A second ground for likening Rhodes to Hitler lies in his alleged responsibility for the “concentration camps” that the British employed during the South African War of 1899-1902. This claim is false, too, for three reasons. First, beyond the fact that large numbers of people died in them, these camps have nothing in common with their Nazi namesakes of the Thirties and Forties. Following Spanish practice in Cuba in 1898, the British military commander, Herbert Kitchener, introduced “concentration camps” to South Africa in the summer of 1900. These were designed to isolate Boer guerrillas and rob them of support by concentrating the rural civilian population in camps, as well as to protect surrendered Boers from the revenge of their comrades.

Second, while it is true that about 25,000 whites and the same number of blacks perished in the camps due to poor conditions, this wasn’t the result of a deliberate policy of genocide, but rather of the culpable negligence of the British army’s administration. After causing a scandal back in Britain and provoking two inquiries, reforms were implemented and the mortality rate declined dramatically from an annual average of 344 per thousand in October 1901 to 69 by the war’s end in May 1902.

And third, there is no evidence whatsoever that Rhodes had anything to do with this military policy.

VIII.

Cecil Rhodes was no Hitler. But nor, of course, was he a St Francis. Convinced that the extension of British rule was commensurate with human progress, Rhodes was disposed to let his lofty ends justify recourse to dubious means, both in business and in politics.

Moreover, as a typical entrepreneur he was an impatient man, who preferred founding things to managing them: hence his culpably negligent delegation of the administration of Matabeleland in 1893-96. And his impatience sometimes made him a reckless gambler, most notoriously in his support for the fateful “Jameson Raid”. 

Further still, for most of his life (until 1896) Rhodes’s overriding concern was the reconciliation of Afrikaner and Briton within the British Empire. This was an entirely reasonable concern, since tension between them had broken out into open war in 1880 and would do so again in 1899. However, since one of the bones of contention was Afrikaner ill-treatment of black Africans, the price of reconciliation — at least in the short term — was the compromise of native interests. And this Rhodes was willing to pay, arguably, too often.