Part Two: Cecil Rhodes: The First Proud Boy

are you still doing? How are you feeling after part one? You know, Yeah, I feel the way I think everyone every guest feels after slightly defeated, feeling like I knew this but I didn't know it. And my day is great because I enjoyed talking to y'all. But yeah, but also like the feeling between part one and part two of every episode of this podcast, you just know that it's going to get worse. It's all you get worse. Yeah, you're just like impending you guys got a two day break, Yes,

impending doom. But also I'm still thinking about him flashing his diamonds at parties. Just the flex of that, Like I can't get that image out of my head and how I feel about it. It's so hard to process how I feel about that because it's he sucks, but it's so fucking cool. But like, yeah, got to respect the hustle sometimes rest like goddamn, okay, yeah so uh. In that last episode, I didn't go into overwhelming detail about all of the Cape Colony politicking, but Cecil engaged in.

But he was not just building a business, going to you know, getting to know people within the sort of the Empire's political strata. A lot of his friends would be very influential. Um. The parties that they would go to when he was back, you know home in in in England were often held at like a Nancy Astor's house. Miss Astor, who was like this this fairy fancy. She was a very big figure and sort of like the Victorian era of British high society. Uh, and later became

a backer of the Nazis. If you've ever heard that that story about like Winston Churchill, where like some lady walks up to him and says, um is that yeah you uh no, no, it's the um uh. If she was like if if you were my husband, I would do something or other and he says like, yeah, I'd kill you. And if I were if you were my husband, if you were my wife, I'd let you. Is more or less how it goes. Yeah, So she's like one

of his confidants when she's younger. Like a lot of people who go on to run the empire, um are friends of Cecil's in in his younger life. So he's politicking with that set of people. And by the way, a decent chunk of them. Mind up backing the not season, you know, the whole World War two period, um and uh, but back in the Cape Colony, he's also he's getting very directly involved in politics. He's not just meeting people, he's he's getting he's into he gets he's getting elected

to parliament. He's like he's he's doing politics in the Cape Colony and he becomes very very successful at it. He's very good at being a politician. Um. So yeah, that's that's happening during this whole period that we were talking about last episode. UM. One of his very first political forays happened in eighteen eighty three when he was

a member of the Cape Parliament. Boers from the Transvaal had conquered some of the land of an African chief named men kurwani Uh, and they proclaimed their conquest to be a new republic Stella Land. Now they were not the only white guys out there who were like creating countries via machine gun. Another group of Boers conquered and

declared a republic nearby a few months earlier. So like this was happening a number of times, and Cecil hated it, not because it was wrong for them to steal the land of African tribes, but because all these new republics disturbed his dream of a South Africa united under the English colors or under British colors, whatever um And the founder Rotberg writes, I saw that this is his speech

to the Parliament. I solemnly wore in this house that if it departs from the control of the interior, we shall fall from the position of the paramount state in South Africa, which is our right in every scheme of federal union in the future, to that of a minor state. What we now want, Rhodes urged his colleagues in a memorable phrase, is to annex land, not natives. That's that's

a key phrase interesting. Yeah. Roads made it clear that he was quote no negro phillist, like that is a word, because people accused him because he wasn't like overtly physically cruel to his workers. He was accused of being a negro file. That was a term they used. That was like a word that you like file. Yeah. And here he's defending himself by saying, I'm not a negro philist, and I hold the distinct view that we must extend our civilization beyond our present borders. We don't need any

of them on the land that they currently own. We just need the land. Um. And I don't want your wallets. I don't, I don't, I don't want your I just want to land bro dag. Now he urged the Parliament to basically carry out a military action against the whites of Stella Land, the bowers who would who would usurped Mankawan Land? But he didn't want to give the land back, and he wrote or he he said, the natives abound gradually to come under the control of the Europeans. I

feel that it is the duty of this colony. Then, as it were, her younger and more fiery sons go out and take land to follow in their steps with civilized government. That's the purpose of fiery young men is to go out and take land. Yeah. I still you know, that's part of like my history that's unclear is like, you know, I knew those British colonies, that I knew those Dutch colonies, but it ended up the Dutch end up getting it. I just don't know how that happened.

Is Yeah, So the first first Bowler war happens, I think not that long after he comes to Africa in the first place, and it's pretty small. I think like three people die. Um, but there is fighting and on kind of between the British and between the Boers, um, and they're both really shitty to the natives. I should like, this isn't a good guy, bad guy. You're fighting over a house that ain't yours. Yeah, I stole it fair

and square. Yeah. In this instance, like he failed, like he urged the Cape Colony to basically like send out a military force to attack these new republics, and he did not succeed in that. Um. The government of the Empire from one thing was like we don't really want to get involved in this. We already have enough land. Down there, like, and that's one of the things you see. Cecil once more land than the people actually running the British Empire wanted to have, because he's getting it too fast.

He's acquiring it too quickly, and they're like, we can't, like, we can't digest all of this. It's actually kind of a strain on our resources to try to govern it. His his attempt to take both these republics by force fails. But the treaty that comes as a result of this between the Empire and the Transvaal gives Britain responsibility for a vast chunk of land north of the Cape Colony uh,

a lot of what would become Zimbabwe um. And this is obviously land that they get responsibility for in this treaty that other people live in and are governing themselves in at the time. So we're already a country, guys, don't, Yeah, what's happening. Yeah. In eighteen nineties, Cecil was elected Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. So at this point he's like he is he is the power in in Southern Africa.

He controls the most powerful political entity in the region um and he also is again personal owner of most of the world's diamonds. So he's hit his zenith here. After almost twenty years of methodically building power, Rhodes is ready to launch his first major attempt to unine Southern Africa, which is of course a precursor to taking all of

Africa for the British Empire. So in eighteen ninety he forms the British South Africa Company, which is an umbrella business that he uses to coordinate all of his enterprises. He's one of the first guys to start setting up shell companies. Um. Some of what he does is to like make fake false competition over diamonds, to like drive up the price of diamonds. It also is what he does if you think back to our Wonga coup episode or anything on on on Eric Prince. He uses this

company to buy a mercenary army. Um. Yeah, And I want to read a quote from a book called The Heartless Stone, which is about the diamond trade by Tom Sohlner. Quote by Rhodes's own admission, the company aimed to do more than mine diamonds. In fact, it aimed to annex other African nations, conduct diplomacy with local chiefs, build railroads, raise a standing army and even wage war. De Beers was a law to itself and accountable to no one.

So again, the South British South Africa Company and De Beers as essentially the same thing in this period because they're run by the same guy. It's just it's a shell company, you know, it's it's yeah, it's so crazy too, like to just like you know why we talked in the first episode about this, like like these people live on another planet and in that planet, it's like controlling

all of the money and resources ain't enough. You still got to become prime minister, you know what I'm saying Like that, you like how you in college, then you ain't gotta be in college? You know with pocket diamonds, do you expect them from pocket diamonds? Guy? This is this seems on par It's very saying like that is the we know, like that is the on that is the next step is you want to get in political power. It's like why, like do you It's never enough. It's

never ever enough, never enough. Um, now here's the thing. So he uh, this this period of time, like the it's not popular or appropriate anymore for a corporation to have an army in the traditional sense of the word, because the British East India Company has kind of run into some a lot of that ended very ugly in Afghanistan and in chunks of India. Um So, but he buys an army. He just calls them police. Um So, he gets about a seven hundred man army with machine guns,

field artillery. It is an army, but he calls them police. And he puts together a group of two hundred settlers and he sends them into a place called Mashona Land, which is roughly present day Zimbabwe, in order to search for gold. And he sends his army in not to invade Mashona Land, but to protect the settlers, because that's what police do is they protect man. There is nothing new man, nothing. I mean, it's kind of new then.

