Cecil Rhodes Rhodesia What were his first experiences in Rhodesia? The BSAC had its own police force, the British South Africa Police, which was used to control Matabeleland and Mashonaland, in present-day Zimbabwe.
How did he found Rhodesia?
How did Cecil Rhodes found Rhodesia?
The BSAC had its own police force, the British South Africa Police, which was used to control Matabeleland and Mashonaland, in present-day Zimbabwe. The company had hoped to start a "new Rand" from the ancient gold mines of the Shona. Because the gold deposits were on a much smaller scale, many of the white settlers who accompanied the BSAC to Mashonaland became farmers rather than miners. When the Ndebele and the Shona--the two main, but rival, peoples--separately rebelled against the coming of the European settlers, the BSAC defeated them in the First Matabele War and Second Matabele War. Shortly after learning of the assassination of the Ndebele spiritual leader, Mlimo, by the American scout Frederick Russell Burnham, Rhodes walked unarmed into the Ndebele stronghold in Matobo Hills. He persuaded the Impi to lay down their arms, thus ending the Second Matabele War. By the end of 1894, the territories over which the BSAC had concessions or treaties, collectively called "Zambesia" after the Zambezi River flowing through the middle, comprised an area of 1,143,000 km2 between the Limpopo River and Lake Tanganyika. In May 1895, its name was officially changed to "Rhodesia", reflecting Rhodes' popularity among settlers who had been using the name informally since 1891. The designation Southern Rhodesia was officially adopted in 1898 for the part south of the Zambezi, which later became Zimbabwe; and the designations North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia were used from 1895 for the territory which later became Northern Rhodesia, then Zambia. Rhodes decreed in his will that he was to be buried in Matobo Hills. After his death in the Cape in 1902, his body was transported by train to Bulawayo. His burial was attended by Ndebele chiefs, who asked that the firing party should not discharge their rifles as this would disturb the spirits. Then, for the first time, they gave a white man the Matabele royal salute, Bayete. Rhodes is buried alongside Leander Starr Jameson and 34 British soldiers killed in the Shangani Patrol. 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. CANNOTANSWER
In May 1895, its name was officially changed to "Rhodesia", reflecting Rhodes' popularity among settlers who had been using the name informally since 1891.
Cecil John Rhodes (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. An ardent believer in British imperialism, Rhodes 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. South Africa's Rhodes University is also named after him. He also devoted much effort to realising his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory. Rhodes set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.

The son of a vicar, Rhodes was born at Netteswell House, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. A sickly child, he was sent to South Africa by his family when he was 17 years old in the hope that the climate might improve his health. He entered the diamond trade at Kimberley in 1871, when he was 18, and, thanks to funding from Rothschild & Co, began to systematically buy out and consolidate diamond mines. Over the next two decades he gained near-complete domination of the world diamond market, forming a massive monopoly. His diamond company De Beers, formed in 1888, retained 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. During his time as prime minister, Rhodes used his political power to expropriate land from  black Africans through 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). Rhodes's career never recovered; his heart was weak and after years of poor health he died in 1902. He was buried in what is now Zimbabwe; his grave has been a controversial site.

In his last will, he provided for the establishment of the prestigious international Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, the oldest graduate scholarship in the world. Every year it grants 102 full postgraduate scholarships. It has benefited prime ministers of Malta, Australia and Canada, United States President Bill Clinton, and many others.

Origins
Rhodes was born in 1853 in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, the fifth son 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 well known for never having preached a sermon longer than ten minutes.

Francis was the eldest son of William Rhodes (1774–1843), a brick manufacturer from Hackney, Middlesex. The earliest traceable direct ancestor of Cecil Rhodes is James Rhodes (fl. 1660) of Snape Green, Whitmore, Staffordshire. Cecil's siblings included Frank Rhodes, a British Army officer.

Childhood

England and Jersey 

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, "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. His health was weak and there were fears that he might be consumptive (have tuberculosis), a disease of which several of the family showed symptoms. His father decided to send him abroad for what were believed the good effects of a sea voyage and a better climate in South Africa.

South Africa 

When he arrived in Africa, Rhodes lived on money lent by his aunt Sophia. After a brief stay with the Surveyor-General of Natal, Dr. P.C. Sutherland, in Pietermaritzburg, Rhodes took an interest in agriculture. He joined his brother Herbert on his cotton farm in the Umkomazi valley in Natal. The land was unsuitable for cotton, and the venture failed.

In October 1871, 18-year-old Rhodes and his 26-year-old brother Herbert left the colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley in Northern Cape Province. Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes succeeded over the next 17 years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area.

His monopoly of the world's diamond supply was sealed in 1890 through a strategic partnership with the London-based Diamond Syndicate. They agreed to control world supply to maintain high prices. Rhodes supervised the working of his brother's claim and speculated on his behalf. Among his associates in the early days were John X. Merriman and Charles Rudd, who later became his partner in the De Beers Mining Company and the Niger Oil Company.

During the 1880s, Cape vineyards had been devastated by a phylloxera epidemic. The diseased vineyards were dug up and replanted, and farmers were looking for alternatives to wine. In 1892, Rhodes financed The Pioneer Fruit Growing Company at Nooitgedacht, a venture created by Harry Pickstone, an Englishman who had experience with fruit-growing in California.  The shipping magnate Percy Molteno had just undertaken the first successful refrigerated export to Europe. In 1896, after consulting with Molteno, Rhodes began to pay more attention to export fruit farming and bought farms in Groot Drakenstein, Wellington and Stellenbosch. A year later, he bought Rhone and Boschendal and commissioned Sir Herbert Baker to build him a cottage there.  The successful operation soon expanded into Rhodes Fruit Farms, and formed a cornerstone of the modern-day Cape fruit industry.

Education 

In 1873, Rhodes left his farm field in the care of his business partner, Rudd, and sailed for England to study at university. He was admitted to Oriel College, Oxford, but stayed for only one term in 1874. He returned to South Africa and did not return for his second term at Oxford until 1876. He was greatly influenced by John Ruskin's inaugural lecture at Oxford, which reinforced his own attachment to the cause of British imperialism.

Among his Oxford associates were James Rochfort Maguire, later a fellow of All Souls College and a director of the British South Africa Company, and Charles Metcalfe. Due to his university career, Rhodes admired the Oxford "system". Eventually, he was inspired to develop his scholarship scheme: "Wherever you turn your eye—except in science—an Oxford man is at the top of the tree".

While attending Oriel College, Rhodes became a Freemason in the Apollo University Lodge. Although initially he did not approve of the organisation, he continued to be a South African Freemason until his death in 1902. The shortcomings of the Freemasons, in his opinion, later caused him to envisage his own secret society with the goal of bringing the entire world under British rule.

