(African music: drums, marimba, vocals)
♪ Africa ♪
(drumbeats, male narrator)
Early in the 16th century, Africa began to suffer
the greatest calamity in its history:
the steady and continuous arrival of Europeans.
(drums)
This was one of 43 castles built by
seven European nations along the coast of West Africa.
They stand today as monuments to rivalry and greed,
for the Europeans had discovered the wealth of the Americas,
mining wealth and plantation wealth,
and the way to get it: by using slave labor.
Unwilling to take slaves from Europe,
and unable to find enough in the New World,
they turned to Africa.
Horrible in its brutality and violence,
the slave trade robbed Africa of millions
of men and women, and even children.
It spread cruelty and disaster.
And yet, it was not only the enormous numbers that mattered.
Every year for centuries, the trade removed from Africa
tens of thousands of productive workers,
of skilled workers, of men and women
trained in tropical farming, in valuable crafts,
and in many forms of enterprise.
(waves breaking)
Today the great Atlantic rollers have long lost their menace,
and the forebears of these boys were among the lucky ones.
But for millions before them, perhaps as many as 15 millions,
this was the last they would ever see
of their African homeland.
Among the ships' captains there were
tight packers and loose packers.
Their purpose was the same:
to enlarge their profits by landing
as many slaves as possible alive in the New World.
(music)
Sometimes captured far inland, the victims
of black traders were driven to the dungeons
of their white partners on the coast.
There were protests, but they dwindled
as the profits of the trade became ever more corrupting
to kings and merchants in Africa,
as well as in Europe.
It became normal, and even necessary,
for white people to think of their black victims
as less than human.
Racism grew out of slavery.
At Cape Coast, a chapel was built for the British garrison,
right on top of the dungeons where,
at any one time, up to 1500 black captives awaited shipment.
Not even the clergy spoke out against the trade,
and some were ready to share in the pickings.
Early in the 19th century,
the Atlantic slave trade gradually began
to come to an end.
But even as the slavers withdrew,
Europeans of a new kind began to
penetrate deeply into the interior.
These were the explorers.
They had no warlike intentions,
and the guns they carried were for hunting and self-defense.
It was seldom the fault of such men
that the routes they opened up would
all too soon be used by others with very different aims.
Later generations of explorers would try
for the North Pole, or the South,
or in our own day, the moon.
But for Mungo Park, Livingstone, Burton and many others,
Africa's legendary lakes and rivers
were the great challenge. Above all else,
they wanted to unlock the geographical mysteries of the continent.
The strange thing about those remarkable men
is that they really were only interested,
with a few exceptions, in finding things:
in gold, in ivory, in geographical information,
in land to take.
Almost never were they really interested
in the humanity of Africa.
The great exception was David Livingstone,
for the inhabitants of Central Africa,
surely the best-loved European
ever to set foot in their country.
A missionary who became an explorer,
Livingstone traced the great Zambezi River
from its far inland source to the Indian Ocean,
hoping that if he could only prove it to be
a navigable waterway, the whole of Central Africa
could be opened up to the blessings of the Gospel.
In 1855 he became the first white man to see the Victoria Falls,
soon to be accepted as one of the natural wonders of the world.
(music)
But less dramatic obstacles further downstream
barred the way to navigation.
His specially constructed river steamer
had to turn back.
Today, Livingstone's statue stands
overlooking the falls to which he gave a name.
The inscription says that Dr. David Livingstone
discovered the falls. That was in 1855.
What happened, in fact, was that African
friends of his, with whom he was living,
some days upstream from here,
told him about this amazing sight in their country,
and brought him to see it.
And Livingstone, whose generosity of heart
never allowed him to forget what he owed to Africans,
was careful to record this in his memoirs.
But the people who put the statue up,
long after, evidently thought that nothing
really exists until a white man has found it.
(roaring waterfall)
But news of such earthly wonders
failed to impress his missionary paymasters in London.
To them, Livingstone's journeys
and geographical researches were a sign
that he was neglecting his work for God.
They wanted converts, not waterfalls.
He, for his part, found their attitude
to the splendors of Africa so narrow
that he was driven to resign his membership
of the London Missionary Society.
His duty, he believed, was to respond to a wider vision.
There were plenty of others to do ordinary work.
And so indeed there were.
(music)
A growing band of dedicated men and women
came forward from many nations
to carry the Gospel into these heathen lands.
This is the Mangwe Pass, an historic place
in the story of the white man's penetration of Southern Africa.
