He was the son of Francis William Rhodes, a priest of the Church of England in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. Cecil was the fifth born.
He was born asthmatic. He could not attend boarding school as his siblings and so he went to a day-school near their home. At 16 years, he was sent to Africa in the hope that his health would improve due to the African climate that was not as cold as back home in Britain. He started off in cotton farming alongside his brother, Herbert.
Rhodes never married. He said that he could not be a committed husband due to the many tasks that he was undertaking. He said “I have too much work on my hands”. He was laid to rest at World’s View in Matobo National Park.
Rhodes is one of the founders of the mining industry in South Africa. He started with an open-pit diamond mine where he used to sort diamonds mined by his workers in the 1870s. In 1880, he formed the De Beers Mining Company. It is currently named De Beers Group of Companies. It is one of the leading producer and distributor of diamonds in the world.
In April 2015, students at University of Cape Town, South Africa took to the streets calling for his statue to be demolished. They regard it as the representation of colonialism and all the ill-treatment it meted out to South Africans. He is regarded by the protesters as a founder of the apartheid regime by introducing Lawson voting and land ownership that shaped one of South Africa’s worst regimes.
He is not one of the greatest Britons, based on results of a poll conducted in 2002. The research by international media house, British Broadcasting Corporation showed that he was not regarded as one of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. In Zimbabwe, there have been calls to have his remains moved from the Matobo National Park to United Kingdom, his land of birth. He is hated by most black South Africans, Afrikaners and South Africans of British origin.
He was one of the most controversial figures of the British colonialist in Africa. He was once quoted saying ‘I could never accept the position that we should disqualify on account of his colour’. He later led his government to bar Africans from voting by using financial status as a factor to allow or bar an African from voting.
The Rhodes Scholarship programme was founded in 1902 after his death. He set it in his will before he died.
