NOTE: I’ve been playing with ideas for a future “Have To” History book, tentatively titled “Who In The World?” The premise would be to tackle major events and issues in world history through a series of brief narratives or biographies of world figures whose names may sound vaguely familiar but who aren’t the “A-listers.” Cecil Rhodes certainly fits that bill, but I’ve been having trouble narrowing down what to include and what to cut from his story. The draft I’m sharing today demonstrates both the potential of using biography as an anchor for larger themes and issues and the dangers of the rabbit trails which naturally result from this approach. I doubt most of this will make it into the final version, if such a thing should one day come about.
Cecil Rhodes potentially represents many things in world history. In doing so, he reminds us of the futility of attempting to categorize our forebears into “good guys” and “bad guys.” Rhodes was… complicated. It in no way excuses the wrongs for which he was responsible for us to recognize and appreciate the laudable elements of his story. If anything, it reminds us that in the right circumstances, most of us are quite capable of being both swell and abhorrent – sometimes within a very short time frame.
As Marvel comics (or the Bible) figured out long ago, our heroes often have an unpleasant feature or two, while the nastiest villains may retain smatterings of graciousness, talent, or good intentions of the sort we’d much rather be reserved for someone more likable – hence the endless debates over whether or not the Declaration of Independence is forever tainted by Thomas Jefferson’s record as a slave owner or when it’s appropriate to spill tea on Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr. Personally, I’ve always found flawed heroes to be far more inspirational and complicated villains far more illuminating. Few of us can aspire to be as flawless as Superman of Gandhi as commonly presented. Perhaps, however, we can strive to emphasize the better angels of our nature even as flawed, fallen mortals.
Then again, Rhodes was no Jefferson or Gandhi by any measure, no matter how much grace we choose to employ. Whatever his mitigating intentions or ideologies tied to his times and circumstances, Cecil was in many ways a very naughty man who used and abused those he deemed lesser than himself – which was most people.
Rhodes wasn’t American, but his life echoed a Horatio Alger tale: misfit kid defies all the odds and becomes monumentally successful. He craved wealth and power and exploited both once attained. He believed his race was naturally superior to all others – particularly those native to the continent of Africa, where he made much of his fortune and at one time had two countries named after him. He used his wealth and political power to fight for the protection of the “little people” (of various races). He started a war which wasn’t at all necessary and cost tens of thousands of lives. He believed deeply in British values and culture and the good it could do for the world at large once embraced.
Rhodes was idealistic when it came to British values or the power of education. He left behind an endowment committed to providing opportunities for others like himself to attend Oxford University and carve their own pathway to success, explicitly specifying that “no student shall be qualified or disqualified for election … on account of his race or religious opinions.” At the same time, he pretty much laid the groundwork for what would later be known as “apartheid” across South Africa.
Oh, and he helped make diamonds sacred in western culture, sparking a bizarre conviction (which still lingers today) that unless you cement your relationship with small rocks worth several years’ salary, you’re not REALLY in love.
So, like I said… complicated, despite leaning quite naughty by modern standards.
The Son’ll Come Out, Tomorrow…
And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
But his disciples muttered to themselves and insisted, that can’t be right. He’s mistranslating the original Greek or something. Can we go back and choose a passage from the Old Testament instead?
(John 9:2-4, Modern American Version)
Cecil Rhodes was born in 1853 in Hertfordshire, just north of London. He was by all accounts a rather “sickly” child – a generic term covering anything from asthma to allergies to lactose intolerance (but stopping short of something major enough to secure accurate diagnosis, like scarlet fever. His father was a clergyman in the Church of England, making the family what we’d today think of as “middle class.” His older brothers attended what were known as “public schools,” the nineteenth century British equivalent of ritzy private schooling. Cecil, however, was sent to the local “grammar school,” an early version of what Americans today would think of as a decent, local public high school – humble, but still set above any “charity schools” in the area.
When he was sixteen years old, Cecil fell victim to “consumption” – most likely tuberculosis or something similar. This was a fairly severe condition in the nineteenth century and not everyone recovered. As we’ve recently been reminded, serious ailments which prove difficult to control tend to spark socio-political reactions on top of the personal suffering they cause. When people feel frightened or out of control, they tend to embrace explanations which offer them some sort of control or detachment from danger or suffering, reality be damned. Folks in nineteenth century England were no exception.
Like so many nasty things, tuberculosis was (and is) caused by bacteria attacking various organs inside the human body, most particularly the lungs. All that coughing and gagging and spitting up blood helps spread the ailment to fellow humans, making it highly contagious – particularly in crowded households, cities, or anywhere else people live and work together. Biologically, the disease itself was an equal opportunity infector. Rich folks were just as susceptible as the poor, other factors being equal.