But yeah, I was just gonna protect you. Yeah, We're just going to protect, to serve and protect you, not them. So they picked Mashona Land because it was much more weakly defended than its neighbor to the south, Mata Belly Land, which was governed by a king named Loban Goula, who they to whom the people in Mahona Land owed fealty. So they were part of Loban Goula's kind of empire. But this is not really a country in the traditional

sense of the term. It's systems of influence between different groups of tribes that are mostly autonomous, but like the Mashona will pay tribute to Loban Goula and he's yeah, like anyway, it's it's it's yeah. Um. So Rhads in Great Britain successfully negotiate a treaty with Loban Goula which guaranteed them mineral rights to the territory. And this is going on for a couple of years before he becomes

Prime Minister. Um. And the way that the treaty is negotiated becomes a problem for Rhodes because it's only mineral rights and his real ambition is to found a new country, which he doesn't have the right to do, but he plays along for the sake of legal nicety. And if you've paid attention to any thing written accurately about colonialism, you know what a treaty between white people and native Yeah, yeah, their placeholders for guns. Yeah, except for I guess recently,

we did make good. The Supreme Court made us make good on exactly one of the treaties we made with the Native Americans here in the United States, which is why like half of Oklahoma is now not under federal law enforcement, juristiction or something. I don't fully understand the situation, but it's something like that. Like there was a treaty that they signed and they were like, look, we have this in the Supreme Court had to be like, yeah, we have to actually take this series, we have to

do this. Yeah. So good Oklahoma, So yeah, half of it at least. So the colonists quickly established a capital h Salisbury Um and they found our Salisbury whatever, and they found the land to be fertile. But they gradually realized that there was no gold there, which was a problem again because they don't have rights to anything else,

only the minerals um. And it meant that because there wasn't gold, his company is burning through Da Beer's capital without anything to make up for the losses, and by the first year they're out by seven hundred thousand pounds. So they start taking austerity measures. He has to cut most of the police force and shutters a lot of the administrative functions, which he shouldn't have been doing. Anyway, because this isn't allowed to be a country, but he's

treating it as one. You're unnecessary in the first place, But everything that comes next is very complicated, which is often the case when the Britain acquired chunks of Africa. It's it's not often less often is it just naked force invading, than it is a series of much more limited military engagements and then extensive treaties, and then settlements come in and then there's a fight, and then there's a military engagement more and they just keep eating more

and more. And that's kind of what happens here. Um. Naked force is always a part of it, but there's also a lot of political maneuvering and negotiation to make the rank theft of land seem legal because the British are like a law loving people. They want to believe that they're they're going about this properly. Um. The short of it all is that King Loban Goula basically sold

all of the land, right. It's that he had to a Boer named Lippert as part of a complex ploy to try to play the Boers against the British, because you can't think of any other way to fight them, and this doesn't work out. It backfires because none of the white people that loban Goula was negotiating with gave a shit about abiding by their words. So Lipperts sold the claim to Rhodes, who starts selling land occupied by the Mashona to white settlers and then pocketing the profit

for de beers. The Indigenous People's Act obviously got nothing um. So in eighteen ninety three, this leads to an invasion of Mashona land by King loban Goula, and his justification is that they'd stopped paying him tribute because the white guys had taken taken over. So Rhodes uses this invasion as a justification to just kind of take everything um. And the battles that followed were all absolute nightmares. So he sends an actual British regular Forces to help fight

alongside his police forces. And there you know, these are armies of modern armies with machine guns and field artillery uh going up against African armies with the best kind of antique rifle um. And again it's just a nightmare. All of these battles at the Battle of they're not even really battles at the Battle of Ego Dodd, for example, UM, six thousand African soldiers attacked a column of several hundred whites. In ten minutes, eight hundred Africans were dead and three

Englishmen were killed. UM and even these profoundly racist colonial soldiers were shocked by the bravery of African warriors charging these machine gun lines in the way the British soldiers would be doing a couple of decades later, during World War One. UM, one of these soldiers later wrote, it was a nasty ten minutes, especially as the Matta Bali shooting with the rifles was much better than it had been, and they came on with wonderful courage to within eight

yards of the wagons. Because all the fighting they're building wagons circles and just shooting out. It made one realize what what those terrible machine guns mean. It must have required extraordinary courage to come up the hill against the fire. And again, one of the things that's interesting here is if you if you read about Western soldiers in this they there's always there's kind of in satements like this, you can read this dawning realization that like will be

running into those machine guns. One of these kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't. Yeah, you can't work in that field and not know someone's there's always a bigger gun. Yeah, which I'm sure I know a lot of US soldiers who have been in Afghanistan and Iraq know about drones. Yes, yes, yes, so. The Times correspondent, who was embedded with the British forces, also hailed the gallantry of the men he had just

seen die, quote as showing their tenacity. I may mention that many were found three thousand yards away from the spot where they had received their death wound. Um, but you know, toughness, courage, it doesn't really matter when the other side has yeah. Uh, you know they had the maximum gun. You know, that's what happened. Whatever happens, we have got the maxim gun and they have not. So after several bloody defeats, Loban Goula eventually fled north with

most of his remaining soldiers. And I think he killed himself, um, you know, poisoned himself. There's some debate about that from what I can read. And of course, now that all of this land has been conquered, white settlers flood into the areas. Uh. They decide early that the original African names of these places. We're not going to do um.

Starting in eighteen ninety one, the name Rhodesia grew increasingly popular, and Cecil encouraged this, as there's evidence that had been his plan for sometimes for years before the invasion, to name both of these new illegally conquered nations after himself. By eighteen nine five the term was in regular use, and in eighteen nineties seven it became official. So there's

two rhodes Is. Actually there's Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, and both become the personal property of Cecil rhodes Um. When asked about this, he told a friend, well, you know, to have a bit of country named after one is one of the things a man might be proud of. You. You know what, Broke likes his pocket diamonds. Now he's got pocket rhodes Now he's got And I think he is the only person in history who has ever personally

owned two countries named after him. And you look, not in his honor is not named after his in his honor is mad and is he is? And he and he named it. Lord, I can't oh m, that's just Lord, give me the confidence and just success of mediocre white guys. Yep, if I could just be as wow that man anyway, naked confidence, naked confidence and reckless ambition. Yeah, good stuff. Who says you can't? Yeah, you like, what do you tell that guy? What do you talk about me? You can't? Bro?

