Cecil Rhodes
The British mining magnate who built the De Beers diamond monopoly, ruled the Cape, and carved Rhodesia out of Africa for the empire.
He was a sickly clergyman's son, shipped from an English vicarage to South Africa at sixteen in the hope that the dry air would save his weak lungs. Within twenty years Cecil Rhodes controlled most of the diamonds on Earth, governed a British colony, and had an entire country named after himself. No single figure embodied the ambition and the arrogance of high-Victorian empire more completely, and few have left a legacy still fought over as fiercely.
The diamond monopoly
Rhodes reached the Kimberley diamond fields in 1871 and grasped quickly that the money lay not in digging but in owning. Over the next seventeen years, bankrolled by the Rothschilds, he bought out rival after rival until in 1888 he founded De Beers Consolidated Mines. By 1890 De Beers controlled roughly 90 percent of the world's diamond production, a monopoly so durable that the company still shapes the diamond trade today, well over a century later. He extended the same method to the gold of the Witwatersrand. Rhodes did not want wealth for its own sake. He wanted it as fuel for power.
Cape to Cairo
From 1890 to 1896 Rhodes served as prime minister of the Cape Colony, and he dreamed of an unbroken belt of British territory running the length of the continent, from Cape Town to Cairo. His chartered British South Africa Company pushed north with Maxim guns and treaties the other side could not read, seizing the land beyond the Limpopo that the company named Rhodesia after him, today Zimbabwe and Zambia. He was frank about the racial hierarchy he believed in, holding that the Anglo-Saxon was the finest race on earth and born to rule, and he backed laws that stripped Black Africans of land and the vote. His overreach caught up with him in the Jameson Raid of 1895 to 1896, a botched armed attempt to topple the Boer government of the Transvaal that forced him to resign and helped light the fuse for the Second Boer War.
A contested statue
Rhodes died in 1902, aged 48, and left much of his fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarship, which still sends students to Oxford and remains the oldest international graduate scholarship in the world. For decades that endowment softened his image. It no longer does. In 2015 the Rhodes Must Fall movement began at the University of Cape Town, won the removal of his statue there, and spread to Oxford, where students demanded the same of the figure on Oriel College. Rhodes remains exactly what he was in life: a builder of empires and fortunes who is impossible to admire without reckoning with what, and whom, he was willing to crush to build them.