In the footsteps of Cecil Rhodes

In a scrubby paddock on the edge of Bulawayo, I walked up to a half-broken leatherwood tree growing in a tangle of old barbed wire. It looked no different to a million tough trees across Zimbabwe, the still-beautiful, still-friendly country which remains the most wonderful place in Africa. But this tree is exceptional: it is listed as a national monument. Beneath it, in October 1888, a concession was agreed which led Lobengula Khumalo, King of the Ndebele, to lose his lands to a consortium led by Cecil Rhodes. It’s disputed what Lobengula thought he was agreeing to when he made his mark on the treaty. “I thought you came to dig gold, but it seems that you have come not only to dig the gold but to rob me of my people and country as well,” he protested later — sending envoys to Queen Victoria. But Rhodes pressed on. Lobengula died, perhaps of poison, in exile. Rhodesia, named after its founder, took power in his place. It, in turn, gave way to Zimbabwe. Only the old leatherwood tree has lasted — at least some of it. Not long ago, squatters hacked down one of its twin trunks to make furniture from the rock-hard timber.

It is less than two lifetimes since Rhodes died, and his ghost hangs over the country he created. In Bulawayo’s railway museum his now-dusty personal carriage is preserved, along with his cutlery, bed and on-board bathtub. In the nearby Matobo Hills I watched rainbow lizards scuttle over the plain, godless plaque which marks his grave, cut high into a stack of gray rounded granite boulders of the sort which burst through the greenery all over Zimbabwe, as if some giant had been throwing pebbles. Rhodes picked this spot in his will, and despite chatter about removing the grave no government has done so. Robert Mugabe said it was better to let tourists pay their dollars at the gate. Smartly dressed Zimbabwean families panting up to the summit to see the view he loved did not seem troubled by the presence of his bones. Zimbabweans — dealing with inflation and drought — have more pressing things to bother them than relics of an egomaniacal race-supremacist vicar’s son from Bishop’s Stortford. It’s only the rich who can afford handwringing about the past.

Still, it’s remarkable so much survives from so short a life. Rhodes died at forty-eight, a year after Queen Victoria, yet his name still triggers a sort of horror while other grander men who made the late empire — Joseph Chamberlain or Lord Curzon — are forgotten. Why? Because he was the purest of individualists, bending imperialism to his will rather than being bent by it. A hackneyed exam question asks whether history is made by great forces or great men and women. Rhodes’s life makes the case for the latter. Can biographers ever know him? I once wrote a life of Thomas Telford and came to feel a companionship. But Rhodes? The man was a mess. He “combined shrewdness and adolescence, romanticism and ruthlessness, imagination and vulgarity,” one commentator is quoted as saying in Robert Rotberg’s biography of Rhodes — which is about as kind as anyone can get. The historian J.H. Plumb condemned his “unbalanced, unpleasant” dream of British world leadership, but admired the scholarships that continue to be funded by his wealth as “one of the greatest endowments to education ever made.” It’s those scholarships which are the most active remnant of his life.

Oxford’s Rhodes House, wrestling with the balance between the good these scholarships do and the embarrassment about the man who created them, has a thoughtful essay on its website by a Zimbabwean student, Naseemah Mohamed, written at the height of the “Rhodes must fall” battles. She makes the case that so much that has gone wrong with modern Zimbabwe — the theft of property and the quest for wealth by those in power — began not at independence but with Rhodes and his British South Africa Company. That’s not to forgive what came after, but it helps understand it. Maybe that’s why Zimbabweans seem less bothered by Rhodes’s remains than some in Britain. He’s part of their country’s living story as he is not part of Britain’s. As I walked up the marvelous rocks that hold his grave, heavy rain clouds gathered. A sharp spotlight of sun cut through. For a second the tumble of boulders at the summit of the place he named “world’s view” turned bright gold. There was magic in that manic life.