Rhodes’s view echoes that of J.S. Mill, the great patriarch of Victorian liberalism, who, during the American Civil War, proved himself one of the most uncompromising and outspoken critics of slavery in the American South. Nevertheless, in the opening chapter of his classic 1859 treatise, On Liberty, he wrote: “Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury . . . Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end”.

Such a view is almost unspeakable now. Here in the early 21st century, reference to other human beings as “barbarians” is commonly regarded as intolerably “racist” (unless the objects of description are our medieval forebears or members of Islamic State). Four or five generations ago, however, “barbarism” and “civilisation” were respectable, technical terms. So, for example, in Ancient Society (1877), Lewis H. Morgan, a pioneer of scientific anthropology, developed a theory of human progress that divides into three stages: “savagery”, “barbarism”, and “civilisation”. Morgan’s “barbarism” roughly corresponds to what we now call the pre-historic Bronze and Iron Ages.

Talk about “barbarians” or “children”, who aren’t yet grown-up enough to cast a vote, may seem patronising to us, but it wasn’t expressive of biological racism. Indeed, it was effectively applied to white Britons in the United Kingdom, where, throughout the 1890s only 28 per cent of the adult (21+) population were regarded by the law as fit to vote.

And if Rhodes could be patronising towards Africans when he called them “children”, he was racially indiscriminate in his attitude. In 1899 he also referred to the Fellows of Oriel College as “children” (in financial affairs), when he stipulated that they should consult trustees about managing his benefaction.

If Rhodes was a racist, he would not have enjoyed cordial relations with individual Africans, he would not have regarded them as capable of civilisation, and he would not have supported their right to vote at all. Nor would he have stipulated in his final will of July 1899 that the scholarships that would famously bear his name should be awarded without regard for “race”. And yet he did all these things.

Some biographers assert that by the word “race” in his will Rhodes had in mind the distinction, not between white and black, but rather between British and Afrikaner. For sure, it was the conflict between the latter that preoccupied him for most of his life. However, in 1896 two things happened to change his focus. First, his involvement in the abortive coup d’état in the Transvaal — the infamous Jameson Raid — destroyed his credibility in the eyes of the Afrikaners, and with it any possibility of playing conciliator between them and the British. Second, after he had made peace with the Ndebele later in the same year, he told a companion that prosperity in southern Africa depended on establishing “complete confidence between the white and black races”, and he vowed to make building it one of his main aims. After 1896, therefore, Rhodes was much more conscious of the conflict between whites and blacks. That’s one reason to think that the word “race” in his will doesn’t refer simply to the distinction between British and Afrikaner.