Cecil John Rhodes could arguably be said to be both the hero and anti-hero of the entire British African experience. He was a man ideally suited to his time; an imperialist and capitalist with a dream of unlimited global British expansion; and a visionary with a desire to include all of the disparate peoples of the world within the Pax Britannia.

Realistically Rhodes made his mark principally on Africa. His vision for the continent was no less than a British Protectorate running from the Cape to Cairo, and to this end he strove for more or less the entirety of his short life.

Cecil Rhodes arrived in South Africa in 1870. He was 17 years old, and in search of a climate more salutary to his fragile health than the damp of the British Isles. This he found, and moreover he found an ideal outlet for his unique talents. On the rich diamond fields of Kimberly he quickly rose to great wealth and prominence by the shrewd and aggressive amalgamation of diamond production under his company De Beers.

Rhodes began his political career as an elected member of the Cape Parliament at the tender age of 28. From this vantage he began to attempt the construction of a greater Anglo/Saxon union of South Africa stretching as far north of the Limpopo River as could practically be achieved. He was the force behind the declaration of Bechuanaland (Botswana) as a British protectorate, and likewise, under his British South Africa Chartered Company, behind the annexation of Rhodesia, which was named after him, and which later became Zimbabwe.

Rhodes’ British South Africa Company soon pushed north across the Zambezi and eventually laid claim to the territories that now make up the republic of Zambia. His attempts to push even further north were thwarted by the southern boundaries of Leopoldville’s Congo Free State and the southern limit of German occupation of the territory now known as Tanzania.

Rhodes’ vision of a British Protectorate from the Cape to Cairo was only realized after his death with the League of Nations mandates issued after WWI that gave Britain effective control over Tanganyika, allowing then for a link that ran from Egypt and Sudan, both British controlled, through Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, on through South Africa, then a dominion of the British Empire, to the Cape.

Rhodes’ unbridled ambition, and an increasing sense of both his own power and his diminishing health, caused him as the century neared its end to consider actions that in later years would be deemed highly questionable. His interference in the delicate race and political dynamic of Boer and Briton in a fractured South Africa in no small way precipitated the Anglo/Boer War. Rhodes spent the bulk of that conflict under siege in Kimberly, and died at the Cape in 1902 at the age of just 48.