![]() Having made a lot of money in Kimberley, becoming a millionaire by age 20, Rhodes then signed on for a degree at Oxford. One of the puzzles in Rhodes’s life story is his time at Oxford University. In The Secret Society, Brown explores the enigma of Rhodes, delving into his homosexuality more deeply than any work on him so far and showing how Rhodes’s dreams of an expanded British empire were codified early in his career and were then played out, through the efforts of members of his inner circle, at least until the end of World War II, when Britain began to let go of its imperial possessions. Acknowledging that, for at least the first half of the 20th century, most books about Rhodes treated him heroically, before the tide turned and the anti-colonial view condemned him as a ruthless robber baron, Brown says: “We need an honest account of Rhodes.” “I count at least five characters in him,” says Robin Brown, author of the new book The Secret Society: Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan for a New World Order (Penguin). Villain or not, he was a complicated man, something of a chameleon with vastly different aspects contained within him – even a bit of a multiple personality. ![]() Rhodes spent much of his time in South Africa living in shacks near his mines, even as he was amassing the huge fortune that would underpin his colonial projects while he lived and ensure that they were pursued after his death. Yet his legacy, insofar as it includes a united South Africa and the mining base of our economy, is still with us.Īnd the man remains something of an enigma: a megalomaniac who believed God’s support for his cause was evident in every stroke of luck, but also a sensitive soul who grieved wildly and publicly for his dead secretary, Neville Pickering. His statue at the University of Cape Town was doused in pink paint and then, as demanded by the student protesters, removed to a vault somewhere. Cecil John Rhodes is now the imperial archvillain, a symbol of all that “must fall” in a decolonised South Africa.
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