As Prime Minister of Cape Colony and through his British South Africa Company, he introduced policies including:

• Franchise and Ballot Act (1892): Rhodes drove legislation to raise the property qualification for voter registration and introduced a literacy test. This dramatically reduced the number of Black Africans entitled to vote.

• Glen Grey Act (1894): Rhodes conceived and drafted the Act, intending it to spread across the Cape and beyond. It was first applied to the Glen Grey district in the Eastern Cape, where it imposed a cash labour tax on African men, forcing many to leave their families to seek wages on white-owned farms and in mines. It also replaced communal land tenure with restricted individual plots, depriving communities of their ancestral land.

• Expansion into Rhodesia: Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (founded 1889) used violence to colonise territories that became Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia). It brought devastating loss of life and the forced displacement of communities. The brutality was widely reported at the time, and Rhodes was strongly criticised.