lands and succeeded in reducing them to an industrial and agricultural proletariat. Together they ruled a land comprising more than a million square kilometres. And they had convinced themselves that their aggression had been carried out in the name of progress.
6
AS THE PRIME MINISTER OF CAPE COLONY AND “CHAIR-MAN” of Rhodesia, Cecil Rhodes had achieved the pinnacle of power, authority and respect. In the Cape Colony he continued to manage his commercial interests and to work towards bridging the widening gap between the Cape’s Boer and English colonists. Stability would not only be good for business, it would be absolutely necessary for the company to fully exploit Rhodesia. In order to advance this agenda, Rhodes needed the support of both Boer and English parliamentarians and made some odious concessions to secure that support. In Parliament, he made many deals with the Boers to secure his business interests, such as railroads where he wanted them, particularly railroads heading north into Rhodesia. He also stilled opposition to De Beers’s abusive treatment of workers and deferred plans for a tax on diamonds. In exchange, he supported laws and regulations that discriminated against black Africans and that were advocated by the Boers. Antony Thomas writes that there were “two important considerations that moved Rhodes towards a racist position—a politician’s need for votes and an industrialist’s need for a controlled labour force.”
A third consideration was Rhodes’s belief in the need for a common “native” policy among all the republics. In the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, black Africans had no voting rights, and Rhodes supported the proposals to limit the black vote in the Cape Colony as well. He began by implementing policies that denied the vote to those who owned land communally, a move that gained him political favour with many of his Boer constituents. “We have to govern the natives as a subject race,” he announced. “By the last census [perhaps around 1890] there are 1,250,000 natives in the Colony and 250,000 Europeans. Under the present franchise, if they were to exercise it, the natives would have a majority of votes.” He went on: “Treat the natives as a subject people as long as they continue in a state of barbarism.”
Rhodes was continually working towards a union of the southern African republics, and he knew that the Cape Colony’s relatively liberal policies regarding black Africans would always be a major stumbling block to any unification with the Boer republics. So he set about working to change the laws in the Cape Colony, supporting legislation to legalize the flogging of disrespectful (black) servants; voting to raise, again, the property-ownership requirements
for voting; introducing an education test, an action that disenfranchised yet thousands more black voters; and annexing more native lands by force and moving thousands of black Africans onto reserves. “My idea is that the natives should be kept in these native reserves and not mixed with white men at all,” he pronounced. He passed laws that made farms undividable, which meant that farmers’ younger sons and unmarried daughters were forced to leave the land, conveniently providing a stream of cheap labour. Not yet satisfied, Rhodes eliminated missionary schools so that black Africans would not gain an education. “When I see the labour troubles that are occurring in the United States,” he observed, “and when I see the troubles that are going to occur with the English people in their own country . . . I feel rather glad that the labour question here is connected with the native question . . . If the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day will come when we shall all be thankful that we have the natives with us in their proper position.” He imposed curfews on black Africans and racial segregation in public institutions.
All these changes were supported by Rhodes’s newspapers, particularly the Cape Argus. By 1895 he had essentially established all the key foundations of an apartheid regime that would come into full force half a century later. And, in Rhodesia, Rhodes’s Land Commission removed natives from their land and placed them in poorly situated reserves so that their territories could be opened to white settlers.
Even Cecil Rhodes, though, was not invincible. His downfall was swift and of his own making. His health was deteriorating. He suffered from heart problems, exacerbated by smoking, drinking and a substantial gain in weight. He was only in his early forties, but he looked and acted much older. He began to feel like he was running out of time to fulfill one of his greatest ambitions: the consolidation of all the independent republics of southern Africa under one banner. So far, the mineral prospects in Rhodesia had not shaped up as he had hoped. After an extensive tour of the region, one of his mining engineers reported, “I urge the investing public to exercise due discrimination.” It appeared that the great gold deposits in the Transvaal, around Johannesburg, did not extend north, as many had assumed they would. Not only were Rhodesia and the British South Africa Company failing to meet the earlier optimistic predictions of incredible mineral wealth, but the great gold fields of the Transvaal were propelling the Boer republic to become the richest state in southern Africa—a situation that would forever prevent its unification with the Cape Colony. In addition, Rhodes had a personal hatred of Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, and became involved in a scheme to invade the Boer republic, overthrow its president and forcibly annex it to the Cape Colony.
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