The LONG and WINDING Rhodes – #3 (Diamonds=>Genocide/Death Camps ~ Eugenics ~ Hitler/Goering ~ Apartheid)

(see bottom of #2, How it was done)

Shark Island off the coast of Namibia (then German Southwest Africa):

Shark Island (German Haifischinsel) is a small peninsulaadjacent to the coastal city of Lüderitz in Namibia. Its area is about 40 hectares.Formerly an island, it became a peninsula from 1906 on by the creation of a wide land connection that doubled its former size.Now a campsite for tourists, from 1904 to 1907 it was the site of a concentration camp, created for members of the Herero and Nama tribes in German South West Africa. (See Shark Island Extermination Camp.)

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(Viewer Alert: Disturbing Images and Text:)

The first Holocaust: Horrifying Secrets of Germany’s Earliest Genocide Inside “the Forbidden Zone” (Feb. 7, 2009 dailymall.uk article by Sean Thomas). This must be the most God-forsaken place on Earth. I’m standing on a dusty desert road in a desolate country on the south-west coast of Africa. ~ In front of me is an unspoken border. Summoning the courage, I prepare to step across. ~For the past 100 years, this simple act would have got me arrested, beaten or shot. In a way, Namibia exists because of German interest in diamonds. In the early 1900s, geologists began exploring the area’s lonely wastes for mineral wealth, including diamonds. Previously, in terms of white settlement, this desolate territory had been thought suitable only for cattle farmers, and maybe guano merchants. The German overlords of Namibia, who had half-heartedly acquired the colony in the 1880s, otherwise showed little interest. But gemstones were a different matter – to protect the potentially lucrative business, the Kaiser sent out his elite colonial forces. The problem was that these forces were led by men who had two ways of dealing with difficulties: violence or, failing that, extreme violence. To see the evidence for this, I must backtrack up the coast of the Sperrgebiet, to Luderitz. This seaport, with its lofty Lutheran churches and its gingerbread Bavarian houses standing stark against the dust of the encroaching desert, has a surreal charm. It is surrounded by intriguing colonial ghost-towns slowly drowning under lemon-yellow dunes. The imposing Skeleton Coast is popular with tourists But dig a little deeper and the charm dwindles. At the far end of Luderitz harbour is a small promontory called Shark Island. It was once a real island, but was recently attached to Luderitz by a causeway. In 1905, Shark Island became the world’s first extermination camp when the German colonial forces, enraged by tribal rebellions, turned on the local Witbooi people. Many Witbooi were killed in the colonial war. Those that remained were herded on to tiny, inhospitable Shark Island. The Germans sent them there to die. The tactic worked: countless hundreds perished, and the Witbooi were wiped from the face of the Earth. Modern Namibia is a land of natural beauty and wildlife That was bad enough. But this was merely a precursor to a second, much larger German-Namibian holocaust. In the mid-1900s the Herero people of northern Namibia rebelled, massacring dozens of German settlers.  The Germans saw this revolt as a serious threat to the potential of their diamond-rich colony, so they despatched a ruthless Prussian imperialist, Lothar von Trotha, to deal with the uprising. The Kaiser’s explicit instructions to his upper-class viceroy were to ’emulate the Huns’ in savagery.  Von Trotha didn’t need encouraging. His intentions were quite plain. ‘I know enough tribes in Africa,’ he boasted. ‘They are all alike insofar as they only yield to violence. My policy was, and is, to exercise this violence with blatant terrorism and cruelty.’ He was as good as his word. After several battles, where the Herero were slain in their multitudes, von Trotha decided to finish the job once and for all by destroying the entire Herero people. In 1907 he issued his notorious extermination order, or ernichtungsbefehl. ‘I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero . . . the Herero are no longer German subjects. . . they must leave the country. If they do not leave I will force them out with the big gun. ‘All Herero, armed or unarmed, will be shot dead. I will no longer accept women or children, they will be forced out or they will also be shot. These are my words to the Herero.’ The Herero were driven west, into the Kalahari desert, to expire. Guards were stationed at waterholes so the people couldn’t drink; many wells were deliberately poisoned. In the searing heat of the desert, denied water and food, the Herero didn’t last long. Some women and children tried to return, but they were immediately shot. Accounts of the holocaust are unbearably harrowing. Witnesses reported hundreds of people just lying in the desert, dying of thirst . . .