Diamonds and the establishment of De Beers 

During his years at Oxford, Rhodes continued to prosper in Kimberley. Before his departure for Oxford, he and C.D. Rudd had moved from the Kimberley Mine to invest in the more costly claims of what was known as old De Beers (Vooruitzicht). It was named after Johannes Nicolaas de Beer and his brother, Diederik Arnoldus, who occupied the farm.

After purchasing the land in 1839 from David Danser, a Koranna chief in the area, David Stephanus Fourie, forebearer for Claudine Fourie-Grosvenor, had allowed the de Beers and various other Afrikaner families to cultivate the land. The region extended from the Modder River via the Vet River up to the Vaal River.

In 1874 and 1875, the diamond fields were in the grip of depression, but Rhodes and Rudd were among those who stayed to consolidate their interests. They believed that diamonds would be numerous in the hard blue ground that had been exposed after the softer, yellow layer near the surface had been worked out. During this time, the technical problem of clearing out the water that was flooding the mines became serious. Rhodes and Rudd obtained the contract for pumping water out of the three main mines. After Rhodes returned from his first term at Oxford, he lived with Robert Dundas Graham, who later became a mining partner with Rudd and Rhodes.

On 13 March 1888, Rhodes and Rudd launched De Beers Consolidated Mines after the amalgamation of a number of individual claims. With £200,000 of capital, the company, of which Rhodes was secretary, owned the largest interest in the mine (£200,000 in 1880 = £22.5m in 2020 = $28.5m USD). Rhodes was named the chairman of De Beers at the company's founding in 1888. De Beers was established with funding from N.M. Rothschild & Sons in 1887.

Politics in South Africa 

In 1880, Rhodes prepared to enter public life at the Cape. With the earlier incorporation of Griqualand West into the Cape Colony under the Molteno Ministry in 1877, the area had obtained six seats in the Cape House of Assembly. Rhodes chose the rural and predominately Boer constituency of Barkly West, which would remain loyal to Rhodes until his death.

When Rhodes became a member of the Cape Parliament, the chief goal of the assembly was to help decide the future of Basutoland. The ministry of Sir Gordon Sprigg was trying to restore order after the 1880 rebellion known as the Gun War. The Sprigg ministry had precipitated the revolt by applying its policy of disarming all native Africans to those of the Basotho nation, who resisted.

In 1890, Rhodes became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. He introduced various Acts of Parliament to push black people from their lands and make way for industrial development. Rhodes's view was that black people needed to be driven off their land to "stimulate them to labour" and to change their habits. "It must be brought home to them", Rhodes said, "that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labour, and the sooner that is brought home to them the better."

In 1892, Rhodes's Franchise and Ballot Act raised the property requirements from a relatively low £25 to a significantly higher £75 which had a disproportionate effect on the previously growing number of enfranchised black people in the Cape under the Cape Qualified Franchise that had been in force since 1853. By limiting the amount of land which black Africans were legally allowed to hold in the Glen Grey Act of 1894, Rhodes further disenfranchised the black population. To quote Richard Dowden, most would now "find it almost impossible to get back on the list because of the legal limit on the amount of land they could hold". In addition, Rhodes was an early architect of the Natives Land Act, 1913, which would limit the areas of the country where black Africans were allowed to settle to less than 10%. At the time, Rhodes would argue that "the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa."

Rhodes also introduced educational reform to the area. His policies were instrumental in the development of British imperial policies in South Africa, such as the Hut tax.

Rhodes did not, however, have direct political power over the independent Boer Republic of the Transvaal. He often disagreed with the Transvaal government's policies, which he considered unsupportive of mine-owners' interests. In 1895, believing he could use his influence to overthrow the Boer government, 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. The raid was a catastrophic failure. It forced Cecil Rhodes to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, sent his oldest brother Col. Frank Rhodes to jail in Transvaal convicted of high treason and nearly sentenced to death, and contributed to the outbreak of the Second Boer War.

In 1899, Rhodes was sued by a man named Burrows for falsely representing the purpose of the raid and thereby convincing him to participate in the raid. Burrows was severely wounded and had to have his leg amputated. His suit for £3,000 in damages was successful.

Expanding the British Empire

Rhodes and the Imperial Factor 

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. He befriended its local representatives, the British Commissioners, and through them organized British protectorates over the mineral concession areas via separate but related treaties. In this way he obtained both legality and security for mining operations. He could then attract more investors. Imperial expansion and capital investment went hand in hand.

The imperial factor was a double-edged sword: Rhodes did not want the bureaucrats of the Colonial Office in London to interfere in the Empire in Africa. He wanted British settlers and local politicians and governors to run it. This put him on a collision course with many in Britain, as well as with British missionaries, who favoured what they saw as the more ethical direct rule from London. Rhodes prevailed because he would pay the cost of administering the territories to the north of South Africa against his future mining profits. The Colonial Office did not have enough funding for this. Rhodes promoted his business interests as in the strategic interest of Britain: preventing the Portuguese, the Germans or the Boers from moving into south-central Africa. Rhodes's companies and agents cemented these advantages by obtaining many mining concessions, as exemplified by the Rudd and Lochner Concessions.

Treaties, concessions and charters 

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's proposals. His associate Charles Rudd, together with Francis Thompson and Rochfort Maguire, assured Lobengula that no more than ten white men would mine in Matabeleland. This limitation was left out of the document, known as the Rudd Concession, which Lobengula signed. 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.

During the company's early days, Rhodes and his associates set themselves up to make millions (hundreds of millions in current pounds) over the coming years through what has been described as a "suppressio veri ... which must be regarded as one of Rhodes's least creditable actions". Contrary to what the British government and the public had been allowed to think, the Rudd Concession was not vested in the British South Africa Company, but in a short-lived ancillary concern of Rhodes, Rudd and a few others called the Central Search Association, which was quietly formed in London in 1889. This entity renamed itself the United Concessions Company in 1890, and soon after sold the Rudd Concession to the Chartered Company for 1,000,000 shares. When Colonial Office functionaries discovered this chicanery in 1891, they advised Secretary of State for the Colonies Knutsford to consider revoking the concession, but no action was taken.

Armed with the Rudd Concession, in 1889 Rhodes obtained a charter from the British Government for his British South Africa Company (BSAC) to rule, police, and make new treaties and concessions from the Limpopo River to the great lakes of Central Africa. He obtained further concessions and treaties north of the Zambezi, such as those in Barotseland (the Lochner Concession with King Lewanika in 1890, which was similar to the Rudd Concession); and in the Lake Mweru area (Alfred Sharpe's 1890 Kazembe concession). Rhodes also sent Sharpe to get a concession over mineral-rich Katanga, but met his match in ruthlessness: when Sharpe was rebuffed by its ruler Msiri, King Leopold II of Belgium obtained a concession over Msiri's dead body for his Congo Free State.

