My colleague Michael Cardo’s eloquently written and solidly researched tome — about 500 pages — Harry Oppenheimer, Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty, triggered a series of thoughts on how the entry of Ernest Oppenheimer — “with fifty pounds in his pocket” — to the diamond diggings of Kimberley shaped the economic and political history of this country.
Astute and driven, as he was, it was within a Rhodes-tinted world that denied local people and other sojourners any meaningful entry on the grounds of race. It was in this post-Anglo-Boer War world that Harry Frederick Oppenheimer (HFO) was born in 1908.
The Union of SA, formed in 1910, had established white supremacy over indigenous people, effectively fusing the Boer republic’s doctrine of “No equality between black or white in church or state” and the British principle of “equal rights for all civilised men”.
The book’s background is set against a slew of discriminatory measures enacted against blacks, Indians and coloureds to prevent them from competing with whites. They supplied a constant stream of cheap labour for white farms and mines and operated on the fringes of mainstream economic activity — compounded by the wholesale exclusion of the 1913 Land Acts.
A key feature of these measures involved controls which both helped the Oppenheimer companies to establish their hegemony and later propelled successive custodians — HFO and his Oxbridge-educated successors — to assist in averting a collision course with nationalist forces ranged to challenge ownership of “the commanding heights of the economy”.
It was only about 70 years after the Union that these edifices really began to be chipped away. It is against this interregnum that the life and contribution of HFO must be viewed. Antonio Gramsci, best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, describes how the state and ruling class use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies: “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
While Cardo’s book — no hagiography — evinces an understanding, balance and questioning of the gap, there is a discernible thread which suggests a behemoth that evolved and helped alter the pernicious aspects of economic and social apartheid. In doing so, it is inescapably cognisant of HFO’s rider to the London Stock Exchange: “without destroying the great achievements of a long period of white rule”.
It does however raise the question which Cardo alludes to but doesn’t interrogate deeply: whether, given the heft of the Oppenheimer empire, an opportunity was not missed which would have altered the course of history and perhaps delivered us in a place not quite as parlous as we find ourselves today.
It is useful to consider, by way of comparison, the role of the Tata Group in India which provided significant overt support to the Indian nationalist movement, offering financial assistance as well as promoting indigenous industries and supporting educational and philanthropic initiatives aligned with the cause of national freedom. Tata did not rule out other forms of struggle, seeing constitutional participation as merely a first step towards a goal that may require additional steps along the road to ending colonial rule in India.
The role of Anglo American and De Beers, on the other hand, owed their growth, in no small measure, to the skewed umbrella of colonial and racial protection. Today the Tata group of companies has a combined market capitalisation of $149.91bn while Anglo American has a market cap of $38.08bn.
Nicky Oppenheimer acknowledged, “With hindsight it’s quite clear that we at Anglo did not do everything we could have or should have ... for that we must express our apologies and our remorse.” Cardo cites Bobby Godsell’s 19-page written submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and characterises it as “part apologia, part mea culpa”. He goes on to point out: “the authors of the submission conceded, there were ‘missed opportunities’ and a gap between ‘word and deed’.”
Clearly the company’s actions were not uniformly negative, and it is important to consider the broader context and nuances of their involvement, which Cardo explores as to how Anglo underwent a significant shift in its position on racial discrimination and apartheid policies over time. It is widely acknowledged that the real shift took place gradually, gaining traction in the 1980s and early 1990s.
During this period, mounting international pressure, internal resistance movements, and negotiations for political reform in SA prompted Anglo American to reassess its stance on apartheid. As a consequence, the company began taking steps to distance itself from apartheid and its discriminatory policies. As detailed by Cardo, this was gradual and ongoing.
Differences between colonial India and SA notwithstanding, there is a lingering sense of missed opportunity. Moreover, there was an unambiguous continuation of an idea that chimed with those of Jan Smuts’ views on the economic integration of blacks, coloured, and Indians, involving segregation and limited opportunities for non-white populations. While HFO supported a number of policies that enforced racial discrimination and inequality, his views evolved over time, and he made some efforts to improve living conditions for non-white communities within the framework of segregation.
