Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902)
The empire-builder of the odious type believed that the whole world was to be dominated between the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic race. This led to Boer War. Not because of his grandiose sense of racial superiority but owing to a private war.
Son of an English clergy man he had made his millions in the South African Mines and he had to have the Rand Diamond Mines that was located in the Boer Republic of Transvaal. So using the techniques perfected by Anglo-Saxon colonialism over centuries he harried the Boers. He was the Prime Minister of Cape Colony that gave his attacks certain respectability as territorial expansion for the honor of the Queen and the country. He annexed two new colonies Northern Rhodesia and South Rhodesia, named after him. This is a subtle hint of the mindset of any plunderer of such colossal scale. He was the greed of the British Empire gloved by semblance of law. He made a treaty with the King Lobengula of the Matabele which if one looked closely was a classic case of the swindle*. The king thought he was selling the British South Africa Company the right to mine minerals within his kingdom. Instead he had signed away the entire country. In the ’30 the Company struck it rich when copper was located in Northern Rhodesia.
A confirmed bachelor and given to megalomania he was the hero that sent vast chunk of Africa’s wealth into the Imperial coffers. He died at the age of 1902 at the age of forty-eight. Owing to the Boer War of 1899-1902 his reputation was at its nadir. He willed about 4 million pounds to found scholarships at Oxford for students from the colonies, the US and Germany.
*Rhodes had already tried and failed to get a mining concession from Lobengula, king of the Ndebele of Matabeleland. In 1888 he tried again. He sent John Moffat, son of the missionary Robert Moffat, who was trusted by Lobengula, to persuade the latter to sign a treaty of friendship with Britain, and to look favourably on Rhodes’ proposals. His agent Francis Thompson, who had travelled to Bulawayo in the company of Charles Rudd and Rochfort Maguire, assured Lobengula that no more than ten white men would mine in Matabeleland. This limitation was left out of the document which Lobengula signed, known as the Rudd Concession. Furthermore it stated that the mining companies could do anything necessary to their operations. When Lobengula discovered later the true effects of the concession, he tried to renounce it, but the British Government ignored him.(wikipedia)