To the southwest lay the deserts of the Kalahari,
and beyond, to the southeast, white-ruled South Africa,
while back behind me, through the hills,
the old trail ran north to Bulawayo,
capital of the kingdom of the Matabele.
Here ran the southern frontier of that kingdom,
and this pass was the only point of entry
allowed by the Matabele king to
European missionaries, traders or hunters.
In their attitude to the Africans whom they'd come to convert,
most of the missionaries would have been
happy to echo the words of Livingstone himself:
(male voice, Scottish accent) We come among them as members
of a superior race, and servants
of a government that desires to elevate
more degraded portions of the human family.
We are adherents of a benign, holy religion,
and may by consistent conduct and wise, patient efforts,
become the harbingers of peace
to a hitherto distracted and downtrodden race.
(narrator) A few thought otherwise.
Here are the words of Bishop Tozer of the Universities' Mission:
(male voice) What do we mean when we say that
England or France are civilized countries,
and the greater part of Africa is uncivilized?
Surely the mere enjoyment of such things
as railways and telegraphs do not
necessarily prove their possessors to be
in the first rank of civilized nations.
Nothing can be so false as to suppose
that the outward circumstance of a people
is the measure either of its barbarism,
or its civilization.
Nevertheless, most missionaries believed
that they alone could raise Africans
out of their spiritual degradation.
They faced many perils, not from being
boiled in an African pot, which never happened,
but from mortal fevers they could not cure.
Six out of nine at Makalolo Mission,
which Livingstone had founded,
died in a single year.
Willing converts were few, so it had to be asked:
is force justified to save a man's soul?
Flogging was used at some mission stations,
others disapproved.
(male voice) If it is agreed that an expedition
cannot be carried out unless the leader of it
commits day by day acts of brute violence,
the reply is that missionary expeditions
had better not be undertaken.
If missions can only be worked by methods
which no supporter of the mission would
dare to state in detail on a mission platform,
then missions had better not be undertaken.
(music)
(African drumming and singing)
But another and unquestioned requirement
lay at the core of missionary labors:
if the Gospel message was to be accepted,
the spiritual beliefs which formed
the foundation of African community life,
had to be drained of their power, and effectively destroyed.
What the missionaries had come to do
was to convince Africans that they must
renounce their beliefs, forget their ancestors,
and discard the very fabric of their culture.
(drumming, singing)
This missionary film, made as recently as the 1960s,
makes the point very clearly.
(male voiceover from film) As these women, whose lives have been spent
in the dark shadow of fear, listen to the
radiant young girls, they wonder at their joy and confidence.
They remember the offerings they had
so often made to the juju themselves.
The sacrifices which have been of no use.
(drumming, music)
I will tell you of a God who does not
require our sacrifice. He made sacrifice for us.
She shows to these fear-ridden people
the symbol of God's love.
Sometimes the people seek out the missionary later.
We have lost our faith in these jujus, they say.
We want to destroy them and begin a new life.
(drumming)
Some rejoice. Some wonder what will become of them now.
Finally comes the great day when they
gather for the baptism service.
Students from the training college, girls from the primary school,
men and women, one by one
they go down into the waters of baptism
so that they might be renewed in Christ.
(music)
(narrator) A skeptic might find it hard to see why
one form of spiritual renewal should be
so superior to another.
But to these missionaries, this was the
indispensable climax to their endeavors.
(music)
This is a Methodist school called
Waddilove, in modern Zimbabwe.
It's an important day, because the
Minister of Information, Mr. Nathan Shamuyarira,
himself an old boy of the school, is making a visit.
The event brings into focus some of the
underlying currents and contradictions of recent history.
Mr. Shamuyarira speaks for a government
with radical ideas, which may well
find itself at odds with religious conservatism.
Yet he was educated here, and brought up
in the religion of white Colonial settlers,
whose contempt for African humanity
generally outweighed their Christian commitment
to the brotherhood of man.
(singing)
It's one of the ironies of Christianity in Africa that,
although it may have preceded
Colonial occupation, it can't now escape
from the fact that it became deeply involved with the system.
The foreign rulers may have departed,
yet the tunes live on.
(singing)
♪ Oh Lord I thank you ♪
♪ Oh Lord I thank you, for the rest of my life ♪
(preaching in native language)
(narrator) Nowadays, the sermon is no longer In English.
This clergyman is speaking Shona,
the language of most of the children at Waddilove,
and he clearly feels no need to put so much emphasis on sin and guilt.
