Rhodes of Africa: only slightly less offensive than the man himself
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Version 0 of 1. Rhodes of Africa (1936)Director: Berthold ViertelEntertainment grade: CHistory grade: C+ Cecil Rhodes was one of the most remarkable imperialists in British history. Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) was named after him. Last week, his statue was removed from the University of Cape Town. Race “In 1870, South Africa was a largely unexplored territory of a million square miles peopled by a handful of white men,” intones a voiceover at the beginning of the film. Yep, just white men. No one else there. Maybe a couple of lions. Rhodes of Africa is not the most enlightened biopic, but it was made in 1936, and is at least slightly less offensive than Rhodes himself. Diamonds A few of these white men’s kids are playing a game with stones on a farm, when one of the adults notices the stone is a massive diamond. This is true. The kid was Erasmus Stephanus Jacobs. He found the Eureka diamond, weighing over 21 carats, in 1867, and gave it to his neighbour, Schalk van Niekerk. The South African diamond rush did not begin in earnest until 1869, when Van Niekerk bought an even bigger diamond – the Star of South Africa, over 83 carats – from a Griqua shepherd boy. Entertainingly, the film depicts the rush as literal stampede of white men over Kimberley, top hats falling off, punching each other for the right to stick their stake in little plots. Cecil Rhodes arrived in Kimberley in 1871, aged just 17. After a false start attempting to farm cotton, he got into the diamond business – and made heaps of money. Filming The film jumps a decade to show Rhodes (played staunchly by Walter Huston) freaking out his shareholders by attempting to diversify into gold. He makes a crooked deal with King Lobengula of the Ndebele, then known to the Europeans as the Matabele. The film attempts to get some things right: its glorious South African locations were filmed by the adventurous director Geoffrey Barkas, and Lobengula is played by Ndaniso Kumala, who was, according to reports at the time, the real Lobengula’s nephew. Romance Any hope that this movie might not be hopelessly racist is dashed when Rhodes receives fictional writer Anna Carpenter (Peggy Ashcroft), who is based on Olive Schreiner. Schreiner was at first taken with Rhodes, but later wrote a novella critiquing his racism and imperialism. “I always think of them, the natives I mean, as children,” Rhodes tells Carpenter in the film. “One has to be very patient with them, and understanding.” She glows with delight because, in 1936, this line sounded paternalistic and kindly to British audiences, rather than paternalistic and appalling. The pair get flirty. Though there were rumours at the time that Rhodes and Schreiner were romantically involved, the most intense relationships in Rhodes’s life appear to have been those with young men – notably his secretary, Neville Pickering. Imperialism “England must expand or perish!” Rhodes exclaims. The film admits Rhodes wasn’t all about being paternalistic and kindly to the natives but, in order to keep him approximately sympathetic, it can’t go anywhere near the full force of his white supremacist thinking. In real life, he wrote a “Confession of Faith” while he was at Oxford, arguing that a secret society should be formed “with but one object[:] the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule[;] for the recovery of the United States[;] for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire”. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography points out, “however juvenile and ungrammatical” this sounds, it “none the less expressed the philosophy that governed the rest of his life”. The Glen Grey Act that he introduced as prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1894 is sometimes considered to be a foundation stone of apartheid. It is not difficult to understand that new generations of South African students might feel “Rhodes rage” about statues of this man in their universities. Military Things start falling apart for Rhodes when his doctor chum Leander Starr Jameson (Basil Sydney) mounts the ill-fated Jameson Raid on Paul Kruger (Oscar Homolka)’s Transvaal. The film correctly shows that Jameson went ahead on his own initiative. It was a fiasco; Rhodes had to pay £25,000 per head to the Transvaal treasury to save each of the key members of Jameson’s committee from death. From a historian’s point of view, the film’s downbeat ending is reasonably accurate. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make for a great piece of cinema. Verdict There’s a terrific film to be made about Cecil Rhodes, but it would be a lot sharper and darker than this. Perhaps some of those South African students should have a go. |