Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company (1889)

Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) was a British-born businessman and politician who made a fortune in South African diamonds and used it to drive imperial expansion north of the Limpopo River. His British South Africa Company, which received a royal charter on 29 October 1889, occupied the lands of the Shona and Ndebele peoples and governed them as “Rhodesia”, today Zimbabwe and Zambia. The company’s rule, built on a disputed concession and on force, shaped the region for nearly a century.

Rhodes and the diamond fortune

Born at Bishop’s Stortford in England, the son of a vicar, Rhodes went to Natal in 1870 for his health. In 1871 he moved to the newly opened diamond fields at Kimberley, where he and his partner Charles Rudd bought up claims and pumping equipment.

The De Beers Mining Company was founded in 1880. With financial backing from the Rothschild bank, Rhodes outmanoeuvred his main rival, Barney Barnato, and in 1888 created De Beers Consolidated Mines, which controlled the great majority of the world’s diamond output. He also invested in the gold fields of the Witwatersrand through Consolidated Gold Fields.

Rhodes studied at Oriel College, Oxford, in intervals between business trips, and entered the Cape Parliament in 1881. He served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He openly believed in British racial superiority and dreamed of British territory stretching from the Cape to Cairo.

The Rudd Concession

North of the Limpopo lay the Ndebele (Matabele) kingdom of Lobengula, with its capital at Bulawayo, which also claimed authority over many Shona communities to the east. Rumours of gold attracted rival concession-hunters, and the Transvaal, Portugal and Germany all showed interest.

In February 1888 Lobengula signed the Moffat Treaty, promising not to cede land to other powers without British approval. On 30 October 1888 Rhodes’s agents Charles Rudd, Rochfort Maguire and Francis Thompson obtained the Rudd Concession. It granted exclusive rights to all metals and minerals in Lobengula’s domain, in return for £100 a month, 1,000 Martini-Henry rifles, 100,000 rounds of ammunition and a steamboat on the Zambezi or £500 instead.

Lobengula soon said he had been misled; he understood the agreement as allowing a small number of men to dig, not as a grant of sweeping rights. He sent two senior indunas (councillors) to London to see Queen Victoria and publicly repudiated the concession. By then, however, Rhodes had bought out competing claims and was using the document to seek a charter.

The royal charter of 1889

Rhodes argued that a chartered company could extend British influence at no cost to the British taxpayer. The government of Lord Salisbury agreed, and on 29 October 1889 Queen Victoria granted a royal charter to the British South Africa Company. Its board included aristocrats such as the Duke of Abercorn and the Duke of Fife, giving it prestige in London.

The charter allowed the company to make treaties, maintain a police force, acquire land, grant concessions and administer territory in the region north of British Bechuanaland and the Transvaal. Its northern limit was not fixed, and the company later extended its claims across the Zambezi into what became Northern Rhodesia.

The Pioneer Column

In 1890 the company organised the Pioneer Column, a body of about 200 settlers and several hundred company police, guided by the hunter Frederick Selous. Each pioneer was promised land and gold claims. Avoiding the heart of the Ndebele kingdom, the column moved into Mashonaland, reached the site it named Fort Salisbury, today Harare, on 12 September 1890 and raised the British flag there the next morning.

The gold the company hoped for proved disappointing. Settlers turned to land and cattle, and the company pressed for control of Matabeleland. In 1893 the company’s administrator, Leander Starr Jameson, used a dispute over Ndebele raids to launch the First Matabele War, which destroyed Lobengula’s kingdom.

Rhodesia and its costs

The company’s territories became known as Rhodesia, a name in use by 1895. Land and cattle were taken on a large scale, Africans were confined to reserves and pressed into labour through taxes. In 1896-1897 the Ndebele and Shona rose in revolt, a conflict known in Zimbabwe as the First Chimurenga, which was suppressed with heavy loss of life.

Rhodes’s own career suffered after the failed Jameson Raid on the Transvaal at the end of 1895, which he had helped plan. He resigned as Cape Prime Minister in January 1896. He died at Muizenberg near Cape Town on 26 March 1902 and was buried in the Matobo Hills of Rhodesia. His will founded the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford.

Company rule ended in 1923-1924, when Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony with a white settler electorate and Northern Rhodesia a British protectorate. Settler rule in Southern Rhodesia later led to the unilateral declaration of independence of 1965 and a long war before Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.

How the company worked

The British South Africa Company was both a business and a government. Its shares were sold to investors on the promise of mineral wealth, and its directors in London answered to shareholders, while Rhodes, as managing director in South Africa, directed policy on the ground. The British government kept a formal power of oversight but rarely used it.

In practice the company’s administration was run cheaply. It relied on its own police and on settler volunteers, raised revenue through hut taxes on African households, and granted land and mining rights to settlers and syndicates. It also acquired the Lippert Concession, a grant of land rights made by Lobengula in 1891, to strengthen its claim to the land itself as well as its minerals.

For years the company paid no dividends, and investors grew impatient. The hope of quick profit was one reason it pushed for the conquest of Matabeleland in 1893.

Legacy and debate

Rhodes left most of his fortune to fund scholarships allowing students from the British Empire, the United States and Germany to study at Oxford; the first Rhodes Scholars arrived in 1903. Admirers presented him as a visionary empire-builder. Critics, then and now, emphasise his role in dispossessing African peoples and his openly racial views, set out in writings such as his “Confession of Faith” of 1877.

Key people

• Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902): Mining magnate, Cape Prime Minister and founder of the company.
• Lobengula (c. 1836-1894): King of the Ndebele who granted, then rejected, the Rudd Concession.
• Charles Rudd (1844-1916): Rhodes’s business partner, who negotiated the concession.
• Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917): Doctor and close friend of Rhodes; company administrator and leader of the 1895 raid.
• Frederick Selous (1851-1917): Hunter and explorer who guided the Pioneer Column.

Timeline

• 1871: Rhodes arrives at the Kimberley diamond fields.
• 1888, 30 October: Lobengula signs the Rudd Concession.
• 1888: De Beers Consolidated Mines is formed.
• 1889, 29 October: Royal charter granted to the British South Africa Company.
• 1890, 12 September: The Pioneer Column founds Fort Salisbury.
• 1893, October-November: The company conquers Matabeleland.
• 1896, January: Rhodes resigns as Cape Prime Minister after the Jameson Raid.
• 1896-1897: Ndebele and Shona risings against company rule.
• 1902, 26 March: Rhodes dies near Cape Town.
• 1923, October: Company rule in Southern Rhodesia ends.

Why it matters

The British South Africa Company showed how private wealth and a royal charter could be combined to conquer territory in the Scramble for Africa. Its legacy of land seizure and settler privilege lay at the root of later conflicts in Zimbabwe, and Rhodes himself remains a contested figure, as shown by the student campaign that removed his statue from the University of Cape Town in 2015.