Cecil Rhodes was born in 1853, the fifth son of a clergyman. Aged 17, he travelled to what is today South Africa, mostly because his older brother Herbert was already there. The two started work as farmers but were quickly drawn into the diamond-mining boom around Kimberley. Herbert's accidental death in 1879 was a bitter blow.
Helped by some dodgy financial trickery, Rhodes established a diamond monopoly for his company, De Beers, which remains one of the world's largest producers. He was also a big investor in gold mines in the region. From an early age he was rich enough to buy out business rivals and buy off political foes.
He favoured white over black employees. Black miners were subjected to invasive, demeaning searches once they reached the end of their contracts, though his businesses generally paid black miners more than most white miners were earning in Britain at the time.
In 1880 Rhodes entered politics in the British Cape Colony, with the overt goal of protecting his business monopoly and his wealth. He became the Cape's prime minister in 1890. Black Africans were less badly treated in Rhodes's Cape Colony than in the Boer republics—which practised slavery decades after the British abolished it—or in the Congo Free State ruled by Belgium's King Leopold II.
Through dubious deals with native African kings, and helped by troops equipped with Maxim guns, his British South Africa Company took over big chunks of what became Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today's Zambia and Zimbabwe). Rhodes deliberately favoured white farmers in the new colonies, setting strict limits on black ownership of land.
One of his worst mistakes as prime minister was becoming too closely involved in provocations against the Boer republic of the Transvaal, culminating in the disastrous Jameson Raid of 1895-96, which attempted to overthrow the government. It foreshadowed the outbreak of the second Boer war three years later. The subsequent absorption of the Boer republics into South Africa ultimately led to the apartheid system.
Rhodes died in 1902, aged 48.
Rhodes's bequests were many and munificent. He gave the huge sum of £100,000 ($500,000 at the time, equivalent to almost $20m today) to Oriel College, Oxford, and set up the famous Rhodes scholarships with the explicit provision in his will that no applicant should be disqualified "on account of his race or religious opinion".
In 2015 Chumani Maxwele, a young black South African, gave a "poo shower" to Rhodes's statue at the University of Cape Town, built on land Rhodes bequeathed. This set off a global campaign called "Rhodes Must Fall". The Cape Town statue was removed, but others, notably one at Oriel College, Oxford, remain standing. Some of the loudest proponents of the campaign have been Rhodes scholars from Africa.
The African National Congress's Freedom Charter of 1955 amounted to a call for the rooting out of the legacy of Cecil Rhodes, since it was his colonialist achievements that presented so many obstacles to those who sought a country based on equality, including equal access to land, mines and housing.
Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government.