When critics charge Rhodes with reducing his workers to the status of slaves, what they probably have most in mind is the “compound system” in his diamond mines. From 1885 Africans who worked in the mines at Kimberley were required by their contracts to be confined in compounds throughout their three-month term of employment, to stop them smuggling diamonds out and to control their enervating access to alcohol. While this arrangement was restrictive and irksome, it was contractual and the conditions inside the compounds were remarkably decent — according to two witnesses, one a physician, in 1885 and 1895. Slavery it was not.

VI.

As for the alleged invasion of “ancestral lands” (the phrase is Adebajo’s) in what became southern Rhodesia, it wasn’t exactly an invasion and they weren’t exactly ancestral. The lands occupied by the Ndebele in the 1880s they themselves had seized by ruthless conquest two generations before, having broken off from the aggressive Zulu empire to found their own. The defeated Shona were reduced to the status of vassals, subject to indiscriminate torture and slaughter upon failure to pay tribute. On entering a Shona village shortly after its punishment by the Ndebele, one missionary reported: “Fastened to the ground was a row of bodies, men and women, who had been pegged down and left to the sun’s scorching by day and cold dews by night, left to the tender mercies of the pestering flies and ravenous beasts.” By what legal or moral right the Ndebele ruled this territory it is not obvious.

Nevertheless, in 1888 Rhodes secured a signed concession from the Ndebele chieftain, Lobengula, which permitted the British South Africa Company to mine for gold in the farther reaches of his territory. Since Rhodes’s men didn’t care to explain all that was intended by the document, Lobengula didn’t fully understand what he was signing. When its meaning did become clear to him, he repudiated it. But Rhodes’s men, deliberately skirting the land of the Ndebele proper, began to exploit the concession anyway. If this was an invasion, it was a subtle and ambiguous one and Lobengula tolerated it.

Rhodes did not seek war, and Lobengula went to great lengths to avoid it. Nevertheless, it eventually broke out in July 1893, after the white settlers of Victoria woke up one morning to find their Shona servants being massacred on their doorsteps by a punitive Ndebele raiding party. In the ensuing conflict, the settlers prevailed, aided by their liberal use of Maxim guns. Rhodes then returned to the Cape, negligently entrusting the administration of the territory to his buccaneering friend, Leander Jameson.

Three years later, after suffering appalling abuse at the arbitrary hands of the Company’s men, the Ndebele and the Shona both rose in rebellion. Rhodes hurried back from the Cape and got stuck in to suppressing the rebels. This, the so-called Second Matabele War, came to an end when Rhodes and five companions ventured unarmed into hostile territory and parleyed with the rebels for several days. Rotberg, who regards this as his subject’s finest hour, describes the scene: “Although the Africans were armed, and most of the whites exceedingly nervous, Rhodes appeared casual, even crossing from the white side of the gathering to the African side, and sitting with them and taking their part.”