HOW CECIL RHODES STOLE AN ENTIRE CONTINENT! 🤯 #africanhistory

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]One man, one lifetime, five countries stolen, and he did it legally [music] with paperwork.

[00:00:07]Cecil John Rhodes was born in England in 1853, the son of a vicar, sickly child, sent to South Africa at 17 for his health.

[00:00:17]He arrived in a continent full of diamonds and gold and land and people who had lived on that land for thousands of years.

[00:00:24]>> [music] >> And he looked at it and saw one thing, his.

[00:00:29]By the time he [music] died at 48, Cecil Rhodes had personally accumulated more land than most European countries combined.

[00:00:37]He had become the richest man in the world. He had founded two countries, literally named one of them after himself.

[00:00:44]He had become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.

[00:00:48]And he had done it all with the philosophy he stated publicly, in writing, without shame.

[00:00:53]I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.

[00:01:02]He wrote that down, put his name on it.

[00:01:05]Here is the mechanism, [music] because this is where it gets cold.

[00:01:09]Rhodes used paper, contracts, treaties, agreements written in English that he presented to African kings and chiefs, men who often had no English, no legal training, no reason to trust the man sitting across from them, and he told them to sign.

[00:01:27]The most infamous example, 1888.

[00:01:32]Rhodes sent agents to meet King Lobengula of the Ndebele people, a man who controlled the territory of what is now Zimbabwe.

[00:01:41]They told Lobengula the agreement was for limited mining rights, the right to dig a hole in the ground.

[00:01:49]What the document actually said, what was written in the English that Lobengula could not read, was that he was signing away his kingdom everything the land the governance the people all of it Lobengula signed he had been lied to in writing by men representing [music] the most powerful empire on earth Rhodes took Zimbabwe Rhodes founded a company the British South Africa company and used it to govern stolen territory as a private enterprise he was not a government He was a man [music] with a company a company with its own police force its own army its own courts he named his territories after himself Rhodesia what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia two countries his name on the map his name on the letterhead his name on the laws he wanted more he wanted a railway a continuous line of British territory from Cape Town in South Africa to Cairo in Egypt The entire eastern length of the African continent from the bottom to the top