The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

The petition to the authorities at Oxford University cited several quotes from Cecil Rhodes. Describing him as an “apartheid colonialist” they claimed that his statements included this one: “I prefer land to n*****s . . . the natives are like children. They are just emerging from barbarism. . . . one should kill as many n*****s as possible.” These quotations were then picked up and used by other media when reporting on the petition and protests.35 And they are terrible quotes indeed. For they showed Rhodes to be not only a racist but someone advocating genocide against black Africans. At such moments, with such damning material put in front of everyone, it is not easy to even query such material. But a small number of people at Oxford did, including students. They began to look at the sources of the quotes that the anti-Rhodes campaign was using and look into their claims about Rhodes’s life. What they found revealed a deep dishonesty. The anti-Rhodes petition itself offered no sources for its quotations. But the quote did turn up, ellipses and all, in a book review in the Times Literary Supplement in 2006. The author of that piece, Adekeye Adebajo, happened to be a former Rhodes scholar himself, and was quoting from a book under review by Paul Maylam.36 That book makes it clear that the three phrases were all said at different times. But all three parts of the quote turned out to be unstable in their sourcing. These include a work from 1957 that is not a work of scholarsh...