'When I find myself in uncongenial company, or when people are
playing their games, or when I am alone in a railway carriage,
I think of my great idea....It is the pleasantest companion I have.'

Cecil Rhodes.

Cecil Rhodes' incredible achievements - one of the richest men
in the world, the creator of the De Beers diamond empire, the
founder of a new country, and the originator of the Rhodes
Scholarships - were motivated by one single thing, his 'great
idea'.

This idea came to him at the age of 24 with the force of a
religious revelation. What is interesting is that it struck
him in the hours immediately following his initiation into
the Masonic Order while at Oxford University.

Although Rhodes was slightly contemptuous of the organisation
he had just joined - `I wonder that a large body of men can
devote themselves to what at times appear the most ridiculous
and absurd rites without an object and without an end' -
the fact remains that whatever the Masonic induction he
had gone through, it would appear to have triggered something
of an epiphany in the young student.

On the evening after the ceremony, Rhodes sat pondering what
had happened that day. Then, as he puts it, the 'idea gleaming
and dancing before one's eyes like a will-of-the-wisp at last
frames itself into a plan'.
He proceeded to pen his `Confession of Faith' in which he
outlined his ambition: to establish a secret society whose
objective would be the furtherance of the British Empire
and the uniting of the entire Anglo-Saxon race, including
America, into one single empire.

From that day, June 2, 1877, Rhodes was a man with a mission,
with his `Confession of Faith' his guiding star and
inspiration. When he had grown to trust anybody, he
would confidentially reveal his 'idea' to him and
expect the man's life to be changed immediately.

Historians and biographers have criticised his naivety,
but the fact remains that when
Rhodes did reveal his 'idea' to others, it often had the
same effect, resulting in them devoting themselves from
then on to helping him achieve his lofty aims.
There was an event in Rhodes' life, soon after his
`illumination' at Oxford that is hardly mentioned by
his biographers, but which may well provide a key to
how Rhodes acquired the personal magnetism and power that
he displayed from then on.

Three months after his Masonic induction at Oxford, Rhodes
was back at the diamond diggings of Kimberley, in South Africa.
One night, while staying in his bachelor
quarters, a very strange thing happened. `His friends',
according to his biographer Sir Lewis Michell, `found
him in his room, blue with fright, his door barricaded

with a chest of drawers and other furniture; he insisted that
he had seen a ghost.' Immediately after this pivotal crisis,
Rhodes had his previously penned `Confession of Faith' (which also contained his last will and testament) legally formalised by a Kimberley attorney.
From then on, his star was in the ascendent.

What exactly happened to him alone in his room that night? No one
will ever know, except that exactly the same thing happened to
another man, in the following century, who also went on to
become one of the most powerful men the world has ever known -
Adolf Hitler.
In his book, `Hitler Speaks', published in 1939, Hermann Rauschning
writes of an event that took place at the beginning of the 1930's prior
to Hitler's seizure of power and his ascent to fame and infamy. Says
Rauschning: `My informant described to me in full detail a remarkable
scene - I should not have credited the story if it had not come from
such a source. Hitler stood swaying in his room, looking wildly about him.
`He! He! He's been here!' He gasped. His lips were blue. Sweat streamed down
his face. Suddenly he began to reel off figures, and odd words and broken
phrases, entirely devoid of sense. It sounded horrible. He used strangely
composed and entirely un-German word formations. Then he stood quite still,
only his lips moving .... gradually he grew calm. After that he lay asleep
for many hours.'

In 1933, soon after this strange event, Hitler seized power and the rest, as
they say, is history. A clue to exactly what fearsome thing Hitler had
witnessed is given
by Hitler himself, who said to his circle of intimate friends, of which
Rauschning was a part: `The new man is among us! He is here! I will tell
you a secret. I have seen the vision of the new man - fearless and formidable.
I shrank from him!'

On another occasion, reported by Rauschning, Hitler remarked: `I will tell
you a secret. I am founding an Order.' Which is pretty well exactly what
Rhodes had set out to do after his illumination. How strange that Rhodes'
secret society dedicated to ruling the world should have ultimately become
a living reality in the next century in Hitler's SS (Schutzstaffel).

The German scientist, Oswald Spengler, in his `Decline and Fall of
Civilisation in the West', described the spirit of colonial expansion
which possessed Rhodes as something, `daemonic and immense, which grips,
forces into service and uses up mankind.' And herein lies the clue to the
careers of both Rhodes and Hitler, that at a point in their lives, they
both encountered something `daemonic'.

In the years after the end of the First World War, Rhodes began to receive
attention from the European political right wing precisely because his
career showed such an elemental will to power. In 1918 the intellectual
prophet of German Nazism, Oswald Spengler, published the first volume his
famous work, 'The Decline of the West'. In this book, Spengler regards
Rhodes with almost mystical awe, as a prototype of a new sort of leader.
'Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a western type of Caesar.
He stands midway between Napolean and the force-men of the next centuries....in our Germanic world, the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again - there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes.'

Hitler himself appears to have made only one reference to Rhodes: at a dinner on April 18, 1942, he discussed Britain's failure to maintain the world position it had held in the Victorian age and commented that the only person who had understood the historical conditions for continuing British supremacy was Cecil Rhodes, whom the British had ignored.

'Mr Rhodes aspired to be the creator of one of those vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations which, like the Jesuits have played so large a part in the history of the world. To be more strictly accurate, he wished to found an Order ... and while he lived, he dreamed of being both its Caesar and its Loyola.'

W.T.Stead


Rhodes Scholarships


Rhodes' lifelong dream of creating a secret society to further the interests of the Anglo-Saxon people finally evolved into a somewhat more practical scheme - the Rhodes Scholarships.
On his death in 1902, Rhodes left the greater part of his vast fortune for the establishment of scholarships at his alma mater, Oxford University. Rhodes decreed that these scholarships were to be awarded to young men in regard to: 'literary and scholastic attainments; his fondness of, and success in, manly outdoor sports; his qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for the protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship, and his exhibition during his school days of moral

force of character and of instincts to lead and take an interest in his schoolmates'.
Rhodes' original will provided for 52 scholarships each year. Twenty were for students from countries which then formed part of the British Empire (Canada, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, Bermuda and Jamaica) and thirty-two were for the USA. In a codicil to his will a year before he died, Rhodes added five for Germany - having been particularly impressed with Kaiser Wilhelm after meeting him a few years previously.
In 1977, the British Parliament overrode his expressed wishes that only men were eligible for the scholarships, and extended them to women as well. At the same time, the scheme was also extended to students from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Singapore, Malaysia, Kenya, Hong Kong and the European Community.
Ninety-four Rhodes scholarships are now granted each year and to date more than 5,300 scholarships have been awarded. The most well known Rhodes Scholar of recent times is the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.