(congregation laughs)
How far is the accusation true
that missionary teaching was really
part of Colonial teaching?
Well, the whole missionary enterprise here
was an integral part of colonization.
The missionaries came to this country
with the colonizers from South Africa,
and one particular missionary, Reverend Jackson,
assisted in interpreting the deceptive
Rudd Concession to King Lobengula
at the time of colonization, and this
relationship between the administrators,
the soldiers and the miners
-- the gun and the Bible, so to speak --
continued throughout the Colonial period.
But however, Colonial ... the missionary
enterprise did also assist
in the sharpening of contradictions within Colonial society.
On the one hand, missionaries were preaching the equality of Man,
and yet they themselves were practising
discrimination in a deeply racially divided Colonial society.
So they were part of the racist setup?
They were part of the racist setup.
On the other hand, they were providing
education in order to get literate workers
to work in the factories, and in the mines,
and farms of the colonizer.
(singing)
In honor of the Minister's visit,
the school has laid on a display of gymnastics.
Most early missionaries tried to destroy
the dancing arts and rhythms of Africa,
saying that these were lascivious and evil.
Yet African Christianity has managed to
survive that effort at repression,
and children at mission schools like this
can have the fun of combining the new with the old.
(music and singing)
In another part of the school grounds,
quite suddenly, old Africa was being revived.
Here was a schoolgirl in the midst of a Christian mission,
re-enacting the role of a spirit medium
as she goes into her trance.
(Ow! Oow! Ooooww!)
(clapping, chanting)
Helped by friends, she portrays
an ancient ritual of Shona belief.
This, many people still believe, is the method used by their ancestors
to pass messages to the living.
(a-ooo!)
These girls were playing out a drama of
their own history, one that many of them
will have witnessed in their family backgrounds.
Across the years of the Colonial intrusion,
it's a kind of psychological reconciliation
between the present and the past.
How does one summarize the effect of the
missionary effort in terms of Africans
coming to terms, coming to grips with
the realities of the world.
Well on the one hand they were anxious,
and did, you know, take very drastic steps
to destroy the culture of the African people.
This was implicit in the teaching of Christianity itself.
In the same context, it produced
the contradictions which led to its ...
to the downfall of Colonialism,
by educating people, bringing them to an
institution like this where we were able
to meet students from different parts
of the country, and one was given a
national perspective at an institution like this.
And it was, eh, then possible, when one left here,
to go and organize at a national level.
So many of the national leaders of this country today
were educated at mission schools.
Nine out of every ten educated blacks
were educated at mission schools.
Comrade Robert Mugabe, the first
prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe,
was brought up, trained and educated
at Kutama, a Roman Catholic mission school.
And many of the leaders in the present
Zimbabwean government were educated
at various mission schools throughout the country.
So it did produce its own contradictions
and it, you know, sharpened
the contradictions in Colonial society.
Like a lot of other things in history,
it had an unforeseen outcome.
Yes, yes it had.
When you get an old boy coming to your school,
suddenly some of you should feel inspired
by the amount of contribution that he has made,
and what Waddilove has produced in him.
So sir we are greatly honored that you have come.
I know the visit has been a very brief one,
but it is historical, and we do hope
that when you have time, you'll be able to come back
and see more of Waddilove than you have seen today.
(choir singing)
The Minister receives a hero's sendoff,
partly for his role as one of the leaders
who fought for Zimbabwe's independence,
and partly, no doubt, for being
the occasion of an extra day's holiday.
Watching scenes like this, it would be
hard to deny that the coming of Christianity
to Central Africa has, in the end, brought many blessings.
These children of Zimbabwe look forward
to opportunities and freedoms unknown to their parents.
Yet, the cost has been a large one.
Much of value in African culture
was distorted or buried beneath the
intolerant certainties of a foreign culture.
And who can say whether, in the end,
it won't be the practical benefits provided by the missions
that outlast the spiritual ones.
♪ Africa ♪
(voices murmuring, church bell)
(singing)
(narrator) The little town of Bagamoyo
had been the African starting point
for missionaries as well as explorers.
For David Livingstone, it was journey's end.
This the place, ironically a Catholic mission,
the first Catholic mission on the East African mainland,
where Susi and Chuma finally laid the body
of their friend, David Livingstone,
in its last resting place on the African continent.
Throughout the final months of his life,
Livingstone had always been accompanied
by his two devoted companions, Susi and Chuma.