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Huge costs, to this day, for the Scramble for Africa. I believe this is important to keep in mind, because the same colonizing spirit is in action today, only it’s just the world. People who are not members of (Anglo-Saxon, German, Dutch, etc., tribes?) carving up the world into regions and making treaties with each other about who gets which continent (or part of one) — should remember how the ancestors who formed the same armies and/or corporations, treated indigenous populations who got in their way, and the political/theological rationale for practicing atrocities.

I would not be dragging us through this (or have spent the time looking it up) did we not have major American leadership who had been schooled at Oxford, courtesy the Rhodes Trust, and as part of its Scholarship Program, running a good deal of politics today. In this set of scholarships.  Women were not allowed til ca. 1970s (compare with when women got the vote in USA), and people of color, only one in 1907, and no more til the 1960s, with primary objection coming from contemporary American Scholars. In case I’m not clear on this, racism and sexism in the name of greed and pride.

When, in 1996, finally welfare reform was passed (privatizing welfare, basically) in the US, two Rhodes Scholars (one, a US President) at least were involved.  Not coincidence, probably, that the populations welfare reform targeted were women and blacks, starting with black women.  In general, people have reported that the US is slated now for “going under” after our assets have been appropriated; there only remains the delicate issue of what to do with, how to house, the remaining population — which are good for labors, which should be warehoused, and which discarded.  Always remember, there is an end-game, and it’s rarely what it’s sold as.

This blog is about consolidation and centralization of wealth, while continuing to wear out and extort most of the population with taxes and lectures about morality, liability and the national debt — as if they were the cause of these issues.   The history of the people behind “the Great Scramble” here is character testimony, and relevant today.

Sorry I can’t put a nicer spin on this ugly truth: The Germans practice for death camps and genocide on displaced tribes on an Island in German Southwest Africa. Before shipping them off to “Shark Island” their water holes were poisoned, they were driven beyond water into the desert, and guards posted to make sure they did not return. They were then used as labor (and the woman also used); they were even used in a very evil fashion after death.

While this section starts with the Germans, there were also the Dutch who practiced slavery, and Mr. Rhodes who fomented a number of the wars, and was absolutely not above mowing down people who stood in his way with an American invention, the Maxim machine gun. The American in question (Hiram Maxim), I learned was a prolific inventor from Maine, however he did move to London, and attempted to sell his gun to the British army; they were less than impressed, so instead he sold it to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s army, who took it up.

There is direct connection between practices here, Goering, Hitler, the concept of forbidding intermarriage of races, and a lot of other horrible things. I do notice (after my own experiences in ‘family court hell’ in America, another century) that the architect of apartheid started out in religion, but later focused on the fields of APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, AND WELFARE.

