[The most important agent of British imperialism in…]

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The most important agent of British imperialism in this . period was Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes virtually ran South Africa for the last 25 years of the nineteenth century through his combination of being both Prime Minister of the Cape government and one of the leading capitalists in the diamond and Gold mining industries.

Financed by money raised .. on the London Stock Exchange Rhodes and his friends were making profits by 1889 in excess, of £1½ million a year out of the sweat of African labourers recruited - often by force - as mine labourers, and paid no more than a pittance.

By the late 1880s several things were worrying Rhodes and through The Kaiser was not far behind. He already had Tanganyika on the East and had moved into South West Africa on the Western borders of South Africa. He likewise might try and link up the two.

In the minds of the imperialists, Africa was a gigantic chess board. Rhodes dealt stealthily first with the Africans and then with the Boers.

Once colonial control was consolidated Rhodes instituted the hut tax. This was the basic imperialist tactic - together with forced labour measures - to force the Africans to go and work in the mines.

A tax had to be paid in money on each hut. The only way to get money was to work in the mines for wage labour. The other part of the strategy was land robbery.

Africans were moved off the majority of the most fertile agricultural land and on to tribal reservations. Here the land was worse and the food output was less.

This, coupled with the greater concentration of population on the land, meant starvation unless some of the youth were sent off to work in the mines.

The other side of that coin was that mine wages were incredibly low - below the subsistence cost of

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SOCIALIST PRESS Wedesda h the labourer. Death was prevented only by food grown 'at home' by the rest of the community on the