Jean-Luke’s Reviews > The Randlords: The Exploits & Exploitations of South Africa's Mining Magnates > Status Update

"Sometimes, when talking to his his acquaintances, [Rhodes] would amuse them by absent-mindedly putting his hand in his pocket and pulling out a fistful of diamonds."

"Small wonder that men despaired of South Africa. It was not a country; scarcely even[...] a geological description. It was a number of miscellaneous territories, a ramshackle collection of policies, a congeries of peoples, united by little more than poverty. It was a land without millions and certainly without millionaires. At the beginning of 1867 no one dreamed of making his future in that faraway and empty land."