But of course, other factors weren’t equal – end therein crept that socio-political dynamic history teaches us to expect. One of the primary benefits of wealth was having a little elbow room, thus reducing the chances of infection to begin with. Your surroundings tended to becleaner and you were more likely to spend time outdoors, further restricting the spread of yucky things.
Correlation, Causation, and the Moral High Ground
Nineteenth century medicine wasn’t quite caught up on the whole bacteria/infection thing, but physicians certainly noted the correlations between nasty conditions and disease. One of the most common treatments, in fact, was to send the afflicted who could afford it to warmer, and thus presumably healthier, locales, where they’d be directed to spend more time outside breathing fresh air and reading epic poetry or whatever. (In Cecil’s case, that meant sending him to South Africa to farm cotton with one of his brothers – but we’ll get back to that in a moment.)
Illness, in other words, correlated with poverty in the sense that poor folks were more likely to live in crowded, unsanitary conditions. Poverty, in turn, often correlated with the sorts of lifestyles upper classes derided as immoral and in constant violation of proper social norms. It’s not always easy to distinguish between difficult circumstances and poor personal choices, then or now.
By way of example, for centuries those paying attention had noted a strong correlation between bad smells and severe illnesses. It was thus reasonable enough to assume that strong odors were actually the source of many ailments. Avoid the nasty scents, and you’d reduce your chances of getting sick.
This “miasma theory” had such staying power because it largely worked. Staying away from gross things will, in fact, reduce your chances of serious illness. More time outside and “socially distancing” from others makes you less likely to take in new germs. Keeping your surroundings clean, eating healthier foods, and getting enough sleep also lower your odds of “consumption.” We can all break out our “correlation does not imply causation” memes, but it wasn’t such a crazy supposition – incorrect or not.
It was thus natural – if unfortunate – that many perceived a strong correlation between poverty and the careless, often “immoral” life choices which accompanied it, and tuberculosis. In other words, the disease took on an ethical component. As is so often the case throughout history, sufferers were thought to be at least partially responsible for their own conditions. If those living better lives, with better educations, and better morals, and better resources, were less likely to contract tuberculosis, then maybe those who did fall ill (or die) were kinda asking for it. Add in a predisposition for divine retribution and eternal justice and whatnot and you get the very human “just-world fallacy.”
Science Progresses; Bias Conserves
And therein lies the problem. (Well, one of them – and a BIG one.) The confusion about the source of illness is problematic from a purely medical standpoint, of course, but that element tends to clear up over time because that’s how science works – explanations are proposed, tested, messed with, and tried out, until refined into better explanations. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s the oversimplification of the moral and personal factors which proves far more dangerous over time. Nearly two centuries later, and we’re still not fully convinced that poverty and illness aren’t primarily caused by the afflicted simply not being as wonderful as we are.
I mean, it should be obvious – we’ve worked hard to do all the right things, and while it hasn’t been easy, we’re doing OK. Therefore, that’s how things work. Therefore squared, anyone for whom things aren’t working out must not have worked as hard as we have or done as many right things – otherwise, the system is chaotic and random and meaningless and there’s no point to any of it and madness rules eternity.
It’s a tempting bit of reasoning, especially if we work very hard to avoid thinking about it too clearly. (It’s far “truer” when we just kinda “feel” it in the background and don’t over-analyze it.) Such a monumental fallacy goes nicely with some false dichotomy icing and blood-red sprinkles spelling out “EITHER OUR CHOICES MATTER OR THEY DON’T” in an awkward sugary scrawl (and the “DON’T” kinda crammed in at the far edge).
In any case, “consumption” meant Rhodes was unable to attend the same sorts of schools as his brothers. He was instead sent to South Africa where it was warmer and he could spend more time outside, in this case working on a small cotton plantation with one of those same brothers. It just so happened that something else was going on in Africa at this time – something shinier and more appealing than picking or refining cotton.
Africa had diamonds. Lots of them. Now it simply needed someone with a little vision to make the most of the sparkly beasts.
1. Responsible for the best-known and arguably most influential set of legal codes in the ancient world. Key issue: they were written down and publicly posted.
Hammurabi was the sixth king of Babylon, having assumed the throne from his unfortunately-named father, Sin-Muballit. They seem to have been Amorites, originally a tribe from western Syria and one of the groups most often mentioned in the Old Testament as both scary and deserving of slaughter whenever possible. Then again, records from this time period are fragmentary and the language maddeningly inconsistent, so a term like “Amorite” may have been more of a title or categorization than a specific ethnic group or family name. Like much from this era, the issue is cloaked in contradictory evidence and academic debate.
