[smudgie]

Originally Posted by Merry Kizzmas

We do yes, but horrible histories don't sugar coat the truth that's why it's horrible, because some actions, ethics and laws were in our 'civilised' times abhorrant...
As were the views and actions of Mr Rhodes, regardless of the contents of his will.

If we were to imagine for a second the plight of south Africans in the 19th century and not the conscience easing financial aspect it gives a different perspective.

'We know little about the lives of ordinary people of these times, but archival evidence reveals glimpses of slaves’ struggles against harsh conditions imposed by their white oppressors. Krotoa (known to the Dutch settlers as “Eva”) was a Khoi woman caught in the identity crisis of colonization: used by Dutch leader Jan van Riebeeck as an interpreter against her own people in the mid-1600s, she married a European but was rejected by white society. Sarah Baartman was taken in 1810 from Cape Town to Europe and displayed in exhibitions like an animal. Katie Jacobs, interviewed in 1910 as one of the last surviving ex-slaves, told of her harsh life, of a master who even refused to baptize her. Inhuman treatment sometimes led to resistance. For example, the slave woman Dina escaped during the Boers’ (or Afrikaners') Great Trek of the 1830s. In another instance in 1825, after suffering repeated floggings, Galant van der Caab, a slave on a farm northeast of Cape Town, led a small-scale revolt of slaves. Eventually, Great Britain pronounced the emancipation of slaves in the Cape Colony in 1833, but slavery was replaced by draconian Master and Servant laws that preserved a social hierarchy in which race closely corresponded to class.'

http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/unit.php?id=65-24E-2

Well, to be fair, Cecil John Rhodes was born in 1853, a good 20 years after the emancipation of slaves in the Cape Colony, and after the draconian Master and Servant laws.
Something it appears he can't be blamed for, unless of course we are rewriting history