Further, in the late 19th century many who are now regarded as paragons of humanity had doubts about whether black citizens could be culturally compatible with white ones. Abraham Lincoln is rightly lauded for emancipating African-American slaves during the US Civil War and entrenching their freedom legally by initiating the passage of the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution. The former slave and leading abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, wrote of him that he was the first great man in the United States with whom he had conversed and “who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color”. Nevertheless, almost to the end of his life, Lincoln — together with every leading member of his cabinet — doubted that the freed slaves could be integrated into white society, and favoured their being shipped to Africa or to South America to set up a colony of their own there. In other words, he supported a policy of separate development — or, to sharpen the point, segregation or apartheid.

Further still, if Rhodes is to be blamed for post-war apartheid he must also be credited with early support of the African National Congress (ANC). In 1897 he gave financial backing to a newspaper, Izwi Labuntu, that was the voice-piece of one of several black African political associations, which were the forerunners of the ANC.

V.

Did Rhodes promote forced labour and reduce miners in his diamond mines to the status of slaves? In his first year in southern Africa, 1870-71, while farming cotton in Natal, Rhodes learned that treating his labour force well was good for business, especially where the demand for labour outstripped supply. As a consequence he became a generous and popular employer, and Africans came from considerable distances to work for him. In the late 1890s he set up experimental fruit farms and at one of these he built a model village, complete with school and church, for his workers. Maybe in between he forgot his early lesson about the benefits of treating labour well, but, given that securing enough of it for his mines was a chronic problem, it would have been oddly counter-productive.

It is true that in 1894 Rhodes’s Glen Grey Bill did propose to levy a tax of 10s on any African who had not worked outside his district during the previous 12 months. The rationale was this: before the imposition of white rule over native peoples, young African men had been employed mainly as warriors. By suppressing inter-tribal war, white government had robbed them of their traditional employment and rendered them redundant. As a consequence, many had turned to alcohol. Therefore, Rhodes asserted, “It is our duty as a Government to remove these poor children from this life of sloth and laziness and to give them some gentle stimulus to come forth and find out the dignity of labour.” Certainly, the tone is patronising and, no doubt, the stimulus was sharper in fact than Rhodes let on. What’s more, economic interest most probably featured among his unspoken motives — given the persistent problem of the undersupply of labour. Nevertheless, the problem of the enforced and debilitating unemployment of large numbers of young black African men was a real one, to which Rhodes was offering a practical solution. While that solution involved the application of a certain pressure in the form of a financial incentive, it still fell some way short of “forced labour”. It’s also noteworthy that Rhodes proposed to spend the proceeds of the tax on “industrial schools” for training Africans.