II.

The case against him is this. That he held black Africans in contempt as racially inferior; that he sought to abolish their voting rights in Cape Colony; that he supported racial segregation and laid the foundations of the policy of apartheid; that he promoted forced labour and reduced miners in his diamond mines to slaves; that he invaded and stole the ancestral lands of the Ndebele; and that he promoted genocide against them (and the Afrikaners). In short, that Rhodes was South Africa’s Hitler.

The supporting evidence is encapsulated in a quotation deployed by RMF in its petition to Oriel: “I prefer land to niggers . . . the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism . . . one should kill as many niggers as possible.” This has been taken verbatim either from a 2010 essay or from a 2006 book review, from which the essay draws. The author of both is Adekeye Adebajo, a former Rhodes Scholar, who is now executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town.

If all (or much) of this were true, then Rhodes would surely deserve to fall from public grace. But it’s not. The “quotation” is, in fact, made up from three different quotations drawn from three different sources. The first has been lifted from an 1897 novel by Olive Schreiner, who oscillated violently between worshipping Rhodes and loathing him: it’s fiction. The second has been misleadingly torn from its proper context. And the third, as we shall see, is a mixture of distortion and fabrication.

III.

It is true that in his so-called “Confession” of 1877 Rhodes did refer to parts of the world inhabited by “the most despicable specimens of human beings”. Insofar as the phrase “despicable specimens” implies the absolute denigration of all members of a human group, it is indefensibly racist. However, Rhodes wrote this when he was only 24 years old and young men often say reckless things that they later live to regret. Ntokozo Qwabe, the South African co-founder of the Oxford franchise of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, recently hit the front pages of the press, when, in the wake of the November terrorist attacks on Paris, he declared “I do not stand with France,” implied a moral equivalence between France and Islamic State, and equated the French tricolour with the Nazi swastika. Qwabe, too, is 24 years old. At some point down the line he might well come to wish that he’d chosen his words more carefully.

Besides, Rhodes’s early, arguably racist reference deserves to be weighed against all the other things that he said and did. From first to last, he had a record of good relations with individual Africans. His premier biographer, Robert Rotberg, who is generally critical of his subject, writes that “as a young man he had related directly and well to unlettered Zulu. Throughout his life he remained sympathetic and responsive to the needs of individual persons of colour.” Not your stereotypical racist, then.