Title: Harry Oppenheimer: Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty
Author: Michael Cardo
ISBN: 9781868428014
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers SA
For the first half of the twentieth century, Jan Smuts bestrode South African politics like a colossus. Twice prime minister and three times a general (in the Boer War, the First World War and the Second World War, during which he became a field marshal), he is the only person to have signed the treaties that ended both World Wars, and he also contributed to the drafting of the Charter of the United Nations. He is still the only non-Brit to have become chancellor of Cambridge University. By the time he died in 1950, exactly halfway through the century, his primacy in our politics was total.
The second half of the century saw the hard men of apartheid, who had taken over South Africa’s governance in 1948, dig in. Apartheid began to look like it was to have an endless timeframe. But then another statesman arose in South Africa, and he first hit the headlines in the ANC’s Defiance Campaign in 1952. His name was Nelson Mandela, and despite spending more than half of these 50 years in jail, he – certainly with the help of many friends – emerged from jail as the last decade of the century dawned, and he and his friends proceeded to turn apartheid out and take over the governance of South Africa, ushering in a non-racial democracy constrained by a modern and exceptional constitution, which contains a bill of rights. Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, a circumstance unimaginable 50 years earlier. As the century drew to a close, Mandela retired and left the next century to others. He had dominated our politics for the second half of the twentieth century even more emphatically than Smuts had the first.
So it was with our politics.
The economic development of our country, which was the reason the twentieth century began in war, has also been dominated by two men, and they were, astonishingly, father and son – Sir Ernest Oppenheimer and his son Harry, père et fils. Sir Ernest first created the group that would become the world’s dominant force in mining, and son Harry would take on this legacy and turn it, by the time he retired in 1984, into a set of companies that still had primacy in world mining, but now also had developed industrial and commercial interests that dominated the South African economy with a control so astonishingly complete as to be unprecedented in an economy as developed as was South Africa’s.
South Africa is not undiscovered territory.
While the story of our political figures has been extensively told (Hancock’s authorised biography of Smuts is as good as it is large, and there are many other biographies of this legend; and Mandela has cut the ground out from under his army of biographers by leaving us an autobiography that has sold 14 million copies), of the two businessmen there is less in print. Two biographies of Sir Ernest are both out of print, and Harry has, until this month, eluded biography. This was to change when the titan of South African political publishing, Jonathan Ball, and a young writer with a Cambridge PhD in history and one biography to his name, managed to convince the heirs of Harry (he died in 2000) to allow this writer, Michael Cardo, access to the family’s private papers and Harry’s many companies’ private records, in order to create an authorised biography. About six years later, Cardo’s book, Harry Oppenheimer: Diamonds, gold and dynasty (Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg, 2023), has just hit the bookshelves.
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Cardo’s biography is a large book, about 450 pages. He follows a common biographer’s convention of using a timeline on which to hang his text – he begins with a description of the world into which Harry was born, then moves on through the years of his life, ending with a description of the world at the time of his subject’s death. He divides this story into four parts: Part one begins with the years of Harry’s father’s (Ernest Oppenheimer’s) youth.
Ernest journeyed from Germany (the Oppenheimer family was originally German and Jewish) to England at the age of 16. Thereafter, as an employee of A Dunkelsbuhler and Company, he, now 22, arrived in Kimberley in 1902 to take responsibility for Dunkelsbuhler’s office in the diamond trade in South Africa. On returning to England on leave in 1906, Ernest proposed to May Pollak and married her by Jewish rites. They returned to Kimberley, where on 28 October 1908 their first son was born. They named him Harry Frederick. Again observing Jewish rites, infant Harry had a bris as he entered our world. (It was much later that Ernest led his family to the Anglican faith).
That same year, Ernest became a councillor on the Kimberley Council, and his extraordinary energy, judgement and personability quickly saw him become mayor in 1912.
It was not to last. The First World War provoked anti-German sentiments, and the Oppenheimers fled to England in 1915 after the family was threatened and Ernest attacked. In England, Ernest conceived of the idea of creating a significant mining group, but, unlike those then operating in South Africa, it would not be based in London but in South Africa.
For this he would need money, and lots of it.
He started his money journey with the American mining engineer William Honnold, who organised a meeting with Herbert Hoover (later president of the USA). Oppenheimer, already steeped in the Rhodes tradition of using politics to get business opportunities to happen, brought to this meeting at London’s Savoy Hotel Henry Hull, previously South Africa’s finance minister. It worked like a dream.
Hoover went on to convince Newmont Mining, a major American mining firm, and Newmont’s bankers, JP Morgan, to come up with half a million pounds, and Oppenheimer arranged a like sum from London and South African financiers. On 25 September 1917, Ernest launched the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa with a capitalisation of one million GBP, a massive sum in those days, and with himself as chairman.
The family moved back to South Africa and rented a home in Parktown, Johannesburg. Harry was initially schooled at Parktown School. However, in 1922 his parents did two things: firstly, they bought 20 hectares of Parktown, on which sat a splendid Herbert Baker mansion; they named it Brenthurst and it became, and still is, the central home of the Oppenheimer family. And secondly, they sent the 14-year-old Harry off to be a border at Charterhouse School in Surrey. He was never happy there (schooling was “something to be gone through rather than lived”, he wrote; 34), and in 1927 he made it into Christ Church at Oxford University, where he spent a few very carefree years. By 1931, he had completed a PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) degree and returned home to begin work at Anglo.
Here ends part one of Cardo’s book.
