“I see Rhodes as the negative image of somebody like Nelson Mandela,” says writer and filmmaker Antony Thomas. “Rhodes had the charismatic gift where he could relate to anybody, whether you were black African, Afrikaner, English, Jewish, whatever you were, if Rhodes wanted you on his side, he could seduce you.
“Rhodes used those gifts negatively, and Mandela has used them positively.”
At 8 p.m. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday on WTTW-Ch. 11, PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” presents “Rhodes,” a profile of one of the great empire builders of the Victorian era. While most Americans know Rhodes through his founding of the self-named Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and his creation of Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarships, in England and Africa it is quite a different matter. In the past 100 years, Rhodes has gone from a near godlike figure to the worst kind of evil tyrant.
And the irony is, he truly was both.
Born the sickly son of a vicar in Hertfordshire, England, on July 5, 1853, Cecil B. Rhodes headed to Africa to seek his fortune on his brother’s cotton farm. What he found instead were diamonds, lots and lots of diamonds. But getting them wasn’t easy, and making sure the rich motherlodes didn’t flood the market was even harder. After a stint at Oxford, Rhodes set about building a financial empire in southern Africa.
And before he was done, he had laid telegraph lines and railroads across the veldt; founded the DeBeers diamond company; seized vast tracts of land through subterfuge, clever maneuvering and outright warfare; helped trigger the bloody Boer War; and sowed the seeds of apartheid.
Martin Shaw, a Tony Award nominee for best actor in Broadway’s “An Ideal Husband,” plays Rhodes in adult life.
Raised in South Africa, Antony Thomas had always known about Rhodes. “I was brought up in that British tradition, that British colonial tradition, and for us, Rhodes was almost a divine figure. He represented everything that it meant to be English. Everything about him … the fact that he was celibate was almost compared to Christs celibacy. He was too preoccupied with higher things and great visions than to marry and all this stuff.
“I made my own political journey, and by my early 20s, I had set Rhodes behind me completely.”
About 10 years later, Thomas was asked to direct and produce a documentary about Rhodes and was plunged back into research. This later led Thomas to write “Rhodes” and a companion biography, “Rhodes: The Race for Africa.”
“The fascination was–how can I put it? It was like a journey into the heart of darkness. I was discovering a Machiavellianism and an evil that was absolutely profound. At the same time, I was finding so much in this man that I recognized. We are part of the same culture and the same tradition. I think this is very good for an English person to do.
“Other countries–you only have to think of Germany–have had to confront their recent history. We never have, as British. We’ve never had to confront what happened in Ireland in 1916 or what happened in any of our colonies. Most English people would still believe this, that we British were jolly good in Africa, that we played decently.”