Like what if? What if you were in seventh says you can't? Exactly where you can't? Yeah? What are you in seventh grade with him? And you're just like and he like beat you in like freaking kickball, and you're like, I just I just don't. I just want this guy to lose. And then you run into him at like a pub in London. He's got two countries. Yeah, He's like yeah ah, and you're such a piece of ship. Yeah yeah yeah, and he as racists like to point out,

because again, this guy is beloved by racists. He did. Rhodes did a lot of lovely things to to connect and modernize Africa. He had telegraph cables laid from Cape Town to Cairo. He had train tracks laid across the continent.

There's the most famous illustration of him is a political cartoon that you've almost certainly seen, where he's he's standing as like a giant caricature of him is standing in the center of the continent of Africa with like telegraph cables across him, and it's called the New Colossus of Rhodes. Um and yeah, that's like that, that's his reputation in

this period of time. Um. Yeah. And and he's doing this, he's putting all this together to connect to the continent because connecting it will prepare it for British control and prepare it to have a unified culture under the Anglo Saxon race, which is what he wants for Africa and everywhere that's not Africa. Um. So he conquers other people, including them out of l a people. Um and he yeah, it's it's uh, it's it's horrible. He could. He's doing a lot of conquering and he's he's in the field

for a significant amount of this. He's not like fighting, but he's following his armies along. He's in attent. He loves doing this. He loves being on the ground and being sort of feeling the dust and his lungs and being a part of it. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's the same as like those people who like sat up on a hill to watch the battles in the Civil War, you know, except for he wants to be directing that ship and he doesn't want there to be

a chance that the people fighting back will win. It's a movie. Yeah. So while all this is going on, the Mighty de Beer's company was still chugging right along. Cecil had gained almost complete control over the Diamonds planets diamond supply so quickly and improved production so much that he ran into a problem. There were too many diamonds. It turned out that the little bastards are actually pretty common.

In order to avoid a collapse in the value of the mineral that was funding his illegal wars of expansion, Cecil hatched a scheme. So he starts laying off thousands and thousands of his workers, and he creates a bunch of policies that inflated the price of diamonds that restricted the supply artificially. He's one of the first guys. He

creates artificial scarcity. I shouldn't say he's one of the first guys, because we talked about in our Birth of Capitalism episode, the first corporation that ever existed traveled to the Spice islands, committed genocide and then killed all of the nutmeg on every island but the one that they had their farms on in order to that's the scar This this is the Dutch the Dutch East Um India Company, I think it was. This is before even that. Yeah,

maybe you listen to the episode, I get it right there. Um. But yeah, So he creates artificial scarcity for the diamond for diamonds because he realizes that's the only way to make diamonds profitable. And this doubles the price of diamonds in a single year. Um. So he channels, he restricts the supply. He channels the diamonds into a bunch of different diamond dealers in London who are willing to make

a cartel with him. He basically he creates a cartel with the people make digging the diamonds and like the people selling them and crafting them in order to keep prices high. Um. And the diamond industry continues to work this day into like the fucking like like honestly in some ways to the present day. But it doesn't really start to get broken up until the middle of last century. Um. Yeah, So in eighteen nine four Rhodes was elected Prime Minister

a second time. He was forty one years old, the owner of two private nations, one of the wealthiest men in history, the sole proprietor of the diamond trade, and the elected leader of the most powerful colony in South Africa, almost as big as Europe. Yeah. So he's the Prime Minister of South Africa quote unquote or the the Cape Colony. Yeah, the Cape call he's the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, like duly elected according to whatever made up laws they have.

At the same time, the owner of other countries. Yeah, none of the companies of the countries. So you prime minister one and owned two other. God bastard he is. And I see how he's like the Ata Turk of Bastard, Like, yeah, he's here, there's no there's I don't know. We've reached we've reached pinnacle Bastard. Yeah, peakee Bastard here. It doesn't it doesn't get it doesn't get much worse than this.

I'm like, I gross under as underestimated this guy. He's fucking Hitler level, you know, if you're talking about like the most influential pieces of ship in history. He's there's not there's a number of folks at his level. There's not a lot of people i'd put above him, clearly, I don't know if you could put yeah not it's yeah, yeah yeah, a lot of time for the top of

that list. Yeah yeah yeah. Anyway, you know what isn't the sole proprietor of two countries illegally conquered by a mercenary police force, the products of services, none of them, none of them until I conquer my own country in present day Idaho, Um and use it as a basis from which to declare war on the f d A. M. That's the plan. I wouldn't mind you redeeming Idaho. Yeah,

pretty beautiful. Do it together. We can harness the power of Idaho to wipe out the fd I think actually I would have a lot of support in Idaho for taking on the f d A, mostly from people who want to sell brain pills. But anyway, um, we could probably ally with Utah. Anyway, here's the ads. We're back, we're back, and we're talking about cecil. So he gets elected Prime Minister for the second time, and now that he's at the height of his power, he's really got

everything under control. He's just gotten his second election. He turns to the thing the party episode where you're like, here it is, you're at the top of the roller coaster, and he's about to just like the part we're at, the part where he invinced apartheid. Um yea. So he decides that the focus of his second term as Prime Minister is going to be dealing with what he called

the native question. Now, motherfucker. If you know fascists, you know that when people have a question about a race that they keep referring to as the blank question, it doesn't end well. Ever, the Trajet jury is predictable. Yeah, okay, yeah. Uh So from the founder quote that biography of Rhodes, Rhodes employed this skillfully obtained unprecedented and largely unquestioned matter of measure of decisive political power to continue rearranging relations

between blacks and whites. He had introduced radical notions in this domain during the legislative years from eighteen ninety to eighteen ninety two, from eighteen ninety three, and dramatically after his electoral triumph in eighteen ninety four, must much of Rhodes's considerable political energy was directed at to rewriting the Cape Statute books in wage ways which might have appeared limited and parochial at the time, but which were profoundly

to alter the contours and reach of discrimination throughout South and even Southern Africa. He viewed burgeoning African numbers as a clear danger to white superiority and to the emerging coalition of Dutch and English speaking colonialists. Together, Rhodes and his allies acted to undercut the established tradition of Cape liberal him That's what I was talking about earlier. The liberal is the idea that all men are equal, and we have to even if we all don't really believe it,

we have to hold to that because it's important. Um, Even the most antagonistic of the Cape's legislators and the most die hard leaders of the Bond, which is one of the political sort of factions there, had hitherto been hesitant to erode the principle that all persons, irrespective of color, were equal before the law, one of Britain's priceless nineteenth century gifts to the Cape and thus to South Africa.

