There are two further reasons. One is that the July 1899 will was drafted in England, where the word “race” refers to ethnicity in general, and, without explicit qualification, cannot possibly be understood to refer to Afrikaner ethnicity in particular.

The other reason is that this is how the first Rhodes Trustees understood the word. In 1907 the question of awarding a Rhodes Scholarship to an African American arose. Some Trustees were averse, fearing that white Scholars from the southern states of the USA would not appreciate being presented with a black confrère. Nevertheless, the Trustees felt bound by the terms of Rhodes’s will not to permit colour to disqualify a candidate. So it came about that, within five years of Rhodes’s death, an African American became a Rhodes Scholar.

IV.

What about the charge that Rhodes laid the foundation of the policy of apartheid, which was pursued by the National Party’s government in South Africa shortly after the end of the Second World War? In 1894 Rhodes introduced the controversial Glen Grey Bill to the Cape parliament. The bill did not bar Africans from obtaining the vote, but it did change the qualifications for the franchise in certain areas, ruling out the possession of land. For those who couldn’t qualify, it offered, as a substitute form of political representation, district councils in charge of local government.

Why? To enable Africans to be given individual tenure of land, without producing a sudden and massive increase in African voters, before they had been sufficiently civilised to exercise the responsibilities of a citizen: “I would compare the natives generally, with regard to European civilisation, to fellow-tribesmen of the Druids . . . We say that the natives are in a sense citizens, but not altogether citizens — they are still children.”

Was this a forerunner of apartheid? Only in a very attenuated sense. Whatever blame should attach to Rhodes for the post-war policies of the National Party can only be remote, since between his experiment at Glen Grey in 1894 and the National Party’s policy from 1948 stands over a half a century of responsible decisions by other moral agents. Others could have decided differently. That they didn’t, cannot be blamed on Rhodes.

More particularly, the post-Second World War policy of apartheid was based on biological racism and a consequent radical cultural relativism, according to which, in the words of the private secretary of the National Party’s Prime Minister in 1952, “these differences [between Bantu or black South African on the one hand, and European on the other] are permanent and not man-made”. Hence the justification of permanently ‘separate development’. In contrast, as we have seen, Rhodes was not a biological racist and believed in the possibility of black Africans becoming civilised: “They are just emerging from barbarism . . . I do not believe that they are different from ourselves”.