A Colonial Celebrity in the New Attention Economy: Cecil Rhodes’s Cape-to-Cairo Telegraph and Railway Negotiations in 1899

Abstract

Abstract In 1899, the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes went to Berlin to negotiate about his fantastical ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ telegraph and railway scheme with his former nemesis, the German emperor Wilhelm II. Why did this initiative of Rhodes, who was held responsible for the disastrous Jameson Raid and no longer occupied any official position, receive so much coverage and legitimacy in the international press? Despite the vast scholarship on Rhodes, there is strikingly little analysis of these negotiations, considering that they were hailed as marking the rehabilitation of Rhodes and the troubled Anglo-German relationship, signalled that Germany would not support the Boers in their conflict with Britain, and led to Germany’s inclusion in the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships scheme. This article analyses the reporting of the negotiations and shows that Rhodes overshadowed other political figures in the competitive ‘attention economy’ of the emerging mass press. Building on the notion of ‘celebrity politics’, it argues that the press attention for him resulted from three interconnected logics: a political logic of agenda-setting and ideological loyalties, a journalistic logic in which scarce access to Rhodes fostered his mythologising, and a mass media logic that increasingly superseded ideological divides. This mass media logic dictated a focus on Rhodes’s personal narrative (infused with literary and colonial themes), personifying politics, and performing these politics in a novel business-like style. This press attention gained Rhodes informal power and shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, successful politics required the new ability of political figures to attract and leverage media attention. Moreover, it constituted the precondition for the growing cult of Rhodes in the twentieth century, and the subsequent criticism of this cult and its representation of racism in recent times.