Another source relates how initially the Germans offered protection against other tribes in exchange for sovereignty, but this degraded : The chiefs had thought that the treaty with the Germans would make them stronger, but when they realised that the opposite happened, it was already too late. The Germans took away the land from the Hereros, cut them off their waterplaces, plundered them, forced them to be slaves and raped the wives and girls. Their plan was to rob the Hereros of all they had, to degrade them and to put them into reservations. But the Hereros started to defend themselves and made a rebellion. The Hereros were actually well organised and armed. They fought bravely with good tactics. The Germans were about to lose the fight, but the situation changed when the Germans sent reinforcement. The Hereros were beaten in the battle of Waterberg on August 11th 1904. After that, the horrible genocide on the Hereros happened, which only a fifth of the people survived. The German forces drove them into the desert without any water. Tens of thousands died of thirst. The few who survived were put into concentration camps. ANOTHER SOURCE: “The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide And The Colonial Roots Of Nazism by David Olusaga and Caspar W. Erichsen (Faber, £20) Reviewed in the DailyMail.Co.UK (Sept. 23, 2010, Michael Williams) At the new seafront restaurant overlooking the bay in the tiny resort of Luderitz on the coast of Namibia, tourists are invited to sit out on the balcony, where they can dine on the finest South Atlantic seafood accompanied by vintage South African wines as they take in the views over neighbouring Shark Island. But little do they know the horrific truth about that view, which the tourist guidebooks describe as ‘stunning’. Shark Island, with its picturesque setting, was the site of the world’s first death camp  –  the German invention that culminated in the Holocaust of World War II, the greatest mass crime of the 20th century. Three-and-a-half thousand innocent Africans were liquidated here at the hands of the Germans, decades before the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, with the tacit sanction of the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II,*** and his ministers.  As modern diners tuck into lobster and oysters, washed down with chilled Chenin blanc, just yards away beneath the waters lie the bones and rusting iron manacles of the Germans’ victims Experiment: The newly invented Kodak roll-film camerawas used by wealthier German officers to take home ‘mementoes’ of their time in Namibia Hitler hadn’t been born when the German flag was raised in 1883 on the coast of South-West Africa (as Namibia was then known)  –  the first conquest of Germany’s African empire. Significantly, the first Imperial Commissioner was Heinrich Goering, father of Herman Goering, later Field Marshal of the Luftwaffe and the most powerful Nazi after the Fuhrer. Until then colonisers had thought Namibia a forbidding place, whose treacherous and fog-bound Skeleton Coast had deterred all but the most intrepid explorers. But hidden from the gaze of Europeans was a land of enormous beauty  –  a realm of tall grasses, hot springs and waterholes, where an array of tribes prospered by tending their long-horned cattle and hunting the herds of springbok and wildebeest that roamed the land. Contrary to the German belief, the indigenous Herero and Nama people were not savages. The Herero had a sophisticated culture, having occupied their ancient lands for centuries, while the Nama  –  the mixed-race offspring of early Dutch settlers  –  were ferocious warriors as well as Christians. Both were more than a match for Goering  –  an overweight provincial judge with a fondness for dressing up in military uniforms  –  who fled the colony, his nerves shattered by their relentless insurrections.  However, Goering had already planted the seeds of an experiment that would ultimately lead to their genocide. German South-West Africa was to become a testbed for Lebensraum  –  the twisted policy of expansion that was to form the heart of Hitler’s ideology. What better solution for the Germans living in the crowded cities of the Rhineland than to create a new Germany on African soil? And it was easy to justify the elimination of the local Africans because they were an ‘inferior race’. However, the Herero and the Nama did not prove quite as ‘inferior’ as the German occupiers thought. For years they stubbornly resisted being driven off their lands into the desert to die, despite huge loss of life at the hands of the Schutztruppe (colonial army) and their ‘cleansing patrols‘. But by 1905 the survivors were weary and weakened. The final straw came when the Kaiser issued an imperial decree expropriating the African lands. Most of the Africans surrendered and were rounded up into concentration camps to build the colony’s new railways  –  gruelling work where men were routinely beaten and women workers systematically raped. on one section of the line, two-thirds of the prisoners died in 18 months. But a sinister new idea was forming in the evil minds of the governors of German South-West Africa. An ‘anthropologist’ was commissioned to investigate the prisoners, who reported that it was of ‘vital importance’ for the success of the German colonial project that those races deemed ‘unfit for labour’ should be allowed to disappear. ‘The struggle for our own existence’ depends on it, he warned. And so the first Holocaust was born. Shark Island  –  a bleak rocky islet in the harbour outside Luderitz  –  would become the world’s first death camp and the most feared place on earth for all the black peoples of South-West Africa. Namibia–Germany has offered a formal apology for the massacre 100 years ago of 65,000 members of the Herero tribe in Namibia by its colonial troops. Development Aid minister Heidemarie Wiecaorek-Zeul made the apology at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the massacre.  