Rhodes also wanted Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) incorporated in the BSAC charter. But three Tswana kings, including Khama III, travelled to Britain and won over British public opinion for it to remain governed by the British Colonial Office in London. Rhodes commented: "It is humiliating to be utterly beaten by these niggers."

The British Colonial Office also decided to administer British Central Africa (Nyasaland, today's Malawi) owing to the activism of David Livingstone trying to end the East African Arab-Swahili slave trade. Rhodes paid much of the cost so that the British Central Africa Commissioner Sir Harry Johnston, and his successor Alfred Sharpe, would assist with security for Rhodes in the BSAC's north-eastern territories. Johnston shared Rhodes's expansionist views, but he and his successors were not as pro-settler as Rhodes, and disagreed on dealings with Africans.

Rhodesia 

The BSAC had its own police force, the British South Africa Police, which was used to control Matabeleland and Mashonaland, in present-day Zimbabwe. The company had hoped to start a "new Rand" from the ancient gold mines of the Shona. Because gold deposits weren't as plentiful as they had hoped, many of the white settlers who accompanied the BSAC to Mashonaland became farmers rather than miners. White settlers and their locally-employed Native Police engaged in widespread indiscriminate rape of Ndebele women in the early 1890s. 

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, 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. He remained Managing Director of the BSAC (with power of attorney to take decisions without reference back to the Board in London) until June 1896, defying Chamberlain's calls to resign, and he gave instructions that no mercy be shown in putting down the rebellion, telling officers that "Your instructions are" he told a major, to "do the most harm you can to the natives around you." He ordered a police officer to "kill all you can", even those Ndebele who begged for mercy and threw down their arms... Shortly after learning of the assassination of the Ndebele spiritual leader, Mlimo, by the American scout Frederick Russell Burnham, and after participating in the cavalry charge at one of the last pitched battles of this phase of the war, Rhodes' associate Johan Colenbrander arranged for a meeting with the remaining Ndebele chiefs. Rhodes and a few colleagues walked unarmed into the Ndebele stronghold in Matobo Hills. In a series of meetings between August and October, he persuaded the Impi to lay down their arms, thus ending the Second Matabele War.

In the aftermath of the war in Matabeleland, but whilst the uprising in Mashonaland was being suppressed, Rhodes returned to London to give evidence the UK House of Commons Select Committee of Enquiry into the Jameson Raid. As Rhodes had incriminating telegrams demonstrating the complicity and foreknowledge of the Raid by Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, he and his solicitor were able to blackmail Chamberlain into retaining the BSAC Charter, leaving the Company in charge of administering the territory north of the Limpopo even as it became a Crown Colony. Rhodes returned to Mashonaland, further overseeing the suppression of the uprising there into 1897. The scandal attached to his name did not prevent him rejoining the board of the BSAC in 1898. He remained an MP in the Cape Parliament and a Privy Councillor.

By the end of 1894, the territories over which the BSAC had concessions or treaties, collectively called "Zambesia" after the Zambezi River flowing through the middle, comprised an area of 1,143,000 km2 between the Limpopo River and Lake Tanganyika. In May 1895, its name was officially changed to "Rhodesia", reflecting Rhodes's popularity among settlers who had been using the name informally since 1891. The designation Southern Rhodesia was officially adopted in 1898 for the part south of the Zambezi, which later became Zimbabwe; and the designations North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia were used from 1895 for the territory which later became Northern Rhodesia, then Zambia. He built a house for himself in 1897 in Bulawayo.

Rhodes decreed in his will that he was to be buried in Matopos Hills (now Matobo Hills). After his death in the Cape in 1902, his body was transported by train to Bulawayo. His burial was attended by Ndebele chiefs, now paid agents of the BSAC administration, who asked that the firing party should not discharge their rifles as this would disturb the spirits. Then, for the first time, they gave a white man the Matabele royal salute, Bayete. Rhodes is buried alongside Leander Starr Jameson and 34 British soldiers killed in the Shangani Patrol. 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.

"Cape to Cairo Red Line" 

One of Rhodes's dreams (shared by other members of the British Empire) was for a "red line" on the map from the Cape to Cairo (on geo-political maps, British dominions were always denoted in red or pink). Rhodes had been instrumental in securing southern African states for the Empire. 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".

This enterprise was not without its problems. France had a conflicting strategy in the late 1890s to link its colonies from west to east across the continent and the Portuguese produced the "Pink Map", 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.

Political views 

Rhodes wanted to expand the British Empire because he believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to greatness. In what he described as "a draft of some of my ideas" written in 1877 while a student at Oxford, Rhodes said of the English, "I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence."

Rhodes wanted to develop a Commonwealth in which all of the British-dominated countries in the empire would be represented in the British Parliament. Rhodes explicitly stipulated in his will that all races should be eligible for the scholarships.  It is said that he wanted to develop an American elite of philosopher-kings who would have the United States rejoin the British Empire. As Rhodes also respected and admired the Germans and their Kaiser, he allowed German students to be included in the Rhodes scholarships. He believed that eventually the United Kingdom (including Ireland), the US, and Germany together would dominate the world and ensure perpetual peace.

Rhodes's views on race have been debated; he supported the rights of indigenous Africans to vote, but critics have labelled him as an "architect of apartheid" and a "white supremacist", particularly since 2015. According to Magubane, Rhodes was "unhappy that in many Cape Constituencies, Africans could be decisive if more of them exercised this right to vote under current law [referring to the Cape Qualified Franchise]," with Rhodes arguing that "the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa". Rhodes advocated the governance of indigenous Africans living in the Cape Colony "in a state of barbarism and communal tenure" as "a subject race. I do not go so far as the member for Victoria West, who would not give the black man a vote. ... If the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall be thankful that we have the natives with us in their proper position."

However historian Raymond C. Mensing notes that Rhodes has the reputation as the most flamboyant exemplar of the British imperial spirit, and always believed that British institutions were the best. Mensing argues that Rhodes quietly developed a more nuanced concept of imperial federation in Africa, and that his mature views were more balanced and realistic. According to Mensing, "Rhodes was not a biological or maximal racist. Despite his support for what became the basis for the apartheid system, he is best seen as a cultural or minimal racist". 

On domestic politics within Britain, Rhodes was a supporter of the Liberal Party. Rhodes' only major impact was his large-scale support of the Irish nationalist party, led by Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891).

Rhodes worked well with the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony; he supported teaching Dutch as well as English in public schools. While Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, he helped to remove most of their legal disabilities. He was a friend of Jan Hofmeyr, leader of the Afrikaner Bond, and it was largely because of Afrikaner support that he became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. Rhodes advocated greater self-government for the Cape Colony, in line with his preference for the empire to be controlled by local settlers and politicians rather than by London.

