Episode 263 - How Black Voters Helped Elect Cecil Rhodes: Kimberley and the Cape Franchise, 1879

The battles are coming thick and fast because this is the end of the seventh decade of the 19th Century - the British have just been defeated at the Battle of Hlobane mountain on the 28th March.

There’s been so much skop skiet and Donner it’s time to reflect on matters further south west Before we buzz back to Zululand next episode.

n the Transvaal, resistance to British rule was slowly setting, like mortar hardening between stones, the scattered grievances of the Boers beginning to cohere into something firmer, more deliberate. Far to the west, Kimberley glittered with a different intensity - fortunes were rising from the dust, deals were struck in the heat and noise, and the great hole in the earth swallowed men and money alike. Yet beneath the clangour of picks and the shimmer of diamonds, another current was moving. For even as the town prospered, a sequence of personal tragedies was about to cast a longer shadow over Kimberley shaping not only its mood but the hardening temper of one of its most ambitious young men.

Cecil John Rhodes would endure a series of personal blows in the years ahead. These losses did not soften him. If anything, they seemed to harden an already melancholic temperament. One by one, the setbacks accumulated, and the young speculator who often appeared distant in manner would, in time, come to embody the ruthless vanity and moral ambiguity that marked the diamond fields and the empire they fed.

The string of tragedies began with his brother Herbert. It was he who had come to South Africa first and started the Cotton farm at Richmond near Pietermaritzburg. And It was he who had impulsively upped and off to Kimberley to look for diamonds. Once these had been unearthed and he’d convinced young Cecil to join him — he upped and off once more to the eastern Transvaal, where gold had been discovered. After a while he tired of that life and began gun running from Delagoa Bay to amaPedi people, then roved about into northern Mozambique and what is Malawi today. He hunted the next gold find everywhere he went, a mad Victorian searching for his personal treasure.

Cecil John Rhodes watched and took his own notes. He was already thirsting for power, and now he realised there were two routes. From Barney Barnato he learned the value of politics, and from JB Robinson he came to understand the uses of Journalism. Rhodes wanted something much bigger, and that was a seat in the Cape Parliament.

He ran for representative of a rural territory, Barklay West which was a mistake. When he appeared at a meeting one of the local boers told him off

“In the first place, you are too young, in the second, you look so damnably like an Englishman…”

Rhodes, unlike certain modern politicians, listened.

First stage of campaign complete, time for second stage. And here it may surprise many listeners, but he turned to black South Africans because at this time in our history, blacks could vote in the Cape.

All they had to do was show they had enough cash, the Cape qualified franchise. Every voter had to show either 25 pounds of land or more in value or prove they received at least 50 pounds a year in income.

After disbursing black workers with an unknown sum of money, 250 turned up to vote for Rhodes on election day and largely because of this support, he won. It is truly amazing that Cecil John Rhodes won his seat in the Cape Parliament because of black voters, and would go on to hold that seat in periods of triumph, disgrace and depression, until the day he died.