(music)
They it was who nursed him through his last illness,
and undertook that great African journey
of 1500 miles, to bring his body down to the coast
after he died in 1873.
For that most Christian act, they were
frowned out of notice and curtly dismissed.
Later, happily, those faithful companions
received less churlish treatment,
yet it has to be said that Livingstone himself
was not quite free of that same attitude.
Remember his words: "We come among them
as members of a superior race, to elevate
the more degraded portions of the human family."
Of course he was a man of his time,
and such attitudes were common,
but he also affirmed --and this was most uncommon --
that black people could be made to be equal
with white people by two gifts
that Europe could offer: Christianity and commerce.
That's what he believed, and he died believing it.
But I have wondered, in my own years of wandering these trails,
what Livingstone would have said if he
could have seen the outcome of those two gifts.
(silent movie-style piano music)
In the 1870s, the land around the little town of Kimberley,
in what is now South Africa, was found
to contain the richest deposits of diamonds in the world.
Europeans in search of quick and easy profits
rushed into the area.
Among them was a young Englishman who'd
come to South Africa at the age of 17.
His name was Cecil Rhodes.
In spite of his youth, Rhodes quickly learned
that the path to great personal wealth
led through great personal power.
He set out to win that power by getting
control of the diamond industry.
He succeeded by clever maneuvering,
the steady purchase of other men's claims
when their funds were low, and the necessary ruthlessness.
Rhodes saw to it that he was going to be
the one to emerge as the king of diamonds,
and his kingdom was going to be in Africa,
where the English reigned supreme.
This is what he wrote:
(male voice) Just fancy those parts of the world
that are at present inhabited by the most
despicable specimens of human beings.
What an alteration there would be if they
were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.
(narrator) This early film, taken in Kimberley, shows
that attitude and arrogance at work.
Yet mineral wealth was not the only prize.
There was territory to be won.
All through the 19th century, British forces
pushed out of Cape Colony, overcoming
one African people after another, until,
in 1879, they came up against the most
formidable of all, the Zulu.
(music and singing)
So far, this mission of the gun had gone well for the British,
but the Zulu had 25,000 warriors ready to take up arms.
Their king, Cetshwayo, wanted peace.
After all, he'd been crowned with British approval.
But the British wanted war.
(delicate piano music)
(sound of slide advancing in machine)
This genteel set of lecture slides,
the Victorian equivalent of news film
from the battle front, reported the war
as the public at home wished to imagine it.
This was the heyday of empire, and here were British redcoats,
subduing one more mob of heathen savages
before bestowing on them the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
The reality was very different.
(singing)
At Isandlwana, Britain suffered one of
the worst defeats in her Imperial history,
and the Zulus had a victory to celebrate.
As the troops strove vainly to get the lids off their ammunition boxes,
the Zulu impis overwhelmed them.
At the end of the day, 800 British soldiers lay dead.
Not a single wounded man was spared.
But at Rorke's Drift a few miles away,
a tiny British garrison, with great bravery,
withstood three Zulu regiments, numbering nearly 5000 men.
Modern firepower took its devastating toll.
(drumbeat)
(music, shouting)
Determined to break Zulu power once and for all,
another British invasion force,
equipped with field artillery and the new
rapid-firing Gatling guns,
advanced on the king's capital at Ulundi.
Here they found the Zulu army,
but what followed was a massacre, rather than a battle.
Some 1500 Zulu warriors died in fruitless charges on the guns.
British casualties were put at 12.
It was the end of the independent Zulu nation.
(music, drumbeat)
A billionaire by this time, Rhodes now
unfolded his plan for British rule
from Cairo to Capetown.
His immediate ambition was fixed on the
upland country to the north of the Limpopo River.
Here in this broad plateau with its pleasant climate,
there was abundant land for cattle,
and beneath it the promise of still more
mineral wealth, especially gold.
He faced one great obstacle:
60 years earlier, a branch of the Zulu
known as the Matabele, had broken away,
trekked north, and built a strong military kingdom
in the lands that Rhodes now meant to seize
for white settlement.
The African bush has long since moved in and taken over,
but this deserted spot, a hundred years ago,
was the living heart of Matabele power
and the seat of government of its king.
King Lobengula was only the second ruler of the Matabele.
He was destined to be the last.
True to their Zulu tradition, his men lived by the spear,
raiding their neighbours, the Shona people,
for cattle and women.
This, they believed, was their land by right and title,
but now, in a series of deceptions,
Rhodes and his cronies proceeded to
dispossess the Matabele of their land,
their cattle and their independence.
