Part One: Cecil Rhodes: The First Proud Boy

k A pro West West. I'm coming in blind. So I had no idea we were doing another white colonial in Africa. This is we're not We're not doing another white colonial in Africa. Actually, we're doing the white colonial in Africa. We're talking about the guy we're talking about today. Problem might be the whitest man who ever lived. Um, we are talking about Cecil, motherfucking Rhodes. The boy's name is Cecil Cecil. Let's go Cecil. And he's the namesake of Rhode disja. Um oh my god, yeah, I'll tell

me Rhode is named after him. Yeah, Rhoda was his personal property. Um, so the Cecil Rhodes is not just like an influential imperialist. He's one of like he's Hitler Stalin Mao level of influential in the world. Um he is. In addition to owning Rhodesia and another nation as his private property, he governed a third country. He controlled of the world's diamonds supply. Uh oh. And by the way, he helped invent apartheid. Um, so like that that's where

I'm from. Apartheid. Yes, like, here we go. That's why didn't know you. I didn't think about the Rhodes thing. I just do it from the apotheid stuff. But yeah, here we go. Yeah. Yeah, he's like he's bastard with the capital be bold underlying three exclamation points. Yeah, he's one of the big ones. Yeah, he's one of the big ones. And he is like Mark like when you see the when you see like the fucking like the fashy, proud boy types out in the street. He's what every

every one of them wants to be. Like. Cecil Rhodes lived the dream life of an imperialist. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's cool stuff. Prop it's cool stuff. This is I can't wait, dude, this is one of those episodes where I included a bunch of quotes from him, and then I had to go through the quotes and edit out the inn word repeatedly because he says it a lot. Yeah, okay, so like this is why I was smiling so much.

I remember early on in my career there was is this like venture capitalist guy that just really took a liking to me because he's super wealthy, super white, but he loved hip hop, so he was essentially trying to help mentor me and my business thoughts. But he would say things like I bought that company because who says you can't? And then he would be like and his whole thing was like, dude, that's He's like, that's the money got to live by. Who says you can't? You know,

you just go pursue your dreams? Who says you can't do it? And I just thought, okay, you're where do I start? Man like you saying? I'm like you're you're trying to motivate me, but you turned me to funk off because I'm like, what do you mean? Who says you can't? I mean, actually I know what you mean? Yeah, And I'm like, no, I don't I don't know, man, I don't know if I'm gonna I don't know if

I'm gonna go down this road. But yeah, that's why it giggles, because I was like, yo, he was telling me, this says like a good thing, Like, hey, man, who says you can't? Yeah? I think it's you got one of those You've got one of those reminders that we all get from time to time that there are within this planet, there are multiple planets, and that guy lives on a different planets, on a different one. Just just

that's not ours. He's on the who says you can't planet, He's on the yeah, And I'm just like I just I God, okay, I guess yeah, because for me, I have I do have who says you can't feelings. But it's when I'm looking at like like like a like a really fancy bag of coffee, Like it's twenty five dollars for this bag of coffee, who says I can't? Like, yeah, I'll get I'll get the nice coffee. I like how he translated that into like prop speech. That's great. Yeah

you know I love it. Yeah, you know. Whereas with him, it's like the company that makes the coffee. Yeah, yeah, you know this is his family. You know, it's it's there. It's their granddad's plantation in Lumbia. You know what I'm saying. And he's like, I want a coffee company. You know who says you can't. I'll just buy it from them. I'll give him a good price. And that's it is very appropriate because Cecil Rhodes is that guy. But he's

he's a step above that guy. So that guy's a step above you and I we we we say that when we think about buying a nice product. He thinks about that. When Cecil Rhodes was that for Nations. Yeah, he says, I can't. You know what, I'm gonna take it like, I'm just gonna take this. Yeah. So this is the guy we're getting into um and I'm gonna I'm just gonna start. Cecil John Rhodes was born on July five, eight fifty three, in the hilariously named town of Are you ready for this? Prop Here we go,

Bishop Stortford in Hertfordshire, England. Um probably pronounced wrong. Who cares? It's the English um Bishop not a town name, but is a town name. But that's not what you should name a town. I wish I understood that. I wish I understood or like language animalogy of like British things like thornberry and yeah works in stire like why yeah Worcestershire Wooster, I think is how you're supposed to say it, like yeah, like what's the wars going on with you people?

Why that? That obviously must be safe word and nobody can figure out how to pronounce it and that's why everything's so fucked up. That's a good get. Yeah, I feel like I feel like we just all kind of left the English alone on their island for too long and that was a bad call. Yeah, because that little, that little teeny island conquered the planet. Yeah, and they came up with some weird things to ways to pronounce words in weird ways to pronounce things yes and very

enizes worse. Yeah, just can't y'all have no saut just add some weird stuff. Anyway, if you're English, this might be a hard episode to listen to because we're we're going to be going off. But yeah, anyway, so uh Cecil was the fifth son of Reverend Francis William Rhodes and Luisa Peacock his best biographer, probably Robert Rotberg, calls the Rhodes family circumstances modest but hardly deprived. And this is something I'll probably quibble with him on a bit,

because modest is not how I would describe the Roads friendly. Um, both sides of his family owned a significant amount of property. As late as nineteen o one, the Roads siblings were receiving rent payments from six D properties and bishops. That's not modest, that's not modest. Yeah, it would be fair to say that Cecil never worried about money in his entire life. Um, the Roads were of modest means though within the world of the British upper crust. So within

the social environment they existed in. They were middle class, but they existed in the upper like five percent of of the British nation. You know, yeah, there's there's money. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, they got they got the c class Yeah exactly, Okay, got it. Yeah, they rent there that like today, They're the kind of family that rinse yacht's a couple of times a year but doesn't because they just can't handle those slip fees. Yeah, got it,

got it. So Cecil's mother and father spawned uh. Copiously, they produced nine children in very quick succession. Seven of those kids survived to adulthood, which means they were pretty good at being parents by the standards of the time. You get seven and nine into adulthood, you're doing all right. In eighteen fifties. That's pretty good for scentage. Because that bodio boy, Yeah, it's a yeah no no, yeah, yeah no,

it should have been more like five. Really. Cecil was child number four, the middle kid, and he was most definitely his mama's boy. Um Rickett the family servant, and I should say that boys named Rickett. Yeah, yeah, they had a family servant named Rickett. His name Rickett. That's like what you put into a show if you're making fun of the British shuffle upper crust as you give him a servant named Rickett. You give him a servant named after a disease. Yeah, which understand was wrong, which

I'll putting use words randomly, very funny. Um. So yeah, the family servant, Rickett later recalled he was his mother's boy, her favorite. I mainly included that quote, yeah, just because I wanted to laugh at the fact that they had a servant named Rickett. Um. So Cecil was the only one of his siblings whose mother called him my darling, and by all accounts, she was a very nurturing mother. While her children were young, she acted as their teacher,

helping them learn to read and write. Cecil's father was a very different sort of parent. The couple had married when she was twenty eight and he was thirty six, which was unusual because that's very old for a woman to get married in this period of time. Like she's a spinster at um. So you would say that, like he he Actually I was like, sorry, Sophie, And that's just the way they talked in the back then, Sophie. It's awful. I mean, low key. All of the rich

people back then were in the teenagers. Like that's the way it worked in those days, and it was messed up. Yeah. So you got to give Cecil's dad credit for, you know, marrying someone who's an actual adult. Um, that's good. Uh so. Yeah, but this did mean that he was in his fifties by the time Cecil came into the picture. He was not a super fun dad was a very strict disciplinarian, and the children often ran to their mother for comfort.

Robert Rothberg's Cecil's biographer or Cecil's biographer writes, quote, Ms. Rhodes was unusually skilled in establishing supportive relations. Well liked by contemporaries and servants, she provided an ample measure of love for her children, especially Cecil. It was that special love which was the foundation of his invincible self confidence, an affirmative sense of self which was both a spur to accomplishment and a resilient buffer against the ravages of failure.

To his credit and discredit roads throughout his lifetime. Was remarkably free of both guilt and shame. So his mom is very supportive, and maybe she should have been a little less supportive. Job. Let me tell Let me tell you the parent that actually cares about their kids. Biggest fear is that you were you actually showed your favorites

and like cared for one more than the other. And then one of him is like well adjusted and wonderful, and then the other ones like you know, in and out of rehab, and you're like, not to shame anybody for that, but you're just like or the one and then like in this scenario, the one you actually unfairly favored turns out to be the piece of crap you was trying to avoid your saying, yeah, that's kind of

where where this story is a leading unfortunately. So yeah, he grows up um yeah, very very very much coddled by his mama. Uh this, and he grew up very entitled as a result of this. And this is particular clearly illustrated by an anecdote from his nurse when he was five or six years old. She just made jam and had set it up high to cool. She left the room for a few minutes, and she came back, the jam was gone and Cecil had clearly eaten it.