Noting that the atrocities committed then would be termed genocide today, she asked forgiveness in front of 7,000 people.  Herero chief Kuaima Riruako accepted the apology, but added, “there must now be dialogue to finish the unfinished business,” referring to growing demands by the Herero people for compensation from Berlin.  Ms Wieczorek-Zeul repeated her government’s rejection of compensation claims but promised that German aid to Namibia, about $24 million a year, would continue (Daily Telegraph, August 16, 2004).  COPYRIGHT 2004 Catholic Insight Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1314399/Hitlers-Holocaust-blueprint-Africa-concentration-camps-used-advance-racial-theories.html#ixzz2DTk2GwOY REGARDING “SHARK ISLAND” — HERE’S AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHS: Photo to left shows that to the east of the island is desert.  Photo to the right shows that the ships are seeking shelter on the east side of the island. The prisoners were put in the NW side without sufficient clothing, where winds were fierce. Shark Island at Luderitz would become the blue print for the death camps of the 20th century. The idea of collecting people from far away locations – shipping them by rail in cattle cars to a remote location beyond the public gaze – then systematically killing them – originated there. If it was done once, it can, and would be done again…. It may be done yet again, depending on same circumstances, and particularly if the same groups (descendants of the colonialists, people with a desire for global domination of Anglo-Saxons such as Rhodes, the German Kaiser, the Dutch (who practiced slavery), etc.   The island is flanked by the vast Namib desert and the ice cold waters of the South Atlantic. (open image above left) The landscape was characterized by solid rock carved into surreal formations by hard ocean winds. Note modern day ships seeking shelter on the protected east side of the islands ocean swells.  Click either image for larger resolution pictures. Shark Island – Photo Gallery Ezakawntu Prisoners were intentionally placed on the exposed northwest point of the barren island – infamous for its bitter cold arctic gale force wind. Diseases in the camp were rampant and intentionally left out of control. The unhygienic living quarters, lack of clothing and high concentration of people contributed to disease which rapidly spread. (typhoid) Huddled together and suffering from malnutrition, the prisoners began to die. Statistics show that as many as 80 % of the prisoners sent to this concentration camp never left the island ‘alive’. They did leave the island though.  IT GETS WORSE — A LOT WORSE: [viewer alert, both images and text:]  THIS CAMP WAS USED BY “EUGEN FISCHER” TO CONTINUE HIS RACE STUDIES, EVENTUALLY FORBIDDING INTERMARRIAGE THROUGHOUT THE GERMAN COLONIES, DIRECTLY INSPIRING HITLER, WHO GAVE HIM A PROMINENT POSITION (RECTOR AT A BERLIN UNIVERSITY); FISCHER STUDENTS INCLUDED A SOUTH AFRICAN PRIME MINISTER HENDRIK VERWOERD (1901-1966, IMPLEMENTED APARTHEID), AND — SS DOCTRS, INCLUDING JOSEF MENGELE.  FORCED STERILIZATIONS, ETC. regarding “verwoerd” notice religious background:  (very interesting bio, pls. read.  Spent time in America also) Born: 8 September 1901, Amsterdam, Netherlands Died: 6 September 1966, House of Assembly, Cape Town, South Africa  In summary: Academic, South African Prime Minister, considered to be the primary architect of apartheid His father was a shopkeeper and a deeply religious man who decided to move to South Africa in 1903 because of his sympathy towards the Afrikaner nation after the South African War. The Verwoerd family settled in Wynberg, Cape Town for ten years, after which they moved to Bulawayo, Rhodesia where the elder Verwoerd became an assistant evangelist in the Dutch Reformed Church. After four years they returned to South Africa and settled in Brandfort, in the Orange Free State.Young Hendrik proved himself to be an able student at the Lutheran School in Wynberg and the Wynberg High School for Boys. In Rhodesia Verwoerd attended Milton High School where he did so well that he was awarded the Beit Scholarship. … theology at the University of Stellenbosch, later changing to psychology and philosophy. He was awarded a masters and a doctorate in philosophy, both cum laude, and turned down an Abe Bailey scholarship to Oxford University, England, opting to continue his studies in psychology in Germany. Verwoerd left for Germany in 1925, and stayed there during 1926, studying at the Universities of Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig: A method for the experimental production of emotions (1926) “‘n Bydrae tot die metodiek en probleemstelling vir die psigologiese ondersoek van koerante-advert” (1928) (“A contribution on the psychological methodology of newspaper advertisement”) Effects of fatigue on the distribution of attention (1928)His lecture notes and memoranda at Stellenbosch stressed that there were no biological differences between the big racial groups, and concluded that “this was not really a factor in the development of a higher social civilization by the Caucausians.”  