By 1976, when Sowetan students rose up, Anglo and HFO’s reform agenda was spurred to avoid a bloody revolution of the kind that ushered in Marxist governments in Angola and Mozambique.
Initiatives like the Urban Foundation, set up by HFO and Anton Rupert in 1977, began to inform and help initiate political, economic and social reform “for betterment in the hearts of people” while preserving “the great achievements of a long period of white rule” (HFO). Big business bought into this effort “to build bridges between pragmatic whites and moderate blacks” (Cardo).
HFO’s wife, Bridget, initiated Women for Peace despite reservations from the Black Sash and scant recognition of the previous existence of organisations such as the Women’s Progressive Union (WPU), established in 1948 with the purpose of helping women become financially independent.
As Cardo points out, by 1978 HFO still justified support for a qualified franchise and only fell in line with the new constitutional policy of the Progressive Federal Party after it recognised and supported universal suffrage. This followed Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, who became leader in 1978 and steered it towards supporting a universal franchise within a federal system.
The 1980s was a period of intense political and union activity and with it the National Party’s (NP) strategy changed, co-opting a small number of black people into the middle class.
In a sub chapter — “Total Strategy, Total Onslaught” — Cardo traverses the new constitution introduced by the NP in 1983 to create a new parliamentary system — the Tricameral parliament — while introducing certain reforms. HFO came out against the constitutional amendments but opened up a line of communication: “Oppenheimer would try to coax the combative curmudgeon to climb down”. As Cardo says, “Botha was riding a tiger and he evidently had no idea how to dismount it”.
Then geopolitical events came to bear. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War had broader implications for global politics, including SA. With the geopolitical landscape changing, there was less tolerance — inside and outside SA — for racially discriminatory regimes.
Against this backdrop, the impetus for change in SA received a propulsion, emboldening hitherto somewhat cautious players, locally and internationally. After PW Botha’s Rubicon speech in 1985, HFO and key members of the Anglo executive, mindful of the changing business and labour environment in a changing world, found the apartheid government falling further and further behind domestic societal and global shifts.
Four weeks after Botha’s Durban speech, HFO’s successor Gavin Relly led a delegation to meet ANC leaders in Zambia. The demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin wall, which Cardo describes as “the determining event in FW De Klerk’s unfolding glasnost and perestroika,” provided the space to do this. Apartheid had become a drain on the economy and both the ANC and business understood that they needed each other. The rest, as they say, is history.
Cardo justifies, in his final balancing of the scales, the claim “that Oppenheimer moved his country forward from the murk of apartheid to the dawn of a nonracial democracy”. He cites HFO’s “individual and corporate philanthropy, his championship of black trade union rights, his role in the Urban Foundation and the reformist initiatives of the 1980s”.
The degeneration of BEE — an initiative championed by HFO, “into a patronage scheme, a system of elite enrichment for the politically well connected, and a vehicle for state capture” — Cardo avers was not foreseen by Oppenheimer, “who would have been aghast at the turn of events”.
The question remains: was BEE not different from the empowerment of Afrikaner capital in the mining industry by Anglo American? Afrikaner capital was not simply “gifted” an increased share of the mining economy. Afrikaner investors, through their financial contributions, played a role in the acquisition and ownership of assets within the mining sector. Of course, they too amassed their dispensable finances on the back of Apartheid.
Was another structure, other than BEE, not preferable and practicable? With the gift of hindsight, I’d say so, but then the white man’s burden is a complex thing — pernicious in many respects — and representing a continuum from the dubious veneer of seeing early colonial “financial success as a by-product of building SA” (Ernest Oppenheimer) to the paternalistic guilt that BEE fed on — let alone the insult inflicted on the capabilities of recipients.
I can’t help feeling that much of our present day pernicious precarity may well have been tempered had the actions of a man at the very intersection of business and politics for much of our history been different. But that’s in the realm of what could have been; now it’s about what is to be done. It was, after all, Vladimir Lenin who argued in his famously eponymous pamphlet that “the economic struggle is inseparably linked to the political struggle”.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.