So I'm gonna quote her relating the rest of this story. Cecil, did you eat that jam? Yes, he replied, I am sorry, it's gone. It was very good. Makes some more. I can't take any of this seriously. Yeah, yeah, that was that was a that. This is first of all, spot on great accident, um and five and he's giving orders to adults. Yeah, just hey, make more. I just I wish Cecil was Caesar, so our r sezel. So when a nurse comes in and says you eat that jam,

and he goes hell yeah, mm hmm, makes him amazing. Yeah, he was seezed. Yeah. She described his attitude as superior, and he just told her to make more jam and walked away, whistling to his mom and asked what should be done with a boy like that, and his mom said, let him alone as long as he speaks the truth, which is my god. Look at that point, nurse, take your apron off and just be like, look, it's a lot of rich people in this city. I'm gonna go

work somewhere else. I don't need this. Yeah, at that point, I'm not. I would. I would not be bought. I'm already bossed by you. I would not be bossed by a five year old. It seems like the thing that he needs is the thing that's done in some households when you talk back to your mom or your auntie and they chunk their their sandals at you. Yeah, like that just the kind of yeah, not nothing that hurts, but a sandal thrown at him. Yeah, just a nice

chunkl just real, yea chocolate exactly. Yeah, just you know, just let me remind you which one of us is the adult. That's the way my poles used to say. I'm just gonna remind you which one of us is the adult. Yeah, so that should give you some idea as to the way the kid grew up seeing himself and other people. Um, we don't know very much about like his dad personally. There are a few details that I kind of find tantalizing, one of which is that

as a preacher, he was eventually a vicar um. He was famous for never delivering a sermon longer than ten minutes. So I grew up, grew up in a Baptist you know, a Black Baptist church. Talk about ten minutes sounds great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

that that part sounds cool. And the other thing Cecil's biographer just drops this in the biography with no added context, probably because we don't have it, is that um Cecil's father despised the law and raised his children to not respect the law and to abide by their own more. He just hated He hated the idea of going to lawyers, he hated judges, he hated cops, And we don't know anything about why, but that was just something they were

raised with a little conflicted about Cecil's daddy. Now you know, I'm saying, like, okay, hold up, you know what I'm saying, Like money, you know he was able to keep his kids alive. Uh keep the speeches short, speech short, and the cops. I'm like wait, and he married a full grown adult, you know, like he he was married and he went He wasn't at the middle school picking curls, you know. Yeah, he wasn't getting married to a fifteen

year old at age, which a lot of dudes did. Yes. Yeah, so uh Cecil's first school was was a private school rather than a public school. And that means a different thing. Actually, that means he didn't go to he didn't go to like Eaton or one of the fancy schools. It means a different thing, I guess in England in this period. Um so he was always kind of insecure about the fact that he went to a private school and didn't get to go to one of the big fancy like

he he didn't get to be an Etonian. You know, we talked about that in our our episodes on the Wonga Coup, like that, that he didn't get to to get that early introduction into like the fancy pot of the of the of the white British boys education. Um So, maybe that's why he thinks he's like he's of modest. Yeah. They his parents I think kept him out because his

health wasn't great, although that's even debated. There's a lot of like argument over whether or not he was a sickly kid, which I just don't care to get into because it's boring. Um. Yeah, he was studious and intelligent. Um,

And he's overwhelmingly described as having been very moody. His nurse claimed that he was never like a normal child, although the evidence she gives for this is also baffling because the thing that she she cites is that he only laughed when he liked, which is like when else's wait yeah, yeah, I don't understand what she was going It's just you get reminders reading through this that like oh yeah, this is like a again a different world,

like I don't understand what these people are talking about, as like she's bitter that he didn't laugh at her job. Like to me, it was like, maybe you're just not funny because like your first story, Yeah, that's a warning sign from a kid. But like the fact that he doesn't laugh when he doesn't want to laugh, you can't really Yeah, yeah, well who does laugh when they don't want to laugh? You laughing light? You don't learn that until you're an adult. So yeah, of course he didn't laugh.

I guess English kids are supposed to learn that earlier. I don't know. But for a little bit more context on Cecil as a boy, I'm going to read a quote from the Founder, which is a biography about him. When vexed, he would hide in a dark corner under the staircase, not speaking for hours. He sometimes fled to the family summer home with a book, poring over it

by the hour, together resenting imperiously any attempted intrusion. He was prone to strange fits of moodiness, some vague uneasiness of spirit, whose source he was never able to properly communicate, unaware himself of whether it was melancholy or horror that seized him. Occasionally, the young Rhoades rocked himself to and fro and kept up a low crooning which was almost a moan, a crooning that never shaped itself into articulate word.

At such times Ms Rhodes would go to his special son, and with her arms about him, she would beg him to explain the reason of his disquiet, but he never told her, locking himself. Then, as later in a private, possibly solipsistic world. There were similar moments when he curled up under the dining room table, remaining there invisible behind an overflowing table cloth. Despite the frantic searching of servants. He sat underneath, dinnerless through many a meal of his

young ears, hugging his knees. Yeah, he's sounds autistic. Thing like I used to used to teach special ed and like that is like, um, and I've heard a number of theories as to like why it's a thing, but like, yeah, I don't know, Like you can't diagnose a guy who died decades before, like yeah, obviously, um, but it does sound like he was, Um he was. I don't know, Like I don't even like the term neurotypical a lot.

It sounds like he was. He definitely had some there's something going on there and maybe understanding yeaheah, they didn't have a name for whatever that was. Well, yeah, and it's and it's that's a benefit for like being seeing the world differently can allow you to see options others don't.

And I think kind of what you with this paragraph is getting at and what I've experienced with the number of a number of the autistic folks that I worked with, who would do who would have kind of behavior, coping behaviors like that. The moment is they're taking in like too much of the world, like yeah, yeah, like they're they're kind of overwhelmed by all of the sensory stimuli because their brain, for whatever whatever ours like other people,

their brain maybe filters out more or something. And maybe that's part of why Cecil was able to see some of the options. He was able to see. I don't know, like, let's yeah, I don't want to psychoanalyze dude, but that there is something to being able to have a coping mechanism that maybe the rest does think are weird, but we don't. But we ain't go on, I met we have some mechanisms is probably a less less anger than us,

you know what I'm saying. Yeah, that's so yeah anyway, and they're able to navigate a world U because his brain works a certain way, which we don't know obviously, is all. Yeah, it just it does sound like what we can say from that paragraph is that he's he was he felt overwhelmed a lot by reality as a little kid to an extent that was was was unusual. Um so yeah. Now, the author of that biography, Robert Rockberg, is very interested in developmental psychology, and he analyzes Cecil

repeatedly through that lens. And I think the book was written in eight eight, so there's not a lot of he didn't. I think if it was written more recently, he probably he might have speculated more on some of the stuff that we've been talking about. UM. But he's he's real into like some Freudian ship um. And he notes that first and only children tend to get the most attention, while middle children learned better inner personal skills, and Rockberg basically writes that Cecil had elements of both

of these things in his own upbringing. He was the middle kid, but he was also his mother's favorite, and so he got special attention and he he he theorizes that this kind of might explain how he grew up into the political animal he became, because he was both kind of surrounded by a very competitive family and he learned how to do diplomacy as a result of that. But he also grew up with this kind of limitless self confidence that comes from being, you know, the most

favored child. So another major influence on the growing Cecil was the fact that his father was kind of a dick um, and as Cecil later confided to a friend, quote my father frequently and I am now sure wisely demolished. Many of my dreams is fantastical. But when I had rebuilt them on more practical lines, he was ready to listen again. He never failed to put his finger on the weak spots, and his criticism soon taught me to

consider a question from every possible point of view. I don't know, it sounds a little bit dickish to me to like be tearing apart of kids dreams all the time, but Cecil clearly was grateful for it. So yeah, yeah, somehow like read like read like a little history revisionism here like looking back going. I guess it was kind of cool that my dad was emotionally abusive and didn't let me imagine. Also, yeah, he just decided to stop

doing the accent. Well, yeah, I'm not going to do it all the time, So Fie, I like to think that that your cat looks at you when you do those accents, like who is this man? I do enjoy a nice British accent. You're very good at it. Thank you, thank you. I have a real racist Italian accent to they don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, Okay, I only I only do it when I'm cooking pizza, which is fine. I'm a Talian. Yeah, but so um yeah. From an early age, Cecil's talents as a leader were evident.

He loved to play soldiers, but he insisted on playing general. He was temperamental. And I find it noteworthy that the main people who reported on this later were not his actual family members, but the help all of whom seemed to have stories about the fact that he was very easily angered. Um. So all of like the service workers who know this kid say like, he's fucking dick. Oh my god, this kid. That's because they're didn't just dude. Now now I get a better picture. It's like the

servants are action figures. They're just they're living accent figures to him. Yeah. Yeah, And that's and again one of the people a lot of people who come up later, and we'll talk about this when we talk about all of the racism, because he gets defended a lot by people today by saying like, well, we can't deny that he believed things that were racist, but it wasn't out of step with the attitudes of the time, which number one.