Verwoerd’s admiration of the American doctrine of “separate but equal” cannot be equated with the racial ideology of the National Socialists. (oh???)  He returned home in 1928 to lecture at his old university. He was appointed to the chair of Applied Psychology and six years later also became Professor of Sociology and Social Work. During the Depression years Verwoerd became active in social work among poor White South Africans. He devoted much attention to welfare work and was often consulted by welfare organisations, while he served on numerous committees.  His efforts in the field of national welfare drew him into politics and in 1936 he was offered the first editorship of ‘Die Transvaler’, a position which he took up in 1937, with the added responsibility of helping to rebuild the National Party (NP) in the Transvaal. Pls. Note:  Drawn to sociology, applied psychology (conducting of psychological practices on others), and welfare; also architect of apartheid, drawn particularly to run education systems for the entire country, believed that Blacks only needed a minimum level of education, enough to fulfil their assigned role in society (i.e., serving the Whites and their businesses). In studying “family court matters” (2009ff) and some of the top USA HHS (which administers and distributes “welfare”) leadership, I noticed that so many of them had majored in and were from fields of psychology and education, both of which are relatively “manufactured” fields seeking outcomes which are likely to be influenced by the politial winds. He also declared himself strongly in favour of racial segregation by attacking the United Party’s policy of ‘pampering, levelling and living together’. In 1938 he published a poster condemning mixed marriages depicting a Black man and White woman living in poverty. Jews were also sharply criticised as a result of the important professional positions they held, which were seen as a threat to Afrikaners. COMMENT — These fields (applied psychology, sociology, welfare) to this day have issues of racism, sexism, attitudes by the elite (who are funding many of the studies) about causes of poverty.  None of these causes, typically, seem to ever credit the same elite as having previously robbed, displaced, or enslaved former generations of the same poor, or set in place policies guaranteed to trend towards poverty (such as has been discovered in the operations of HUD, HHS, DOJ, etc. within the last quarter-century).  We should be aware of their origins and some of their founders! (Verwoerdrose to Cabinet level in 1950 as Minister of Native Affairs. He began to slowly transform the Black reservations into autonomous states (Bantustans), which would eventually federate with South Africa. He was responsible for the displacement of some 80 000 Africans from Sophiatown, Martindale and Newclare to the newly established townships of south-western Johannesburg (Soweto). Verwoerd was also in charge of African education, which he believed should be adapted to the economic life of Africans in South Africa. In reality this limited the access of Black people to the benefits of higher education, good jobs and economic advancement. It was here that he made his infamous statement regarding the limitation of the Black academic curriculum to basic literacy and numeracy** because Africans were meant to be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’. Reminds me of American public education today, except they are having issues with even reaching basic literacy and math.**  His willingness to guide Black people to self-determination once he considered them ready, won him many new White supporters. He promised that the different ‘tribal nations’ living in the Republic would be given equal political rights in their own ‘homelands’. This represented a radical swing in NP policy as previous leaders D.F. Malan and J.G. Strijdom had preached a naked form of White racism and ‘baasskap’ (paternalistic domination) in order to retain Whites in a position of power. As a result of the repressive laws, rebellions broke out in some rural reservations, and strikes and riots occurred in the main industrial areas. Verwoerd’s answers to these were bans, banishments, arrests, and the enactment of increasingly harsh laws. On March 21, 1960,Mangaliso Sobukwe, president of the Pan-African Congress (PAC), called the Africans out in a nationwide protest against the Pass Laws. The police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators at Sharpeville, killing 83 and wounding 365. A state of emergency was declared, and theAfrican National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned. Verwoerd dismissed the international and internal rejection of apartheid. His apparent failure to perceive the abhorrence his policies aroused among civilised nations was best described in his own words when, shortly after the Sharpeville Massacre, Verwoerd addressed a cheering crowd of White supporters, reassuring them that the ‘Black masses of South Africa were in support of the government and administration of the country and were also peace loving and orderly’. Verwoerd is often attributed the title of ‘Architect of apartheid’. Apartheid was however a partial legacy of British colonialism that introduced a system of pass laws in the Cape Colony. However, he was responsible for considerably expanding the apartheid system and creating the “modern” version of apartheid Back to Cecil Rhodes BIOGRAPHY: In 1888 De Beers was restructured as De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. and this company