Cecil Rhodes

Cecil John Rhodes (/ˈsɛsəl ˈroʊdz/ SES-əl ROHDZ; 5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902) was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He and his British South Africa Company founded the southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which the company named after him in 1895. He also devoted much effort to realising his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory. Rhodes set up the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.

The son of a vicar, Rhodes was born in Netteswell House, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. Due to his ill-health, at age sixteen he was sent to South Africa by his family in the hopes the climate might improve his health. At eighteen, he entered the diamond trade at Kimberley in 1871 and with funding from Rothschild & Co, began to systematically buy out and consolidate diamond mines. Over the next two decades, he gained a near-complete monopoly of the world diamond market. In 1888, he founded the diamond company De Beers, which retains its prominence into the 21st century.

Rhodes entered the Cape Parliament at the age of 27 in 1881, and in 1890, he became prime minister. As prime minister, he expropriated land from black Africans with the Glen Grey Act, while also tripling the wealth requirement for voting under the Franchise and Ballot Act, effectively barring black people from taking part in elections. After overseeing the formation of Rhodesia during the early 1890s, he was forced to resign in 1896 after the disastrous Jameson Raid, an unauthorised attack on Paul Kruger's South African Republic (or Transvaal). His career never recovered, and after years of ill health and cardiovascular issues, he died in 1902. At his request he was buried at Malindidzimu in what is now Zimbabwe. In his last will, he provided for the establishment of the international Rhodes Scholarship at University of Oxford, the oldest graduate scholarship in the world.

With the rise of international anti-racist movements like Rhodes Must Fall, Rhodes's legacy is a matter of debate. Critics cite his confiscation of land from the black indigenous population of the Cape Colony, and his promotion of false claims that southern African archeological sites such as Great Zimbabwe were built by European civilisations.

Rhodes was born in 1853 in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, the fourth son and sixth child of the Reverend Francis William Rhodes (1807–1878) and his wife, Louisa Peacock.

Francis was a Church of England clergyman who served as perpetual curate of Brentwood, Essex (1834–1843), and then as vicar of nearby Bishop's Stortford (1849–1876), where he was known for having never preached a sermon longer than ten minutes. Francis was the eldest son of William Rhodes (1774–1855), a brick manufacturer from Hackney, Middlesex. The family owned significant estates in London's Hackney and Dalston which Cecil would later inherit. The earliest traceable direct ancestor of Cecil Rhodes is James Rhodes (fl. 1660) of Snape Green, Whitmore, Staffordshire. Francis first wed Elizabeth Sophia Manet of Hampstead in 1833, but she died in 1835, giving birth to their daughter Elizabeth.

Louisa Peacock was one of two daughters of Anthony Taylor Peacock, a Lincolnshire banker, and came from a prominent family. At twenty-eight, she married Rhodes as his second wife on October 22, 1844. Her grandfather, Anthony Peacock, was a large landowner who helped found the Sleaford and Newark bank in 1792. He also sponsored the construction of the Sleaford canal and was one of three commissioners who administered the Lincolnshire Enclosure Acts in the 1790s.

Louisa was described was a warm, cheerful woman and had an especially close relationship with Cecil out of her sons, who was described as a serious and somber child. In contrast, he had a more distant relationship with his father, owing to the latter's career and advanced age; when he was present, Rhodes described him as coolly pragmatic, interrogating his son's dreams and fancies and encouraging him to rebuild them on "more practical lines." He had three sisters and eight brothers, though two of them died in infancy. His siblings included Frank Rhodes, a British Army officer.