In the course of the negotiations, he learned about the natives’ humiliations and realised that the white settlers had brought down retribution upon their own heads. The settlers and the imperial authorities wanted the rebels’ unconditional surrender, but Rhodes, knowing this would provoke them to take up arms again, resisted, responding, “If necessary tell the Secretary of State that I am prepared to go and live in the Matopos [hills] with the rebels.” Instead, he promised to reform the administration, which moved the leading Ndebele chief to call him “Umlamulanmkunzi” (“The bull who separates the two fighting bulls”), that is, “Peacemaker”. Rhodes also realised that he’d made a major mistake in allowing his subordinates to carve up the territory for themselves, and as a token of his intention to put things right again he bought back 100,000 acres of prime farming land and gave a large portion of it to the Ndebele. Later that year he resolved to make the building of trust between white and black part of his work.

To summarise this tangled history by talking of “Rhodes stealing ancestral lands from Africans” hardly does justice to its moral complexity.

VII.

One of the main grounds of the charge that Rhodes was South Africa’s Hitler belongs to this chapter of his life. The allegation is that he once said, “One should kill as many niggers as possible.” The earliest source for this, however, is Dr Adebajo’s review of Paul Maylam’s biography of Rhodes in the Times Literary Supplement (28 July 2006). Maylam’s book doesn’t report it. Nor do any of the other several dozen biographies of Rhodes.

A similar quotation — though ad hoc rather than general in form and lacking the word “niggers” — does appear in Gordon Le Sueur’s 1913 biography, which Maylam cites. The setting is the 1896 Matabele War. The Company’s men have just discovered that the Ndebele are about to launch another attack, shortly after losing a previous battle. On asking how many of the enemy had been killed in the first encounter, Rhodes is told that very few had been, since they’d thrown down their arms and begged for mercy. Then Rhodes (reportedly) responds, “Well, you should not spare them. You should kill all you can, as it serves as a lesson to them when they talk things over at their fires at night.” In other words, “Next time don’t give quarter, but kill all you can. Otherwise, they’ll only come back to attack again.”

Whatever moral evaluation one makes of this advice — given on the battlefield of a conflict undisciplined by any international laws of war — it is a world removed from a recommendation of a general policy of genocide aimed at black Africans. Therefore the allegation that Rhodes said, “One should kill as many niggers as possible,” is a false claim, which appears to be based on a sexed-up version of Le Sueur’s report — a version that has been completely abstracted from its historical context and to which the word “niggers” has been added.