Cecil John Rhodes died in Cape Town in March 1902, aged 48. He had already specified where he wanted to be buried: a granite summit in the Matobo Hills of what was then Rhodesia, a place he called ‘the world’s view’ — Malindidzimu in Sindebele. He had visited it several times in the final years of his life and described it as the most beautiful place he had ever seen.
His body was transported by train from Cape Town, then in a specially constructed ox-wagon through the bush to the Matobo Hills, accompanied by a Ndebele honour guard. It was interred in a rock grave on the summit, which required blasting to create.
The politics of that burial, and of what it means that a grave is still there, are not simple.
Rhodes was a British businessman, politician, and imperialist who controlled the diamond and gold industries of southern Africa through De Beers and the British South Africa Company. He was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He gave his name to the country that is now Zimbabwe — Rhodesia, named after himself at his own initiative. He died one of the richest men in the world and endowed the Rhodes Scholarships, which continue to fund international students at Oxford.
He also authorised the Jameson Raid, a failed coup attempt against the Boer Republic of the Transvaal. He implemented policies that dispossessed African communities of land on a massive scale. His expansion of the British South Africa Company into Matabeleland in the 1890s came with significant violence. The Ndebele and Shona uprisings of 1896–1897, known as the First Chimurenga, were responses to the dispossession and humiliation that British colonial rule had imposed.
One of the more remarkable episodes in Rhodes’s story concerns his role in ending the First Chimurenga. In 1896, facing a protracted guerrilla war in the Matobo Hills — the same granite koppies that he would later ask to be buried in — Rhodes travelled into the hills on horseback with a small group, unarmed, to negotiate with the Ndebele indunas (chiefs).
The meetings that followed — three of them, held in the open on the boulders — resulted in a ceasefire and eventually a peace settlement. Whether this represents genuine courage or a calculated public relations gesture is debated by historians. The outcome — an end to a war that would otherwise have been more destructive — is historical fact.
World’s View is a National Monument in Zimbabwe. The grave of Cecil Rhodes sits alongside the grave of Dr Leander Starr Jameson (his close associate) and a memorial to the men of the Victoria Cross who died in the Matabele Wars. A separate bronze memorial to the fallen of the 1896 uprisings was added in the post-independence period.
The Zimbabwean government has debated the appropriateness of maintaining the site but has not moved to remove it. There is something honest about this ambivalence — the site is complicated and the decision to leave it complicated is, in its way, a more sophisticated response than either demolition or uncritical celebration.
We visit World’s View on all Matobo Hills itineraries. It is, as advertised, one of the most beautiful viewpoints in Zimbabwe. The conversation it produces is usually one of the more interesting ones that happens on a Zimbabwe safari.