I hate it when people bring that up because there were actually a bunch of dudes and ladies at the time who were like, hey, our society is racist, this is fucked up. It's like with slavery. There were a lot of abolitionists. Like, no, that was never a thing that was just like taken for granted as as right like it, it doesn't make it okay. But also like, yeah, the treating the help shitty that was very common among the British upper crust. Also doesn't mean he's not a dick,

yeah exactly. Yeah. When Cecil turned sixteen, he was more or less a man because again, people didn't live all that long back then. Um, So it was time for him to head to grammar school, which is a term

for secondary school. UM. But I think was kind of more like it was basically like he the normal thing to have done for a boy and his his his um, his situation would have been to get on the track to start going to university right um, and and to have done that and go to some place like he wanted to go to Oxford, that was always his dream um,

and he wanted to become a lawyer. But yeah, he he didn't like he It was kind of like a situation where he wasn't a certain about what he wanted to do, and um, he wound up picking another option, which was that his brother Herbert had moved to South Africa and started a cotton farm, and his family kind of thought that he wasn't really ready for college and he couldn't wasn't mature enough to go to join the military or anything like that. Yeah, they wanted to harden

him up. That's what you did if you were an upper class British family and you had a kid that you wanted to toughen up, you would send them to Africa. Um. Yeah, it was like a yeah, my god. Yeah. Yeah, and just knowing it's South Africa just even adds yes, yeah right. And at this point South Africa is not a political entity. It's the Cape, the Cape colony. Um. And we'll talk a little in a little more details soon about like what the powers kind of in Southern Africa are at

that point. Yeah. But yeah, Africa in this point for the British was seen as a place, not where, not just as a place where a white man could get rich because it was obviously that. But where a white boy could become a white man by ordering you know, black African people to work for him. Um yeah, and surviving malaria. Uh So. The primary motivating factor was probably Cecil's father, who saw his son as soft and an

underachiever in school. Um. As Rotberg writes, despite the school prizes that Cecil had won, the vicar may have also had qualms about the thoroughness of his preparation in Greek and Latin. Furthermore, his father recognized that he was unfitted for a routine life in England. Sons of the sturdy Victorian middle class went overseas. They went to America and India. They were beginning to go out to Africa again. Dirty, sturdy middle sturdy middle class. That's what a great term.

And that's who builds the British empire. You know, it's not the it's not the wealthy people, um like they have they fund a lot of it. But if you're looking at like the people who actually conquer most of land, it is these like these folks and Cecils, these kind of the upper classes middle class is who actually goes out to prove themselves in these places. It just I just wonder what it would like, honestly, feel like to

really believe that, like the world is your playground. Yeah, and no matter where I go, I'm at home because these are our colonies. So when you land in the Southern Cape, you're like, well, this is England. Yeah yeah, yeah, it's hard to imagine. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's there's a there wasn't not anymore, but there wasn't. One time when I was traveling the most, I I felt kind of similar to that having a US passport, because

you can go anywhere and everybody like I can. I remember times in like Central America where they were just I'd be in towns where there was a whole police force just to keep just for the tourists, Like cops would like stop and give you rides and stuff to go get to go to the next bar, because it's like our job is to make sure that the white Americans who visit have the best possible time, because that's an important part of our Like it's yeah, I feel

that to a small extent. You know, it's not the same, and it just both scenarios seem amazing. Yeah, you know what I'm saying just yeah, blissfully unfair, but probably incredible. Yeah, very definitely unfair. Um yeah, so uh yeah, there's pretty persistent rumors that Cecil's family sent him to Africa because he was sick, uh, and that wandering around Africa was like a medical treatment at the time. Like, and you

get that a lot in the Cecil's life. He'll get ill and they'll be like, go to Africa and then he'll get another kind of ill and they'll say, oh, you need to head back to England. There was a lot of medicine was like go where it's hot, go

where it's cold. Um. Rothberg, who I think is probably the most rigorous biographer of Cecil, thinks that this is untrue, that like looking at letters between him and his family, there's no evidence that he was sick um and that he probably his family mostly wanted him to go get hardened up and go make the family wealthier by taking other people's stuff and his his his family invested a

lot of money in him. His aunt gave him two thousand pounds, which was like that's a year's worth of living comfortably at that point in time, um, which he could use to like fund whatever adventure venture struck his fancy. Um. So he again he's he's his family. He's never worried about money. He always knows when he when he strikes out to Africa. Number one, I have a giant pile of cash and no matter what I do, my family will send more. Yeah, this is an understanding he has.

So he lands in Africa in eighteen seventy and at the time, Southern Africa was divided between several white colonies were like the major powers in the area. There was the British controlled Cape Colony, which was roughly the size of Texas. When we call this a colony, most modern nations are smaller than the Cape Colony. Like, again, fucking Texas. It's the size. It's almost it's like it's the size of Europe basically. Yeah, there's the Orange Free State, which

was a bunch of Dutch weirdos who really hated the Brits. Uh. These are like the Bowers or the Africanners. And there's the trans Ball which is also which it's run by even weirder Dutchmen and it was essentially a theocracy at this point. Um, and these are also Bowers. Yeah, exactly.

So between these white people controlled lands. A lot of Southern Africa was still independent and controlled by people like the Sotho, the Nama, the Herrero, I think the Pseudo was one of them, the kimbay Um yeah or in the something we'll get to them later, the a yeah yeah yeah, and and these there's there's still there are still some very like the um the Mada Bali I think is one of them. Are are very have a lot of power and still control a sizeable chunk of land. Yeah.

I was like, I know, I know a little bit just because of my black panther father and then um being like I perform in South Africa at least once a year except for this year. But like yeah, so like the Zulu region down south, you know, they're obviously very still very tribal, but like that, the power that they wielded among even surrounding tribes was like yeah, it was undeniable, and their interaction with the with the colonizers

was like super crazy. Like you know the whole Shaka Zulu story Yeah, yeah, the Zulu wars and stuff, um, yeah,

which is which is happening in this period? Like this is this is exactly the period where also the Zulu wars are happening, um, which are you know, there's there's a there's a phrase that sums up all of the wars between the English uh and and the bowers and um and the African tribes at this point, and it's it's a phrase that has come up with by a British poet and I believe the poem was kind of

critical of of imperialism. But the phrases, whatever happens, we have got the maxim gun and they have not, which is like the maxim guns, the first heavy machine gun. That's all the wars is at the end of the day. Yeah, a few hundred white troops, thousands of African troops, but the white people have heavy machine guns. Yeah, the shield is still stretched like leopard skin. That's still their ship,

no matter how Chraine you are. Yeah. And a lot of these African tribes they're fighting with rifles still, but it's one they have antique rifles and the white people have machine guns. So it doesn't you know, it doesn't matter, Yeah, Robert, Robert, you know what doesn't matter? You know who else has machine guns? No, No, that's not that's not I mean probably right, yea somewhere in the room. Um, that was trash. All right, we're back. So uh Cecil has just landed

in Africa, Southern Africa and the Cape Colony. And the first thing he learns after setting foot on the continent, um is that the cotton he had gone there to grow cotton because his brother has this cotton farm, um. And this is a period where cotton's prices temporarily skyrocketed because the U s has a civil war and Sherman

burns all of the cotton fields and stuff. So there's a period it was it was for the longest time not profitable for anyone but people who lived in the south of the United States to grow cotton because it's just the best region to grow it in and they were producing so much of it that there was no point in anyone else growing it. There's this brief cotton boom in this period in like the eighteen seventies, and it doesn't last long, but it's kind of at its

height when he lands in Africa. But as soon as he gets to Africa, he starts talking with people and he learns that cotton he hears about essentially a a boom product that he finds a lot more exciting than cotton. Diamonds. Um. Yeah, so yes, diamonds. And he starts talking with as soon as he lands, he meets a guy who just discovered a massive diamond mine in southern Africa. Um and yeah, and his brother actually doesn't show up to meet him. He leaves him a note because he was scoping out

diamond fields when Cecil landed. Um and had also like kind of moved on from the cotton. These are all these are all speculators right like they're they're they're boom chasers. It's the same basic thing going on in Africa in this period, in Southern Africa in this period as was going on in California, you know, with the gold run goal. Yeah. So Cecil fell in love with the geography of Africa at once. Um. And when I say he fell in love with it, I I want to be really like,

he didn't fall in love with Africa. He fell in love with the land in Africa. It was a possessive love and it did not include it's the people there. Um. And that's a long terms sort of thing. Yeah. Having spent a decent amount of time in Africa, there is and I say this in all honesty, there is something magical there and then just and also the idea that like inside of the ground somewhere in Africa, I mean, the the land just produces everything. Yeah, it's just like

it's all of it is there. It's it's pretty crazy. It's massive, it holds, and so it's so much bigger like our maps. Do us a disservice? Do it a disservice? Um, because again, like one of the colonies in Southern Africa is the size of Texas, and there's a bunch of other ship they're still the other land in the world in Africa. It's huge. So yeah, I'm gonna read a paragraph that is something that that Cecil wrote about kind of the native peoples in Africa after he first arrived there.

