Rhodes' Ghost

Cecil John Rhodes lived from 1853 to 1902, a brief span, and was the renowned and world-famous founder of Rhodesia (1890-1980), the leading personality and figure in the Victorian world's late nineteenth-century Africa empire. Rhodes' endeavours shaped the domains of late nineteenth and twentieth century Zambesia, and set down the trajectories marking southern Africa, while the Great Powers' record of empire in Africa proved greatly inferior to Rhodesia's. Zambesia's long history of continuous turbulence on a troubled plateau was reversed by Rhodes' Pioneer Column in 1890 when the 'First Rhodesians' arrived following five decades of itinerant white presence in Zambesia. Rhodesia was forged on blood, sweat and tears: no easy task. Rhodes had been the main architect and visionary behind its formation, the continental geopolitics around Zambesia, establishing enduring state boundaries in its undefined geographies, the legal and institutional systems, corporate world and political economy. All came from pioneer endeavour which reversed feudalism on the plateau and brought the fruits of civilisation and prosperity into Zambesia. Generations of Rhodesians followed this pioneering path for ninety years, building the longest-established modern state seen in Africa, one that succumbed to civil war and the perilous, shifting tides in Africa's histories. Apart from what is 'left behind', with few Rhodesians living in the inheritor state, there has remained continuity in Rhodesiana and its legacies on the world stage.