The sheer humanity of Cecil and Wilhelm

Destiny to an end

I found myself thinking about the men I wrote about in my blog yesterday and how men of destiny can be undone by the uncertainties and the inadequacies of our humanity. Something to reflect on, if only to put things in perspective about how to live life and relate to others.

There were just 6 years between the birth of Cecil John Rhodes and that of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the former, the 5^th son of a country clergyman and the latter, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the grandson of the first emperor of the German Empire and Queen Victoria, destined for the throne and the power that it portended.

Privilege and fortuitousness

Cecil John Rhodes was a sickly child sent to South Africa in the hope that it might help his health, he became a man of the right time in the right place when gold and diamonds were being discovered in large quantities in South Africa and by deft business acumen, political power and economic heft became one of the richest men in the world.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was a spoilt brat, the eldest of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, but hardly well-liked for his demeanour, arrogance, megalomania, and self-belief that he was more capable than his ministers and diplomats. In time, his quest to expand his empire with the advent of WWI led to his forced abdication in 1918 and the end of the German Empire.

Our limitations as humans

Cecil John Rhodes could have been anything, he was ambitious if not power-drunk, and Mark Twain wrote of him saying, “he is the only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention with an eclipse.” [Mark Twain: Cecil Rhodes]

Yet, it is his health that failed him, for, at 48, he died with these words recorded from his lips, “So little done, so much to do.” Kaiser Wilhelm II was emperor for just over 30 years when he went into exile at Huis Doorn in The Netherlands where he lived another 23 years probably ruing the decisions that lost him the empire. A man who could only reminisce of the life and glory he once had when he died of a ripe old age of 82.

The dead stay dead

Kaiser Wilhelm II leaves a legacy of being the centre of WWI and presiding over the falling of the major monarchies of mainland Europe, he lies in repose in a mausoleum built by his exiled residence at Huis Doorn.

Cecil John Rhodes, the imperialist and every other epithet he both deserves or not is the benefactor of the Rhodes Scholarship and many memorials to the whitewash and sterilised part of his biography. He lies under a slab of stone at Matopos Hills in Zimbabwe at a place he called World’s View.

Just a thought

You can have so much power and lose it, just as you can have so much money and not live to use it. Who would have thought a sickly child from the English countryside would rise to become one of the most powerful and richest men in the world?

Conversely, maybe Kaiser Wilhelm II might have sustained the German Empire and ruled for 53 years and taking the House of Hohenzollern into its 4^th Century of power, but he squandered what was bequeathed to him.

“The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” [Bible Gateway: Psalms 103:15-16 (NIVUK)]

Blog - Huis Doorn (1999), Rhodes Cottage (2019)

Huis Doorn (1999), Rhodes Cottage (2019)

Men who touched the world

This morning, I read a story of how Cecil John Rhodes inspired WWI through a first fraught then interesting friendship between him and Kaiser Wilhelm II. The fascinating link between them is exemplified in a paperweight presented to the Kaiser in 1905 which included rocks from Cecil John Rhodes’ grave at the World’s View in the Matopos Hills, which is to be displayed at Huis Doorn. [The Guardian: The kaiser and the paperweight: how Cecil Rhodes helped inspire the first world war]

Now, I will not go into the lives of these two extraordinary yet flawed men who have left an indelible mark in world history, that is covered by more qualified archivists and historians, but I find myself filling in another blank in my experiences of travel interests spurred on by curiosity.

My own personal journey

It was August 1999, in January of that year, I had just come out of an almost 7-year relationship, but we remained friends and best of friends to date, we had gone on holiday to Brussels for a week, then he returned to London whilst I made my way up to the Netherlands by train to holiday with a friend I first met on a trip to Amsterdam and developed a friendship with over more than a year.

He picked me up from Utrecht Central Station and we drove to his house in Doorn. Just a few hundred metres from his house was this uniquely imposing building, Huis Doorn where I was told the Kaiser spent his final decades in exile after his abdication at the end of WWI. Audrey Hepburn’s mother had before his residency spend her childhood at Huis Doorn too.

My friend had a story, three times in the preceding decade with his mother by his bedside, they thought he was not going to make the morning, like a cat with nine lives he rose from the grip of AIDS to survive and thrive. His mother lived a few streets away, a native of Doorn. It was whilst in Doorn that I observed the solar eclipse of 1999 on the 11^th of August. [Wikipedia: Solar eclipse of August 11, 1999]

Huis Doorn – a personal tour

His mother, a dear lady in her early 70s was such fun to be with, we just bantered at length and as a child, her father was a groundsman at Huis Doorn, with their house neighbouring the grand house. She talked of times of having tea with the Kaiser who had many children and embraced into the Doorn community found time to entertain the children of the village and play games with them.

She told me of times when they, the children played hide-and-seek in the house which had secret rooms, doors, chutes, tunnels and much else. She offered to take me on a tour of the house on a bright afternoon, which we eventually did. A guided tour by someone who knew the Kaiser, the house, the stories, the gossip, the rumours and witnessed his demise was something not to be missed and we were the only ones there, after the public museum itself had closed.

Rhodes Cottage Museum – a personal tour

Just over 30 years later, I was in Cape Town with Brian and we decided to visit Rhodes Cottage Museum in Muizenberg, the cottage by the sea was where Cecil Rhodes spent his last days and died. Upon arrival there, the cottage was closed, it did not look like a typical museum, it is run by volunteers.

However, we went next door to ask for some information about the museum and as luck will have it, they had keys to the museum and the cottage was opened for Brian and I to tour at our leisure and return the keys when we were done. [Facebook: Rhodes Cottage Museum]

To view the bed in which Cecil Rhodes died and other elements of his personal history within the cottage rather than his public profile in monuments, endowments, and bequeathments was awesome. You got the essence of the man in his greatness and limitations of our humanity in our mortality. The Kaiser and Cecil Rhodes, after all they did, were now footsteps in the sands of time.

Houses with personal effects show a different picture of a person’s humanity with all the accoutrements of public life and achievement stripped away, I visit houses because I get to know the person is just human rather than superhuman or divine.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Akin Akintayo (@instaforakin)