Financed by the people of Cape Town in appreciation of a visionary who pioneered the regulating of world diamond trading, Rhodes Memorial is located on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. The memorial is in honour of Cecil John Rhodes, a British born sickly young lad who travelled to South Africa to join his brother farming and later on the Kimberley diamond fields. He was to make a fortune there and start the De Beers Mining Company. One of Rhodes’ properties was that of the Groote Schuur (great barn) estate below Devil’s Peak and when he died in 1902 at age 49, a decision was taken to erect the memorial above the estate which he bequeathed to the public.

The building of Rhodes Memorial was completed in 1912 and overseen by Sir Herbert Baker, a well-known architect. The centre piece is a bronze statue of a man on a bucking horse and the monument leads up 49 granite steps flanked by 8 lion statues. Rudyard Kipling was a friend of the man and under the Rhodes bust he wrote: ‘The immense and moving spirit still shall quicken and control, Living he was the land and dead his soul shall be her soul.’

Rhodes Memorial has fine views of Cape Town’s southern suburbs stretching down to False Bay and on clear days, all the way to the Stellenbosch Mountains. There is an excellent restaurant behind the memorial that serves light meals. A number of hiking trails up Table Mountain begin at Rhodes Memorial and directly below, a fenced-off area called the Paddocks contains a few buck, zebra and wildebeest.   

These days, Rhodes divides South Africans, some believing he contributed greatly to the development of the country, while others see him as a racist who stood only for self-gain. Either way he has a place in South Africa’s history that cannot be ignored and the memorial is a testimony to this.