So this is one of his first impressions. Uh. And the term he uses here, I don't know. I didn't decide like I don't. I don't. I don't normally I don't read out like slurs if I can avoid it. I also don't want to say the K word. But it's it's the it's that it's that word in South yeah, yeah, yeah, the South Africa's version of the in word. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

and and at this point I should stay. They use both that word and the in word interchangeably, and they are they are slurs, but they're not using them as slurs because to them, this is just what you call these people like, it's not it's not. Yeah, so which is time and language is crazy alive? Yeah? Yeah, So the people here shock your modesty. Many of them have nothing on excepting a band around the middle. They are

fine looking men and carry themselves very erect. They all take snuff and carry their snuff boxes in a hole board through their ears. They also pay great attention to their hair and carry porcupine quills in it with which they dress it. You often see them sitting down in groups dressing each other's hair and picking the fleas out. Um. And then he talks about how he doesn't think they smell very good. Um, and he's very judgmental. Um, just a real judgmental dude. Uh So yeah, that's that's Cecil's

first impression of these people. And he eventually receives a letter that his brother has sent him that included twenty dollars in a crude map to the cotton farm, So he heads to the cotton farm uh. And you know, pretty soon after he arrives there, the price of cotton falls. Um. But he he spends some time as a cotton farmer, and he's not really interested in cotton. He really wants

to get into diamonds. But his family keeps writing him letters basically saying, don't like, stay stay on the cotton path. This is safe, Like this is a good investment. Diamonds are risky and that's kind of um. You know, his first year or so in in Africa is him constantly getting this like this flood of information about all the diamonds people are finding in different parts of southern Africa, and it makes his he write he writes that it makes his mouth water. Um and uh, but why why

is his family so involved? But this is like that's what they do. This is what I think that's pretty standard for an upper crust family at the time. Like this, like a child is also an investment, and he reflects on the family and you you're you're putting a lot of money into him to send him there. You want him to do things that will will provider return. Still building, Yeah, you're building the empire. Remember they're like middle rich, so

you got to build the empire. Yeah. Yeah, And empires are built by people who are building private empires for themselves, right, Like that's what makes it doable. You know. It's the Eric Prince sort of thing. So, um yeah, they warn him away from this path, but he keeps. He keeps like hearing all these stories like that. There's he reads a story about how an African man found a diamond and traded it for a roll of tobacco to a white man, and the white guy sold it for eight

hundred pounds. Um. His brother finds a couple of diamonds because he's always going off to go diamond finding some roads, just keeps getting his key, like he's got this hunger. He does describe it as like a physical hunger to go out and find diamonds. Um. Now, the first diamond had been discovered in South Africa three years earlier, in eighteen sixty nine, a black farm employee had found an enormous eighty eight carrot diamond the Star of Africa. And

I think this is neat. So the diamonds were first found, as far as we can tell in human history, um, by people in southern India. And carrots are what you you kind of measure diamonds by because those people back in like seven hundred BC UM, would weigh a diamond next to carib seeds. And that's why it's called carrots. Is like the number of carab seeds that it takes to like way a diamond. Like that's where that word

came from. We don't use carab seeds anymore, but like anyway, I just thought that was neat that research and it's yeah, and it's not carrots like every kid thinks, no, no, no, it's like carab seeds. So he was paid the black man who finds the Star of Africa, this massive diamond. Yeah, he was paid five hundred sheep, ten oxen and a horse for it, which actually, like if you're looking at kind of like Africans who find diamonds and sell them to white people, that's not a bad price. That's a

lot of ship. Yeah yeah, yeah, he came up off found in the ground. Yeah you know yeah. Yeah. The star though did eventually sell for twenty five thousand pounds, which is like you're very wealthy if you've got access to that kind of money in in in this period of time. Um, it's about the equivalent of four million

modern dollars. Yeah, that's some money. Yeah. So this does bring me to an interesting The fact that this guy, this farm worker who sold him and got paid reasonably nothing like close to what it finally sold for, but got paid pretty good does bring me to a point about Southern Africa in this period that is important to state. It was less racist than it became. This is actually it actually started out as a much less racist as

a colony. Then it turned into and the guy we're talking about today is part of why it made that turn. So Obviously the British were outrageous bigots, um, and everybody in this period, every English person this period in the colony is tossing around the inn word like it's going out of style. But the Cape Town Colony was run under British law, and the British had a whole be in their bonnet in this period about the rights of men, and British law held in theory at least that all men,

even black men, were equal. Um. And this was this was something that was enshrined in their in their legal codes in a way that it was not in the United States. Um, this was a principle. Um. It was not like a civil right in the way that we conceive of it, um. But it was a principle that was abided by. And so while while black men were very much second class citizens in the eyes of the white people who lived there, they still theoretically enjoyed full

rights if they owned property, they could vote. Segregation was not a matter of law, um. And that this is within kind of the core of the Cape colony. And one of the things you'll see is that like within the core of the colony they hold pretty strictly to these these things that they consider proud traditions of the British Empire. And the further out you get from it in the areas where they're actually extracting resources, the less

and less those legal niceties apply right um. But within the center of the colony they make at least an effort at that. And there are you know, to their credit, you will find lawmakers who when there are other people who are talking about like restricting the rights of of black Africans, there are lawmakers in the colonies who get very angry about that, white lawmakers. So there is this is part of why you can condemn people like cecil Is.

There are white men at this time who are like that's not right, Like all men should be equal and they have to be treated that way under the law, and like you are you are developing a separate legal code for them, which is just worth noting that this is not when we talk about the racism of colonialism. I do think we often we often make it out to be something that everyone just thought was fine, and they didn't A lot of people pushed back, a lot

of white people pushed back against you. It's part of why you can condemn the ones who didn't. Yeah. Yeah, I would even argue that, like that's like, yeah, things don't things don't start at the end, you know, And that I mean, the same happen in America, Like there couldn't without the without the work of you know, non racist white people. Yeah, we probably couldn't have gotten where

we've gotten so far anyway. Yeah, And and I think for this it's because they don't stop anything from happening in the Cape colony, right, Like the racism is is enshrined into law despite their objections. But the fact that people objected is important, I think for for condemning the

ones who were who pushed for the racism, including Cecil sure. Um. At this point in our story, though, Cecil is just a seventeen year old boy learning how to become a cotton farmer UM, or rather, he was learning how to command the Zulu laborers who actually work out his farm,

how to run a farm, not how to farm. Now, it seems fair to say from the context that Cecil was not an excessively hateful racist in his personal interactions with the natives UM, but he was in his bones a capitalist, and he was very frustrated by the fact that these people were not. Their way of life did not jell well with capitalism, uh. He wrote, for though there are any amount of he uses that k word out here, there are such independent fellows that the greater

part of them won't work. Their daily food is mealy maze porridge. They grow their own mealies, and the only thing they had must have his money for their hut tax, which is very light. And he considers this a problem that all they They're like, Oh, I grow my own food. I don't really need money, so I'm not gonna work that much because I don't. I don't want much. I'm happy just growing my own food and living. I don't want to like labor for someone else all the time,

and he's like, this is a problem. It sounds kind of good. Yeah that that actually says like an I a life sounds pretty great. I have what I need. Yeah. But he's he's recognizing these people are not going to be ideal citizens um of of of global capitalism, which isn't a thing at this point, but is being born. And Cecil is one of the people who first kind of sees what's going to be born. Um, and he

wants to build. He becomes enthralled with the idea of building a massive network of trade throughout Africa and the rest of the world. Um, so that products can move and go because he loves he in his bones, he loves capitalism. That's and yeah. So uh. He was unique among the white men in his area for being willing to lend his black workers money. Um. He and his brother both believed strongly that Africans were almost incapable of lying um. And that's so, like you could trust them

with money. He actually said that, uh, he would prefer to loan them money than to like have money in the Bank of England, because the Bank of England was a less trustworthy institution. So like that's something. Yeah, that's that's that's the that's the off balance racism where you like to hang I don't. Yeah, I feel so weird. Yeah.

I've heard some descriptions that his workers were basically slaves, And it does seem like later on, as the story develops, it became that way that does happen to the people who work for him, but that doesn't appear to have been the case in this period. In fact, in this period, Cecil probably could be described as one of the better white men in the Cape Colony to the black people who worked for him. Um, he was also one of

the better insult me. Yeah, I mean it's not a it's not a compliment, it's I'm just trying to make sure there's proper context of this guy's journey. Um. He was also one of the better cotton farm managers, but he didn't really he never really liked farming cotton. Um. He couldn't stop thinking about diamonds. And in eighteen seventy one, a huge field of diamonds, the biggest diamond find in in the world, was found near a town now called Kimberly, Um.

