Episode 263 - How Black Voters Helped Elect Cecil Rhodes: Kimberley and the Cape Franchise, 1879
About this episode
This episode explores the impact of black voters in the election of Cecil Rhodes and the socio-political climate of Kimberley in the late 19th century.
The battles are coming thick and fast because this is the end of the seventh decade of the 19th Century - the British have just been defeated at the Battle of Hlobane mountain on the 28th March. There’s been so much skop skiet and Donner it’s time to reflect on matters further south west Before we buzz back to Zululand next episode. n the Transvaal, resistance to British rule was slowly setting, like mortar hardening between stones, the scattered grievances of the Boers beginning to cohere into something firmer, more deliberate. Far to the west, Kimberley glittered with a different intensity - fortunes were rising from the dust, deals were struck in the heat and noise, and the great hole in the earth swallowed men and money alike. Yet beneath the clangour of picks and the shimmer of diamonds, another current was moving. For even as the town prospered, a sequence of personal tragedies was about to cast a longer shadow over Kimberley shaping not only its mood but the hardening temper of one of its most ambitious young men. Cecil John Rhodes would endure a series of personal blows in the years ahead. These losses did not soften him. If anything, they seemed to harden an already…
More episodes of History of South Africa podcast
- Episode 272 - The Boers wring Major General Colley’s Column at Laing’s Nek
- Episode 271 - Basutoland Gun War, Gold Coast and Ottoman Empire
- Episode 270 - Kruger vs Black Michael and Courageous Women at the Battle of Bronkhorstspruit
- Episode 269 - Bapedi Chief Sekhukhune’s Cruel Fate and the Afrikaner Paradox
- Episode 268 - The Theodolite and the Hardepad: Thomas Bain’s Silent Mountain Pass Artisans
- Episode 267 - Betrayal at the End: Mnyamana, Cetshwayo’s Dutchman, and the Crushing of the Zulu Kingdom
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the History of South Africa podcast podcast page.