Cecil Rhodes

The son of a vicar from Hertfordshire, Rhodes arrived in South Africa at sixteen for his health and entered the diamond fields at Kimberley by eighteen. With Rothschild backing, he spent two decades buying out competitors until he held a near-complete monopoly of the world diamond market, founding De Beers in 1888. He entered the Cape Parliament at 27, became prime minister in 1890, and immediately set about dispossessing black Africans - seizing land through the Glen Grey Act and tripling the wealth requirement for voting to bar them from elections. He oversaw the founding of Rhodesia in the early 1890s, pushing his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory, but the unauthorised Jameson Raid in 1896 ended his premiership and broke his career. He died in 1902 after years of cardiovascular decline, buried at his request in the territory he had named after himself, leaving behind the Rhodes Scholarship and a legacy now fiercely contested.