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the way most amakwerekwere of modest ambition and means are nowadays, Rhodes defined and confined those he encountered in his hunter-gatherer endeavours. He was on a quest for greener pastures and fresher pleasures. Armed with the powerful technologies of dominance – such as writing, books, maps, guns, ships, trains, telegraphs, cars and telephones – inherited from his forebears and perfected in the course of his own adventures, Rhodes was able to penetrate, conquer, possess and tame at will and at first contact the powerful – mind, body and soul – of the strange and distant lands of the Heart of Darkness that Africa represented to the civilized savagery of his native England.
Aided and abetted by his repertoire of perfected technologies of the self and power, Rhodes took over, ruled, developed and exploited for his personal profit and that of Britain the lands and bodies of those he conquered, turning them into amakwerekwere on their own native soil, their homeland. Rhodes was so thrilled with ‘Rhodesia’ (‘Rhodesland’ and ‘Cicelia’ were other names suggested for the new country) (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 65) as a symbol of his personal power and achievements, that he is reported to have proclaimed: ‘Has anyone else had a country called after their name? Now I don’t care a damn what they do with me!’ (Flint 1974: 156; see also Plomer 1984 [1933]: 64).
Lobengula, King of the Matabele, compares himself to a fly being eaten up by Rhodes the chameleon. He was convinced that a man who came rampaging around his kingdom uninvited could mean no good. Lobengula and the Matabele were not alone in being consumed ferociously by adventurer amakwerekwere at the service of the nobility of Europe. Other lands and nobility ‘have suffered undue neglect’ as a result of ‘white intrusion’ (Saunders 1979).
Rhodes was not unlike his fellow adventurer amakwerekwere who had harnessed and exported their hosts as slaves and freak-show entertainers to Europe and the Americas. He was said to ‘look on men in the abstract as instruments of the work to be done’ (Baker 1934: 88). When Rhodes boasted that diamond-rich Kimberley was the ‘richest community in the world for its size’, this was perhaps true for everyone but Kimberley’s black migrant workers from all over the vast territory that was yet to pass for South Africa as we know it today (Beinart 2001: 28). The precarious economic and social conditions of black labourers, migrant and indigenous alike, have failed to improve in any significant way since the diamond and gold rushes of yesteryear, even with the end of apartheid and the graduation into legal and political citizenship of its black victims. The violent suppression and massacre of striking Marikana mineworkers in August 2012 attest to this.
Rhodes’s legacy as Uitlander and makwerekwere
Rhodes stands tall as an example to all amakwerekwere the world over, who are victims of the exclusionary violence of zero-sum games of belonging played by powerful states and those they co-opt in the name of bona fide nationhood and citizenship. Rhodes’s lesson to all those defined and confined as makwerekwere is clear: the only way to outgrow the status of makwerekwere within the logic of zero-sum games of ever-diminishing circles of inclusion is to rise and challenge – with violence and superior technology – the status of social, political, cultural and economic invisibility which others readily confer on their real or imagined ‘outsiders’, ‘foreigners’ or ‘Uitlanders’ and ‘strangers’.
The racialized hierarchies pioneered by Rhodes and perfected by apartheid are still very active in the purportedly new non-racist South Africa, where everyone is in principle equal in citizenship and before the law. However, few have the luxury of living their freedoms in abstraction. Ironically, black labourers remain confined to the margins, in townships or seething slums of hurriedly erected shacks, desperately seeking to get by. Many struggle on a daily basis despite the ‘enormous, untold, inconceivable wealth’ they have helped dig out of their native soils since the Kimberley days – to fill the insatiable imperial pockets of Rhodes and his band of Uitlanders or amakwerekwere from Europe.
As for middle-class whites, from the protective distance and comfort of their securitized, sanitized and secluded suburbs, they continue to delude themselves that their economic and social positions can be safeguarded irrespective of the social and economic misery of the bulk of their black compatriots.
Paradoxically, poor working-class whites, increasingly finding it difficult to live up to the illusion of a class of work beneath the dignity of whites, are perceived to bring shame on the white race and to pose a threat to white dominance. Put differently, they are fast losing the whiteness which was propped up by the deliberate, systematic and collective suppression of blacks and often taken for granted under apartheid. Whiteness beyond skin colour is increasingly being picked up or acquired by a crystallizing black economically empowered middle class.
The idea that whites are fast losing out in the competition for whiteness is an increasing preoccupation beyond South Africa, as attested by the rise and proliferation of right-wing political and cultural fundamentalism in Europe, North America and their global satellites. In this regard, Donald Trump’s campaign and persistent message as President of ‘Making America Great Again’ by making it white again, through exclusion, intolerance and vitriol, is particularly telling.
Is it time or even possible to put Rhodes to rest?
Although he died in Cape Town, Rhodes, like many a makwerekwere I know, had left instructions to be buried at home, by which he meant, not Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, England, where he was born on 5 July 1853, but rather, Matabeleland, which he had conquered and renamed after himself, and where he had chosen a final resting place. Since 1902, Rhodes’s grave lies in the Matopos Hills of Matabeleland in Zimbabwe – ‘Where four great boulders [… keep] eternal guard upon the summit of the World’s View’ (Stent 1924: 77).
It is only when a makwerekwere succeeds in imposing him or herself as a son or daughter of the native soil, and in insisting on his or her superiority – body, mind and soul – that the locals, initially for self-preservation and subsequently as a form of social distinction, start looking up to the makwerekwere as a pacesetter worthy of imitation or mimicry. Such mimicry or imitation is practised, perfected, internalized, embodied and effortlessly reproduced and transmitted from one generation of indigenes to another, as the natural order of things.
It is this whitening up that would explain why many a black South African insist that makwerekwere is strictly employed in relation to black foreigners, whom, they would also admit, are generally less advanced than South African blacks, even when the latter have few material successes to show for themselves.
This is so reminiscent of how the Boers limited the use of Uitlanders to fellow Europeans whom they saw as being beneath them! It would thus be interesting to establish when and by what means whites in South Africa came to lose their makwerekwereness. Or, should we say their Uitlanderness?
If whiteness is primarily about power and privilege, and only coincidentally about having a white-pigmented body (even if this is where it started its journey, and remains its instinctive reference point), then it is something open to being acquired and lost to whites and blacks alike. It is hardly surprising therefore that Rhodes, in his tropical adventures, did not arrive with power and privilege in his briefcase, but acquired both through his interactions with others in what today constitutes southern Africa. Like every other makwerekwere, Rhodes needed the opportunities of the land of his adventures to activate whatever capacity for fortune, power and privilege he may have inherited.
It is the ever-diminishing circles of inclusion, or narrow nationalism, which post-apartheid South Africa inherited, ironically, from Rhodes and Kruger, which perpetuate current xenophobic attacks on Africans from North of the Limpopo in present-day South Africa. Just as in the days of Rhodes and Kruger, when not every white was white enough, in present-day South Africa, not every black victim of colonialism and apartheid is black enough. It is a case of ever-diminishing circles of inclusion, even when a shared predicament is not in question.