Eighteen-year-old Cecil Rhodes and his brother Herbert leave the Natal Colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley in October 1871.

Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes will succeed over the next seventeen years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area.

Cecil Rhodes was born in 1853 in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, the fifth son of the Reverend Francis William Rhodes and his wife Louisa Peacock Rhodes.

His father is a Church of England vicar who is proud of never having preached a sermon longer than ten minutes.

His siblings include Francis William Rhodes, who will become an army officer.

Rhodes had attended the Bishop's Stortford Grammar School from the age of nine, but, as a sickly, asthmatic adolescent, he had been taken out of grammar school in 1869 and, according to Basil Williams, had "continued his studies under his father's eye...His health was weak and there were even fears that he might be consumptive, a disease of which several of the family showed symptoms. His father therefore determined to send him abroad to try the effect of a sea voyage and a better climate. Herbert [Cecil's brother] had already set up as a planter in Natal, South Africa, so Cecil was despatched on a sailing vessel to join Herbert in Natal.The voyage to Durban took him seventy days, and on 1 September 1870 he first set foot on African soil, a tall, lanky, anaemic, fair vhaired boy, shy and reserved in bearing." (Cecil Rhodes, Makers of the 19th century, H. Holt & Company, 1921, retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=A1txHgXvlU4C on 8 November 2012)

His family expected he would help his older brother Herbert, who operates a cotton farm.

When he first came to Africa, Rhodes had lived on money lent by his aunt Sophia.

After a brief stay with the Surveyor-General of Natal, Dr. P.C.

Sutherland, in Pietermaritzburg, Rhodes had taken an interest in agriculture, and joined his brother Herbert on his cotton farm in the Umkomazi valley in Natal.

The land is unsuitable for cotton, and the venture had failed.

Mineral discoveries in southern Africa in the 1860s, the 1870s, and the 1880s have an enormous impact on the region.

Diamonds had initially been identified in 1867 in an area adjoining the confluence of the Vaal and the Orange rivers, just north of the Cape Colony, although it was not until 1869 to 1870 that finds were sufficient to attract a "rush" of several thousand fortune hunters.

The British government, attracted by the prospect of mineral wealth, had quickly annexed the diamond fields, repudiating the claims of the Voortrekker republics to the area.

Four mines were developed, and the town of Kimberley had been established.

The town has grown quickly to became the largest urban society in the interior of southern Africa in the 1870s and the 1880s.

Although the mines were worked initially by small-scale claims- holders, the economics of diamond production and marketing soon lead to consolidation.

Within two decades of the first diamond find, the industry is essentially controlled by one monopolistic company—Cecil Rhodes's De Beers Consolidated Mines.

The 1886 Treaties and the "Rose-Colored Map": Portugal’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa

In 1886, Portugal signed two treaties with France and Germany, formally delimiting colonial boundaries and securing international recognition of Portuguese sovereignty over vast interior territories between Mozambique and Angola. These agreements reinforced Portugal’s claim to a continuous east-west corridor across Africa, a vision that would become central to Portuguese imperial ambitions.

The "Rose-Colored Map" and Portuguese Expansion Efforts

• The Portuguese claim to this territory between Mozambique and Angola was visually represented in a map annexed to the treaty with France, where the claimed lands were colored red—a depiction that would later be known as the "rose-colored map" (Mapa Cor-de-Rosa).
• To substantiate this claim, Portugal organized successive expeditions into the interior, attempting to establish effective occupation in line with the principles set by the Berlin Conference (1884–1885).

British Rivalry and the Cape-to-Cairo Railway

While Portugal sought to consolidate its territorial ambitions, Britain had its own imperial objectives in the region. Under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes, the British were simultaneously exploring the interior from south to north, aiming to establish a British-controlled corridor from Cape Town to Cairo, linked by a transcontinental railway.

This conflict of interests between Portugal and Britain would soon escalate, leading to a diplomatic crisis that would culminate in the 1890 British Ultimatum, forcing Portugal to abandon its territorial aspirations in favor of British expansionism.

The British send a force under Sir Charles Warren into Stellaland in December 1884.

Whether or not the formal independence of either Stellaland or Goshen was ever officially recognized is not entirely clear.

In Stellaland's favor, one can point out that the Montevideo convention which formalized the definition of sovereignty in the modern sense would not be signed until 1933, and that the local chiefs approved its existence.

On the other hand, several British sources refer to van Niekerk and his followers as "freebooters" and "marauders," but de jure recognition from the United Kingdom can be implied from a telegram that was erroneously sent by Sir Charles Warren, military commander for British Bechuanaland, to van Niekerk in which he had endorsed Cecil Rhodes' settlement in Stellaland.

Only later did Warren realize that his wording could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of Stellaland's legality, and he tried to deny the message's implications.

In February 1884, Great Britain unilaterally declares the area a British protectorate.