Scholar and Zimbabwean author Peter Godwin, whilst critical of Rhodes, writes that he needs to be viewed via the prisms and cultural and social perspective of his epoch, positing that Rhodes "was no 19th-century Hitler. He wasn't so much a freak as a man of his time...Rhodes and the white pioneers in southern Africa did behave despicably by today's standards, but no worse than the white settlers in North America, South America, and Australia; and in some senses better, considering that the genocide of natives in Africa was less complete. For all the former African colonies are now ruled by indigenous peoples, unlike the Americas and the Antipodes, most of whose aboriginal natives were all but exterminated."

Godwin goes on to say "Rhodes and his cronies fit in perfectly with their surroundings and conformed to the morality (or lack of it) of the day. As is so often the case, history simply followed the gravitational pull of superior firepower."

Personal relationships

Personal life 
Rhodes never married, pleading, "I have too much work on my hands" and saying that he would not be a dutiful husband. Author Robin Brown has claimed in The Secret Society: Cecil John Rhodes’s Plan for a New World Order that Rhodes was a homosexual who was in love with his private secretary, Neville Pickering, and that he established "… a homosexual hegemony—which was already operative in the Secret Society—went on to influence, if not control, British politics at the beginning of the twentieth century". Paul Maylam of Rhodes University criticised the 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.

Princess Radziwiłł 
In the last years of his life, Rhodes was stalked by Polish princess Catherine Radziwiłł, born Rzewuska, who had married into the noble Polish family Radziwiłł. The princess falsely claimed that she was engaged to Rhodes, and that they were having an affair. She asked him to marry her, but Rhodes refused. In reaction, she accused him of loan fraud. He had to go to trial and testify against her accusation. She wrote a biography of Rhodes called Cecil Rhodes: Man and Empire Maker. Her accusations were eventually proven to be false.

Second Boer War 

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. The military felt he was more of a liability than an asset and found him intolerable. The officer commanding the garrison of Kimberley, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kekewich, experienced serious personal difficulties with Rhodes because of the latter's inability to co-operate.

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.

Rhodes used his position and influence to lobby the British government to relieve the siege of Kimberley, claiming in the press that the situation in the city was desperate. The military wanted to assemble a large force to take the Boer cities of Bloemfontein and Pretoria, but they were compelled to change their plans and send three separate smaller forces to relieve the sieges of Kimberley, Mafeking and Ladysmith.

Death 

Although Rhodes remained a leading figure in the politics of southern Africa, especially during the Second Boer War, he was dogged by ill health throughout his relatively short life.

He was sent to Natal aged 16 because it was believed the climate might help problems with his heart. On returning to England in 1872, his health again deteriorated with heart and lung problems, to the extent that his doctor, Sir Morell Mackenzie, believed he would survive only six months. He returned to Kimberley where his health improved. From age 40 his heart condition returned with increasing severity until his death from heart failure in 1902, aged 48, at his seaside cottage in Muizenberg.

The government arranged an epic journey by train from the Cape to Rhodesia, with the funeral train stopping at every station to allow mourners to pay their respects. It was reported that at Kimberley, "practically the entire population marched in procession past the funeral car". He was finally laid to rest at World's View, a hilltop located approximately  south of Bulawayo, in what was then Rhodesia. Today, his grave site is part of Matobo National Park, Zimbabwe.

Legacy
Rhodes has been the target of much recent criticism, with some historians attacking him as a ruthless imperialist and white supremacist. The continued presence of his grave in the Matopos (now Matobos) hills has not been without controversy in contemporary Zimbabwe. 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.

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. Then-president Robert Mugabe also opposed the move.

In 2004, he was voted 56th in the SABC 3 television series Great South Africans.

In his second will, written in 1877 before he had accumulated his wealth, Rhodes wanted to create a secret society that would bring the whole world under British rule. His biographer calls it an "extensive fantasy." Rhodes envisioned a secret society to extend British rule worldwide, including China, Japan, all of Africa and South America, and indeed the United States as well:

Rhodes's final will—when he actually did have money—was much more realistic and focused on scholarships.  He also left a large area of land on the slopes of Table Mountain to the South African nation. Part of this estate became the upper campus of the University of Cape Town, another part became the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, while much was spared from development and is now an important conservation area.

Rhodes Scholarship 

In his last will, he provided for the establishment of the Rhodes Scholarship. Over the course of the previous half-century, governments, universities and individuals in the settler colonies had been establishing travelling scholarships for this purpose.  The Rhodes awards fit the established pattern. The scholarship enabled male students from territories under British rule or formerly under British rule and from Germany to study at Rhodes's alma mater, the University of Oxford. Rhodes' aims were to promote leadership marked by public spirit and good character, and to "render war impossible" by promoting friendship between the great powers.

Memorials 

Rhodes Memorial stands on Rhodes's favourite spot on the slopes of Devil's Peak, Cape Town, with a view looking north and east towards the Cape to Cairo route. From 1910 to 1984 Rhodes's house in Cape Town, Groote Schuur, was the official Cape residence of the prime ministers of South Africa and continued as a presidential residence.

His birthplace was established in 1938 as the Rhodes Memorial Museum, now known as Bishops Stortford Museum. The cottage in Muizenberg where he died is a provincial heritage site in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The cottage today is operated as a museum by the Muizenberg Historical Conservation Society, and is open to the public. 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.

Rhodes University College, now Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, was established in his name by his trustees and founded by Act of Parliament on 31 May 1904.

The residents of Kimberley, Northern Cape elected to build a memorial in Rhodes's honour in their city, which was unveiled in 1907. The 72-ton bronze statue depicts Rhodes on his horse, looking north with map in hand, and dressed as he was when met the Ndebele after their rebellion.

Opposition

Memorials to Rhodes have been opposed since at least the 1950s, when some Afrikaner students demanded the removal of a Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town. A 2015 movement, known as "Rhodes Must Fall" (or #RhodesMustFall on social media), began with student protests at the University of Cape Town that were successful in getting university authorities to remove the Rhodes statue from the campus. The protest also had the broader goal of highlighting what the activists considered the lack of systemic post-apartheid racial transformation in South African institutions.

Following a series of protests and vandalism at the University of Cape Town, various allied movements both in South Africa and other countries have been launched in opposition to Cecil Rhodes memorials. These include a campaign to change the name of Rhodes University and to remove a statue of Rhodes from Oriel College, Oxford. The campaign was covered in a documentary by Channel 4, which was called The Battle for Britain's Heroes. The documentary was commissioned after Afua Hirsch wrote an article on the topic. Moreover, an article by Amit Chaudhuri, in The Guardian, suggested the criticism was "unsurprising and overdue". Other academics including Kehinde Andrews, prominent British academic and author specialising in Black studies, have vocally spoken in favour of #RhodesMustFall. However, Oriel College opted to keep the Rhodes statue, despite the protests. Oriel College claimed in 2016 they would lose about £100 million worth of gifts if they removed the statue. Nevertheless, in June 2020, the college voted in favour of setting up an independent commission of inquiry, amid widespread support for removing the statue.