One day, King Lobengula told a story
to a white visitor to his court.
He said to him, "Have you ever watched a chameleon and a fly?
The chameleon gets behind the fly and gently
puts one foot forward, then another,
and when he's close enough he darts his tongue,
and the fly disappears.
I am that fly," said Lobengula, "and you are the chameleon."
On the outskirts of his royal kraal,
Lobengula had allowed a few white
missionaries to establish themselves.
This is all that remains of a settlement
run by Jesuits, whose celibate way of life
had no appeal to the Matabele.
But other missionaries, Protestants of various denominations
(because, of course, the many schisms of the Christian faith
were also imported with the missionaries)
did begin to acquire some influence.
But not without misunderstandings,
as this old man, now well over 100, remembers.
(narrator) Not far from the capital, across a small river,
was the Anglican mission of Hope Fountain.
The early missionaries were caught,
almost at once, in an unavoidable dilemma:
to whom was their first loyalty:
to the Africans, who trusted them and whose guests they were,
or to their own kith and kin?
The Reverend Charles Helm, who lived in this place,
made in the end a crucial choice:
he was Lobengula's trusted white friend,
but secretly at the same time, he began to work for Rhodes.
The fact was, that these missionaries soon became convinced,
and no doubt rightly, and as their records show,
that if they were going to convert
a sizable number of Matabele,
the king's power must be destroyed,
and Matabele culture and independence undermined.
And Rhodes, they saw, was the man to do both.
Step by step, Lobengula's power was eroded.
He appealed to Queen Victoria.
He was advised to sign treaties.
Some of those who advised him to sign the treaties
had come in peace and trust,
but they still deceived him.
The Reverend Helm lies buried here.
On his tomb, his fellow missionaries
felt able to inscribe the words, "Friend of the Matabele."
Was he their friend, or from within the certainties of his own belief,
did he connive in their betrayal?
By 1890, Rhodes and his men were ready to move.
These are scenes from the feature film
"Rhodes of Africa," about the famous Pioneer Column.
They show it in terms of the glorious legend
it was to become for the white settlers who followed,
almost a justification in itself for their
right to the land they were about to seize.
(music)
Lobengula had 16,000 warriors eager to attack,
but fearing defeat, he held them back.
The column headed north, avoiding direct contact with the Matabele,
and passing unopposed through the country
of the less warlike Shona.
Each man had been promised 15 gold prospecting claims,
and a 3000-acre farm.
A contemporary described them like this:
(male voice) "Such a mixed lot I never saw in my life,
all sorts and conditions from the aristocrat down to the street Arab,
peers and waifs of humanity mingling together like a hotchpotch."
(narrator) Some of the pioneers came, in fact,
from the leading families of Cape Colony.
If the expedition met with defeat,
Rhodes knew that their influential fathers
would press the British government for military assistance.
(splashing, creaking wood)
(dramatic music)
An unknown photographer captured the moment
when the Union Jack was raised over Fort Salisbury,
fulfilling Rhodes's dream "that this earth shall be English."
The moment became part of the myth.
Established here, for no particular reason of geography,
Fort Salisbury duly became the modern
city of Salisbury, now renamed Harare.
Elsewhere on the continent, towns can be
unmistakably African in their flavor
and their style of life, but not this one.
In just on 60 years, they turned it into
the very model of a white man's city.
And just over there is the flagstaff
that commemorates the place where all that began.
Amazingly enough, it's still here,
for this is what it says:
To the Pioneer Corps specially recruited
to become the first civil population of Mashonaland.
But who were more civil? The black people,
who had long dwelt in Mashonaland,
and made it fruitful, or the white people
who came here and took it from them by deceit and violence?
Maybe that sounds a harsh question now,
and yet the dispossession of the Shona was also harsh.
They had settled the land, centuries earlier,
mastered and tamed it, and now with this,
they had altogether lost their birthright.
Among those who had traveled up with the pioneers
was Rhodes's close friend and instrument, Dr. Starr Jameson.
Rhodes now chose him to administer this newly won territory.
(singing)
To the southwest, there still remained the undefeated Matabele.
In 1892, Jameson decided that the time had come to finish with them.
A pretext was easily found:
although the Shona people were now
supposed to be under white protection,
they were still the target of sporadic Matabele raids.
A dispute over cattle quickly produced
the war that Jameson needed.
