A statue of Cecil Rhodes in Kimberley, South Africa. As Prime Minister of the Cape, Rhodes shared the blinkered and prejudiced reasoning which denied the vote to black citizens and confined blacks to their homelands. But “Within a few years” Williams tells us “he was proclaiming ‘equal rights for all civilized men, irrespective of races, south of the Zambesi,’ his final creed, when he had purged himself of all colour-prejudice and attached importance only to capacity and intrinsic worth.”
Introduction
Basil Williams sat on the board of inquiry into the infamous ‘Jameson Raid’ of 1895 that was instigated by Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) and helped to ignite the Boer Wars. He came to know Rhodes quite well, and just after the Great War published a biography of him in which he suggested ways for the reader to respond constructively to the challenge of Rhodes’s controversial life and vision.
HITHERTO most of the lives or sketches of him have been written under the attractive magnetism of his living personality. Today it may be possible to take a more dispassionate view. Most of the written material ever likely to be available for his life is now accessible, and so much has happened in the last eighteen years that his career can be judged not only by the passions which it raised but by the test of the effects which it has produced.
On the other hand, it has still not been too late to gather living impressions of the man from those who saw him plain, who knew him and listened to his actual words, who can describe his gestures, the tone of his voice, and some of his unguarded moments. Such evidence is especially valuable in the case of a man like Rhodes, who wrote very few intimate letters and received few. For the account of such a man depends for its value not so much on what he did as on why and how he did it; and that can only be obtained by close acquaintance with the man himself.
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