THE FOUNDER
Cecil Rhodes And the Enigma of Power
Robert I. Rotberg, with the Collaboration of Miles F. Shore
New York: Oxford University Press
762 pp., $35.00
Cecil Rhodes, the founder of industries, countries, and scholarships, loomed larger than life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, his abilities and his faults magnified by his extraordinary character and remarkable achievements.
He was "not a good man, but he was great and far-seeing," according to Robert I. Rotberg in this hefty psychobiography. The author, who was himself a Rhodes scholar, has not only given us the facts of Rhodes' life, but with the aid of a collaborator, Dr. Miles F. Shore, a psychiatrist, he has stretched the great man out on the psychiatrist's couch and attempted to explain--with the help of Sigmund Freud, Erik Erickson, and Heinz Kohut--why he was who he was and why he did what he did.
His mother's fault
Cecil John Rhodes, the imperialist, benefactor, politician, and entrepreneur, was born on July 5, 1853. He was the fifth son of a vicar in Hertfordshire, by the clergyman's second wife. Not counting a daughter from the vicar's first marriage, the family eventually consisted of nine sons and two daughters, of whom only one son ever married. Two of the children died in infancy. That one of these was born and died shortly after Cecil's birth, Professor Rotberg and his collaborator find highly significant, for his mother Elmhirst was born, an event that, says Rotberg, "would have been profoundly disturbing for Cecil."
In the nearly five years in which Cecil was the baby of the family, Rotberg and Shore conjecture that he "received the kind of nurturance from his mother which is usually the fortune of eldest children only." Firstborn, they note, are "overrepresented among the ranks of high achievers," while "studies of genius and leadership" demonstrate that "successful political figures come from the ranks of middle children." Rhodes was a middle child. Rotberg and Shore argue that Rhodes experienced the advantages of being both a middle and a first child, and was thus endowed with a bent toward politics and inspired with a drive to succeed.
The birth of Elmhirst, in the author's opinion, was a "traumatic rupture" of the idyll he had enjoyed with his mother, "causing a sense of loss, a desire for restitution and the reduced feelings of guilt which were characteristic of Rhodes' adult character." Furthermore, because this occurred when Cecil was "well into the oedipal state of development," Rhodes had "a conviction of the legitimacy of his own wishes and relative absence of a sense of guilt." All this, it is argued, blessed him with charisma and "an acute empathic sense" that flowed "uninterruptedly form his early and sustained special relationship with a mother whose own empathic gifts were critical and persuasive."
Cotton and diamonds in South Africa
All previous biographies, including Brian Roberts' Cecil Rhodes: Flawed Colossus, published
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