Cecil rhodes biography summary worksheet

Cecil Rhodes: A Bad Man in Africa

The evil that men do lives after them – and rarely more miserably than in the case of Cecil Rhodes, who died 100 years ago this month.

By Matthew Sweet

North of the Zambezi, they have long known about the suppression of free speech, about the bloody redistribution of land along racial lines, about politicians happy to employ armed – and sometimes uniformed – mobs to kill their opponents.

They are practices imported to this region, along with the railways, by the British.

Unlike the African press, the Western media rarely invoke the name of Cecil John Rhodes: nearly a century after his death – on 26 March 1902 – his name is more associated with Oxford Scholarships than with murder.

It’s easier to focus on the region’s more recent, less Anglo white supremacists: Ian Smith, for instance, who – despite his Scottish background – seems cut from the same stuff as those Afrikaner politicians who nurtur