And at the time Kimberly was part of what was called greek A Land Um, which is an independent territory founded by a mix of some members of different African tribes, a lot of former slaves, but also groups of kind of disaffected white men. Like it's actually a very multicultural group of people who all kind of reject what's going on in the colonies of Africa and moved to this place in the middle of nowhere, um, dusty, unfertile land together so that they could be kind of free, almost

like an autonomous zone. Yeah, I mean it was still like they had I think they had kind of like there was like a like a yeah, their leadership structure was was was you know, somewhat horizontal, but like yeah, it was a lot of people who were kind of rejecting what was being done elsewhere in Africa at the time and wanted to get away from it um. And so yeah, that's the Greeks, and it's a very I'm

not going to do that whole story justice. It's worth noting as we tell the rest of the story, you from what I've read, you will not find in this story. In South African history books, Greeka Land has been pretty much written out of the written out of the story. Yeah, um so, I'm gonna quote next from an article in

the History News Network. Then, in June eighteen seventy one, a White prospector announced the discovery then eighty three point five carrot diamond at the place now known as Kimberly, so named after Earl Kimberly, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies. This site of the discovery just happened to be within Greek A territory, but fortune hunters never did bother to raise any questions with the Greeks as

to the ownership of the mining rights. Just a few days earlier, the British Colonial Secretary and a dispatch dated May eighteen seventy one, had already authorized the British High Commissioner in Cape Town to extend the British territory in South Africa by annexing Greeka land. It seems unlikely that the close timing of these two events was purely coincidental. Of yeah, so, oh there's diamonds. I guess this is ours now, um yeah, And the Kimberly discovery came at

a faithful time. Diamonds in South Africa then were like golden California again a thousand. The prospectors would just swarm any chunk of land that seems like it might hold wealth. And just before the discovery had come, there had been a number of false finds. Generally, people would like find a couple of diamonds and like an alluvial plain, which is like land around a river, um and people would swarm there, but there wouldn't actually be nearly as many

diamonds as they'd anticipated. So that had happened a few times. So a lot of these guys were very desperate. So once diamonds are found in Kimberly and it's clear that this is a real find, tens of thousands of desperate miners start swarming in to tear the whole this big mountain that is the find apart. We're not mountain, like a hill, a large hill um. And yeah, Greeka land was brushed out of existence so that these guys could

get rich. Uh. Quote from the History News Network, Greek a leader Nicholas water Bower, through a legal advocate, had during all this time been importuning the British colonial authorities at the Cape to respect Greek lands sovereign independence and its ownership of the land upon which the Diamond Field was situated to no avail. Finally, in May eight and armed rebellion broke out the light. The armed Greeks were no match for colonial troops armed with cannon and breech

loading rifles. A massacre ensued, with the colonial forces suffering only nine fatalities. It signaled the beginning of the end for the Greek nation. Most of the survivors migrated several hundred miles to the northwest, settling ultimately in Southwest Africa now Namibia. So Greeks, you know, not a great story for them. Um, so yeah, the men there's yeah, there's just like an entire as, an entire like like there's yeah, there's they're just not in history books now like that

what would they be they didn't win? Yeah, yeah, it's so crazy that like, yeah, I guess they didn't exist, but no, it's all the existed. But now they're no yeah, not no more, not no more. So uh yeah. Um. The men who would come to work the Kimberly find were also Africans, um, but they were not people who had lived in the Greek a terror tory previously. They were a different group of Africans who had been dispossessed

by the colonial greed of the Boers. Most of them were refugees from areas around the trans Fall in the Orange Free State, they've been pastoral nomads who had had their lands seized by military force. Uh they were destitutes, starving and homeless, and so a lot of these guys had no choice but to work the diamond minds because otherwise they were going to starve to death. Yea quote.

Fortune hunters from all over Southern Africa and from Europe, America and Australia fought over claims well at the same time, remaining united and the common purpose of being the masters

of black labor. Seven hundred individual claims or plots of ground containing a little more than eight hundred nine three square feet were marked off and taken possession of thirty thousand black laborers toiled away in that confined space, but were themselves prohibited from owning claims or dealing in diamonds. They were subjected to constant body searches and restricted to

their Hutson tints by nighttime curfew. Any dark skinned person in the vicinity who could not prove he was employed as a servant or laborer was declared a vagrant and subject to flogging. So you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm

not a new story, not a new story. Yeah, just even you know, there are places in Central and South America and bring it back to coffee again that the locals that the farms that grow it, and the people that like harvest the coffee, they're legally not allowed to drink that, like the beans are only for export, you know what I'm saying, And like, yeah, just it's like tail as old as time, like this day land. Yep.

I can definitely say that. One radicalizing moment for me was during the time I spent in Guatemala hanging out with like some native Guatemalans in their homes and being given instant coffee, yeah, in an area surrounded by and being like, uh wait, we're on a coffee Like there's there's all of the world's coffee comes from here here. What is happening? Yeah? Why are we drinking net cafe?

Does not compute? Yeah, it's because my country has all you walk into their village like, hey, guys, I got this single lordin guatemaland you guys want to try Oh yeah, we grew that right, here, yea, it comes from here. We don't get that. We can't drink it though. And speaking of capitalism, Robert, you know what will let you know? Okay, well you know it's goods. Yeah, I'm no help. Yeah ah oh, those are some good ads. Let me tell you something. I'm about to use all those promo codes.

I love promo codes because I love promotions, and it will put food on y'alls to table. I love food on the table. So while the Greek a territory had been annexed by the Cape Colony, it did not benefit from the same enlightened legal system as the rest of

the colony, because again it's on the periphery. And while it's important for us in the cities to abide by these these laws that we all think are very very nice, once we get out to where the money's made, people stop talking about the rights of man, you know, because there's money. Yeah. It's the same thing as how the United States, our whole lives, talks a good game about

the rights of man. But also, UH fundamentally could not exist in the same fashion if a large number of its UH critical products were not made in areas without any sort of labor laws. Yeah it wouldn't work. Yeah, yeah, we're just we've we've diffused the responsibility by making those

be an independent countries now. So Cecil Rhodes was one of the very first white men to rush towards like he just kind of abandons the cotton farm and he goes to what would turn out to be one of the world's are just diamond minds, the Kimberly find And at the time, the hill where the mind was centered had a Dutch name, which I'm not going to try to pronounce, like I I don't even know how to begin pronouncing it. Long is how It's just I don't even know how to say it is wrong? Right? Um. Yeah.

He was nineteen when he traveled there to help his older brother, who bought a couple of claims um and roads immediately brought his considerable gifts to bear because he's a great organizer. He's great at maximizing productivity. He's one of these people who can who can just like, look at a bunch of people working at a task in scene ways in which to make it more efficient. He's

got that Henry Ford thing going on. I was gonna say, man, you know is the worst thing in the world is to be like in some sort of uh relationship with a person that's good at those things. Yeah, because that's something like it's just like, man, can you just can you just let me put my shoes where they go? Yeah? I mean you're probably right, but like, damn, man, I don't want to think about it. I just don't want to.

Oh my god. When I first got married, I remember I come back from a show like I'd be gone two days. All of a sudden, the drawer that used to have the knives and forks now it's towels in, And I'm like, what am I crazy? Because she didn't figure it out a better way for our kitchen to function, And just man, can you just okay? I don't have an argument as to why this is not. It's actually a better idea, but god, you married up. I did. I mean, I mean, I really did it. She's much

more efficient. But sometimes like you're getting all you know, Rhoda on me. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, I just think of all the times Robert can't find things, and then we start things late because you can't find things. I have started the rebellion against capitalism early in my own life by refusing to ever know what I'm doing or have a plan. And you know what, it works out fine. This is one thank you successful podcast. Thank you, thank you so uick, thank you. So you don't need

capitalism as something as you have products and services. So he was, Yeah, he's a born entrepreneur. He creates a bunch of side hustles in order to basically make additional cash to fund the expansion of their mind to buy their claims. Uh. The probably most successful of these was he bought an ice machine so he could sell ice cream during the vicious summer months in southern Oh my god,

this is brilliant. Yeah, that's brilliant, like the fucking middle of like the the dead middle of like southern Africa, like people working in the summer on a mine and you're like, you know, it'll do well, here's a fucking ice machine. You remember, you remember, uh early like two thousand, you know, teena lever earlier at his decade, like when the one to one model was like like the Tom's model, right, was all the all the all the rage I saw

this video was going around. Its hilarious. I think those dudes make commercials now but like they were totally dressed like the guy that started Tom's and they were supposed to be in Africa doing this one to one thing and he says, you know, I never forget it. Man. I I had this idea where um I was out in Africa. We were on a missions trip and I just thought to myself, where can I get a smoothie? And he goes, He's like, I never forget it. The

the tribe said what's a smoothie? And he was like, and that's when I knew we want to do one to one smoothie machines. So their whole business model was if you buy a smoothie machine, they will provide one for a tribe in Africa. I mean, I kind of love the idea of like hunter gatherers but with a smoothie machine, because like everybody enjoys a smooth because they're all, yeah, they're all you need is like yeah, ice, milk and running water. I'm sure they can get that, right, Yeah,

they're good, right, smoothie machines. And they did totally shot at like what those conversives were, like, you know, he got this white ladies, really nice white person handing this smoothie to like the smiling African and then the guy a little African boys holding They're like what do what is one kid just dragging it by the power cord? Right? Just do that. They're putting rocks on the inside, Like what do I do with this? Right? Anyway has with everybody.