During rhodes premiership, however, other more expedient objectives of achieved precedence, Yeah Man when I think about like this, it's like it's hard to not picture Jim Crow and be like, oh, this is if you carry Jim Crow out to its logical conclusions and then leave it until the nineties. Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah, gosh yeah dude. Yeah, and and that and and it's like you go when yeah, the question, the native question, it's like, uh, of course this is

what you're gonna come up with. Of course it is. Yeah, yeah, keep reading Roberts so um yeah he his main objective here is white supremacy. Um and and again, white supremacy in a very modern way. And the best thing that illustrates his drive to white supremacy and everything that, like how his thought process worked and the way in which he took action to to further that goal. The best thing that illustrates that is Rhodes's plan to push through

the passage of what was called the Glenn Gray Act. Now, Glenn Gray was a district in the Cape Colony that had essentially been a reservation for for one group of of African natives. Quote. Like most reservations, Glenn Gray was overcrowded and overgrazed. Many of its male inhabitants had already begun to seek work from whites in the colony. Others, meanwhile, had crowded into Glenn Gray from more distant or less settled frontier areas. Whites, especially Dutch seeking farmers, coveted its

fertile valleys. In a microcosm, Glen Gray presented most of the problems found in the recently if only partially assimilated frontier districts. There was a clear need to remove sources of friction among Africans and between Africans and whites. Land was at the root of most disputes, but to grant individual tenure meant at least the possibility of a flood of newly entitled black voters, conceivably less pressure on Africans to seek work, and a host of ancillary questions with

local and cape wide budgetary limitations. There also was the danger that whites would purchase the newly salable black owned farms and thus thrust vast numbers of landless black families onto the colony. So Rhodes was really worried that white families also would buy up land owned by Africans and moved there in the middle of land dominated by Africans, and then you would have communities of white and black

people cohabitating. Rhads also thought was unacceptable because if people are living in the same communities, they're going to funk eventually. That's just the ways are like, that's just what's gonna happen, Like, it's just is the thing that happens with people. Um. So he had to find a solution to this problem

that achieved a few goals. Number one, it had to steal back most of the land that African tribes held in common because at this point before the Glenn Gray Act, that we're talking about communally owned land that's like this, this tribe owns this parcel of land. Um. So you have to stop that because communally owned land is not good for the kind of world that Cecil Roads wants to build. Um. So you have to get most of that land back on the market somehow. You also can't

make it look like naked theft. And so that means you're going to be parceling at least a lot of this land up and giving it to individual Black Africans. But that's a problem because the way the laws and the Caper crafted, if you own property, you get to vote. So communally owned property doesn't haunt for that. But if you're going to be giving a bunch of Africans property, suddenly that's a bunch of new voters. And Cecil Rhodes

does not want that ship happening. Okay, y'all voting now because yea, yeah, yeah, So dude, parallel in even in that that like pickle of like yeah, after reconstruction and like you know, uh and all of a sudden America started electing a ton of black people, it was like, okay,

wait a minute, we can't well, yeah to today. A story just dropped today from the Cambridge Analytical Leaks that one of the things they were used for by the Trump administration was to put together a list of between three and five million black Americans that they wanted to and considered it critical to discourage from voting. Oh my god, because again every couple of generations, you're able to be

less naked about the racism. But the goal was the same, stop them from having a say in their own interests. Nailed it, yep. So uh yeah. Since Glenn Gray was representative of so many frontier parts of the colony, it was evident to Cecil that this new law would lay the basis for native and white relations across Africa for the future. This meant, obviously that the new law would have to be constructed in a way that reinforced white supremacy and enshrined it into South African law forever, no

matter what Great Britain's enlightened liberal values said. Cecil told Parliament the legislature must adopt a system of despotism and its relations with the barbarians of South Africa. The legislature has got to treat the natives where they are in a state of barbarism in a different way to ourselves. We ought to be the lord's over them today desperately. If you're saying we have to be despots, you are

the bad guys. Yes, yes, like like like just have just just the just the smidge of self awareness and like just yeah, that's all I'm asking, Just just just have a little, just a little self awareness. It's not good, by and large to be a despot. That's why we came up with a nasty name for it, like a despot. I wish that I wish the listeners could hear me, see me flail in my arms in agreement. Doc the

pretzel Pepe we bend ourselves in to protect power. There's been a lot of head head nodding, head shaking, arms flat and yeah, it shall continue. Yes, speaking of things that shall continue this episode, So uh Rhodes told Parliament that because of the debate over the Glenn Gray Act, the colony was in a state of racial emergency with ballooning numbers. Yeah. Well, because increasing numbers of Black Africans were either filling land white people wanted even worse, moving

to cities that white people lived in. And if you have this population of people, this big underclass, you don't have enough money, I'll live in cities. Some of them might agitate for better living conditions and that could lead to a revolution. He was also terrified that if you gave Africans enough land, you know, enough of the land that they already owned, Um, they might not get jobs

because they'd be able to take care of themselves. And again, they are trying to induct Africa into the global capitalist system at this point. So he's terrified that if they're able to to see to their own needs in their own land, what need do they have to get involved in this system in which they will fundamentally have to be under us, dude, when like just it's it's not such a mind bender because I'm like, Okay, we was taking care of ourselves before you got here. Yeah, we

did it for a long time. We did it for a long time, a matter of fact, longer than any other humans because this is Africa, so we was here the whole time, and now you're worried about us being able to take care of ours. And it's funny because again I did read some defenses, modern defenses by modern conservatives of Cecil Roads, and one thing I pointed as that like he talked about, you know, he didn't he wasn't racist. He just believed that, you know, British civilization

was superior, and it was. And it'll list you know all in all of these tribes that he's conquering and finding a lot of them do do the things like female genital mutilation, things that are very horrible. Um, because all groups of organized human beings do bad things. It's just the thing that people do, period. And it's like, yes, it's true, all of those tribes had problems and things that like we're we're bad that they did. And the British Empire starved thirty million people to death in order

to make a profit. So let's not fucking get up on our high horses about the superiority of Anglo brit like civili fucking exation, like come on yourself. Yeah, basically you're right, Just you can't say it, yeah yeah, yeah yeah. When did they start? And when did they start? Important the Indians to like work? Because I know that that. I think that's a later period. It does not come up in my research, and this maybe that's happening in

this period. I'm sorry if I'm I don't want to make a statement on that one way or the other because it's not my area of expertise. Um, none of this really is. But I at least read up on this ship. Um. So Cecil claims to Parliament that without quote, without the dignity of labor, Africans would live in sloth and laziness. It was thus the government's job to give them some gentle stimulants to go forth and find out

something of the dignity of labors. And he's saying this about the people that have built his entire fortune with their blood, sweat and teeth. Yes, that's like the men who dug my diamonds. Need to understand the dignity of labor. Yes, piece you piece of shit, like just the largest hole in the world that we dug for. You tell me I need to note a dignity of hard labor. Well.

And also it's really interesting to me he doesn't consider farming to be labor because it doesn't necessarily feed into capitalism, because you can farm and just live comfortably and share contint with your neighbors and not need to be a part of this this global system of money. Uh, because you have food and shelter, and that's really all you need. As long as you are able to make a musical instrument and you've got gourds of ship you can make drums.

Like you've got music. You're fine. Food, shelter, fucket, Like what else do you need? Nothing? It turns out apparently apparently his greatest gift was stress, because that's where we needed, apparently, just to worry about collecting more things we don't need. Thank you, thank you. So, after months of politicking and debate, Rhodes finally had a plan for this, the Glen Gray Act that he presents to Parliament. The basics of it were this communal lands these reservations would be broken up

in pieces of them given to black families as individual lots. Now, this had been proposed before by people other than Cecil, and the legislators who had proposed it before wanted to give out one the individual plots to be about a hundred and ten acres, which they thought would be fair, which is not a tiny chunk of lands. Big Rhodes cut the allotments down to eight acres because he wanted it to be impossible for these tiny farms to actually

make a profit. He didn't want them to be able to compete with white people's farms, which were much larger and industrial. He also banned partable inheritance, forcing the whole parcel to be passed on intact. This ensured that only the firstborn son of any family would get any land, and other children in the family would have to leave

the family land to go get jobs. When it was pointed out to him that white people were able to pass down their property however the funk they wanted, he replied that giving Africans equal rights quote, was not a tenable position, which is not if you want the things he wants, you can't be giving black people equal rights. Yeah, he's not wrong. You know, he's so good at this. He's very good at this, maybe the best anyone's ever been.