In traditional style, the Matabele
regiments prepared to fight for their capital, Bulawayo,
against Jameson's advancing troops.
(singing)
No amount of Matabele courage could matter now.
As an English poet wrote in bitter satire,
"Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not."
(shouting)
(heavy gunfire)
After defeat came dispossession.
Nearly all of Matabele farming land
and most of the 250,000 Matabele cattle
were confiscated by Rhodes's British South Africa Company,
or by individual settlers.
The structure of Matabele life was shattered.
London Missionary Society wrote,
"Congratulate Rhodes. As missionaries,
we have little to bind our sympathies
to the Matabele, neither can we pity
the downfall of their power."
Lobengula is said to have told his followers
that rather than have a single bone of his body
touched by a white man, he would disappear,
like a needle in the grass.
And disappear he did, while some of his warriors
tried vainly to find a new homeland
northward across the Zambezi.
(female voice over loudspeaker) Good evening ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome on board our cruise,
[name unclear]
... word meaning The Water That Rises.
My name is Phoebe, and [name unclear] is in command this evening.
All drinks served on board are included in the tour price.
(narrator) Before long, white settlers too began to
push northward over this great waterway,
where a generation earlier,
David Livingstone had wandered alone.
To Rhodes would fall the unique distinction
of having not one, but two African colonies bearing his name.
(loudspeaker) The [unclear] that we are now on
is the deepest and the narrowest part of the Zambezi,
and it was here where the pioneers
chose to cross it in 1889.
They floated their wagons using balsa wood
and [unclear]. Being so close to the river,
they [unclear]
became ill and often died from malaria
and blackwater fever.
(narrator) Livingstone had died exactly 20 years earlier
and now the way was open for Christianity and commerce,
here in these lands where Livingstone had found, as he said,
perfect security for life and property,
but where, for Africans, there was no longer any such thing.
But African resistance was not yet over.
In 1896, just three years later, surviving
Matabele regiments of about 14,000 men,
some now armed with rifles,
rose in furious revolt.
They swept down on isolated white settlements
and slaughtered more than 100 farmers.
Caught unprepared, the bulk of the settlers
made a defensive laager at their new capital of Bulawayo.
(sounds of battle)
Then the Shona people, infuriated by taxation
and forced labor on white farms, rose in their turn.
Led by the priests of their religion,
the spirit mediums Nehanda and Kaguvi,
they fought a stubborn guerrilla war for many months.
It was not until 1897 that both risings were finally overcome.
(gunfire, shouting)
(narrator) The settler forces had suffered
considerable losses in the fighting.
Their mood was not merciful.
So-called rebels were hunted down,
and when taken prisoner, treated as dangerous criminals.
Chained together, they were brought before summary courts,
and not infrequently hanged from the nearest tree.
(drum)
Captured at last, Nehanda and Kaguvi were also hanged.
Such were the foundations on which Cecil Rhodes built his empire.
Having thrust aside anyone who stood in his way,
Rhodes spent little time in the country he had formed.
This was the hut he used as an office.
Close by, the colonial government's state house
was built directly on the site of
King Lobengula's old headquarters.
At his death in Capetown in 1902,
Rhodes's body lay in state,
and was then taken to Bulawayo,
where it was carried in procession through the streets.
In the Matobo Hills, south of the city,
Rhodes had a summerhouse built,
where he liked to sit in the evening
and watch the sun go down over that old Africa
into whose history he had broken with such explosive force.
Here the coffin was placed overnight,
before being carried up into the hills for burial.
(music)
Thousands of Europeans had gathered
at the spot called World's View.
Rhodes had come here in the past,
and had chosen it as his final resting place.
(African choir singing)
So here he lies, in the heart of the country that he conquered,
but are we to see this grave
as the final act of taking possession,
or the ultimate insult to the people he dispossessed?
Rhodes has evoked conflicting judgements.
For the world of wealth, he was and is
the mighty empire builder,
the benevolent millionaire,
the hero of money.
For the world of poverty,
he remains a plunderer and a pirate,
the robber baron who took with both hands
what did not belong to him.
Rhodes and his men brought material progress
and 19th-century Africa certainly needed progress,
but they brought it in such a way
that Africans could not share in it.
They deprived Africans of that very condition,
freedom, that enables mankind to move forward and develop.
So the great mission of the Bible and the gun
ended by completely contradicting itself,
by producing an African servitude,
in which the visions and the dreams
of men such as Livingstone
were bound to be denied and set at naught.
(music)
♪ Africa ♪