The New Student's Reference Work/Rhodes, Cecil John

Rhodes, Cecil John, English and South African statesman, railway projector and mining operator, was born at Bishop Stortford, England, where his father was rector of the parish, July 5, 1853. Aftef graduating at Oxford, he went to the Cape of Good Hope in 1871 for his health, and settled at Kimberley, engaged in diamond-mining and began to dream of a united British South Africa and of a railway project that would connect the Cape with the Zambezi and ultimately through Egyptian Sudan with Cairo. Cape politics for a time attracted him, and he entered the local legislature and became prime minister, but resigned in consequence of the Jameson raid. In 1893, in alliance with the Dutch Afrikander party at the Cape, he took the field against the warlike Matabele and subdued them; after which he obtained mining rights over what is now Rhodesia, which he did much to develop. By this time, while working out his schemes of British expansion in the country, he had formed the great De Beers mine consolidation, where he amassed great wealth. When war in the Transvaal broke out, he went to Kimberley, and remained there during the investment of the great diamond-mining town by the Boers, raising and equipping at his own expense a town-guard of 400 men at a cost of $75,000. He died on March 28, 1902.