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'. But he probably regarded the possibility of native Africans becoming 'civilized' as so remote that the two expressions, in his mind, came to the same thing."

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. Currently, in Oxford a number of those South African and Zimbabwean recipients of funds from his legacy are campaigning for his statue to be removed from display in Oxford. When asked if there was any double standard or hypocrisy in being funded by the Rhodes Scholarship fund and benefiting from the opportunity, whilst at the same time, campaigning against the legacy of Rhodes, one of the South African campaigners, Ntokozo Qwabe, replied that "this scholarship does not buy our silence...There is no hypocrisy in being a recipient of a Rhodes scholarship and being publicly critical of Cecil Rhodes and his legacy... There is no clause that binds us to find 'the good' in Rhodes’ character, nor to sanitise the imperialist, colonial agenda he propagated". 

In June 2020, amid the wider context of Black Lives Matter protests, the governing body of Oxford's Oriel college voted to remove the statue of Rhodes located on the college's façade facing Oxford's High Street. The actual removal would not take place until at least early spring 2021, when a commission set up by the college delivers its report on the future of the statue. In May 2021, the commission reported that, while the majority of members supported the statue's removal, the costs to do so were prohibitively high, and the college would therefore not be taking action.

Popular culture 
 Mark Twain's sarcastic summation of Rhodes ("I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake"), from Chapter LXIX of Following the Equator, still often appears in collections of famous insults.
 The will of Cecil Rhodes is the central theme in the science fiction book Great Work of Time by John Crowley, an alternative history in which the Secret Society stipulated in the will was indeed established. Its members eventually achieve the secret of time travel and use it to restrain World War I and prevent World War II, and to perpetuate the world ascendancy of the British Empire up to the end of the Twentieth Century. The book contains a vivid description of Cecil Rhodes himself, seen through the eyes of a traveller from the future British Empire.
 In the British film Rhodes of Africa (1936, directed by Austrian filmmaker Berthold Viertel), Rhodes was portrayed by Canadian actor Walter Huston.
Rhodes is the unofficial mascot of Uncomfortable Oxford, an Oxford based tour guide and history organisation which focuses on British imperial history. Much of their promotional material, tours and speeches all focus on Rhodes's statue outside of Oriel College, Oxford, and they were central to organising the 2020 Oxford Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd.
 Rhodes was played by Ferdinand Marian in the Nazi propaganda film Ohm Krüger (1941), where he—like all other British characters in the film—was presented as an outright villain.
 In 1901, Rhodes bought Dalham Hall, Suffolk. In 1902, Colonel Frank Rhodes erected the village hall in the village of Dalham, near Bury St Edmunds, to commemorate the life of his brother, who had died before taking possession of the estate.
 Rhodes was a peripheral but influential character in the historical novel The Covenant by James Michener.
 His memorial at Devil's Peak also served as a temple in The Adventures of Sinbad episode "The Return of the Ronin".
 The 1976 Hugh Masekela album Colonial Man has a song titled "Cecil Rhodes".
 Cecil Rhodes was the subject of a South African television mini-series, Barney Barnato, made in 1989 and first aired on SABC in early 1990.
 In 1996, BBC-TV made an eight-part television drama about Rhodes called Rhodes: The Life and Legend of Cecil Rhodes. It was produced by David Drury and written by Antony Thomas. It tells the story of Rhodes' life through a series of flashbacks of conversations between him and Princess Catherine Radziwiłł and also between her and people who knew him. It also shows the story of how she stalked and eventually ruined him. In the serial, Cecil Rhodes is played by Martin Shaw, the younger Cecil Rhodes is played by his son Joe Shaw, and Princess Radziwiłł is played by Frances Barber. In the serial Rhodes is portrayed as ruthless and greedy. The serial also suggests that he was homosexual. Countering the implication of Rhodes' homosexuality, historian and journalist Paul Johnson wrote that Rhodes had been falsely smeared by the programme, commenting: "In nine tendentious hours, Rhodes is to be presented as a corrupt and greedy money-grabber, a racist and paedophile, whose disgusting passion was to get his hands on young boys ... the BBC has spent £10m of our money putting together a farrago of exaggerations and smears about this great man." Peter Godwin said of the film that "it feels like a work overwhelmingly informed by malice, consistently seizing on the very worst interpretation of the man without really attempting to get under his skin. Rhodes was no 19th-century Hitler. He wasn't so much a freak as a man of his time."
Rhodes features prominently in Wilbur Smith's Ballantyne series of novels, fictional stories based amongst real events in Rhodes' lifetime.

See also 
 Cecil John Rhodes Statue
 Rhodesia (region)

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Monographs 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 , a scholarly biography
 Galbraith, John S. Crown and Charter: the Early Years of the British South Africa Company (1974).
 
 
 Judd, Denis, and Keith Surridge. The Boer War: A History (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013).
 
 

 
 
 

 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 ; 856pp; the standard scholarly biography says McFarlane,  (2007)

Encyclopedia

Journal articles 

 
 
 
 

 Plumb, J. H. "Cecil Rhodes" History Today (June 1953) 3#6 pp 431–38.

Newspaper articles

Websites 

 PBS: Empires; Queen Victoria; The Changing Empire; Characters : Cecil Rhodes

Primary sources

Historiography and memory

 

 
  online review

External links 

 Cecil John Rhodes history

Cecil Rhodes
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Alumni of Oriel College, Oxford
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North-Western Rhodesia, in south central Africa, was a territory administered from 1891 until 1899 under charter by the British South Africa Company. In 1890 the British South Africa Company signed a treaty with King Lewanika of the Barotse, one of the most powerful traditional rulers in the territory. The treaty did not confer protectorate status on the territory, as only the British government could confer that status. Nonetheless, the charter gave the territory protection. 
   
The territory consisted of the western half of present-day Zambia up to the Kafue River, its border with North-Eastern Rhodesia. Later the border between the two chartered territories was moved east, but the distinction did not have any great implications.

In 1899 North-Western Rhodesia was amalgamated with Barotseland to form Barotziland-North-Western Rhodesia, an official British protectorate.  In 1911 Barotziland-North-Western Rhodesia was amalgamated with North-Eastern Rhodesia to form Northern Rhodesia. Today this is the Republic of Zambia.

