Yet, as Mr Storey also notes, his businesses generally paid black miners more than most white miners were earning in Britain at the time.
His bequests were many and munificent. Along with benefactions to Cape Town University, Rhodes gave the huge sum of £100,000 ($500,000 at the time, equivalent to almost $20m today) to Oriel, his old college. He also set up the famous Rhodes scholarships at Oxford University, with the explicit provision in his will that no applicant should be disqualified “on account of his race or religious opinion”. Some of the loudest proponents of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign have been Rhodes scholars from Africa.
Rhodes predicted that what he built would last. In a baleful sort of way, Mr Storey says, this is true. Many in the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign link South Africa’s inequities to Rhodes’s racially restrictive policies. The African National Congress’s Freedom Charter of 1955 “did not mention him by name, but it amounted to nothing less than a call for the rooting out of the legacy of Cecil Rhodes”, since it was his “colonialist achievements that presented so many obstacles to those who sought a country based on equality, including equal access to land, mines and housing”. Rhodes believed his reputation would remain “fresh with the praise of posterity”. Today it carries a whiff of faeces.