He's exceptional at this. He's exceptional at this thing. It is one of those things we do talk about a lot of mediocre white men who failed upwards. He's not media, he's he's not he's very intell. He is actually he knows what he's doing and he's good at it. And that is of heartbreaking consequence to the entire history of

the human race from this point on. Um So, in order to ensure that absolutely every single black person in the colony had to get a job, Rhodes instituted a labor tax of ten shillings per head for every African, which means you have to We've conquered your country and now you have to pay every year to like checks every bastardly box. It's amazing. I'm no longer I think he sucks. One of the laws he passes, maybe the most influential, but one of them he does a bunch

of this ship. So the tax meant that no longer could Africans just stay unemployed and lived through hunting and farming, like the way that people had survived for forever. They couldn't do that anymore. They had to get hard currency somehow. Um, and the landowners that were created by this were included in this, so they couldn't just grow their own food because he didn't think that it was really labor. He wanted everyone do have to engage with capitalism in some

way and work. And it's so frustrating, so frustrating because he's so remarkably in charge that like, yeah, there's you have no recourse because he's like he's freakishly in charge. One of the things I think Rotberg's a very good biographer. One of my issues with him as he will repeatedly talk about sort of cessil's ability to convince people of things, as he had this kind of remarkable ability to to

convince other men of his vision. And he he talks about all of the racist things Cecil does, but he doesn't lay out in a way that I find as direct as maybe at Auto be and again he wrote it in Night, but um, he doesn't lay out very directly the vision was white supremacy. That's why they all got on board. Yes, I am speaking to the lowest part of you that wants to believe you're better than

everybody else. Yeah, it's gonna work. So yeah, again and again, back to sort of his this tax that he institutes to even force the landowners to work, because he doesn't consider growing food to be labor. I'm gonna quote from Rothberg here. Rhodes thought that he he being these small farmers, would spend only three or four weeks sewing maize and would truly not be working hard enough. It would be wise if such a man also went out and worked

for a certain period. Now, one of his political opponents at the time, another guy in parliament, commented to this sarcastically. No toil, however, strenuous upon a native's own land was dignified enough to satisfy the tax collector. So again, there are white guys in politics who recognize how messed up this is and do speak out. You know, he's he's acknowledging that, like, it doesn't matter how hard they work if it's for themselves. Cecil wants them working for white people.

It's not that they're not working, it's that they're not working for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna continue to quote. Stimulated by the labor tax rhads. The social Darwinis suggested Africans would change for the better. Every black man could not have three acres and a cow in the future, he said, Africans would have to change as a black man could not have three Africans would have

to change as the English had changed. It must be brought home to them that in the future nine tenths of them must would have to spend their lives in manual labor. And the sooner that was brought home to them, the better spend their lives. Yes, so now see some of the supremacy stuff is like you you you start being able to follow their train of logic. He is well aware that Britannica was at one point a bunch of feuding tribes that were just hunter gatherers with serfdom

and feudalism, and we have become this. So then when you look at Africa, you go, oh, yeah, we used to be like that in the tenth century. We're better than you, you know, and just so like at least it's like you following his logic at least, and I mean that's the same, that's the proud boy logic of like, no, we used to be like this we're better. No, yeah, no,

you're not. No, And a lot of you were miserable because like the early industrial Age Victorian England, the cities are fucking nightmares with factories where children's hands get mangled and cool mines that killed people by the thousands. It's horrible. The fucking the air was unbreathable. It would they had poisoned their own country and had left because they wanted to poison other people's cousin. Yes, like what was what

was the thing? The great London stink? Was that? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, the stinch blossom or whatever that like made the city almost unlivable and killed huge numbers of people because it was a nightmare. There m The fact that they were able to push their surplus population out to the colonies and also move a lot of their manufacturing in resource attraction out to the colonies is why England's pretty nice nowadays. Yeah yeah. So Additionally, Africans would find that they were

better off when they went to work. Rhoads promised to spend the funds from the labor tax on industrial schools. Think back to the residential school episodes that we did on Canada, because it's the same thing and that the US had where they put indigenous people, and that Australia

had where they put indigenous people. It is the same thing where Africans could be caught taught trades and vocations, not taught history, not taught you know, to, not taught to seek their dreams out, taught how to be functional cogs and capitalism. Rhodes thought, quote, South Africa had too many schools which specialized in turning out a peculiar class of human beings. The and he uses the K word again, person. Now the K word person was a most excellent type

of individual, said Rhods. But he belonged to a class that was overdone. They became agitators and accused the government of oppressing the common people. They constituted a dangerous class. Remember that from the police episodes when we were talking about over here. It's the same mother fucking thing everywhere

it happens thing. Yeah, yo, I as I said, I know, I know people who went to the American Native schools and we're yeah, and told horror stories that and it's yeah, it's just samey kill the Indian to save the man was the term they used. Totally. Yeah, and that's what Rhodes would say, and he's not racist, because he's no. I have nothing against black people. I just want to kill everything about them culturally that is different from the

way I want them to live. Yeah. So, rhodes Is new law also banned the sale of Indigenous land to white people. And this was not for any high minded reason. It was because the Natives should be in Native reservations and not mixed up with whites. Yeah, keep them away. This is the start of apartheid. This is the birth of sere segregation, legal segregation. Yeah. You have a place to be and it's not near us. Yeah. Yeah, as cool as long as they over there. Yeah. So again.

So the and finally, after all that, the Glen Gray Act in in sured that all of these new landowning black people would not get the right to vote, as enshrined by the law. As he told Parliament, it was really ridiculous to suppose that these poor children could be taken out of this absolute barbarism and come to a practical conclusion on politics. So the Act very simply banned any Native enfranchised by the Glen Gray Bill from voting

in Cape elections. Roads justified this again by saying that because the government protected their land, they had no real light right to vote on it. Black people could not be citizens as they were children. Several roads. Again the the he wove a store. This is yeah, this is why I'm saying. He took when a place that had been caught like that was African land, conquered and dominated by white people, and he made it worse and more racist. This is where apartheid comes from. This is the legal

underpinning that all apartheid descends from. Is the ships Cecil Rhodes was making. Happened in this period and it lasts up until what like the late eighties, the early nine Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's still like the impacts are still. It's still if you yeah, every year, like I said, like I performed there at least once a year. I got a homeboy on the radio and Cape down my homeboy DJ Easy and he's he's what they called colored under the system. Right.

