It’s also true that Rhodes saw the British as civilised and Africans as not. But he had some good reason to think that. After all, whether in terms of science or technology or communications or commerce or liberal political life, late-19th-century Britain was streets ahead of any indigenous southern African society.

And in important respects British civilisation was morally superior, too. Just as we 21st-century moderns react with moral indignation against forced marriage, the honour-killing of women, capital punishment without fair trial, militaristic society, slavery, and the wicked cruelty of despots, so our Victorian Christian forebears railed against the abominable practices of the Zulu and Ndebele.

Yes, Rhodes thought that black Africans were generally inferior, but in terms of cultural development, not biology. He believed that they could become civilised. This is important, because if one regards a people as biologically inferior and incapable of development, then that’s a reason to exclude them permanently from participation in their own government. But that wasn’t how Rhodes saw things. In a speech of 1894 he made this quite clear, when he said: “Now, I say the natives are children. They are just emerging from barbarism. They have human minds . . . We ought to do something for the minds and the brains that the Almighty has given them. I do not believe that they are different from ourselves.” (Note what Dr Adebajo chose not to include in the second part of his composite quotation.)

Because he believed in the possibility of African cultural development, Rhodes never sought to overturn the remarkably liberal, colour-blind franchise that had existed in Cape Colony since 1853. And when in 1899 the Cape government proposed legislation that would have disenfranchised most natives, Rhodes protested, arguing that he had “always differentiated between the raw barbarians and the civilised natives” and that the vote should be extended to Africans under the principle of “equal rights to every civilised man south of the Zambesi”. The previous year, when asked to clarify what he meant by “civilised man”, he had added “a man, white or black . . . who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property, or works. In fact, is not a loafer.”

Rhodes’ critics retort with a contrary proof-text, his statement 11 years earlier that “the Native is to be treated like a child and denied the franchise”. But then he was referring to uncivilised Africans who lived under communal land tenure and so did not meet the property condition for the vote. The full quotation is this: “We have got to treat the natives, where they are in a state of barbarism, in a different way to ourselves. We are to be lords over them. These are my politics on native affairs, and these are the politics of South Africa. Treat the natives as a subject people as long as they continue in a state of barbarism and communal tenure . . . The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise.”