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Applications for the Rhodes Scholarship 2026 are open! Click here to learn more.

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Who was Rhodes?

Portrait of Cecil Rhodes. Portrait of Cecil Rhodes by Edward Rowntree.

Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902) was a figure who divided opinion even in his own lifetime. The Indian-born imperialist writer Rudyard Kipling thought him ‘the greatest of living men’, while to South African progressive author Oliver Schreiner he came to mean ‘so much of oppression, injustice, and moral degradation to South Africa’. Rhodes himself was committed to imperialist ideas which (unlike many critics at the time and subsequently) he saw as the key to political and economic progress. He was once heard to say that ‘It is the dreamers who move the world’ and there is no doubt that his ideas and actions were massively influential. You can read more about the debates surrounding his life and legacy here.

Born in England, Rhodes travelled to southern Africa at the age of 17, and it was the wealth he drew from the people and resources of that region – principally through mining diamonds and gold – that made him both immensely rich and extremely powerful. He was ruthless in his pursuit of concessions that would allow him to extend his mining activities. Perhaps most famously, his agents deliberately deceived King Lobengula of the Ndebele Kingdom regarding the extent of control they were proposing over the lands of the Ndebele people. The British South Africa Company (BSAC), founded by Rhodes, colonised the inland regions of southern Africa between the Limpopo River and Lake Tanganyika. In 1880, BSAC renamed the area north of the Zambezi River Northern Rhodesia (this would become Zambia in 1964) while the area to the south was initially named Southern Rhodesia (becoming Zimbabwe in 1980). Rhodes went on to become prime minister of Cape Colony.

From relatively early on in his life, Rhodes had been thinking about ways to ‘extend the influence of the English-speaking race’. When he died, he left around £3.7 million (equivalent to over £650 million today) for the foundation of scholarships to bring young men from the British colonies (and the United States and Germany) to study in Oxford ‘for instilling into their minds the advantage to the Colonies as well as to the United Kingdom of the retention of the unity of the Empire’. These became the Rhodes Scholarships, the first international postgraduate scholarship programme.

Books about Rhodes and his legacy include:

  • Robert Rotberg, The Founder. Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
  • Philip Ziegler, Legacy. Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
  • Brian Roberts, Cecil Rhodes: Flawed Colossus (London: Thistle Publishing, 2015)
  • Robert Calderisi, Cecil Rhodes and Other Statues. Dealing Plainly with the Past (Columbus, OH: Gatekeeper Press, 2021)
  • William Kelleher Storey, The Colonialist. The Vision of Cecil Rhodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025)
  • Rhodes’s correspondence is held by the Bodleian Libraries.