So we're driving through Cape Town one of the like this is the most beautiful like overlooking cliffs beach, like it's a paradise, and he goes, Yo, my dad used to work at this beach, but at sundown he had to leave because colors weren't allowed on this beach, and I'm like, yo, you still, I'm like, that's your father, bro, Like that's this this, that's now. You know what I'm saying.

He talked about like people, you know, the police will come in and stick a pencil in his hair to make sure because if the pencil falls, then that means he's black and not color and just all kinds of just like this is he's on he's a DJ, he's on the radio. Now, this is now. Yeah, that's why Trevor no Is biography is title like born a crime, right because he was he was his his one of his parents was white and one was black, and yeah that was colored and that's yeah, that's illegal and it's illegal.

Like Cecil Rhodes is the guy who it's not quite banned in this period, but he's the guy who starts that process starts. Why he part of his goal in this act was to make sure these people can't breed, because if they breed, then they stop hating each other. Right, people are falling in love, they don't want lesser rights for the people they're in loved with. And that's going to be a fucking problem for me. Cecil, Rhodes, So

you have to stop them from knowing each other. Speaking of knowing each other, get to know the fine products and services that support this podcast. All right, uh we're back, Oh my back, so good product. So the this the one of the this is the greatest, like white supremacist Vanesse. Yeah,

it's amazing, incredible. The Glen Gray Act did create something broadly analogous to local councils for these native reservations, so that they could have an element of self government, but even letting black people vote for their own local leaders was too much for cecil. Instead, white people appointed all of the council members, and the reservations were governed by a white magistrate. He was supposed to teach them how to take care of themselves. Yeah, yo, yeah, that's that,

that's the answer their children, you see. Yeah, which is so such a god damn it and it's unique version of white supremacy exactly. And Rhodes is, again, other people are having this idea. You can even probably find some people earlier who were talking about it. Rhodes is kind of the first who explains it to other white people in a way that gets them on board. And then

follows through in a really comprehensive fashion. And again, aspects of this are are happening in the United States at the time, aspects of this are happening in other parts of the world. So he's not alone, but he's part of the first wave of modern white supremacists, and in some ways is probably the one who did the best

job of defining and explaining it. So uh Rothberg writes, quote the Glenn Gray Bill was a forerunner of the segregationist legislation of the twentieth century and of the combination

of laws which together constitute apartheid. But it was not so much the content of the bill as it was rhodes rhetoric and rationalizations which which prefigured the future what modern readers appreciate as fatuous and solipsistic arguments mere fig leaves for white supremacy and denials of African rights, where those that Rhodes and all subsequent rulers in South Africa have used to justify their departures from the natural law

and political culture of the Western world. It is a testimony to Rhodes's force of character and quality of persuasion that he, alone of likely Cape leaders, was able to Arrange shut such shifts away from previous norms with ease. It delineates his character too, that he did so with equanimity, without shame, and with self righteous termination. Got dog when you when you swear you're right? M m yeah, And I can't I can't believe how long it lasts? Yeah,

damn ye yeah. And I'm like whatever, like did you own two other countries? Man? Like, why you gotta do you own? Man? Like, why you gotta do this way out? They? Yeah, yeah, And it's it's because it's not enough. It's because the world is what he wants. Oh, I forgot because the because this is like manifest destiny only the glow. M And again, he's the kind of white person who like

is angry because Americans are independent and they filled. But like he talks a lot about the how the inferior Italian and Irish races and stuff are dominating in Germans are dominating in America and that's why it should have stayed under Anglo control. So he's like he's the kind of racist who is sees shades of other white people and like his judgmental it's like, oh, Italians, it's like if you if you look at if you look at

Nazi propaganda, the degree in which I do. One of the joking things that they will do is talk about how the Axis was less racist than the Allies because Hitler had a black friend. And when they refer to that, right, yeah, they're talking about Ussolini because Italians aren't white to them. Yes, I felt so like like knowing that, like once, I yeah, once I learned that, Like I had to take back some of my own jokes that I used to feel, like, Yeah, Italians were the black white people do y? I mean

they're they're like they're they're definitely like close. I mean it's basically they're almost in the Middle East, right, Like it's right across that fucking sea. Yes, yeah, that's what racists are seeing. But that's what roast. So I'm like, dang, I can't agree with racist, no, no, no, no, because I'm saying it endearing, like oh man, I like you got big families, you're a loud ye gangsters. Yeah yeah,

it's great. Yeah. The things we should we should lovingly make fun of Italians for is all of the hand and gestures that we do and and and pizza pies. Uh, that's fine. Don't, don't, don't do the race pizza pies. Yeah, the pizza pies. No, I will though, but not here. I think it's funny. Yeah, that's fine. So Cecil Rhods invented apartheid and the only good news is that he didn't get a lot more time in the sun after this.

After a very long streaming of successes, Roads got cocky and he decided to deal with a problem that had vexed him for years. The existence of the trans Vault, which is this Boer state, becomes like, yeah, it's it's a big chunk of like what becomes the culture of South Africa. These are like the African ors African and yeah and and and the Transvaal is an independent white nation in South Africa. And this, the fact that it existed, fucked up his dream of unifying the whole region under

British control. So, true Cecil Roads fashion, he hatched a plan to steal the transvall. The basic idea was to disguise it as an insurrection. Joe Hennisberg had a sizeable population of British laborers and they were not content with the Boer government. Through his agent Leander Jamieson, Rhodes convinced these folks that if they recruited an army, he would send in his own army and together they could crush the Boars. And armies the wrong word for Rhodes force here.

He had six hundred policemen armed with field artillery and machine guns and stuff. Yeah, all paid for by de beers. So yeah. The invasion, the Jamison Raid, as it's called, was a ship show from the jump. The British Excats couldn't agree on what they wanted politically after the insurrection, and because they had such a disagreement about this, they asked Jamison to pause the raid because they weren't ready, and he said, fuck you, I'm going to invade anyway.

And his hope was that this would spur them to act, but instead it just meant that nobody, none of his allies were ready when he invaded a sovereign nation um and then his troops were trying to cut the telegraph wires to the capitals that no one would know they were coming, but they cut a fence instead of the telegraph wires, which let the Boers organize a defense. Jamison's police were ambushed and a lot of them were shot to death until they surrendered. Now the whole Jamison Reid

was an unaccountable political disaster. It blackened Cecil's name for the rest of his life. It forced him out as Prime Minister. It sparked the end of his political career. He did try to come back a few times. He had friends right defenses of him and stuff a couple of years later, but it didn't work. Old time he canceled. Yeah, he did get canceled for invading a white nation. Yeah. Yeah, like for doing what he'd been doing. Yeah, let me

teach you a little thing about white people. White people don't stand for being challenged, even by other white people. Let me tell you something, brother, you should have slowed down Icarus. I'm saying it is one of those things. You can see. It's just covering the Portland's kind of uprising, whatever you wanna call it, as I have and watching my friends cover it. You do tend to see a big difference when like a black activists gets knocked down as opposed to win a white person who's not an

activist gets knocked down. You see a different You see just a clear difference in like the number of views that that video gets um, and yeah, it's just like nobody's it's not even a conscious thing. It's just a thing. It's crazy to me too, Like it just this when you like, I the one thing I tell any artists or anybody like trying to start a business or anything, like the value of taking an l like the value of a loss. Like if you never lose, if everything you step into you just all you do is win,