But anyway, hey, this boo was brilliant. Sell ice cream, Sell ice cream? Yeah, sell ice cream? Um smart smart guy. Um so yeah. Now, when he first arrived at Kimberly, he described the site of this, this hill that's the cut, like this is the center of the mining claim, as looking like a giant ant hill covered in thousands of scurrying black shapes. And he predicted in this turned out to be very accurate that one day the hill would be completely dug away and replaced by a giant hole

in the itself. And he was completely right about this. Um. If you go to Kimberly today, you can go visit the Big Hole, which many suggest, it's not confirmed, but many suggest is the largest pit ever dug by human hands. And if you look up the photos of this, it's astonishing it is. It is a really big hole. Yeah, that's crazy, I didn't know. You can still go man, Okay, yeah, it's right. Yeah, because they just dug They dug so deep into the ground to get all the diamonds. And

then there's there's this giant hole. Nobody's gonna fill it up. What are you gonna do? H what are you gonna do after? Now we have a hole in our town? Yeah, guys, Hey, now hey look capitalism, Hey, come see the hole comes hole a hole. Let's monetize it. Yeah, you're you're I'm trying to do your sometimes your old timey like newspaper guy voice, Come see the whole. I can't do it, dude. The natives could never have dugging a hole this big, Like, look at this hole. Only white men could make a

hole this big. That's it. There, it is so this. The year after Cecil arrived, the popular lation of diggers in Kimberly swelled to as many as about fifty thousand, and at first most of them operated independent claims finding diamonds because it required nothing more than hand tools. Right, you were just kind of digging and like running water through it and with oil and I don't know, it's a it's a process, but it's pretty simple and it

didn't require heavy equipment UM. But as these claims were found more profitable, and as the digging got deeper, eventually, like you started turning it into a big hole, and that becomes too much of a process for small independent diggers to be a part of. So things start getting consolidated UM and people start abandoning in it too, because there's a period when you're mining diamonds where you strip away like the surface level and it looks like you're done.

And Cecil and a number of other like smarter, well, I guess like just more intuitive guys understood that no, no no, there's gonna be more diamonds underneath that. But we need to be we need to build larger companies to buy

larger equipment to go deeper and extract those UM. So he starts investing his money into buying up individual minds and adding them to he and Herbert's claims, and the process started slowly, took years and years and years UM, and it was a time that Cecil would remember fondly, this like sixteen seventeen year period where he's kind of building the foundation of it would become his empire. UM. In eighteen seventy two, when he's about a year into

this process. Um, he's a very happy guy. His only frustration came from the fact that he wasn't able to go back to Oxford. As Rottenberg writes, quote, Rhodes may have continued dreaming of a university education and of life as a professional, probably a barrister, but these would have been dreams with utilitarian motives. For the moment, he was content to have land of your own, horses of your own, and shooting when you like, and a lot of black inwards to do what you like with apart from the

fact of making money. So that's his attitude. Yeah, there is, Yeah,

it's it's yeah. And again, the the the ease with which he could kind of talk about how happy he was probably had something to do with the fact that his parents were backing him, um and would continue to do it so he never had to like he he had this, He had a cushion, you know, that's the Yeah, he had a where it's like, it's really not a risk because if all else fails, you could just go back to you just go back to England, you know what I'm saying, And and metaphorically and quite literally just

leave a hole in Africa and just and just you just go back home like, well it was fun. I guess it didn't you know whatever, you know, And and that like knowing that it's like it makes the the it's it's you gamified like it's a video game now. So it's like, this is fun building an empire, building an industry. It's fun because if it if it fails, it's just like, oh, it's like a video game. Just hit the reset button and start over. Don't save it, you know what I mean, it just start over. Yeah,

like the thing that you like, I enjoy. I don't know. Maybe I don't know if this impulse is is coated in white dudes socially or if or if there's there's something deeper to it. But like the only video games that I play our games where you you build an invir you you like, build like cities or countries, and you like, you know, it's all about expansion and all of that stuff. Um and I you know, I I feel that impulse and I get to play video games

about it. Uh. I suspect if I had been raised in Cecil's time, in the culture he did, I probably would have done some some fucking imperialism. Probably man I mean, and it's like, who could blame you, you you know, because you could, but I do think, um, I find and I mean, you've joked about it a few times about like starting a cult, you know, and the first time

I heard you quote it, i't talk about it. I thought to myself, I have imagined often building a culture from scratch, and I'm like, well, I mean that's what it is. And I'm like, I guess essentially a cult is just a small culture. And in my head, I'm like, imagining the thing and making it up would be so much more fun than running it, you know. So when I see dudes like like this, that's like, yo, no, let's figure out how to do this consolidated thing doing

the thing. And it's like I start, Okay, we did it, but now you gotta maintain it. Then you're like, damn, that's a drag. You know, Well let me go start another one, you know, and then you start another business and then you go because because the building the thing's fun.

So I just think about that, like even if I was gonna, you know, I would love to just like you know, if I'm everybody on Tuesday nights, we sit in a circle and you have to drink uh you know, green tea specifically only with your left hand at five forty two pm. That's the rule in our cult. And I just think that, like making up stuff like that just seems fun, you know, So in him, yeah, figuring out the best way two make this thing work and then shoot shoot shoot messages back to his brothers and

his family like suck it. I'm living out here, y'all send Yeah, he because you thought I couldn't do it, check this out. I'm winning, you know. I could see the psychology developing again. Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. Um, I get you know. And this is kind of one at where I land on like thank God for video games, but also like I don't know, like this is something I wrestle with, like if I can be completely honest with you, like part of why I moved out to

the West is I want to own land. I want to buy I want to buy a chunk of land that that feels wild to me and get to live on it and roam around. And there's certainly conversations to

be had about how ethical that is. Um. It's a powerful desire and it's coated in me as is as is finding romance and things that I know are not romantic, like the like like like The Cowboy or like The Agent Exploration, UM, which is like I was reading those books when I was like five years old, and you know, I I've gone out of my way to educate myself

about the reality. But you never quite fully break that spell. Nah. Yeah, you can't help but be a like and products not the right word, but but yeah, like you are influenced by the era you're in and you can't not be what you are. So yeah, now I feel I think about that when we talk about reparations with black people. Um, you know, hey, where's our forty acres in a mule? And you turn right over to your indigenous friend that

goes like where they've gonna give you land? It's not there's like you know what I'm saying to you, like a yeah gang, yeah, yeah, you say anyway, yeah, And there's a I don't know, there's a good conversation to be had in um condemning things that are bad, like imperialism, and also understanding the the extent to which we're all products of this system, so that we can have forgiveness for each other. When people realize they've been wrong, you know, dude,

collect offering. That's that was That was disarming, right, there's a collect offer and now was good? All right? So in eighteen seventy three he returned to Britain or England or whatever. People always yell at me for calling it one or the other. His purpose here was twofold to take care of his ailing mother, who died the next year. He was very sad and to return to his education. He applied to Oxford because a degree at Oxford would

mark him out as an Englishman of distinction. But he failed the entrance exam and so we had to ask a family friend who was a graduate to use his influence with the school to get Cecil admission again. He always has help earning the things that he gets planned B baby, who says you can't plan B I'm white. So for most of the next decade, Cecil would switch between summer semesters at Oxford, and he takes some years

off in between. It's not every year, and winters in Africa, a scene to the expansion of what was becoming a mining empire. He initially funded his education by the money his dad had set aside for it. But as he and Herbert's business expanded, he was able to pay his own way through Oxford. He was very proud of this um. He was not a good student, and he was regularly in trouble for failing to attend lectures and not doing

the reading that he was ordered to do. It seems like most of his time at school was spent at fancy parties making connections. He was always careful to make sure everyone knew how wealthy he had become, generally by carrying a box of diamonds with him wherever he went. God, you imagine pulling up to the frat party with Yeah, I was thinking, this guy is so stereotypical white male privilege. But then you were like, oh no, no no, But also no, no, no, let me let me dial this

up a bit. There's like, yo, there are things that just like I like we just said, being gracious with each other and understanding that we're all products. That is saying gulage. There are parts of me that like deeply admires what he just explained right now that like equivalent though of showing a frat party with a box of diamonds, like the biggest that is the greatest flex. I've ever dude looking around diamonds. Yeah, playwood diamonds, keep pocket diamonds

like up chicks diamonds. I don't even need these diamonds. I don't even need these. I got a whole field of them in Africa for which I spent my winters because London is cold down here. Yeah, you diamonds like diamonds. There's a part of me that like and that you ain't got a Really I'm going to Oxford literally for the flex because I don't have to care. It's like and they don't even do the work. I han't even the work. I hate him like he stands for everything

that I hate. But also that's that's that this style that's flag is just my first year of teaching. I never think it was my first year of teaching. There was a little eleventh graders, which was crazy because I was like maybe four years old, but like, uh I this kid, this was like eBay time, right, So this kid was selling these like paint guns on eBay, you know, and I remember being like, first of all, how do you know how to do this? Number one? And number two?

