THE legacy of Cecil John Rhodes came with scholarships comprising the Rhodes Scholarship and the Rhodes University College in South Africa.
Established through the will of Rhodes in 1902, the Rhodes scholarship became the first international postgraduate scholarship programme in the world.
It aimed to identify and bring together young leaders from all English-speaking countries around the world (and Germany) for tutelage at Oxford University to forge bonds of mutual understanding and fellowship for the betterment of ‘mankind’. Rothschild administered the deceased’s estate and helped to set up the Rhodes scholarship scheme at the University of Oxford. In the prelude to the occupation of Zimbabwe, Rothschild had sponsored Cecil Rhodes in the development of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and the de Beers diamond combine.
Rhodes University College was founded in 1904, two years after the British homosexual’s death and entombment in the sacred Matobo Hills.
It was founded through a grant of
£50 000 made by his ‘boyfriend’ Leander Starr Jameson from the Rhodes Trust.
The relevant Act of Parliament was passed on May 31 1904.
Colonial history would prove that the English meaning of the word ‘mankind’ lavished on the objectives of the scholarship was racially exclusive of black people.
Selection for both the Rhodes scholarship and the Rhodes University College would, in practice, racially exclude black people, making it abundantly clear that the initiative’s working definition of the word mankind would be British historian Arnold Toynbee’s definition of the word ‘native’:
“When we, Europeans, call people natives, we take away anything from them; anything that suggests that they are human beings.
They are to us like the forest which the western man fells down.
Or, the big game that he shoots down.
They have no tenure of land.
Their tenure of land is as precarious as that of the animals that they find.
What shall we, the lords of creation, the white people, do with the natives we find?
Shall we treat them as vermin to be exterminated or shall we treat them as hewers of wood and drawers of water? There is no other alternative if niggers have no souls.”
The follower of this series is reminded that the homosexual’s instruction to British occupation forces during the First Chimurenga was to kill everything black, even under conditions of surrender.
It was the homosexual’s ‘shocked and awed’ reaction to the discovery that Shona chieftaincies had a central authority – Murenga – drawing them into a national patriotic front formation against occupation.
In that historical context, the scholarship initiative was evidently taken to present a contingent English-educated front against African nationalism.
One of the earliest (if not the first) recipients of the Rhodes scholarship in Rhodesia was Robert Tredgold, whose mother was Emily Ruth Moffat, the daughter of John Moffat the charlatan who had advised King Lobengula to sign Zimbabwe into the British imperial sphere of influence.
The instrument of deceit became known as the Moffat Treaty. The swindler’s own father, the missionary Robert Moffat, had started it all by advising Lobengula’s own father, King Mzilikazi, to settle in south-western Zimbabwe, in so doing presenting a buffer zone against Boer northward expansion until the British occupation force arrived. And now, as Mzilikazi’s own heirs fizzled into anonymity, the opposite was true of the Moffat dynasty.
Emily Moffat’s brother, Howard Moffat, had become the second Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia after the granting of the 1923 ‘responsible government,’ a process initiated by Winston Churchill during his tenure as colonial secretary of the empire. Winston’s father, Rudolph Churchill, a British oligarch and buddy to Cecil Rhodes, had been rewarded with the richest gold claim in Mashayamombe’s territory on account of the role he had played in the granting of the Royal Charter.
It is Howard Moffat who implemented the 1931 Land Apportionment Act.
And his brother-in-law, Robert Tredgold, successively became Minister of Justice and Defence (1936), Minister of Justice, Defence and Air (1940–1943), Minister of Mines and Public Works (1938), and Minister of Native Affairs (1942–1943) in the tapestry woven to funnel African ‘slave labour’ into European settler-mines and farms of the commercial enterprise established as Rhodesia.
After the successive Ministerial appointments, Robert Tredgold had, in 1943, become a Judge of the High Court of Southern Rhodesia in 1950 before replacing retiring Sir Robert Hudson as Chief Justice.
This means the Rhodes scholarship laureate was the supreme judiciary authority when the 1952 Land Husbandry Act was implemented in Southern Rhodesia.
This means that it was him who jailed those arrested for protesting the act led by the late Father Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo.
The act was the sequel to the infamous 1931 Land Apportionment Act of 1931 implemented by his brother-in-law, Howard Moffat to hogtie Africans for optimum exploitation in the commercial enterprise established as Rhodesia.
The myth of Rhodesia as the ‘breadbasket of Africa’ was born out of the 1931 Land Apportionment Act and the 1952 Land Husbandry Act scandals.
Chairman Herbert Chitepo would describe the travesties (among many more) as, “…a massive armoury of laws of discrimination, suppression and exploitation…,” designed to force Africans to, “…sell themselves in slavery to white capitalists and imperialists.
The ones who have designed this law for the very purpose of making sure they can drain the African labour into their own industries, into their own farms, into their own mines.
Exploit them!
Pay them next to nothing, because they have no alternative. They must try to live.”
The Rhodes scholarship laureate was ultimately appointed the first Chief Justice of the Federal Supreme Court of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1955, a capacity that qualified him to act as Governor of Southern Rhodesia from November 21 1953 to November 26 1954, and as acting Governor-General of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland from January 1957 to February 1957.
He was named Privy Counsellor the same year.
It is important to point out the role of Privy Counsellors in the British Government is to advise the monarch on matters of policy.
In other words, Privy Counsellors constitute the imperial Government oligarchy.
It is another Rhodes scholarship laureate, Sir Thomas Hugh William Beadle, a radical advocate of white supremacy, who succeeded Robert Tredgold, Howard Moffat’s brother-in-law, as Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia and remained at the helm of Rhodesian ‘injustice’ until retirement in 1977.
His notoriety included the Emergency Powers Act, Law and Order Maintenance Act and the successive amendments constituting the ‘massive armoury of laws of discrimination, suppression and exploitation’ designed to cut the myth of the ‘Rhodesian jewel’ which former President Robert Mugabe would be ‘allegedly’ given with the warning not to destroy.
The Rhodes scholarship laureate stood with the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and upheld the pre-UDI death sentences of freedom fighters James Dhlamini, Victor Mlambo and Duly Shadreck, notwithstanding that they had been ‘granted clemency’ by the UK government.
Hindsight must make us wonder why the same Government did not intervene to save the trio and hundreds more on death row.
It is important to note that the current President of Zimbabwe, Cde Emmerson Mnangagwa, was among the hundreds put on death row by the judiciary presided over by the Rhodes scholarship laureate.
He survived the sentence on a technicality of age.
The Rhodes scholarship laureate retired as Chief Justice in 1977 but continued to serve as an acting judge in special trials where suspected freedom fighters needed to be sentenced to death.
This was right up to independence in 1980, shortly after which he died a disappointed man (December 14 1980) in apartheid South Africa where most of the racist scum had re-located with the assistance of the UK government.
But his memory lives on in the Hugh Beadle Primary School named after him in Bulawayo.
White children are long gone and black children are being educated in the ‘memory’.
Meanwhile, Ian Smith, the main actor in the Rhodesian settlers’ UDI was an alumna of Rhodes University.
To be continued…