Stellaland's laws and constitution are practically identical to those of the South African Republic.

It never issues an independent currency, but instead—like all the surrounding states—uses the South African pound; it does, however, print its own postage stamps beginning in February 1884, which are still traded among collectors to the present day.

Due to the fact that van Niekerk's government had announced to levy taxes on all trade going through its territory, both Cecil Rhodes and the British administration fear a setback for their endeavors in the mining-business, since Stellaland lies on one of the main trade routes.

It is also presumed that the small country could eventually be incorporated into the neighboring South African Republic in an effort to circumvent the Pretoria Convention of 1881, which had called for an end to Boer expansionism.

Rhodes had even asserted that the area is of such a crucial nature to the Crown that if the territory held by Stellaland remains under Afrikaner control, British presence "should fall from the position of a paramount state in South Africa to that of a minor state." (Tamarkin, Mordechai (1996), Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners, London: Frank Cass & Co., p. 90)

These fears had been fueled when, on September 10, 1884, President Paul Kruger of Transvaal declared the area to be under the protection of the South African Republic and annexed it six days later.

Warren’s British forces have invaded Stellaland and subsequently abolish the republic in August of 1885 before incorporating it into British Bechuanaland, created on September 1, 1885.

The diamond industry has become the key to the economic fortunes of the Cape Colony by providing the single largest source of export earnings, as well as by fueling development throughout the colony.

Whereas the Cape's exports in 1870 had been worth little more than £2,000,000, with wool providing the bulk of earnings, by the end of the century the value of exports has risen to more than £15,000,000, with diamonds alone accounting for £4,000,000.

There is also substantial growth in population, much of it from immigration.

As a result, there will be close to four hundred thousand resident Europeans in the Cape Colony by 1900, twice the number who had lived there in 1865.

John Tengo Jabavu, a mission-educated teacher and vice president of the NEA, had founded his own newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion) in 1884.

Jabavu uses the newspaper as a forum through which to express African grievances about the pass laws; "location" regulations; the unequal administration of justice; and what are considered "anti-native" laws, such as the one passed in 1887 by the Cape Parliament at Rhodes's behest that had raised the property qualification for voters and had stricken twenty thousand Africans off the rolls.

Through these organizations and newspapers, and others like them established in the late nineteenth century, Africans protest their unequal treatment, pointing out in particular contradictions between the theory and practice of British colonialism.

They call for the eradication of discrimination and for the incorporation of Africans into colonial society on an equal basis with Europeans.

By the end of the nineteenth century, after property qualifications have again been raised in 1892, there are only about eight thousand Africans on the Cape's voting roll.

Cecil Rhodes, who had succeeded in monopolizing the diamond industry, is much less successful on the Rand, where his companies prove to be poorer producers than those of his competitors.

In the 1890s, he seeks to compensate for his lackluster performance by carving out a personal empire in present-day Zimbabwe, original site of the fifteenth-century gold industry of Great Zimbabwe.

There he rules the Ndebele and the Shona people through his British South Africa Company.

South African gold soon eclipses diamonds in importance.

Africans had mined gold for centuries at Mapungubwe (in South Africa, on the border with Zimbabwe) and later at the successor state of Great Zimbabwe, and they had traded with Arabs and Portuguese on the east coast of Africa.

In the 1860s and the 1870s, Europeans had made a number of small finds of their own, but the major development had taken place in 1886 when potentially enormous deposits of gold were found on the Witwatersrand (literally, "Ridge of White Waters" in Afrikaans, commonly shortened to Rand) near present-day Johannesburg.

English-speaking businessmen who had made their fortunes in the diamond industry quickly buy up all the auriferous claims and establish a series of large gold-mining companies that are to dominate the industry well into the twentieth century.

Rhodes, together with his fellow gold mining magnates and the British government (in the persons of Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies, and Alfred Milner, high commissioner in South Africa), continues to denounce Kruger and his government.

Rhodes and his peers call attention to what they consider rampant official corruption while also complaining that taxes are too high and that black labor is too expensive (because of perceived favoritism by the government regarding the labor needs of Afrikaner farmers).

Chamberlain has concluded by the second half of the 1890s that the British need to take direct action to contain Afrikaner power, and he at first uses diplomatic channels to pressure Kruger, although with little success.

Milner points out what he considers the appalling condition of British subjects in the South African Republic, where, without the vote, they are, he argues, "kept permanently in the position of helots."

In 1899 Milner advises Chamberlain that he considers the case for British intervention "overwhelming."

Ignoring attempts by Kruger to reach a compromise, Chamberlain in September 1899 issues an ultimatum requiring that Kruger enfranchise British residents of the South African Republic.

At the same time, Chamberlain sends troop reinforcements from Britain to the Cape.

Kruger, certain that the British are bent on war, takes the initiative and, allied with the Orange Free State, declares war on the British in October 1899.