Where do you keep him? He was like, oh, they I never get them they don't. I don't have them. I just they don't come to me. I buy them and then sell them. And then this little dude will show up late because he was working the German stock market. Eleventh grader, and I was like, if this fool never turns in an assignment, I don't blame him. I don't blame you for not taking high school serious. Yeah, yeah,

fuck it, yeah exactly, Like he knows. He has this thing that you have to have to be truly successful within a society, which is knowing that all of the conventions of your society or bullshit. And Cecil Rhodes knows that Cecil Rhodes understands that it's all it's all a dumb, bullshitty grift. And like he will, he will refuse to do work, and then his like his friends at school will be like the dean's gonna kick like you're gonna

get kicked out of school. And he has a number of meetings with them, and they never do and he knows they're not going to because they know that he's going to be extremely wealthy and powerful and they want to be able to brag that he's an alumni. So when he sits exactly. So when I sit down in this meeting about you about to expel me, I'm just gonna put my backpack down and just let a diamond roll, oh you know when, and let you tell me so tell me, so, tell me how, tell me how this goes?

Excuse me pick up lines like what? How? Well, we'll talk about his romantic life a little bit in a moment. So does women really? Well? Is he just a standing guy? Is that what I should be expelled? No, he doesn't, he doesn't. He doesn't even think about women. Um, he's he's again, he's he's he's he's gay. Well we're talking about this in a little bit, but yeah, he's not. He has no interest in women. Um yeah, so does

a slight turn of events? All right, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that in a bit, because there's some things to say about it. Um. I don't want to, like a lot of people talk about it too much because I don't think it's that big of a thing. But there's some areas in which it impacts kind of other things that he does. I still want to know what his lines were. Well, we'll talk about that too briefly.

I mean, even it's gay or straight you walk into a party with some diamonds that you're just playing around with, shaking him like dice for you know what I'm saying.

So uh. Once a classmate and this is back to the story about his diamond box, a classmate reported quote when he condescended to attend to lecture with which proved uninteresting to him, he pulled out his box and showed the gyms to his friends, and then it was upset and diamonds were scattered on the floor, and the lecturer looked up asking what was the cause of the disturbance and received the reply, it is only rhads and his diamonds.

Oh god, I hate this guy being the professor just look at at this like, yeah, ah, this little prick, you little prick. Yeah, damn, one of those rocks is my year's salary. Yeah, he's probably like that guy, that guy that was viral on social media, the guy who salts the meat, remember that salt. Yeah, he was probably die yeah that guy that's where yeah. Yes, So let's talk a little bit about what it took for Cecil to get those diamonds so right before leaving for his

first turn of Oxford. Yeah, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, none of it is ever so. Right before he left for Oxford, Cecil and his brother Herbert moved most of their operations to a new set of claims in a mind named De Beers. Uh. Yeah, that's where this story is going. So if you want an exhaustive account of every blow and play, you can read Rottenberg's biography, The Founder. The short of it is that Cecil came to own the

entire mind, and he didn't buy it at all. In fact, he convinced a number of investors, many of whom were like men in and around his age group, ambitious younger guys, to invest and he had He's noted as having this superhuman ability to convince primarily other white dudes, to work towards his vision. He's able to get people to buy into a vision and give him full control of achieving it.

That is his gift, that's his his real talent. Because he's not using all of his own money for this, he's convincing other people to pay and let him run things. Freaking brilliant dude. Yeah, and he's very good at that.

Starting in the mid eighteen seventies, he began collecting a group of mostly young men around him, and to these most trusted acolytes, he would reveal what had become his true goal, the creation of a secret society aimed at furthering the spread of the British Empire over the entire world.

The first people he collected for this grand endeavor were co investors in his mining operation, men with money and influence that he welded with the power of his dreams into what essentially functioned as a fanatically loyal board of directors for his business. They were so devoted to Roads and his goals that any in the Cape colony began

referring to these men as the apostles. Wow. Yeah. In eighteen seventy seven, after just six years in business, Roads had accrued in a state worth about ten thousand pounds, which did not make him super rich, but he was very comfortable, and it was enough that he wrote his first will, which listed his wish that all his possessions go quote to and for the establishment, promotion, and development

of a secret society. The true aim and object whereof would be for the extension of British rule throughout the world.

Rhodes went on went so far as to specify that he wanted the society to ensure the spread of British rule, to quote, the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyphrus and candy A, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, and the ultimate recovery of the United States as an integral part of the British Empire. Yo, Yeah, I am

so glad, he added that last part. Yes, that's gotta be a that's gotta be a freaking thorn in your flesh. He hates that the US left the empire. Yeahn't believe we lost this. Yeah, he's very frustrated by that. So the very next year, in eighteen seventy seven, while he's at Oxford, Rhodes published what he called His Confession of Faith.

Now he picked that title because by this point, years of ruling over black African servants and workers and extracting the wealth of their homeland for his own benefit felt so right to him that he considered imperialism to be his religion. When he's saying confession of faith, he's literally saying this is this is my God, this goal is my God. Um. So he opened the statement by noting that he did not care about marriage, he didn't care about having a family, and he didn't even care about

attaining personal wealth. The sole aim that interested him was the furtherance of the Anglo Saxon race. Quote. I contend that we are the finest in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts of the world that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings. What an alteration there would be if they were brought under the Anglo Saxon influence. Look again that the extra employment of a new country

added to our dominion gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth of some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. He's a white supremacist, Yeah, and a lot of people were you can talk about like there's again, I don't want to like get too into the birth the invention of the white race, because that is a story I want to I do want to tell,

but he is. He might be the first modern white supremacist, the first proud boy style white supremacist where that Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say that there's this and it's crazy, like how you know this is that intermingling. I would say, like you don't see a lot of this stuff in Christian literature until about now, where like this like intermingling of yeah, this is our mandate on the planet from our maker, like we are we're helping, this is what

God wants for us. You know what I'm saying. Yeah, Cecil's modern defenders will often bring up like things he said about believing that black people are are are inherently the same as white people. It's a cultural problem and as as soon as they fully embrace Anglo Saxon culture, then I think they deserve to be treated equally. And let's say, like, Nos, he wasn't racist. He had beliefs

about like he thought that he wanted to. It was just a cultural thing for him, and that is that's why I say, I think he might be the first that I've come across really truly modern white supremacist. He's a white supremacist in the way that the Proud Boys are. Were, like, they've got black members, they've get get Pacific Islanders, they have have Latino members, But their whole thing is their

Western chauvinists. They yeah, exactly. They believe that the West is best and that as long as you buy into that, it doesn't matter what color you are. And that's Cecil, that's Cecil Roads. Yeah. And he's writing this ship out in eighteen seventy seven when most races are much cruder. Yeah, and we're yeah, and we're still like suffering from those

writings to this day. Yes. Now, Like all arch imperialists, Cecil attempted to justify his mad ambition on humanitarian grounds, lamenting that if the Empire had not lost the United States, it would have been able to stop the Crimean War by denying both sides money and arms. CRIMEA Yeah, Yeah, that's good. Good, I appreciate that. Uh yeah, what it

really was, Yeah again naked white supremacy. Roads lamented that secret societies of the day, like the Masons, didn't direct their wealth and power towards a clear aim quote, why should we not form a secret society with but one object? The furtherance of the British Empire, and the bringing of the whole and civilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, and for the making of the Anglo Saxon race. But one empire. What a dream.

But yet it is probable, it is possible. I once had it argued by a fellow in my own college. I am sorry to own it, by an Englishman, that it was a good thing for us to have lost the United States. There are some subjects on which there can be no arguments, and to an Englishman this is one of them. But even from an American's point of view, just picture what they have lost. Look at their government.

Are not the frauds that nearly come before the public view would disgrace to any country, but especially There's, which is the finest in the world. Yeah, I mean, you're not wrong. All of our politicians have always been frauds. You get that correctly. But you had a king like like, come on, dude, Yeah, yeah, you're not wrong, but you can't say that. Yeah, not wrong, but you're not wrong, but you're not better either, Like, so go funk yourself. Yeah it takes one and no one. Yeah, you know.

He went on to express a desire to the entire continent of Africa, not just under British rule, but filled with English settlers. Africa is still lying ready for us, and it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory. And we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes. That more territory means simply more of the Anglo Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race

the world possesses, the most human. The thing that I still can't get my wrap my brain around, especially from writing's like this. I'm like, y'all ain't invented sewage. Yeah you in there, Yeah, y'all. Still you still throwing human ship in the street and don't know why you sick? Like you know what I'm saying, like this, how are you gonna tell me? Yeah, so you carry smell things because you don't bathe. I'm like, why are you telling?

Why do you think I'll give this? In Cecil's defense, he was known and it was odd in this period that he bathed every day, even when he was on campaign in the woods. He had like a bath taken around with him that his black servants filled up for him and stuff because he had the wealth to bath of every day. Had the wealth debate, I'm like, you seen have you seen everyone? Yeah to rest y'all like yeah.

