Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form. Please try again.
On C.J.
He is the one wreathed in sulphurous smoke, as the Chisa Nyama women burn their plastic at his feet.
They do not know who he is, they say when asked, “Dis ‘n Boer”.
They say so because of the big hat.
I am currently working on a multi-species history of diamond mining in South Africa between 1870 and 1920. Central to this narrative is the history of De Beers Consolidated Diamond Mining (CDM), and its founder Cecil John Rhodes.
In the course of my work the weirdness of Cecil John Rhodes has become more and more apparent to me. A detested historical figure, much like Adolph Hitler or any other historical demon, who at first appeared to be unidimensional. And yet, the man whom I detested for a whole variety of reasons, has become more and more of an object of interest for me. That is, Cecil John Rhodes as a person became ever more intriguing to me. Discovering correspondence from Rhodes to one of his colleagues in which they referred to one another as Veldskoen and Springbok, whilst communicating with one another in a substitution code littered with German words, only served to pique my interest in the man. Let there be no misunderstanding, Rhodes was intrigant, a wheeler-dealer who went out of his way to cover his tracks and obfuscate much of what he was doing. At the same time, much like Donald Trump, he was brazenly honest about his intentions and activities. His actions in the invasion of what is today Zimbabwe and unprovoked attack on the Matabele Kingdom of Lobengula were brazen acts of the greatest brutality and conscious wanton cruelty. It is a sign of the times that two countries were named after the man and that much of southern Africa was littered with statues and monuments of his craven image.
To many of my colleagues and friends, South Africa is well known, but to some all they know about S.A. is based on my incessant jabbering, particularly on the essential importance of diamond mining in Kimberley in the history of South Africa after 1870. Central to this is Cecil John Rhodes. Without Rhodes’s control of diamond mining in Kimberley, he would not have been able to acquire the wealth that enabled him to buy and finance his many devious ventures throughout southern Africa, from the Cape to southern Congo. Much like Musk, Rhodes entered politics in the Cape Colony, primarily to further his business interests whilst making and consolidating his fortune in Kimberley. As such, he represented the diamond diggers, whom he had, as he put it, “squared”, in the constituency of Barkly West in the Cape Parliament. With seemingly limitless capital derived from the centralised control and sale of diamond production in Kimberley, (off the back of an increasingly curtailed labour force drawn from the sub-continent) Rhodes was able to buy and corrupt the politicians of the Cape Colony and England, and finance the political shenanigans, military expeditions and campaigns that brought contemporary South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi into his ambit.
Intrigued by the persistence of C.J. Rhodes in contemporary South Africa, I recently set off on a road trip to discover traces of C.J. Rhodes in Kimberley. Kimberley in the present is a broken town. I went to buy aspirin for a raging headache at a corner store. The storekeeper acted distracted and aloof, which was understandable, given that his store had been burgled the night before and the cash register was lying smashed on the floor. The storekeeper, who was Bangladeshi, deferred to an “Uncle” to help me. Outside the roads were potholed, and manhole covers stolen for resale to scrap metal dealers. Lampposts, outside the Halfway Hotel on Du Toits Pan Road, have been flattened by drunken drivers and not replaced. Legend has it that Rhodes had a standing arrangement with the hotel proprietors of this hotel to be allowed to walk his horse into the bar whilst ordering his beer. Homeless people and children sleep on the streets of downtown Kimberley. When I park my car behind security fencing at the Africana Library and walk to the archives I see a “Tik” (Meth Amphetamine) addicts lighting up in a pile of garbage across the street.
In 2008 De Beers Consolidated Mining (CDM), the company that had been established by Cecil John Rhodes, abandoned Kimberley after exhaustively mining the five diamond pipes upon which Kimberley was built. The bulk of the mines are now closed down with the exception of Bultfontein that is being mined by EKAPA Mining at a depth in excess of 1.35 Km. In its wake, CDM left behind a museum at the “Big Hole”, the worked out remains of the richest diamond that the world had ever seen and the basis of Rhodes’s wealth. The museum is an eclectic collection of material objects that relate to the diamond mining boom in Kimberley. From an old Panhard hearse of the once large Jewish community, through to saddles, shoes and boots of once rich residents, all housed in the shoddy and ramshackle remains of prefab buildings that have survived from the 1870s and 1890s. Although the museum gives one insight into the specifics of diamond mining, as well as the cultural life of a fraction of Kimberley’s inhabitants, the museum tells very little about those who actually laboured in the mines to delve for diamonds. To be sure, there is a single panel that suggests that labourers were housed in enclosed compounds, without contact to the outside world, for set periods of time. But on the whole visitors can leave the museum and its attractions without once having to think about or confront and actual past that included exploitation.
And yet, there is much to celebrate in Kimberley. The city which was once synonymous with British jingoism and imperial power is literally collapsing in upon itself. The days in which English was the accepted language and Rhodes-ian sentiments of racial supremacy reigned supreme are long gone. Setswana and Afrikaans are the lingua franca, the population is thoroughly mixed, and conversations flow to and fro from English to Setswana and Afrikaans in a single sentence. The equestrian statue of Cecil John Rhodes on Du Toits Pan Road is surrounded by rubbish. Every so often, when enough rubbish has accumulated, a fire is lit and Rhodes on his horse are wreathed by the sulphurous fumes of burning plastic litter that lies at their feet. The women running the chisa nyama (Hot Meat) stall in an abandoned double decker bus behind Rhodes’s statue do not know who Rhodes is and refer to the horseman as “Leburu, die Boer” (The farmer/Afrikaner) on account of his wide-brimmed slouch hat. And so it should be, Rhodes surrounded by Sulphurous fumes, looking out on a decaying city in which his racist and colonial sentiments have long since come to count for nought, and his Empire has crumbled into dust.