Was the arch-colonist a monster? Or is the script just being PC? And was he gay? Marion Edmunds reports
THE BBC’s television series on Cecil John Rhodes – coming to South Africa early next year – has sparked fierce controversy over Southern Africa’s most famous colonist: was he saint, sinner or pervert? Or all three?
Several British critics are have lashed out at the “monsterisation” of Rhodes and questioned scriptwriter Anthony Thomas’s view of him.
Rhodesian-born journalist Peter Godwin criticised the series: “There is a danger of wrenching a life too far out of its own context and examining it though the microscope of today’s sensibilities … Rhodes and the white pioneers in Southern Africa did behave despicably, certainly by today’s standards but perhaps they behaved no worse than the white settlers in North America, South America, Australia …”
This week, Thomas hit back, calling Godwin’s criticism “very bizarre. He is so ignorant of the times and the man. He goes bananas about showing Rhodes stroking a lion cub and says we are borrowing this from a James Bond move, but Rhodes was famous for his lion cubs. There are pictures and documentary evidence to prove this,” said Thomas
Thomas was brought to South Africa at age six and taught by his grandparents to see Rhodes as “a demi-god”, a glorious symbol of the British empire.
“Going to Rhodes Memorial with my grandparents was like the experience of a Catholic child being taken to see the Virgin in the grotto,” he said. They “thought the Rhodes tradition was humane, something that set us
apart from the Afrikaners who were turning South Africa into an international pariah.”
Thomas says he has had only compliments from historians who have reviewed his work, and feels satisfied negative comments come from “snipers on the sidelines”.
A supporter of the African National Congress, he has developed something of an obsession with Rhodes – the man, the series and now the book, the writing of which appears to have been something of a personal political catharsis for him.
He claims his biography of Rhodes (yet to hit the shelves) is the “definitive” Rhodes biography. He worked with original source material, and the book has already sold 15 000 copies in advance orders.
“I think we have had some wonderful early biographies of Rhodes which are very thin on historical details,” he says. Some, he believes, “have no sense of the man at all”.
He sees Rhodes as the father of apartheid. He says the 1894 Glen Grey Act, engineered by Rhodes to prevent competition for land ownership by black people, was the “template for the bantustan policy”.
The agricultural schools for black people, taking them out of missionary schools, he says, “anticipated Hendrik Verwoerd’s education policy”. Rhodes, too, “introduced discrimination in transport and in facilities in the cities. The only things that were missing were the signs which said `whites’ and `non-whites’.”
Yet a previous Rhodes biographer takes issue with this interpretation. Appollin Davidson, head of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Russian Studies, started researching Rhodes in 1959. His biography was published in Russian in 1984 and in English in 1987.
Davidson said that being a racist did not make Rhodes the father of apartheid, and while Rhodes had done many bad things, he had also developed Southern Africa in a way settlers in other colonies had not. He argues, like Godwin, that Rhodes should be judged in terms of his times.
Davidson was contacted by the BBC 10 days ago. He was asked about Rhodes’s alleged homosexuality, which appears to be a particularly juicy bone of contention. The BBC’s post-production consultation suggests some unease.
The shooting of the series in South Africa is described in a gushy publicity pack which talks of the fire which nearly destroyed the sets; various acts of bravery; and the dangers of snakes, wild animals and untarred roads. It also has a chapter on the Zulus.
Martin Shaw, who plays Rhodes, said:”Politically and emotionally I see Rhodes as a monster, but while I was playing him I had to put my own beliefs away. He was an incredibly complex man. He had all the characteristics of a megalomaniac but immense personal charm and charisma.”