 Rhodes was a British imperialist; ultimately he wished to see a united South Africa under the British flag.However, he realised at the outset that this was not something which the Cape Afrikaners would support, much less those in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.He therefore reinvented himself as a ‘colonialist’, he began to emphasise the primacy of local interests, putting them above the idea of subordination to imperial power.