High above the entrance of an Oxford college, a stone figure of Cecil Rhodes looks down on the High Street. He made a fortune from African diamonds and gold, had a country named after himself, and left his money to Oxford. Since 2015 his statue has become a symbol of a bigger argument: what Britain should do with monuments to the men who built its empire.
Cecil John Rhodes was born in an English market town in 1853 and died in South Africa in 1902, aged 48. In less than thirty years he built the De Beers diamond monopoly, became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and used a private company with a royal charter to conquer the lands that became Rhodesia, today's Zimbabwe and Zambia. He believed, and wrote, that the English-speaking "race" was the finest in the world and that the more of the world it ruled, the better.
He left much of his fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford, and left money to his old college, Oriel, which put up his statue. More than a century later, students in Cape Town and Oxford asked why he still stood there. The answer Oxford has given so far says a lot about modern Britain.
Rhodes was born in Netteswell House, Bishop's Stortford, one of the many children of the town's vicar. He was a sickly teenager, and at seventeen he was sent to join his brother on a cotton farm in Natal, in southern Africa, for his health. He went back and forth to England in his twenties to study at Oriel College, Oxford, and took his degree in 1881. By then he was already rich.
His birthplace became the Rhodes Memorial Museum in 1938, later the Rhodes Arts Complex. In August 2020, after Black Lives Matter protests and local campaigning, the arts centre was renamed South Mill Arts. The museum, now Bishop's Stortford Museum, is still in the house where he was born. It combines local history with a Rhodes collection, and it is one of the few places in Britain where you can see his life presented as a whole.
Diamonds had been discovered in Griqualand West, around today's Kimberley, at the end of the 1860s. Rhodes arrived in the diamond fields in 1871 and started out renting pumps to miners. He then bought claim after claim, and with financiers in London he gradually took over the competition. In 1888 he founded De Beers Consolidated Mines, which came to control almost the entire world's diamond production. He also took a large stake in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand, around Johannesburg.
The wealth rested on African labour. Black miners were housed in closed "compounds", partly to prevent diamond theft, and searched on leaving. The system of migrant labour, compounds and pass controls that grew up in the mines became one of the foundations of later segregation and apartheid in South Africa.
Rhodes wanted British rule to stretch north, ideally "from the Cape to Cairo". In 1888 his agents obtained the Rudd Concession from Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, which granted mining rights. Lobengula later protested that it had been obtained by deception and that he had never agreed to give away land. In 1889 Rhodes's British South Africa Company received a royal charter allowing it to govern territory, raise police and make treaties. In 1890 a "Pioneer Column" of settlers and armed police marched into Mashonaland and founded Fort Salisbury, today's Harare.
In 1893 the company provoked war with the Ndebele, using Maxim guns against Lobengula's regiments, and took his capital at Bulawayo. In 1896–97 the Ndebele and Shona rose against company rule, the risings Zimbabweans call the First Chimurenga, and were crushed with great loss of life. The company's territory was named Rhodesia after him. Northern Rhodesia became independent Zambia in 1964. Southern Rhodesia's white minority government declared independence unilaterally in 1965, and the country became Zimbabwe only in 1980, after a long liberation war.
Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. His Glen Grey Act of 1894 restricted African land ownership to individual plots, introduced a labour tax designed to push African men into work for white employers, and is often seen as an early model for the segregationist laws that followed. He also raised the property qualification for voting, which reduced the number of Black voters.
His career in office ended in scandal. At the turn of 1895–96 his close associate Leander Starr Jameson led an armed raid into the Boer-ruled Transvaal, hoping to spark an uprising of foreign miners in Johannesburg and topple the government. It was a fiasco, and Rhodes's involvement became clear. He resigned. The raid helped bring on the South African War of 1899–1902 between Britain and the Boer republics. Rhodes died in March 1902, weeks before it ended, and was buried at "World's View" in the Matobo Hills of today's Zimbabwe, a place sacred to the Ndebele.
Rhodes left most of his fortune to fund scholarships at Oxford. They were first intended for young men from the British colonies, the United States and Germany, and were explicitly meant to strengthen the bonds of the English-speaking world under British leadership. Over the twentieth century the scholarships changed enormously: women were admitted from 1977, and scholars now come from across Africa, Asia and the Americas. In 2003 the Rhodes Trust joined with Nelson Mandela to create the Mandela Rhodes Foundation in South Africa.
Many Rhodes Scholars have been among the fiercest critics of the man who paid for their studies. Several leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford were Rhodes Scholars themselves. Rhodes also left a large gift to Oriel College, which used it to put up the building on the High Street that carries his statue.
The statue stands in a niche high on the facade of Oriel's Rhodes Building, facing Oxford's High Street, above the figures of Edward VII and George V. It is part of a listed building in a conservation area, which matters for what came next. A few minutes' walk away, on King Edward Street, a separate plaque marks the house where Rhodes lodged as a student and praises his "great services" to his country.
In March 2015 a student at the University of Cape Town threw excrement over the campus statue of Rhodes. The protest that followed, under the name Rhodes Must Fall, was about far more than one statue: about who universities were for in a country where the end of apartheid had not ended inequality. On 9 April 2015 the university removed the statue.
The movement spread to Oxford the same year, led by students many of whom came from southern Africa. Oriel at first said it would consider removing the King Edward Street plaque and consult on the statue. In January 2016 it announced that both would stay. Opponents of removal had warned that wealthy donors might withdraw gifts.
After the killing of George Floyd and the pulling down of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol in June 2020, thousands protested outside Oriel. That month Oriel's governing body said it wished to remove the statue and the plaque, and set up an independent Commission of Inquiry. In May 2021 the college announced it would not begin the legal process to remove the statue, citing the cost, the planning obstacles and government guidance against removing heritage. In 2022 the government listed the King Edward Street plaque as Grade II, overruling Historic England's advice. The college has since put an explanatory plaque under the statue, describing Rhodes as a committed British colonialist and setting out the controversy.
Those who want the statue to stay usually argue that removing statues erases history, that people of the past should be judged by the standards of their time, that Rhodes's money has educated thousands of scholars from every continent, and that a plaque explaining the context is better than an empty niche. Many also see removal as part of a "culture war" driven by activists rather than by most of the public.
Those who want it to come down answer that a statue in a place of honour is not history but celebration, and that history is what museums and books are for. They point out that critics of Rhodes's methods existed in his own lifetime, in Britain as well as Africa, so the "standards of the time" defence is weaker than it looks. And they ask how a university can say it welcomes students from southern Africa while honouring the man who led the conquest of their grandparents' lands from the front of one of its colleges.
This page gives you the history. The judgement is yours. But whichever side you take, it is worth knowing what Rhodes actually did before deciding what his statue means.
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The country that carried Rhodes's name until 1980.
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