RHODES, rodz, Cecil John, South African financier and statesman: b. Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, 5 July 1853; d. Cape Town, 26 March 1902. He was educated at the grammar school of his native town, but before he could pass on to the university a serious affection of the lungs necessitated his departure for Natal, where an elder brother of his was engaged in cotton-raising. Rhodes landed in South Africa in 1870 and after a brief experi ence in farming made his way to the diamond fields of Kimberley, where he met with speedy and astonishing success. At 19 he was a millionaire and, with his health well recovered in the salubrious air of the veldt, he planned to return to England to resume his interrupted education. Before leaving South Africa he traveled for eight months, by ox-cart and on foot, through the region north of the Orange and the Vaal, and his imagination, which even at that early age worked in vast spaces, saw in the fc. tile, thinly populated country virgin soil for the building up of an imperial Britain in the Dark Continent. He matriculated at Baliol College, Oxford, in 1873, but his ailments re turned and he was compelled to leave England in the same year. Three years in South Africa made him robust again and from 1876 on he kept his terms at the university, spending the long vacations in South Africa, and taking his B.A. and M.A. in 1::1.. In the same year Rhodes entered the Cape Parliament as member for B trkly West. By this time his plans for the future had assumed a definite character. Convinced, at all times, of the supreme fitness of the English race for the task of governing the world, Rhodes made it his object in life to further the realization of that end in his own especial sphere of South Africa. To aid him in his schemes he looked to money, in whose power he had a tremendous faith, and it is because of the close connection in him of the selfish getting instinct and the broad ambition of the statesman that Rhodes remained for many years an enigma to the world. In the Cape Parlia ment Rhodes devoted himself to the task of establishing harmonious relations between the English inhabitants and the Dutch, for with true insight he recognized that if British in fluence was to dominate South Africa it must be conditioned by the goodwill of the people of Dutch blood. The first step in his scheme of
imperial expansion was the acquisition of Bechuanaland as a British protectorate in 1884. For this he labored against the indifference of the home government, which he finally stirred to action by his insistence upon the necessity of securing Bechuanaland as an outlet for the British trade to the north, already threatened by the encroachments of the Transvaal from the east and Germany from the west.
The annexation of Bechuanaland was a victory for Rhodes over Kruger, the astute President of the Transvaal, but the struggle be tween the two did not end there. When Boer commanders began to cross the Limpopo River, the northern boundary of the Transvaal, about 1887, Rhodes, to cut off their advance in that direction, obtained from Lobengula, king of the Matabele who were masters of the country be tween the Limpopo and the Zambesi, the ex• elusive right to search for minerals within his territories, and in 1889 the British South Africa Company was incorporated with almost abso lute political and territorial powers over a vast. indefinite tract north of the Limpopo. In 1890 settlers were brought into the country and founded Fort Salisbury in Mashonaland, and at the same time the construction of a railway was begun which, running entirely through British territory, was to connect the new settlements with the Cape. Reading his title to Rhodesia, as the country was soon called, in liberal terms Rhodes (after 1893) extended the operations of the company north of the Zambesi as far as to the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, and though his dreams of an gall red" map of Africa had been dissipated by the convention of 1889 with Germany, which allowed that country to stretch a barrier across the continent to the Kongo State, he did not abandon his scheme of a transcontinental telegraph line from north to south and a railway gfrom Cape to Cairo.) Upon his political projects Rhodes spent vast amounts of money, partly his own, partly the funds of the De Beers Consolidated Mines, a corporation formed by him in 1888 and control ling the entire diamond output of the famous Kimberley mines. Of this company he was man aging director.