The Commonwealth in History

Abstract

In the gardens at Peshawar, with the Himalayas towering high behind them, there is a statue to a Colonel Mackeson of the Bengal Army and commissioner of Peshawar, who in 1853, at the age of forty-six, was murdered by a religious fanatic. ‘The defiles of the Khyber and the peaks of the Black Mountains alike witnessed his exploits …’ begins an inscription, to which is appended a tribute from the governor-general, Lord Dalhousie. ‘His value,’ it reads, ‘as a political servant of the state is known to none better than the governor-general himself, who in difficult and eventful times had cause to mark his great ability, and the admirable prudence, discretion and temper which added tenfold value to the high, soldierly qualities of his public character.’ At the southerly tip of another continent in the gardens of Cape Town below Table Mountain there is another statue, not to a soldier of prudence and discretion but to an empire builder not famed for either, one of whose sayings, ‘Take all… ask afterwards’, impressed itself only too well upon the mind of his friend, Dr Jameson. The statue is that of Cecil John Rhodes, in his familiar loose-fitting clothes, with the outstretched hand pointing northward and the inscription below: ‘Your hinterland is there’.