years of mutually destructive cutthroat
competition
among those com-
panies.?
As the competition developed, a few individuals, most of them youthful
immigrants from Europe, struggled to the top and amassed great wealth.
There was Barney Barnato, born in 1852, the son of a London publican and
grandson of a rabbi, who arrived in Kimberley in 1873 with "a little cash
and forty boxes of cheap cigars.?" set himself up as a dealer in diamonds,
and step by step, by fair means and foul, acquired more shares in the
Kimberley mine than anyone else. There was Alfred Beit, born in 1853, son
of a Hamburg merchant, a shy and socially unobtrusive man who was sent
to Southern Africa in 1875 to buy diamonds
for a German
firm and
became the brains behind the amalgamation
of plots and the development
of deep-level mining. And there was Cecil Rhodes, younger son of an
English country parson, who went to Natal for his health in 1869 at age
sixteen and then alternated
between Kimberley and Oxford University,
where he imbibed grandiose visions of imperial expansion and graduated
in 188 I, already a multimillionaire.?
By May 1887, Rhodes had acquired practical control of De Beers, the
second most productive of the four mines, but Barnato and Beit, as well as