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The diamond and gold magnate who founded De Beers, colonized the land named Rhodesia, and dreamed of a secret society to spread British rule worldwide...
The diamond and gold magnate who founded De Beers, colonized the land named Rhodesia, and dreamed of a secret society to spread British rule worldwide. His will built the Rhodes Scholarships and the Rhodes Trust, which fed Milner's Round Table; his segregationist laws prefigured apartheid.
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also in Curriculum, programming, and propaganda
The 23-year-old Cecil Rhodes sets down a Confession of Faith calling for a secret society to extend British rule over the whole world and bring the United States back into the empire. It is the documented ideological seed of the Rhodes Trust and, in Carroll Quigley's contested thesis, of a lasting Anglo-American elite network.
Cecil John Rhodes is initiated into the Apollo University Lodge (Oxford Lodge No. 357) on 2 June 1877, while a student at Oriel College, and remains a Freemason for life. He later attends occasional lodge meetings in Kimberley, though he reportedly finds Masonic ritual frivolous. His Masonic membership is well documented; claims that Freemasonry shaped his political or imperial projects are speculative and not established fact.
also in De Beers and the diamond model of extraction, Production and labor, Scholarships and the machinery of empire, The corporation
Cecil Rhodes consolidates the Kimberley diamond mines into De Beers Consolidated Mines. The company controls most of the world's diamond supply for the next century.
also in The British Empire
Cecil Rhodes won a royal charter to colonize lands north of the Transvaal, later named Rhodesia after him. His dream of a Cape-to-Cairo empire drove British expansion in southern Africa.
also in De Beers and the diamond model of extraction, Land and resources
Having made a diamond and gold fortune, Cecil Rhodes becomes Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. He uses the office to expand British territory northward and to shape policy in the interests of the mining industry.
Quigley asserts that on February 5, 1891, Cecil Rhodes and W. T. Stead formally organized a secret society, with an inner circle of Rhodes, Stead, Brett, and Milner, to extend British and English-speaking power.
This association was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes and Stead organized a secret society of which Rhodes had been dreaming for sixteen years.Tragedy and Hope , p. 120-122
Rhodes's British South Africa Company defeats the Ndebele kingdom in the First Matabele War, using the Maxim gun to devastating effect. The conquest opens the territory that would be named Rhodesia after him, later Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Rhodes's government passes the Glen Grey Act, restricting African land ownership and using taxation to push Black men into wage labor for white farms and mines. Historians read it as a template for the later apartheid system of land and labor control.
A raid into the Boer-ruled Transvaal, backed by Rhodes and led by his ally Leander Jameson, aims to trigger an uprising and seize the goldfields. It fails completely, forces Rhodes to resign as Cape prime minister, and helps set the stage for the Second Boer War.
Cecil Rhodes dies at 48. His will endows the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford to train future leaders in his imperial ideals, and channels his secret-society dream into the Rhodes Trust, which under Alfred Milner fed the Round Table movement. A documented pipeline of elite influence into the twentieth century.
also in Colonialism: the conquest of the world, Freedom movements: how the colonized won their independence, Segregation: Jim Crow and its global cousins, The British Empire, The British Empire and its dark history
Rhodesia's white minority government declared independence to avoid handing power to the Black majority. The move led to sanctions and a long guerrilla war before majority rule arrived as Zimbabwe.
Students at the University of Cape Town launch Rhodes Must Fall, a campaign to remove Rhodes's statue that spreads to Oxford and becomes a wider movement to confront the colonial legacy. The modern bookend to his story, and a fight over how the past is remembered.