During the sittings of the South African Convention at Cape Town, some seven years after Rhodes’s death, an Englishwoman, recently landed, the daughter of an English statesman, was describing to some of us her first impressions of the Cape Peninsula. The charm of Cape Town and its surroundings, Rondebosch, Wynberg, Sea Point, Muizenberg, lovely even in their names; the Mountain dominating them all; the clear, clean South African air and its wonderful light – these she felt and saw as all must who have ever touched there; but there was something more, a haunting sense of some dominating personality present but unseen everywhere. Table Mountain with the town and villages nestling in its kloofs seemed to have some great spirit brooding over it, and in men’s talk there was always a reserve as of some idea too familiar yet too impressive to be much talked about. Then it had dawned upon her that the haunting personality was that of Rhodes; and the mystery was explained. For everything appeared to call up associations with Rhodes. The statue of the old Dutch governor, Van Riebeeck, on the quay, to greet the stranger on his arrival in South Africa, was his gift; the road round the Mountain was planned by him with the loving thought that “human beings would walk that road long after he had gone”; the old Dutch block-house on the Mountain was preserved from destruction by him; Groote Schuur at Rondebosch, with its ample grounds and its masses of hydrangeas, was his home, left for the public service of a united South Africa; in the tiny cottage by the sea at Muizenberg he breathed his last painful breath; the field for Rhodes. He is the only colonial statesman who has to such extent struck the imagination and affected the thoughts of Englishmen at home and throughout the world. The very suddenness with which he loomed upon the outer world helped to concentrate attention upon him. A few years before he became Prime Minister of the Cape he had hardly been heard of in England. During a debate of 1884 Lord Randolph Churchill spoke scornfully of “some cypher” appointed to supersede the missionary Mackenzie in Bechuanaland, a “cypher” whose appointment the Minister was hard put to it to defend as of “a gentleman of some distinction, who had always shown himself to be a great sympathizer with the native races.” Less than six years later the “cypher’s” name was on every tongue as the autocrat of one of the greatest industrial undertakings in the world... Basil Williams Cecil Rhodes ISBN: xxx 269 pages |
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About the author Williams began his career in journalism before entering public service. During the South African War and the early years of the twentieth century, he worked closely with leading British statesmen and gained first-hand experience of imperial politics. His practical knowledge of government and administration later enriched his historical writings. As a historian, Williams specialized in the history of the British Empire and the political development of Great Britain. He became particularly renowned for his studies of the eighteenth century and for his biographies of major political figures. Among his most important works were Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, The Whig Supremacy, and British Foreign Policy under Canning. His books combined careful scholarship with a clear and engaging style, making them accessible to both academic and general readers. Williams also held academic appointments, including a period as Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal. Through his teaching and writing, he helped shape the study of British political history for a generation of students and readers. Basil Williams died in 1950. He is remembered as a distinguished historian whose works contributed significantly to the understanding of Britain’s political institutions, imperial expansion, and statesmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. |
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