Books: Rhodes to Glory

CECIL RHODES-Sarah Gertrude Millin -Harper ($3.75)When a friend asked Cecil John Rhodes how long he expected to be remembered, he replied, “I give myself 4,000 years.” Thirty-one of his self-allotted years have gone, and Rhodes is already a colossus-like myth. Authoress Millin’s biography restores some of the edges to his human outline; she leaves his image something more than lifesize, but strips the marble pediment and shows clay feet.

Tuberculous son of a wealthy English parson, Cecil Rhodes went to South Africa at 16 in search of health. Three years later he went home, to Oxford, but his lungs sent him back again. Later he used to say that he left England not so much for love of adventure or on account of his health, as “because he could no longer stand the eternal cold mutton.” Diamonds had just been discovered at Kimberley (1870). Rhodes got in on the ground floor, was soon making £100 a week. At 27 he founded de Beers Mining Co., soon had control of practically all South Africa’s diamond fields—90% of the world’s diamonds. He entered the South African Parliament, and nine years later was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. By bribery, intrigue, diplomacy, persuasion, force he worked to bring about a united South Africa. Like most men of action a mixture of cynic and sentimentalist, he made no bones of his tricky actions but could not bear to have his ambition thought sordid.

Rabid imperialist, Rhodes once sneered at British policy as “philanthropy—plus 5%.” Sometimes called a coward, Rhodes quitted himself like a brave man when the Matabele ran amuck and were proving costly to subdue. Unarmed, with a few companions, Rhodes went among the Matabele warriors, persuaded the chiefs to air their grievances and lay down their arms. Only big mistake of Rhodes’s career, which cost him the loyalty of many a South African, was the Jameson Raid into the Transvaal, which it was hoped would finish President (“Oom Paul”) Kruger and his Boers, bring the Transvaal into Rhodes’s hands. Instead, the raid was made prematurely, and against Rhodes’s last minute instructions. Kruger’s Boers made short work of the raiders, and Rhodes, head of a neighboring and nominally friendly state, was almost universally discredited. Though he lived to within a few months of the end of the ensuing Boer War, Authoress Millin says Rhodes had no finger in its bringing about, never believed it could actually happen.

What the U. S. principally remembers Rhodes for is the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford-founded in the pathetic belief that they would cement the bonds of Empire, bring back the strayed U. S. colonies to England’s spiritual fold, encourage transatlantic handshaking generally. Reason why there are so many U. S. Rhodes Scholarships, says Biographer Millin: he thought there were still only the original 13 States in the U. S., assigned two to each (in 1929 modified by Parliament to twelve from each of eight U. S. districts).

Rhodes never married. Knowing that he would die young (when he was 20, a doctor gave him six months to live) he was apparently in too much of a hurry for domesticity. “Everything in the world is too short. Life and fame and achievement, everything is too short. . . . From the cradle to the grave, what is it? Three days at the seaside.” His dying words, according to legend, were: “So much to do, so little done.” But candid Biographer Millin is more interested in fact than in legend. In fact, says she, Rhodes’s last words were, “Turn me over, Jack.”