See also

 British South Africa Company
 Company rule in Rhodesia
 Rhodesia (name)
 Northern Rhodesia

References

Northern Rhodesia
British South Africa Company
Former British colonies and protectorates in Africa
History of Rhodesia
History of Zambia
States and territories established in 1891
States and territories disestablished in 1899
1891 establishments in Africa
1899 disestablishments in Africa
1891 establishments in the British Empire
1899 disestablishments in the British Empire The Rhodesia Information Centre, also known as the Rhodesian Information Centre, the Rhodesia Information Service, the Flame Lily Centre and the Zimbabwe Information Centre, represented the Rhodesian government in Australia from 1966 to 1980. As Australia did not officially recognise Rhodesia's independence it operated on an unofficial basis. The centre's activities included lobbying politicians, spreading propaganda about white minority rule in Rhodesia and advising Australian businesses on how they could evade the United Nations sanctions that had been imposed on the country. It collaborated with a far-right organisation and a pro-Rhodesia community organisation. The Rhodesia Information Centre had little impact, with Australian media coverage of the Rhodesian regime being almost entirely negative.

While the centre was initially tolerated by the Australian government, its operations became controversial. The Whitlam and Fraser Governments unsuccessfully attempted to force the Rhodesia Information Centre to close on several occasions during the 1970s, including in response to United Nations Security Council resolutions that targeted Rhodesia's unofficial diplomatic posts in Australia and other countries. The Zimbabwean government closed the centre in May 1980 after the end of white minority rule and later established an official embassy in Australia.

Background

Rhodesian independence
Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing British colony in Africa that was dominated by a small white minority. As of 1964, the population comprised about 220,000 Europeans and four million Africans. On 11 November 1965 the Southern Rhodesian government led by Prime Minister Ian Smith issued an illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence, with the colony becoming Rhodesia. The British government did not recognise Rhodesia's independence, and the United Nations Security Council directed United Nations member countries to not recognise the Rhodesian regime or provide it with any assistance. The United Nations encouraged voluntary trade sanctions against Rhodesia from November 1965, and these began to become mandatory from December 1966. No country ever formally recognised Rhodesia as an independent state, with all regarding UDI as illegal.

The lack of international recognition greatly constrained Rhodesia's ability to operate diplomatic missions in other countries. Only South Africa and Portugal were willing to enter into formal diplomatic relations with Rhodesia,. Rhodesian diplomatic missions were maintained in Lisbon, Lourenço Marques, Cape Town and Pretoria. The Rhodesian High Commission in London that had preceded UDI operated until 1969. The British government required the High Commission to limit its activities to consular assistance for Rhodesians in the United Kingdom, and banned it from public relations activities or promoting trade with or migration to Rhodesia. The High Commission was directed to close by the British government following the 1969 Rhodesian constitutional referendum, in which white Rhodesians endorsed a proposal for the country to become a republic. A Rhodesian Information Office was established in Washington, D.C. following UDI and another opened in Paris during 1968; neither was recognised as a diplomatic mission by the host country and the office in Paris was limited to promoting tourism and cultural exchanges. Small Rhodesian representative offices operated semi-clandestinely at various times in Athens, Brussels, Kinshasa, Libreville, Madrid, Munich and Rome; the governments of these countries were aware of the offices but did not formally recognise them.

Australian response to UDI

The Australian government never recognised Rhodesia's independence and opposed white minority rule in the country, but was initially reluctant to take concrete steps against the regime. This reluctance was motivated by support for the white Rhodesian cause among sections of the Australian population. Many Australians felt that the white Rhodesians were 'kith and kin' and were not concerned about the Rhodesian government's racist policies. It took lobbying from the British government for the Australian government to impose trade sanctions against Rhodesia in December 1965. The Australian Trade Commission in the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury was also closed. In line with its view that Smith's government was illegal, the Australian government refused to deal directly with it. Messages received from the Rhodesian government did not receive a response.

Despite its overall stance against Rhodesia, the Liberal Party of Australia-Country Party coalition government that was in power at the federal level in Australia until December 1972 provided some diplomatic support for the Rhodesian regime. This included issuing Australian passports to the secretary of the Rhodesian Ministry of External Affairs and the Rhodesian representatives to South Africa and Portugal and abstaining on some United Nations General Assembly resolutions that called for strong action to be taken against Rhodesia. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s the Australian government remained unenthusiastic about further extensions to the trade sanctions and was not active in the Commonwealth's efforts to find a solution to the Rhodesian problem. Enforcement of the trade sanctions was also uneven, and was undertaken through regulations rather than legislation. While imports from Rhodesia to Australia ceased, the quantity of Australian goods exported to Rhodesia increased between 1965 and 1973. In 1970 the Australian government defended the export of wheat to Rhodesia on humanitarian grounds. It claimed that the wheat was needed by Rhodesia's black population, despite their staple food being maize.

Establishment and role
The Rhodesian Government did not have a diplomatic presence in Australia prior to UDI. In 1966 it established the Rhodesian Information Service in Melbourne. This organisation moved to Sydney in early 1967 and was renamed the Rhodesia Information Centre. The centre was registered as a business in New South Wales, with the New South Wales government being aware from the outset that it was run by the Rhodesian government. The director of the centre claimed in 1972 that its role was to disseminate "factual information about Rhodesia throughout Australia".

In reality, the Rhodesia Information Centre was a de facto diplomatic mission that represented the Rhodesian government in Australia. This made it the Rhodesian government's main way of engaging with Australians. The information the centre provided was mainly propaganda for the Rhodesian regime. It lobbied members of the federal and state parliaments and advised Australian businesses about how they could evade the United Nations sanctions that had been placed on the country. It also handled queries about visas and migration to Rhodesia. The Zimbabwe African National Union alleged in 1978 that the Rhodesian Information Centre had recruited Australians to fight with the Rhodesian Security Forces. This was denied by the centre's director. The centre had stated in 1977 that Australians who contacted it about enlisting in the Rhodesian Security Forces were told to communicate directly with the relevant organisation in Rhodesia.

Documents stolen from the centre in 1972 indicated that most of its funding came from the Rhodesian Ministry of Information via a Swiss bank account. At this time its director was a Rhodesian who had taken out Australian citizenship, the deputy director was South African and it had one other full time staff member and an unspecified number of casual employees. Greg Aplin, the director of the Rhodesia Information Centre from 1977 to 1980, stated in his inaugural speech after being elected to the New South Wales Parliament in 2003 that he had been a diplomat with the Rhodesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was seconded to an information role during his posting to Sydney.

One of the Rhodesia Information Centre's roles was to distribute a periodical entitled The Rhodesian Commentary in Australia and New Zealand. This largely comprised material written in Rhodesia, with each edition including a page on the activities of the Rhodesia-Australia Associations that were active in each Australian state. One issue of The Rhodesian Commentary claimed that it had a mailing list of 5,500, but this likely included libraries, politicians and other recipients who were sent unsolicited copies.

The Rhodesian Information Centre's activities were illegal. They violated United Nations Security Council resolutions that banned the Rhodesian regime from engaging in diplomatic activity, as well as regulations made under Australian customs law that prohibited the importation of materials from Rhodesia.

