Richard Steyn’s march through SA’s history of the past century has caught up with Cecil John Rhodes. It was inevitable; you can’t ignore the Colossus, even though he’s now often trunkless, his various visages shattered and a favoured target of the fashionably aggrieved.
After Smuts, Botha, Churchill and Milner, Steyn could hardly avoid one of our history’s great characters, certainly one of its big shapers and currently the most reviled, even by those unfamiliar with his story.
So Steyn, invoking the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, believes history needs to rewritten for every generation, because though the past does not change, the present does. With his journalist’s instinct, Steyn has written Rhodes from a new angle. He has plucked from the past an obscure figure to link up with one whose story has been told so often, and in such detail, that it seemed there was nothing left to tell about Cecil John.
To weave the little-known Lewis Michell into the life of Rhodes is the outcome of enterprising archive sleuthing and help from a friend.
Unlike most of us, Steyn had long been aware of Michell. Writing his first book, Hoisting the Standard: A 150 years of Standard Bank, he’d come across Michell (pronounced as in the Beatles song Michelle, ma belle, and not as in Jodi Mitchell). Michell, it turned out, played a fascinating role in our history, especially as a keen observer of “spurious neutrality”. Except all anyone knew of Michell came from a knothole view: seven chapters in a vast, unpublished autobiography gathering dust in the Cape Archives. Where was the full story?
Steyn’s younger brother, Chris, had done some digging in the archives during the Covid lockdown. There he was given the inspired suggestion that the Michell papers might be held by Yale University in Connecticut. It revived the search and brought in Steyn’s friend Charles van Onselen, the eminent historian who would have clout with the Ivy League college. Thanks to all this collaboration, a USB stick containing the full transcript was soon on its way from Yale to Joburg.
“It was 680-odd pages and a few notes [and] bloody difficult to read in parts because it had faded,” says Steyn. It charted in detail the relationship between Rhodes and Michell, the head of Standard Bank who would become the magnate’s bank manager.
Unlike most bank managers, interested mainly in debits and credits — and especially the debits — Michell was a dedicated diarist. “I read this thing with a growing sense of wonder,” says Steyn of those faded pages of Sixty Years in South Africa. “Suddenly there emerges a character we haven’t heard of before. I thought, this is a hell of an interesting story.”
Michell was clear: his wasn’t an official history, it was a hagiography but it was his hagiography, a version of Rhodes and their relationship, for the benefit of future historians, no more than that. Steyn admits: “I had to temper some of his enthusiasms.”
The first meeting of the two men was acrimonious, “stormy in character”, Michell writes. Rhodes blamed the banks for the fall in value of diamonds, Standard Bank being singled out; the banks insisted on playing by the rules.
“Michell was bloody tough,” says Steyn. “He was going to take no nonsense from Rhodes.” Their relationship improved, becoming one of “mutual admiration”, perhaps because Rhodes quickly discovered that Michell, unlike so many others he’d come across, did not have a price.
Rhodes also knew that in Michell he could rely on someone to continue his legacy. Michell became the chair of De Beers and the British South Africa Company (once he had retired from the bank, of course, because he would never reconcile working for both, or be “squared”).
In 1903 he even became, briefly, a minister in the post-war Cape government, possibly feeling he owed it to Rhodes, who had died the year before. In one of the bizarre twists of SA history, the government was led by prime minister Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’ old collaborator and notorious for the raid that was a curtain-raiser to the war.
Michell also carried on the Rhodes Trust, “keeping the ship afloat”, according to historian Phillip Ziegler, and especially the Rhodes scholarships, where he failed to have women included in 1920, a restriction lifted only in the mid-1970s. The Rhodes Mandela Scholarships endure today, women included and possibly benefiting even some “Fallists”.
• ‘Rhodes and his Banker’ by Richard Steyn is published by Jonathan Ball.
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