English businessman, politician and philanthropist Cecil Rhodes was BOTD in 1853. Bon in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire to a middle-class family, he was largely home educated due to his poor health. In 1870, aged 17, he was sent to South Africa to join his brother and improve his health. After a year of attempting to grow cotton, he and his brother moved to Kimberley and became involved in the diamond trade. He lived for eight years between Kimberley and Oxford, where he completed a degree, known for his eccentric habits, effeminate behaviour and fanatical attachment to imperialism. Over many years, he established a virtual monopoly over the South African diamond trade, buying out his main competitor the De Beers Mining Company and paying off shareholders to achieve a majority ownership of his various business interests. Backed by massive wealth and with a messianic desire to continue Britain’s colonial project, he entered the Cape Colony Parliament in 1881 and became Prime Minister in 1890. He became notorious for expropriating land from Black Africans, crushing indigenous rebellions and fending off competing imperial powers. He infamously tripled the wealth requirement for voters, effectively barring most Black residents from the voting process and ensuring white domination of the region. In 1889, his British South Africa Company invaded Bechuanaland, which he named Rhodesia in his own honour. He was forced to resign in 1896 after authorising an attack on the Transvaal Republic. His career never recovered, and he spent many years in ill health, dying in 1902 aged 48. A lifelong bachelor, surrounded himself with a coterie of pretty young men, and had a passionate, erotically-charged relationship with his live-in private secretary Neville Pickering. In 1884, Rhodes set aside his work to nurse Pickering back to health after a riding accident. Two years later, Pickering died. A distraught Rhodes became his chief public mourner, and never fully recovered from the loss. In his will, he established the Rhodes Scholarship programme, providing funding for male students from British colonies, the United States and Germany to attend Oxford University. Now considered a key architect in the white supremacist policies of South Africa, his reputation remains controversial, with widespread calls for the removal of his name and statue from various educational institutions he helped establish.