Sir – Very good to have the corrective letter from Marieke Faber Clarke (King was hunted, January 21) on the death of King Lobhengula of the Ndebele people of Western Zimbabwe and the true nature of Cecil Rhodes treatment after Lobhengula’s death of the King’s sons, Njube Khumalo and Nguboyenja Khumalo, by way of ruthlessly preventing either from laying claim to their father’s kingdom.

Marieke Faber Clarke quotes the Welsh missionary, Bowen Rees, who regarded Lobhengula as “The brave king (who was) hunted like a wild animal’, not a view by those whom Oxford University Chancellor Patten has accused of “rewriting history”, but a contemporary witness who “loved the king from the bottom of my heart”.

This is vital to the Rhodes Must Fall debate, the reality that in his time in Africa Rhodes’ actions were found to be unbearable and repulsive by many of his contemporaries and by many in the UK.

The Rhodes myth of heroic begetter of British civilisation was fabricated after his death; his brutal expropriation of more than a million square miles of African land was achieved without any regard for the cultures and identities of, for example, the Ndebele or the Shona, who were, for Rhodes, “despicable specimens”, examples of a subspecies who deserved to be demeaned and deracinated.

No surprise, then, that Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of Cecil Rhodes: both pursued fantasies of global domination.

The South African writer, early feminist, and humanist, Olive Schreiner, wrote of Rhodes in 1897, five years before his death: “We fight Rhodes because he means so much of oppression, injustice and moral degradation in South Africa – but if he passed away tomorrow there still remains the terrible fact that something in our society has formed the matrix which has fed, nourished, built up such a man.”

Bruce Ross-Smith
Headington