So the secret society Roads proposed sounds almost more like a precursor to the c I A a handpicked group of ambitious and talented young men who would dedicate their whole lives to this cause. When he actually started inducting more men into this society, he tended to restrict his members from marrying and starting families so they would have no priorities before the empire. And this is where we talk about Roads of sexuality because he himself never married.

He expressed repeatedly that he was too busy to do so, and everyone pretty much agrees that he was gay. Um now, this was illegal at the time. You can just ask Oscar Wilde that. But men of means and stature, it was impossible to be poor and gay pretty much because I mean, you'd probably be killed by a lot of like your right because it's very bigoted at the time, or you'd have to keep it completely secret. And yeah, uh, if you were rich, you could be gay and most

people would know it. Like Rhodes is gay, it's illegal to be gay. Everyone in British society knows that he's gay. He brings these South these white South African boys back to England with him, these younger men, and he takes them to parties with him. Um is my is my assistant? Yeah? Well,

and there's he's he's even more blatant than that. There's one story I heard about him where essentially like he's he's at a party with this young, rude South African boy and like the guy hosting the fancy British person hosting the party says Rhodes, I can't invite you to parties anymore if you're gonna bring boys like this around, Like he almost broke my hand with his hand and shake, and Rhodes said something along the side of the lines of you should see how hard he bucks. It's like

a mule um. Like so he's he's not super coy, right, but I like I got pocket diamonds. You say, yeah.

And it's worth noting that a pretty high and oddly high number of British imperial icons of specifically this period were gay, or some of them were They're called gay a lot, but I think it might be more accurate to say they were kind of romantic a sexuals, where they had these very strong, very clearly romantic relationships with men that they probably never had sex with, but they would be inseparable and it was just like a thing

in imperialism. I just feel like, statistically speaking, it's impossible that there's any less amount of gay people there. Now you know I'm saying, but yeah, there's a reason why. There are some reasons why they're probably overrepresented within sort of the subset of the English population that's doing the

imperialist ship. Some of that is that, like we talked about earlier, if you're gay in a majority straighten in a society where it's legal to be gay, you fundamentally see the world differently, and that confers certain advantages you are able to, perhaps especially since a lot of the other men doing this might be gay, build stronger, more emotional relationships with them, um, which leads to more loyalty, which means you have this this loyal band of like

people who you can work with to accomplish these goals. It also means that, like you probably find the culture back home stifling, and you want to get out to a place where there are fewer rules and where you can you can get away with living being the kind of person that you are. There's a quote from Ruyard Kipling's poem Um, one of his poems about imperialism, that I think was about, Uh, I'm forgetting the name of

it now, but the lion is um. Send We send me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain't no tin commandments, and a man can raise a thirst, right so that there's You come across this a lot, and I think it's just because I think there's probably a number of reasons for it. Um. But yeah, this is a thing about cecil, and I'm not going to talk a whole lot more about it because I don't think it has all that much of a bearing other than to the extent that it kind

of forms him into the man that he is. Um. But yeah. One of the men he brought into his scheme was a position named Leander Jamison, and he recalled that as early as eighteen seventy eight, Roads had formed the idea of doing great work for the overcrowded British public at home by opening up fresh markets for their manufactures. As his business had expanded, so too had British colonial

possessions in Africa. And Cecil noticed that when the Empire grew, unemployment back home went down, an average income went up. Things got better for the average people in his country because they were getting worse for the average people in other parts of the world. Um. Yeah, So he recognizes this and he sees this as like a fundamentally positive thing. Um. And other these other white people that he's gathering him to himself at the time, they're deeply impressed and moved

by his belief in the destiny of the Anglo Saxon race. Um. And that's what he's able to get them to buy into. That's why they put so much trust in so much their of their wealth and roads. Um. And it's it's his biographer Rotberg kind of compares a lot of what Cecil's talking about in this time to to Hitler's concept of levin realm um living space, right, And it is

very similar. You can trace the birth of these ideas um, or at least the the birth of these ideas as a written down conception, because they'd certainly been pursued earlier, uh to sec you know, and and he has British imperialism had a massive impact on Hitler. And in fact, he would he would constantly talk about both the United States and the British Empire and the land that they had to for their people to move in as part of why he wanted Eastern Europe, why he wanted Russia

and Ukraine in Poland. Um, because he wanted the same thing for the Germans that he saw these other empires getting. Um, so yeah, it is worth like he he definitely rhodes Is is talking early about what will become these concepts that we recognize as key to to to fascism. Um yeah,

now I think, yeah, it's it's it's it's interesting. And rhodes Is also while he's kind of laying some of the intellectual foundations for the what will become fascism, he's also laying a lot of the intellectual foundations for the

system of global capitalism that we live under today. This this idea that you can have a whole world united in mass resource extraction and trade in After sixteen years of building up his business holdings and a network of loyal Toady's Rhodes amalgamated all of these minds that he had and that his friends had accrued, and he formed them into a single corporation. De Beers amalgamated minds. So this is the de Beers corporation is birthed. Now he's the first head of it. Uh, he's the chairman of

De Beers. Now. In short order, de Beers swallowed up almost the entire diamond trade in Southern Africa. And as they gobbled up more and more minds, Roads streamlined the mining process, killing off the old way of diggers and diamond booms, and refashioned the whole industry into a precise engine that ran on human misery. And I found a paper from an economic student at the University of Boulder that I think sums up what happens very well, and

I'm gonna quote from that now. Rhodes is colored workers were oppressed by his white managers and impaired by the atrocious living conditions. Once Rhodes had his miners, he and his British colonial authorities proclaimed a pass law in Kimberly. Black workers had to possess a document that stated their right to employment, and at the end of shifts, white policemen stripped the colored miners nude and probe their orifices for stolen diamonds. This indignity, however, was not forced upon

the white laborers. To distinguish the manager's fear of theft, the blacks also had to live in prison like compounds on site for the length of their contract. De Beers paid its colored workers in average of ninety seven fifty per month, while the whites were paid in average of four hundred and eighty dollars, and to break even, the laborers needed to make it at least a hundred and

twenty dollars monthly. So he comes up with this idea of amalgamating, streamlining and then getting this workforce that you have total control of in the same way that like those those a lot of those factory workers and Shins and China making our iPhones are and you keep them locked into a cycle of near poverty, forcing them to live in these compounds that he could control. Um he basically succeeded, as de Beer takes off in re enslaving a chunk of the black African populace for the benefit

of the British empire. Um and this plan worked marvelously. In a few years, de Beers controlled between ninety and of the planet's diamond supply. Yeah, and then they cracked open a bunch of de Beers. Yeah, I'm sorry, that's too account at frat parties where he was just like frat parties, diamond diamond He's like diamonds, popping a top with his diamonds. All right, Well, prop, that's the end of part one. There's so much more of this guy to go, but that's what we've got time. Um boy,

this has gone on a bit. You want you want to plug your plug doables? Man, Yeah, I do, And I also want to just diamonds are forever. Diamonds are forever. That's said the entire time. Yeah, and that I mean, that's that's that's after his time. But he sets up a lot of the things that make the diamond trade what it is. Like we'll talk about this more at the end, but like blood diamonds are a thing because

of cecil roads. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Man, That's what I was like, That's where I would like when you started the thing, That's what I was preparing myself for. Like we're gonna get to blood diamonds pretty soon. Well, let's talk about that the end. We're not going to talk about it enough because there's so much of roads to talk about. And he's not the only he starts the process that leads to the creation of blood diamonds.

There are a number of other men over decades who are like responsible for bringing us all down that path. But we will talk some about that at the end. Yeah, well, prop hit pop dot com and prop hit pops all my um handles my social media. I just uh announced a not a blood coffee a but a real coffee UM collaborations company called Onyx, where I kind of special single origin Ethiopian blend that McGear real nerdy with y'all will not blend a single origin Ethiopian um. It's kind

of tastes like dried pineapple. It's pretty bomb uh and in the in in in the spirit of what we're talking about right now, Like it's three brothers that own the farm. They're born and raised in Ethiopia, one of them lives in l A And the fair trade price for the bean is a buck fifty per pound, but me and Onyx paid nine bucks a pound because we believe in supporting real folks. Um, so that's the biggest thing I plug right now is I got a coffee

and if you're into like drinking good coffee, please order. Yeah. Yeah, and it's ethically sourced and we paid the people. Well we're not no Cecil roads. Yeah. Uh, don't be cecil Roads in your own life. And don't come after me for calling him cecil and cecil and interchangeably. I know it's cecil whatever. That's my fault cecil Yeah yeah, fuck it. Like basically, I don't. I don't have to respect this

man enough to pronounce his name. Right. No, No, he got enough respect while he was alive and fucking up the world. To hell with him, right, and to hell with all of you, my beloved listeners. Um no, I I thank you for listening. Uh, we'll come back for part two, where we'll talk about how he conquered two countries just for fun and did some other messed up stuff product. Wait, well, no, we love about forty percent of you statistically. Yeah,