Writing in 1972, the commentator and then-opposition Australian Labour Party staffer Richard V. Hall judged that the centre's attempts to influence Australian politicians and journalists had been "extensive but inept", with media coverage of the Rhodesian regime in Australia being almost entirely negative. A 1977 editorial in The Canberra Times stated that the Rhodesia Information Centre was "relatively innocuous and mostly ineffective".

Australian responses

1966 to 1972

The Liberal Party of Australia-Country Party coalition government tolerated the Rhodesia Information Centre. This formed part of the limited diplomatic support it provided to the Rhodesian government. The federal and New South Wales governments' tolerance of the centre was not in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 277, which was adopted in 1970 and called on UN member states to "ensure that any act performed by officials and institutions of the illegal regime in Southern Rhodesia shall not be accorded any recognition, official or otherwise, including judicial notice, by the competent organs of their State".

By the early 1970s the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was encouraging the government to more strongly enforce sanctions against Rhodesia. The department favoured taking steps to close the Rhodesia Information Centre, but did not pursue this as the Attorney-General's Department did not support such actions. In April 1971 the United Nations Sanctions Committee raised concerns with the Australian government that the Rhodesia Information Centre could be in breach of Security Council Resolution 253, which had been enacted in May 1968, and sought information about it. The response provided in May 1971 noted that the centre had been established before Security Council Resolution 253 was adopted. It was also stated that "so far as the Australian Government is concerned, the centre is a private office and neither the office not its personnel have any official status whatsoever", and the government did "not correspond with the office or acknowledge any correspondence from it". The United Nations Sanctions Committee did not take any further steps.

In March 1972 a small group known as the Alternate Rhodesia Information Centre, which was led by Sekai Holland, passed on documents that had been stolen from the Rhodesia Information Centre to the Australian media. These documents appeared to show that the centre was operating as a de facto embassy and advising businesses about how to evade sanctions. For instance, the documents showed that the Rhodesian government referred to the centre as a "mission", using the same terminology as it applied to its overt diplomatic posts in Portugal and South Africa. Other documents provided examples of how it was seeking to influence politicians and journalists, including by offering free trips to Rhodesia, and indicated extensive collaboration with the far-right Australian League of Rights. The documents also demonstrated that the South African Embassy in Australia had violated customs regulations by importing Rhodesian films and propaganda on behalf of the Rhodesia Information Centre. The Age and The Review published several stories about these revelations. The director of the Rhodesian Information Centre "emphatically denied" that it had smuggled publicity material into Australia or been involved in intelligence-gathering activities. He stated that the publicity material had been imported by post and air freight. The South African Ambassador to Australia also issued a statement denying that his staff had done anything improper.

In response to the media coverage, the Australian government directed the Department of Foreign Affairs to investigate the possible violation of customs regulations. Customs officers also raided the centre. The Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Customs and Excise found that the material stolen from the Rhodesia Information Centre demonstrated that it was run by the Rhodesian Government. The Department of Foreign Affairs recommended that the centre be closed, but the government decided to not take any action. The Minister for Foreign Affairs Nigel Bowen stated on 11 April 1972 that the government did not have the legal authority to close the centre. Richard V. Hall attributed this decision to the influence of the "Rhodesia Lobby" and an editorial in The Age stated that the government's lack of action "showed clearly — all too clearly — where its sympathies lay". During a parliamentary debate on racism and violence in May 1972 the federal opposition leader Gough Whitlam criticised the government for not closing the centre as part. Minister for Customs and Excise Don Chipp believed that the affair was the result of overly strict regulations on materials from Rhodesia, and gained Cabinet's agreement to relax them. The Department of Foreign Affairs judged that easing the restrictions would reinforce the international perception that the Australian Government was not serious about enforcing sanctions against Rhodesia. In July 1972 the government announced that it would not renew the Australian passports that had been issued to three Rhodesian diplomats on the grounds that they were working for a government that Australia did not recognise.

As part of a collection of official documents published in 2017, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade historian Matthew Jordan stated that the government's failure to act against the Rhodesia Information Centre in 1972 after its illegal activities had been revealed demonstrated its "residual sympathy" for the white Rhodesians. He also noted that Chipp's response to the revelations "was symptomatic of the Australian Government's half-hearted commitment to the long-term objective of overturning the white minority regime in Salisbury".

Whitlam Government
Upon its election, the Australian Labor Party Whitlam Government was determined to take a strong stance against the Rhodesian government. Its priorities included strongly enforcing the United Nations sanctions against Rhodesia, banning visits by Rhodesian sports teams that had been racially selected and closing the Rhodesia Information Centre. The Alternate Rhodesia Information Centre was prominent in pressuring the Whitlam Government to take action against the Rhodesia Information Centre, and developed links with groups representing university students including the leaders of the National Union of Students.

Prime Minister Whitlam wrote to the Liberal Party Premier of New South Wales Robert Askin on 7 December 1972 to request that his government deregister the Rhodesia Information Centre's business name. As part of efforts to destabilise the Askin Government, the Whitlam Government leaked this correspondence to the media. Askin was offended by the leak and argued that he did not need to act on Whitlam's request. Nevertheless, in March 1973 his government lodged an application with the Supreme Court of New South Wales seeking permission to cancel the centre's business name. This application was granted in June 1973, with the court finding that the Attorney-General of New South Wales' consent was needed to register an organisation of that name given that it implied a connection with the Rhodesian government. As part of this case the Whitlam Government provided a certificate confirming that it did not recognise the Rhodesian government or people who claimed to represent that government. The Rhodesia Information Centre lodged an appeal, in part on the basis that a reasonable person would not believe that its name indicated that it was linked to the Rhodesian government. The New South Wales Court of Appeal upheld the decision in June 1974. Following this ruling the centre was re-registered as the Flame Lily Centre (named after the Rhodesian national flower) and continued to operate as the Rhodesia Information Centre.

A group of Australians led by Sekai Holland applied to the New South Wales Registrar of Business Names in December 1972 seeking to register another body to be called the Rhodesia Information Centre that would represent the black majority in Rhodesia. This application was rejected. In March 1973 Holland said that she had proof that the Rhodesia Information Centre maintained dossiers on Rhodesians in Australia. The Alternate Rhodesia Information Centre was renamed the Free Zimbabwe Centre by August 1973.

On 18 April 1973, Postmaster-General Lionel Bowen instructed the Postmaster-General's Department to cease all mail, telephone and telegram services to the centre, including locking their post office box and deregistering The Rhodesian Commentary as a newspaper. The Rhodesia Information Centre's director Denzil Bradley initiated legal action in response, and Bowen's directive was overturned by the High Court of Australia on 10 September 1973 in the case Bradley v Commonwealth. The High Court found that Bowen had exceeded his powers under the Post and Telegraph Act and its regulations, and ordered that the government pay the Rhodesia Information Centre's legal costs.

