Founder by Rotberg Robert I.;

Author:Rotberg, Robert I.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1998-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

“The Predatory Instincts of Our Race”

Making War in Rhodesia

RHODES FINALLY VISITED his newly fashioned colony in late 1891, after the conclusion of his first full legislative session as premier. This inspection, at a time when the Rhodesian experiment was established, but was still vulnerable to African attack and financially precarious, inaugurated an intensified, empirical involvement by Rhodes in the detailed affairs of his creation. Much more than the mines, Stellaland and Goshen, his parliamentary accomplishments, or even the rebuilding of Groote Schuur, Rhodesia was his triumphant offspring.

In Rhodesia, Rhodes found an object of care and concern of the kind that Erikson has identified as a mark of a man’s sucessful navigation of the early mid-life crisis of generativity. It gave Rhodes, unmarried and childless, an outlet for that natural desire to be needed which most men satisfy in parenthood. What Erikson calls “the widening concern for what has been generated by love, necessity, or accident” which “potentially extends to whatever a man generates and leaves behind, creates and produces … ,” for Rhodes became a preoccupation and passion.1 Along with seeking a personal destiny through the mechanism of his many wills, Rhodesia drew Rhodes out of himself, thus countering the self-absorption which inevitably is the chief vulnerability of those who are able to translate their dreams into concrete accomplishments. To nurture the young Rhodesia into adolescence was for him more than the obvious imperial task. After all, the colony by no accident carried his name; if Rhodes were to live on after death, that territorial extension of himself must prove a success.

Given the scale and complexity of Rhodes’ varied endeavors, his association with this singular activity was more direct, personal, and intense than it might ordinarily have been during the busy 1890s. It was his troubled child. That he interrupted his pursuit of a diamond monopoly and of political advantage in the Cape to tour Rhodesia in 1891, that he installed Jameson, his closest intimate and alter ego, as administrator in his own stead, that he busied himself with the day-to-day arrangements of the colony, and that he personally made the decision to go to war against the Ndebele demonstrate how thoroughly, even overwhelmingly, his sense of self was tied to the fortunes of the land that he had seized between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Rhodes’ self-esteem was so intimately bound up with its internal well-being and external success that he reacted emotionally, as if it were a part of himself. To the extent that Rhodesia was imperiled, so was Rhodes.2 Much later, after the Jameson Raid and the Ndebele and Shona insurrections, when Rhodes’ reputation had been sullied, his connection to Rhodesia was to become stronger and more obvious. But even before the Raid, when none was so powerful and unchecked in Africa and the Empire as was he, Rhodes was tightly bonded to this extension of himself. He was emotionally at risk over all aspects of the young entity beyond the Limpopo.

It was a year since the pioneers had arrived in Mashonaland.

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