Rhodesia (region) in the context of "Cape to Cairo Red Line"

Cecil John Rhodes (/ˈsɛsəl ˈroʊdz/ SES-əl ROHDZ; 5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902) was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He and his British South Africa Company founded the southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which the company named after him in 1895. He also devoted much effort to realising his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory. Rhodes set up the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate.

The son of a vicar, Rhodes was born in Netteswell House, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. Due to his ill-health, at age sixteen he was sent to South Africa by his family in the hopes the climate might improve his health. At eighteen, he entered the diamond trade at Kimberley in 1871 and with funding from Rothschild & Co, began to systematically buy out and consolidate diamond mines. Over the next two decades, he gained a near-complete monopoly of the world diamond market. In 1888, he founded the diamond company De Beers, which retains its prominence into the 21st century.

Public holidays in Rhodesia, a historical region in southern Africa equivalent to today's Zimbabwe and Zambia—formerly Southern and Northern Rhodesia, respectively—were largely based around milestones in the region's short history. Annual holidays marked various aspects of the arrival of white people during the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the respective unilateral declarations of independence (1965) and of republican government (1970). On these days, most businesses and non-essential services closed. A number of Christian holidays were also observed according to custom, in the traditional British manner, and referred to in official documents by name—Christmas Day, for example, or Easter Monday.

Rhodesian non-work days were first defined in 1895, by The Bills of Exchange Regulations passed by Leander Starr Jameson, the second administrator of the territory appointed by the British South Africa Company. Holidays were instituted along traditional British lines, with some others created exclusively for Rhodesia: Shangani Day, on 4 December, marked the anniversary of the Shangani Patrol being killed in battle, while Rhodes's Day and Founders' Day—respectively commemorating Company chief Cecil Rhodes and his contemporaries—were held consecutively, starting on the first or second Monday of each July, to create the annual four-day "Rhodes and Founders' weekend". Shangani Day was replaced as a public holiday by Occupation Day in 1920, but continued to be unofficially marked thereafter. Occupation Day, held on 12 September each year, marked the anniversary of the arrival of the Pioneer Column at Fort Salisbury in 1890, and their raising of the Union Jack on the kopje overlooking the site. It was renamed Pioneers' Day in 1961.

Alfred Beit (15 February 1853 – 16 July 1906) was an Anglo-German gold and diamond magnate in South Africa, and a major donor and profiteer of infrastructure development on the African continent. He also donated much money to university education and research in several countries, and was the "silent partner" who structured the capital flight from post-Boer War South Africa to Rhodesia. Beit's assets were structured around the so-called Corner House Group, which through its holdings in various companies controlled 37 per cent of the gold produced at the Witwatersrand's goldfields in Johannesburg in 1913.