During this period the centre's office at Crows Nest was petrol bombed on 7 July 1973. The office's furniture and fittings were badly damaged. In August 1973 Sekai Holland and six other members of the Free Zimbabwe Centre were arrested after they occupied the Rhodesia Information Centre's offices to protest its continuing operations.

After the High Court verdict, Prime Minister Whitlam stated in September 1973 that the government would consider amending the Post and Telegraphs Act to allow the Postmaster-General to withdraw services. He also claimed in November 1973, ahead of the 1973 New South Wales state election, that Askin supported the Rhodesian regime and had failed to cooperate with efforts to close the Rhodesia Information Centre. Askin rejected this claim, noting that his government had cancelled the centre's business name and lacked the legal authority to close the centre.

The Australian Labor Party Caucus approved draft legislation to close the centre on 6 March 1974. The Whitlam Government did not introduce this legislation into Parliament, however, due to competing legislative priorities and frequent disruptions to the parliamentary schedule. The government attempted to remove the centre's listing from Sydney telephone directories in December 1974, but a High Court justice issued an injunction prohibiting this in February 1975. The full bench of the High Court considered the matter in August 1975, and endorsed a consent order proposing that the case not proceed further after being told that the centre's details had been included in the 1975 directory and would appear in a 1975-76 directory. The government was ordered to pay the Rhodesia Information Centre's costs. The centre's office was petrol bombed again in March 1975, with approximately $1,500 of damage being caused.

The Rhodesian diplomatic presence was reduced during the mid 1970s. A Rhodesian tourist office in New York City was forced to close by the United States government during 1974. In 1975 the formal Rhodesian diplomatic missions in Portgual and Mozambique were also required to close by the host governments.

Fraser Government

Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who headed the Liberal-National Country Party coalition Fraser Government that replaced the Whitlam Government in November 1975, had a strong commitment to racial equality. He believed that action against the white minority governments in Rhodesia and South Africa should be a priority for his government's foreign policies on both ethical and geopolitical grounds. Opinion within the coalition government's elected members was split on this issue, with some openly supporting the continuation of white minority rule in Rhodesia.

Further steps were taken internationally during 1977 to disrupt Rhodesia's diplomatic activities. The French government forced the Rhodesian Information Office in Paris to close in January 1977. On 27 May 1977 the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 409 whose provisions banned the transfer of funds from the Rhodesian government to offices or agents operating on its behalf in other countries. This aimed to hinder the Rhodesian information offices in Australia, South Africa and the United States. The Carter Administration took steps to cut off funding from Rhodesia to the Rhodesian Information Office in Washington, D.C. in line with this resolution during August 1977, but it remained open until 1979 after receiving donations from American citizens.

Fraser and his Cabinet believed that they needed to comply with Resolution 409 and force the Rhodesia Information Centre to close. It was thought that Australia would become diplomatically isolated if the centre was allowed to remain open, and Fraser's advocacy at Commonwealth meetings would be compromised. In making the decision to close the centre, the Cabinet noted that doing so would impose some constraints on freedom of expression.  Andrew Peacock, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, announced in Parliament on 24 May 1977 that the government was considering legislating to enforce Resolution 409 if it was passed. On 6 June the Australian government formally notified the United Nations via a letter to the Secretary-General that it intended "to introduce legislation designed to give effect to the most recent resolution directed against the maintenance of Rhodesian information offices and agencies abroad".

The Rhodesia Information Centre lobbied the public and government backbenchers to prevent its closure. Roy van der Spuy, the centre's director, argued that Australia was not bound to enforce United Nations resolutions, that the High Court had upheld the centre's legality and that closing the centre would violate the principle of freedom of speech. He noted that the Liberal Party's platform included commitments for protect individual liberties and freedom of speech.

The closure of the Rhodesia Information Centre was strongly opposed by many government backbenchers when parliament resumed on 17 August 1977. Some were motivated by sympathy for Rhodesia, but a larger number believed that closing the centre would be an unjustifiable violation of civil liberties. A large proportion of the non-elected members of the Country Party and the New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party also opposed the legislation, which put further pressure on the elected members. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 18 August that "30 to 50 percent" of government members of parliament opposed the legislation, with at least twelve being prepared to cross the floor and vote against it. For instance, the Member for Tangney Peter Richardson argued that closing the centre would violate freedom of speech and give the United Nations excessive influence over Australian domestic policies. He also stated that the Rhodesian Government was "less menacing to our national interests than Soviet Russia and China". Richardson's subsequent decision to leave politics was, in part, a protest against Fraser's stance towards the Rhodesia Information Centre. At the end of September The National Times reported that 40 government members were opposed to legislating to close the centre.

On 20 September Peacock gave a commitment in Parliament any legislation that introduced to close the Rhodesia Information Centre would not "infringe on the liberty of individual Australians freely to express their opinions with respect to Rhodesia". After he received a copy of the draft bill in October, Peacock judged that it was "too dragnet in its approach" and directed that it be redrafted to better protect freedom of speech. This deferment became indefinite. While the opposition Labor Party would have provided enough votes for the legislation to pass parliament, Fraser was not willing to expose himself and his government to a major backbench revolt over the issue. The political scientist Alexander Lee has described the defeat of the legislation as "a stunning victory" for "Rhodesia's Australian allies", and noted that it meant that Australia did not comply with Resolution 409.

In August 1978 the Fraser Government succeeded in passing legislation to force an unofficial Croatian embassy in Australia to close. The Labor Party opposition attempted to amend this bill to require that the government also legislate to close the Rhodesia Information Centre, but this amendment was defeated. The Fraser Government considered legislating the closure of the centre again in April 1979 ahead of an assessment by the United Nations Security Committee of countries' compliance with enforcing sanctions against Rhodesia. At this time an election in Rhodesia was imminent, and the federal Cabinet was intending to take its outcomes into consideration when deciding how it would go about closing the centre. An article in The Canberra Times stated that the Fraser Government's efforts to close the centre were "moving with the slowness of the most lethargic sloth" and claimed that the centre was a red herring that was being used to distract attention away from the large number of Australians who were fighting with the Rhodesian security forces.

The Rhodesian government that was elected agreed in December the next year to a transition to majority rule. Under this agreement, the country reverted to the status of a British colony until a free and fair election was held in February 1980. After the end of white minority rule and Rhodesia's transition to Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwean government decided in April 1980 to close the Rhodesia Information Centre. It was renamed the Zimbabwe Information Centre for the last weeks of its existence, and closed on 31 May 1980. A Zimbabwean embassy was later established in Canberra.

See also
Australia–Zimbabwe relations
Propaganda in the Rhodesian Bush War

References

Citations

Works consulted

History of the foreign relations of Australia
1966 establishments in Australia
Foreign relations of Rhodesia
De facto embassies
Diplomatic missions in Australia
1980 disestablishments in Australia
Australia–Zimbabwe relations
Propaganda