Periodic cultural melodrama over this chronology stems from a popular, but false, dichotomy between inspiration and incorporation; there’s nothing particularly suspicious about legal codes sharing common elements or social norms evolving from existing customs. Such reasoning would defrock the most sanctified sermon or inspirational song upon discovering the use of standard rhetorical devices or popular chord changes.
The development (or at least the substantial improvement) of dhows and other sailing vessels were making maritime travel and trade safer and easier, even over great distances. There are several things which make a dhow a dhow, but the two most likely to come up on your standard world history exam are how they were held together and what made them go. First, they were stitched together rather than simply glued or nailed. They were made of wood bound together with various types of cords and fibers. Second, and more noticeably, they had lateen sails. These triangular sails are still in use today, and when properly manipulated allowed boats to effectively sail against the wind – an obvious game-changer, nautically speaking, and a nice metaphor for technology in general.
Another old technology reappearing in new and improved form was the astrolabe, a device so modernized by Muslim astronomers and mathematicians as to be essentially a whole new toy. The astrolabe was a miraculous little device that allowed mere mortals to use the positions of the stars and calculations of various angles to determine the time, their current location, and accurately predict America’s Next Top Model, all from the deck of a sailing vessel in the middle of nowhere. Among other things, the astrolabe allowed Muslim sailors to determine the direction of Mecca from anywhere they happened to be, a major assist in adhering to their religious commitments. It was also, no doubt, a powerful psychological connection to home, allowing users to journey an infinite distance while in some way remaining connected to all they held dear. It wasn’t quite Google Hangouts, but it was leaps and bounds ahead of “maybe my next letter will arrive within the year.” 
It doesn’t much matter what goods you have to trade or how efficiently you’re able to transport them if you don’t have people to trade with. As with most things throughout history, the Swahili Coast did not develop in isolation. Traders from the Arabic world, parts of Europe, and beyond, interacted with the Swahili regularly and at times intimately. It was not unusual for traders to stay in local Swahili homes while waiting for the proper winds to take them on their way, often for weeks or even months. The cultural and other exchanges made possible by such extended time together exceeded even those facilitated by trade. It didn’t hurt when they’d occasionally marry or otherwise choose to mingle genetic codes.
Most history students vaguely remember Vasco de Gama. He was the Portuguese explorer who eventually managed to round the southern tip of Africa and sail up to India via the Indian Ocean. Only a few years after Columbus thought he’d reached it by going west (Columbus never accepted that he’d run into a completely different continent), de Gama actually connected Europe with Asia via water, allowing trade and periodic conquest on a scale never before possible.
1. In 1989, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, was one of many sites across China where citizens marched, chanted, and otherwise protested government corruption; they demanded reforms and protection of basic human rights.
On April 15th, 1989, a popular politician by the name of Hu Yaobang died (he was 73 and had a heart attack – nothing nefarious). Hu was rebellious and relatively progressive, popular with idealists and college students – the Bernie Sanders of his day. Students and others took to the streets to mourn his passing, which inevitably transitioned into rather blunt criticism towards those still alive and in power. Soon their demonstrations became protests – against corruption, against the party’s mistreatment of Hu, and whatever else came to mind along the way. And they spread.
The Xhosa were (and are) a major cultural group from the Eastern Cape. The land was fertile and there were plenty of fresh water sources for their cattle – which, as it turns out, were rather important to them. Like the Zulu, they were descended from the Bantu who centuries before had migrated from the northwest. Xhosa is still one of the most-spoken languages in Africa, and the native tongue of Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and the Black Panther.
Since the mid-17th century, the Xhosa, like the rest of Southern Africa, had been forced to accommodate European settlers on the Cape – first the Dutch, then the British. The Dutch Boers were especially problematic. Staunch Calvinists, they believed themselves quite literally chosen by God and rarely hesitated to transgress on Xhosa territory. In turn, the Xhosa raided Boer settlements for (what else?) cattle, and hostilities erupted regularly.
The homestead was understandably hesitant to embrace this revelation, so Mhlakaza returned with the girls to the site of the visitation. The strangers would only communicate through Nongqawuse (which perhaps should have been a red flag) but Mhlakaza was nonetheless convinced one of the spirits was, in fact, his deceased brother, and embraced the prophecy wholeheartedly. Mhlakaza sent word to the other chiefs, and soon the entire nation was talking. Even King Sarhili sent trusted family members to investigate; soon he, too, was officially a believer.