has continued to exercise a monopoly over Kimberly diamond production. Rhodes also won mining rights from the Matabele King Lobengula whose domain lay to the north of Bechuanaland. In 1889 Cecil Rhodes formed the British South Africa Company and obtained a Royal Charter from the British Government to occupy Mashonaland. In 1890 he took office as Prime Minister of the Cape, from which office he had involvement later that year with the establishment of the British outpost of Fort Salisbury (named after the British prime minister of the day) deep in Mashonaland. By 1894 Mashonaland and neighbouring Matabeleland had been subjugated and were united under the name of Rhodesia. In the late 1830’s a number of Boers had become frustrated with the oppressive interference of their British rulers of the Cape and made a `Great Trek’ northwards across the Vaal river where they hoped to live as they themselves pleased. The original Trekkers defeated a native opposition to their presence and were later joined by many Boer migrants. All of this led up to the establishment of a Transvaal Republic in 1860. Although Rhodes viewed the Transvaal Republic as an inconvenient obstacle to British expansionism in southern Africa it was, generally speaking, of little interest to anyone but their own citizens until 1887, when fabulously rich gold reefs were discovered in the Witwatersrand area. The prospect of sudden and amazing wealth lured tens of thousands of non-Boers, many of them English, into the Transvaal to seek their fortunes. The Transvaal’s president, Paul Kruger, refused to grant these ‘uitlanders’ (aliens) meaningful political rights, and Rhodes used this denial as an excuse to conspire to overthrow the Boer-dominated government. He organised his close friend, Dr. Leander Jameson, to lead a column of some 500 armed men to Pretoria with the aim of triggering an insurrection against the Kruger government. The Jameson Raid, which took place in December 1895, was a complete fiasco and resulted in a polarisation of animosity between Englishman and Boer throughout the country. Rhodes was severely censured by the British government for his involvement and forced to resign his premiership of the Cape in early 1896. In the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, Rhodes spent much of this time up in Rhodesia, where he devoted himself to the development of his beloved country. Tensions had been rapidly building up between Rhodes’ pioneers and the country’s indigenous Shona and Matabele population. They eventually rose up in armed revolt against the white settlers, resulting in widespread loss of life. In 1896 – in what was undoubtedly his finest hour – Rhodes and three companions rode, by invitation but unarmed, deep into a Matabele stronghold in the Matopo Hills to negotiate for peace. In October 1899, the simmering tensions between the British and the Boers finally resulted in the outbreak of the Boer war. Rhodes was in Kimberley at the time and was trapped there during a four month siege of the town by 5,000 Boer commandos. As well as playing an important supervisory and morale-building role in the defence of Kimberley – most of whose citizens were employed by his De Beers company – he even had his workshops manufacture a special artillery piece, called `Long Cecil’, to help ward off the attackers. Rhodes, who had a weak and troublesome heart for much of his life, passed away at his beachside cottage at Muizenberg near Cape Town on March 26th, 1902 at the age of only 49. He died just two months before the end of the Anglo-Boer War. By the time of his death, Rhodes had been instrumental in bringing almost one million square miles of Africa under British dominion. At the age of 19 Rhodes had first written out his “Last Will and Testament.” This brief document, prepared at a time when Rhodes’ possessions were modest indeed, included, as its central objective, the furthering the interests of the British Empire. The Will that was valid at the time of Rhodes’ death established the funding of 57 scholarships – now famous as the Rhodes Scholarships – as a practical way of attempting to meet such objective. Rhodes actually left the greater part of his vast fortune for the establishment of these scholarships at his alma mater, Oxford University. Rhodes decreed that these scholarships were to be awarded to young men in regard to: ‘literary and scholastic attainments; his fondness of, and success in, manly outdoor sports; his qualities of manhood, truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for the protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship, and his exhibition during his school days of moral force of character and of instincts to lead and take an interest in his schoolmates’. In 1977 the British parliament legislated in relation to Rhodes’ will such that more Rhodes Scholarships (94) are available and are now open to being awarded to females as well as males and also to persons of a wider range of national origins than Rhodes had himself envisaged.

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Continued on Part #4

which brings it into perspective, and an excellent summary of the history of this cartel also.  FYI, the name “De Beers” came from some Boer brothers whose claims Rhodes (who produced no heirs; never married) bought out early on.   As Rhodes also didn’t live past 50 years old, it turns out that his successor entrepreneur in South Africa was to be Ernest Oppenheimer, also part of this history.  (see last paragraph, here in an (on-line) book by Edward Jay Epstein).