'benevolent benefactor' (whatever this means means

)'
'The actions of Rhodes and his BSAC forever changed the face of Southern Africa and the lives of its inhabitants. He built a large empire in Southern Africa, but in doing so he disregarded the rights of the people—the “natives,” as he referred to them—already living on the lands that he claimed. Rhodes’s treaties with the various African chiefs tended to be of dubious legality, and he routinely pushed against or ignored established boundaries with other European colonial powers, which sometimes put him at odds with Britain’s Foreign Office. Some of the legislation passed while he was prime minister of the Cape laid the groundwork for the discriminatory apartheid policies of South Africa in the 20th century.
A legacy of a different nature was revealed when Rhodes’s will was read in April 1902, detailing an imaginative scheme of awarding scholarships at Oxford to young men from the colonies and from the United States and Germany. That appealed to the public instinct for a more-disinterested kind of imperialism. Most of his fortune was devoted to the scholarships. As the will forbade disqualification on grounds of race, many nonwhite students have benefited from the scholarships, though
it is doubtful that such was Rhodes’s intention. He once defined his policy as “equal rights for every white man south of the Zambezi” and later, under liberal pressure, amended “white” to “civilized.” But he probably regarded the possibility of native Africans becoming “civilized” as so remote that the two expressions, in his mind, came to the same thing.'
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecil-Rhodes