ABSTRACT
In southern Africa the one man who could undoubtedly ‘think big’ was Cecil John Rhodes. [ Doc. 19, p. 122] Rhodes had arrived in South Africa in 1870, a thin, tubercular young man, sent to regain his health on his brother's cotton farm in Natal. He spent most of the next few years not in Natal, but on the new diamond diggings at Kimberley. The first diamond had been found there in 1867. For some time the children of a Boer farmer had played with the ‘pretty marble’ before its value was discovered. Kimberley, perhaps more than anywhere else, symbolised the El Dorado element in the new Africa. Griqualand West, where the diamond diggings were, quickly attracted an overflowing population, old prospectors from America and Australia, petty crooks from the East End of London, the whole choir, according to one report, of the cathedral of Grahamstown. It was a tough society but Rhodes quickly made his mark. His first big coup was to corner the market in pumping equipment when the workings were threatened with disastrous flooding. But Rhodes was a great deal more than a smart operator. Otherwise he would have finished up merely as a rich man like some of his rivals on the diamond fields, Alfred Beit or Barney Barnato. Rhodes was always a dreamer too. He spent long nights on the veldt philosophising to anyone who would listen, and he commuted from Kimberley to Oxford intermittently between 1873 and 1881 to obtain a degree. Rhodes retained an almost mystic faith in the powers of education, which was later to bear fruit in his endowment of ‘Rhodes scholarships’ to take young men from the Empire, the United States and Germany to Oxford.
