Cecil Rhodes - En av de mest hängivna imperialisterna

 Protesters in South Africa are calling for a statue of Cecil Rhodes, one of the most committed imperialists of the 19th Century, to be taken down. Why does he still inspire such strong feelings?

Cecil Rhodes's statue on the steps of the University of Cape Town has now been boarded up. The university will soon make a final decision on the statue's fate.

The students calling for its removal have already attacked it. The tag #RhodesMustFall has been tweeted many times.

Rhodes was an imperialist, businessman and politician who played a dominant role in southern Africa in the late 19th Century, driving the annexation of vast swathes of land.

He founded the De Beers diamond firm which until recently controlled the global trade. Scholarships allowing overseas students to come to Oxford University still bear his name. Many institutions, including Cape Town University itself, benefited from his largesse. Both Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) were named after him.

But in 2002, when the BBC conducted a poll on the 100 greatest Britons, Rhodes failed to make the list. That was despite it being the centenary of his death. 

Those who want the statue removed object to Rhodes as the ultimate representation of colonialism.  

Rhodes' detractors see him as a racist, and one of the people who helped prepare the way for apartheid by working to alter laws on voting and land ownership. In Zimbabwe, there are still calls to have Rhodes's remains moved to the UK, where he was born.

It's clear that Rhodes thought of the English as a "master race".

"I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race," he once said. His famous desire was to be able to draw a "red line" from Cairo to Cape Town, building a railway across the entire continent of Africa without ever leaving British territory. 

His supporters saw him as having brought political and physical infrastructure to South Africa. But the critics now point to his time as prime minister of the Cape Colony, from 1890 to 1896, when his government effectively restricted the rights of black Africans by raising the financial qualifications for voting. At the same time he once reportedly said: "I could never accept the position that we should disqualify a human being on account of his colour."

He was controversial back in Britain even at the height of his influence. Arguably his most notorious moment was his backing of the disastrous Jameson Raid of 1895, in which a small British force tried to overthrow Paul Kruger, the Afrikaner president of the gold-rich Transvaal Republic. The raid helped prompt the Second Boer War, in which tens of thousands died.

"At best his conception of civilisation was empirical, if not vulgar," the Guardian noted in its obituary of Rhodes, "and in course of time most other ideals had for him to be subordinated to that of keeping up dividends."

Apartheid was introduced in 1948 and ended in 1991, but it has taken until now for there to be momentum behind removing statues of Rhodes. "I'm surprised that [the protesters] have come up with this at the moment," says Berny Sebe, author of Heroic Imperialists in Africa, a study of the enduring influence of Rhodes and others. "The year 2002, the 100th anniversary of his death, would have been a more obvious date."