October 30, 1888: The Rudd Concession Is Signed

Cecil Rhodes

October 30, 1888: The Rudd Concession is signed in Bulawayo, Matabeleland, in southern Africa. The consequences for "The Dark Continent" were dire.

Charles Rudd was a business associate of Cecil Rhodes. The concession involved strong-arming King Lobengula of the Northern Ndebele into granting Rhodes exclusive mining rights to the region for his recently formed diamond company, De Beers. This led to the formation of the British South Africa Company, which later led to annexing the region for the British Empire, which of course later led to apartheid.

Rhodes, who became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, if you weren’t white, you were beneath him: He was quoted as saying, "I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race."

At the time of his death in 1902, De Beers controlled 90 percent of the world's diamond production. Rhodes left a lot of that blood money to establish the Rhodes Scholarship. Protests at the University of Cape Town resulted in the statue of Cecil Rhodes being removed in 2015.

He even named the land he stole after himself. The country name Rhodesia persisted until 1980, when, after the natives finally won a civil war, it was renamed Zimbabwe.

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October 30, 1898 was a Tuesday. Baseball season had just ended. Football was in midweek. And professional basketball and hockey did not yet exist. So there were no scores on this historic day.