then you it will end. Ever that l is coming. It's coming, boy. And if you keep stacking and and and just and just and just doubling down, because you'll never lose, you don't never lose, You'll never When that l comes, it is going to be gi enormous. So I'm like, look, look, man, just be be be aware, be aware, be always causes is somebody that don't ever lose because it's coming. Yeah, yeah, stay away from those people. So the whole Jamison right again, just a horrible political

disaster black and Cecil's name and his political career. It also played a key role in sparking the Second Boer War, which is the Boer War that everybody hears about. This led to the first modern use of concentration camps by the British Empire against the Boer people and against Black Africans who lived in Bower Territory. Uh thirty thousand soldiers died, twenty six thousand Bower civilians were starved to death, and twenty thousand African natives were starved to death in British

concentration camps, thanks in part to Cecil. So that war ended in nineteen o two, and so did Cecil Roads. He was only forty nine years old, but he packed centuries of being a piece of ship into his life, and he was ready to go fiship faster. He was forty nine, forty nine, and he always knew he was going to die young. He has his first time attack in like eighteen seventy two. Like yeah, so he's throwing

everything he can into being garbage. Um now. At the time he died, he was a rather marginalized figure within the British Empire. The Times wrote in his obituary, he has done more than any single contemporary to place before our imagination, before the imagination of his countrymen, a clear conception of the imperial destinies of our race. But we wish we could forget the other matters associated with that is the British answer. I know, he did a lot of wax stuff. I mean, but he was really good,

but let's not talk about all the bad stuff. Kind of weird, it kind of kind of weird for a little bit, but he was great and he died, thank god, so he doesn't get to funk up anymore. Yeah, man, Yeah, So the good news for Rhodes is that a number of people have forgotten all the other matters associated with his name today, and he's increasingly being praised as a hero on the right wing. Uh. He was the absolute

archetype of a white supremacist imperialist. He stated at one point late in his life that I would annex the planets if I could, And if you read all like the full quote, he seems really sad that he can't annex the planets, like space imperialism. Yeah, we're almost there now. Yeah, we're working on it. We're working on annex and Mars right now. Yeah. Yeah, and we'll find a way there. There's not native people on Mars, but we'll find a

way to fun to funk them up. We'll make will make an indigenous Martian population and then screw them over. We will we will fight wars over some net come out the ground in Mars, and we will. Yes, We're totally going to do it. We're going to draw an imaginary line on a planet and be like, this side's ours. Let's be angry about it forever. Let's be angry forever. God is so freaking species man. I had to read. I couldn't end this without talking about some defenses of

Cecil Roads. So I found one published back in two thousand sixteen, not coincidentally by Standpoint magazine. Now, a sizeable chunk of their defense is related to probably the most prominently uh the quote most regularly attributed to Cecil Rhodes, I prefer land to inwards. Now, Cecil did not say this exact quote. It's actually kind of people merging two things he said, including like you remember that quote I said earlier that he wants to annex land, not natives.

He said this, He just didn't say it exactly that way, and he said the in word a lot constantly. He just didn't say it exactly that way. So it's not much of a defense that he said something slightly different

but meant the same thing in my fucking book. Now, yeah, again, in the right book Yeah, the defenses get funnier and funnier from there on that and I'm gonna read one besides Rhads, besides Rhodes is early arguably racist reference, yes, arguably racist, That the Anglo Saxon race is superior to all other races and should rule them arguably racist. You could argue that, maybe you might debate that, but but they say this has to be weighed against all the

other things he said and did. From first to last. He had a record of good relations with individual Africans. His primary biographer, Robert Rothberg, who was generally critical of the subject, writes that as a young man, he had related directly and well to unlettered Zulu. Throughout his life he remained sympathetic and responsive to the needs of individual persons of color. Not your stereotypical racist then, to which I say, yes, your stereotypical motherfucking racist. And this is

gonna bring me. Yeah, you have black friends. I can't be racist. Yeah, my son has a black friend. This is gonna bring me to Do you know who Louis throw is. No, he's He's a British documentarian, very very popular one, and I quite like a lot of his work. In the nineties the late nineties, he did a series called Weird Weekends. We would go spend time and mostly I think American subculture, so we spent a lot of time with Nazis, and one of the Nazis he hung

out with this guy named Tom Metzker. Now Tom Metzker was the head of a group called White Arian Resistance or WAR. He was the guy if you're at Oregonian who's whose members were responsible for the murder of Mulu Gettis Raw in Portland, which is like one of the kind of big, yeah, very important thing to understand. He is one of the most famous racists there's ever been.

Tom Metzer. In the documentary where Louise spends several days just kind of living with him to get an understanding for the guy's personality, he notices that Tom has a Mexican American neighbor and is friendly with him and they'll like help each other out and stuff. And Tom differentiates between this individual person who he knows and thinks it's okay and Mexicans in journal with whom he had nothing but like racist bio and Mexican. The same thing for

the Nazis. If you read Internal Nazi discussions as they were planning the Holocaust. One of the problems for them was that in kind of the terms they would use as everyone has their own their own like favored Jew that they think is different from the other Jews. And that's why we have to develop a legal code to oppress these people, because otherwise individuals will be slipping through

the cracks. Even Hitler, even Adolf Hitler, rescued one Jew from the Holocaust that he orchestrated, the doctor who had tried to save his mother when he was a child. He got that guy out of the country because he knew what he was about to do. So, yes, it is stereotypically racist to be nice to individual people who are of the races you ate. Ah Ah, it makes racism, It makes it. It makes it more exhausting and that much more stupid because it's like, oh, you hate a concept. Yeah,

that's exactly you hate a concept. And the proof that your concept is wrong is that there are individual people who are part of this concept of yours that you are able to liken get along with because they're people, and so are you like it? Just yeah, at what point do you get tired of being on the wrong side of history. Yeah, the point at which I don't know.

I don't know, man, I can't get it emotionally. Yeah. Uh. So to continue this conservative writer of this very bad article, um, I I think it's funny that he uses this argument that he argues that, like, well, he was nice to

individual Africans. Because this argument that he made to defend this guy in two thousands sixteen is the same that Leander Jamison used to defend Rhodes from charges of cruelty to natives in seven So, after Rhodes has his disastrous raid, he's trying to do a comeback tour, his friends defend him. They use the same defense, which is that he's nice

to individual Africans. Uh. Leander Jamison noted quote his favorite Sunday pastime was to go to the de Beers native compound where he segregated them away from the white workers, where he had built them a fine swimming pool and throw in shillings for the natives to dive for. Oh man, just the white nonsense boy. Yeah he was. He loved them, he threw money at them. This is nonsense. Yeah, and how you say this? What a straight faced Yeah? Well, the article is very long, and a lot of it's funny.

I'm just gonna read one more quote trying to justify Cecil's bigotry, and again this is from that article. Yes, Rhodes thought that Black Africans were generally inferior, but in terms of cultural development, not biology. He believed they could become civilized. This is important because important regards that people is biologically inferior and incapable of development, then that's a reason to exclude them permanently from participation in their own government.

