Cecil John Rhodes in Love and War

From the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning biographer and pre-eminent scholar, a revelatory new portrait of Cecil Rhodes, the man who built South African apartheid and shaped 19th-century colonialism

Cecil Rhodes, the tycoon and imperialist who left a wake of tragedy and violence in South Africa that is felt to this day, was heralded as a genius of entrepreneurship before he was dismissed as the racist architect of a colonial project.

But Rhodes was both/and, not either/or, and Steinberg, neither sparing nor biased, draws on never-before-seen personal documents to reconcile these two realities. He brings us to the rocking ships that carried a sickly teenage Rhodes from his loveless home in England to the arid, merciless plateaus of Durban; to the diamond frenzy of Kimberley’s mines, where Rhodes ingeniously made his first financial jackpot by providing the only available pump in the often-flooded region; to the nascent Cape Parliament, where Rhodes introduced violent and racist policies that stripped Black landowners of their territories, thus paving the way for the apartheid of the 20th century. The throughline Steinberg draws is one of a lonely, isolated figure motivated by the absent family love he so desperately yearned for, and also one of a closeted man whose mentorship of young disciples may have provided the lonesome politician with a semblance of companionship and romance.

A foremost scholar of South Africa, Steinberg brings incisive research and a critical lens to Rhodes, creating the most comprehensive portrait to date of the complicated and cruel figure. Demonstrating how one figure’s psychological make up can be projected onto global political, economic, and social scales, Steinberg shows that with equal parts mediocrity and ambition, Rhodes went to South Africa like so many other upper-middle-class English boys of proper pedigree in search of personal wealth, and returned a king of kings, rich beyond measure from diamonds, and with an unceasing hunger for state-building and empire-making.