Cecil John Rhodes (/ˈsɛsəl ˈroʊdz/ SES-əl ROHDZ; 5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902)[2] was an English mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.

[4][5] 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).

[6] Critics cite his confiscation of land from the black indigenous population of the Cape Colony, and false claims that southern African archeological sites such as Great Zimbabwe were built by European civilisations.

[10] 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 well known for never having preached a sermon longer than ten minutes.

Rhodes attended the Bishop's Stortford Grammar School from the age of nine, but, as a sickly, asthmatic adolescent, he was taken out of grammar school in 1869 and, according to Basil Williams,[14][page needed] "continued his studies under his father's eye ..." At age seven, he was recorded in the 1861 census as boarding with his aunt, Sophia Peacock, at a boarding house in Jersey, where the climate was perceived to provide a respite for those with conditions such as asthma.

In 1895, believing he could use his influence to overthrow the Boer government,[10] Rhodes supported the Jameson Raid, an unsuccessful attempt to create an uprising in the Transvaal that had the tacit approval of Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain.

[38] Rhodes used his wealth and that of his business partner Alfred Beit and other investors to pursue his dream of creating a British Empire in new territories to the north by obtaining mineral concessions from the most powerful indigenous chiefs.

Rhodes' competitive advantage over other mineral prospecting companies was his combination of wealth and astute political instincts, also called the "imperial factor," as he often collaborated with the British Government.

[43] The Ndebele and the Shona—the two main, but rival, peoples—took advantage of the absence of most of the BSAP for the Jameson Raid in January 1896; they separately rebelled against the coming of the European settlers, and the BSAC defeated them in the Second Matabele War.

Rhodes went to Matabeleland after his resignation as Cape Colony Premier, and appointed himself Colonel in his own column of irregular troops moving from Salisbury to Bulawayo to relieve the siege of whites there.

[47] In the aftermath of the war in Matabeleland, but whilst the uprising in Mashonaland was being suppressed, Rhodes returned to London to give evidence to the UK House of Commons Select Committee of Enquiry into the Jameson Raid.

[51] Despite occasional efforts to return his body to the United Kingdom, his grave remains there still, "part and parcel of the history of Zimbabwe" and attracts thousands of visitors each year.

He and others felt the best way to "unify the possessions, facilitate governance, enable the military to move quickly to hot spots or conduct war, help settlement, and foster trade" would be to build the "Cape to Cairo Railway".

France had a conflicting strategy in the late 1890s to link its colonies from west to east across the continent[54] and the Portuguese produced the "Pink Map",[55] representing their claims to sovereignty in Africa.

Ultimately, Belgium and Germany proved to be the main obstacles to the British objective until the United Kingdom conquered and seized Tanganyika from the Germans as a League of Nations mandate in World War I.

[58] Furthermore Rhodes saw imperialism as a way to alleviate domestic social problems - "In order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.

[62][page needed] Rhodes's views on race have been debated; he supported the rights of indigenous Africans to vote,[63] but critics have labelled him as an "architect of apartheid"[64] and a "white supremacist", particularly since 2015.

[69] In a 2016 opinion piece for The Times, Oxford University professor Nigel Biggar argued that although Rhodes was a committed imperialist, the charges of racism against him are unfounded.

[70] In a 2021 article, Biggar further argued that:[71] If Rhodes was a racist, he would not have enjoyed cordial relations with individual Africans, he would not have regarded them as capable of civilisation, and he would not have supported their right to vote at all.

[79] Paul Maylam of Rhodes University criticised Brown's book in a review for The Conversation as "based heavily on surmise and assertion" and lacking "referenced source material to substantiate its claims", as well as being riddled with basic factual errors.

[82] During the Second Boer War Rhodes went to Kimberley at the onset of the siege, in a calculated move to raise the political stakes on the government to dedicate resources to the defence of the city.

[83][84] Despite these differences, Rhodes' company was instrumental in the defence of the city, providing water and refrigeration facilities, constructing fortifications, and manufacturing an armoured train, shells and a one-off gun named Long Cecil.

[88] The site was of supreme importance to Shona traditional religion as the shrine of Mwari, with this action interpreted as a gesture of colonial triumph and conquest over indigenous Africans.

In December 2010, Cain Mathema, the governor of Bulawayo, branded the grave outside the country's second city an "insult to the African ancestors" and said he believed its presence had brought bad luck and poor weather to the region.

[91] In February 2012, Mugabe loyalists and ZANU-PF activists visited the grave site demanding permission from the local chief to exhume Rhodes's remains and return them to Britain.

Many considered this a nationalist political stunt in the run up to an election, and Local Chief Masuku and Godfrey Mahachi, one of the country's foremost archaeologists, strongly expressed their opposition to the grave being removed due to its historical significance to Zimbabwe.

A broad display of Rhodes material can be seen, including the original De Beers board room table around which diamonds worth billions of dollars were traded.

Captivated by the unspoilt and breathtaking beauty of the area, he immediately purchased a parcel of farms totalling 40,000 ha and then proceeded to import cattle from Mozambique and develop extensive plantations of apple and fruit trees.

Encyclopædia Britannica, discussing his legacy, wrote of Rhodes that he "once defined his policy as 'equal rights for every white man south of the Zambezi' and later, under liberal pressure, amended 'white' to 'civilized'.

"[110] As part of his legacy, on his death Rhodes left a significant amount of money to be used to finance talented young scholars ("race" was not a criterion) at Oxford.