But that wasn't how Roads saw things. In a speech of eighteen ninety four, he made this quite clear when he said, now I say the Natives are children. They are just emerging from barbarism. They have human minds. We ought to do something for the minds and the brains that the Almighty has given them. I do not believe that they are different from ourselves. But you acted that way and enshrining a set of laws that lasted a

century after your death, enshrining those differences. Yeah, I don't believe there are any different than us, except you absolutely believe they're different than you. Yeah. There when you're as a white person, when you're when you're trying to justify when you're trying to talk about and like equivocate on racism, you should think about whether or not you would be comfortable saying that to the face of a person of that race. So would you what would what do you?

How would you feel walking up to a black person and saying I'm not racist or this guy wasn't racist, he just thought that your entire race was children, Like, how do you would you? Would you feel fundamentally guilty saying that? Would you feel too ashamed to say that? Then perhaps it's racist as fuck coming out of your mouth. That didn't sound like you didn't hear yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

I don't know. Yeah. So at the end of this I wanted a little bit of time, not quite yet, because we need to grapple with the last part of Cecil's legatory, the thing that he left us that continues to kill people every year, the blood diamond trade. Now again, by eighteen eighty eight, he had basically complete monopolistic troll

control over the diamond market. He made a monopoly. He formed a cartel called the London Diamonds Syndicate, which were all of the biggest people actually selling diamonds to consumers, and this allowed him to match supply with demand artificially and keep and keep value high even though they were actually shipload of extra diamonds. Yeah, they're fucking everywhere, They're not precious. Um so this provided like yeah, so he builds this thing and it becomes the model of the

diamond industry for forever. Um his descendants, the people who take over to Beers after him, um, following his footsteps and continue to maintain the monopoly using these same tactics, controlling nine plus percent of the global diamond market in the nineteen thirties. The people who follow after cecil Roads into Beers start the mining campaign. Diamonds are forever in the United States. Um. Sorry, Nine is when that starts.

Nine is when they start marketing diamonds to the middle class because they had been like a rich person thing. They start trying to get across everyone needs a diamond to show that you love your spouse. Forever starts in ninety seven and de Beers becomes an even bigger marketing em party than it had already been. Um so they but will bath them drugs. That's a reference, and it's it's it's it's yeah. So they just they expand demand and they also create a permanent They create a permanent

market for diamonds in Africa, and it's not a good market. Um. In nineteen five, de Beers takes complete control of mining prospects in Sierra Leone and their contract gives them control for ninety nine years. Now, this opens up a black market and Lebanese traders in Sierra Leone discovered that you can make a lot of money by smuggling diamonds out of the country ilicit mining and training. It increased throughout Sierra Leone. By the nineteen fifties, the government had given

up any chance of policing the diamond industry. Foreign investors had to supply their own security, which was done generally by mercenary forces. Uh and yeah, So these by creating this very very valuable legitimate diamond trade that the government doesn't control, you also create an illegitimate diamond trade that the government doesn't control, and that provides a way for insurgent militaries to fund themselves. And this is what starts

happening all over Africa. In this period of time, you have these massive wars over over minerals, wars funded by minerals. It with diamond's chief among them. And it's it's it's a nightmare every single place that it happens. In Sierra Leone, they're fucking cutting off hands, armless kids. Yeah, they kill seventy five thousand people. Half a million people become refugees. And that's not the worst that it gets. Um. Have

you you've heard about the Great African War? I think it starts in some people like and and it's the biggest war after World War Three. It's the biggest war we've had since Almost no one in in in the Western world has has ever heard about it. It's also sometimes called the Congo War. UM. It happens in the late nineties. It kills five million people, and it is a war over minerals over gold, diamonds, tin, ivory, and

coal tan, which I think is used to help make computers. Um. And it's it's one of those wars where there's like millions of people who are raped systematically in like an industrial fashion. You have millions more who die from lack

of medical care. Um. And again, the war is able to continue on because rebels are because these different sides are able to take control of diamonds and mind diamonds and sell them for guns to commit these massacres and a lot of other Part of the reason why I'm not going into much to tail about this here is that a lot of other people, of course, are have

involved in this, like Cecil Rhodes has Medetta Wild. He starts the chain of events that makes the Great African War and the Sierra Leon and everything that's happening in all of these countries over diamonds, over over conflict minerals. He's the origin point. Uh. I know, if you're in the hip hop, you've heard the phrase conflict diamonds. Yeah, this is what we're talking about. If you don't know, yeah, yeah. And it's like it's the among the at least at

least in my opinion, among the African American community. This is the the cognitive dissonance that we have to deal with of like our hand in upholding this like diamond trade. You know what I'm saying, Like what if we as a culture, as American culture, who we love to shine, I get it, But if we decided, like yo, we're not touching diamonds anymore. You know what I'm saying In solidarity to our African brothers and sisters. It's something I feel like we need to at some point reckon with,

you know. Um, But yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a hard topic man. And that then, and I've made a reference to a Kanye song from the College Dropout album, which or not from the Late Registration album called Diamonds Are Forever Conflict Diamonds. Yeah, and it's it's um. You know.

One of the things I guess I can say to that is Cecil's goal was to kill the culture the Africans live under and make them all live under the rules and culture that that Anglo Americans and the Great African War is some evidence that he succeeded to an extent because what he did, leading in mercenary armies to take over mining areas in order to extract minerals and using that to fund the conquests of more of these mercenaries is exactly what all these wars what happened. It's

what happened. He succeeded. They adopted that part of British culture. Yeah, yeah, well great, thank you for thanks for that, buddy X. You know, exporting Western culture. We're now mutilating each other. Yeah. For more information on the topic, see the war and Zevon song Rolling the Headless Thompson Gunner. Um, so prop, you you got some plugs to plug in? Now my plugs, let's do it. Great capitalism. Um, Well, I'm selling music

and coffee. Uh, but it's just prop hip hop dot com and that's all my app mentions to and it just all feels so trivial. Um. On the other hand, my children like to eat, so yeah, check out the music, check out the poetry. I got a coffee collab coming up. Uh, what's up now? Um? Where this is ethically sourced? I feel like it's important to say it now. Uh, company called Onyx who pays higher than market price because we believe in farmers and supporting and yeah, and it's a

good drink. And I'm finishing an album and at some point I'll give that links to that. Hell yes, hell, yes, well check all that out. Check me out somewhere on the internet. No one's quite sure where. Um, and that's all that's everything. Well, a lot of people do. Because I've seen your followers grow. Okay, well, I'm not even gonna plug your buggables for you. Robert thank you, Sophie, I'll plug it for you. You could find him at I write okay. I think allegedly allegedly cannot you cannot

confirm or deny that I write okayness. Yeah, and you write better than okay. Man, you're a great writer. Oh, thank you. It was actually, like I think it was. It's very unclear because I'm uh wasn't always as good at writing as I am. Now. My meaning was that was not that I write okay. It was like it came from uh like years of frustration of explaining what I did for a living because I had a bunch of different weird freelance jobs online. Yeah, like I write okay. Yeah, Yeah,

that problems that. That was why pun punctuation matters. M alrighty, alright, it's products late ship probably that's that's capital is I'm for it could be all right mm hmm