Part two begins with Harry taking on his desk at Anglo.
He rapidly discovered that his father had not been sleeping while Harry was away at Charterhouse and Oxford. Ernest had been busy on many fronts, but in particular he had plunged his new company into the world of diamonds.
It had always been Ernest’s ambition to obtain for Anglo a significant presence in the business that had been Rhodes’s great creation. But his every effort had been blocked by the long-established big players, particularly Barnato Brothers and L Breitmeyer. Clearly, Ernest believed, to expand his interests here, he required obtaining control of a major diamond producer. This he set out to do.
What he did next has been reported with more enthusiasm by his son Harry (1) than by Harry’s biographer, Cardo (46). For Ernest now roped in not one but two South African ex-ministers of finance – again the friendly Hull, and now also David Graaff. Together they convinced the South African government to sell to Oppenheimer the German diamond interests in South West Africa that had been confiscated in the First World War and housed in the “Custodian of Enemy Property”. This purchase became the Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa under Ernest’s control, and this shortly became the biggest producer of gem diamonds in the world. Add to this Ernest’s regular purchases of those shares of De Beers that became available, and in 1929 Ernest Oppenheimer became the chairman of De Beers and the biggest name in diamonds. The future prospects of Anglo American had been lifted to another level.
And so, Harry “learned business by doing business” (55). That was not to be his only set of lessons, for in 1924 Ernest had become the Member of Parliament for Kimberley, a position he held until 1938. Now a confidant of Smuts on whose front bench Ernest sat, he proved to be a most useful financial resource for his party. When Ernest wanted to bring an ambitious politician by the name of Tielman Roos onside, he had no difficulty in offering Roos a lucrative directorship in De Beers – what Rhodes would have called “squaring him up”.
Then came the Second World War, and South Africa quickly joined Britain in declaring war on Germany. Harry volunteered for service in the South African army, and in 1940 was in the desert in the north-east of Africa as an intelligence officer with the difficult task of combatting the redoubtable German General Rommel. His wealth did not shelter him, and on a number of occasions he was in bloody skirmishes.
In 1942, his regiment was returned to South Africa to help detect Japanese submarines off our coast, and while off duty he met, and soon married, Bridget McCall. She was to be his wife and constant companion for the remaining 57 years of his life.
Back to Anglo. At this time, Ernest was in the thick of putting together the platform of mining concessions that was to catapult Anglo into being the biggest gold-mining company in the world – for gold had been detected in the Orange Free State, and Ernest was quickly into action. He bought up all available concessions, and Anglo ended up being by far the biggest beneficiary of the gold under the Free State. This set of deals, coming as they did after Ernest’s capture of De Beers, turned the Oppenheimer companies into the world’s leading mining group. And Ernest had done it all in under 30 years.
Harry’s response to this all was to go to parliament.
The 1948 election loomed, and Smuts convinced Harry to stand for the (wait for it) Kimberley seat. First Rhodes, then Ernest, now Harry. He became known as the Member for De Beers, and safely won the seat. But many other United Party MPs didn’t, and Harry spent nine years in opposition in parliament watching the Herenigde Nasionale Party put apartheid in place.
On 25 November 1957, Harry was at home at Brenthurst. As usual, he dropped in on his father on his way to work. Sir Ernest was, Harry said, “very cheerful and full of plans” (157). Harry went to work, and shortly after he left, Ernest collapsed and died of a heart attack. Ten days later, the board of directors of Anglo appointed Harry as their chairman. That was the end of parliament for Harry – Anglo was now to be his world.
So ends part two of Cardo’s book.
Harry was now tasked to control one of the most successful groupings of companies ever assembled, and Cardo gives us a quick summary of his corporate inheritance (161).
Sir Ernest had spent four decades putting together a group that was “the largest producer of gold in the world”, with three quarters of their extraordinary profits in gold coming from the Orange Free State mines Ernest had so successfully assembled. Uranium mining then contributed a profit a quarter as big as that from gold mining. Anglo mined 50% of South Africa’s coal output. De Beers dominated the world’s diamond production and sales, and the South West African output, grasped by Ernest from the government he was so close to, provided nearly a quarter of De Beer’s sales. Anglo’s Northern Rhodesian mines contributed nearly half of that country’s enormous copper exports, the world’s third largest supply. Anglo was, surely, a mining giant, arguably the world’s premier mining group.
What was Harry to do to improve on that?
This is what Cardo answers in part three of his book, which surveys the years in which Harry was the chairman of Anglo (1957-1982) and De Beers (1957-1984) and on until 1989. At nearly 230 pages, this part is the biggest section of the book, and correctly so, for it covers the halcyon years of Harry Oppenheimer, man of business.
The very brief summary of all this is: Cardo notes that in 1957 there were about 100 companies in the Anglo stable (162). A quick reading of McGregor’s Who owns whom with regard to the South African economy for the year 1987 – just after Harry had relinquished his many offices in the group – shows that the Anglo stable then (1987) comprised 78 companies listed separately on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and they in turn had 3 397 subsidiary companies and 456 investments in other companies. (2). Anglo was in control of the South African Breweries and their alcohol and hotels, Tongaat Hulett and their sugar and aluminium, Highveld and its steel, Premier and its foodstuffs, Argus and its newspapers, McCarthy and its motor dealerships, First National Bank and Southern Life Insurers, and so much else – Anglo was everywhere in the South African economy, and its companies Minorco and Chartered were investing in economies all over the world.
Under Harry’s leadership, Anglo had retained its paramountcy in mining (292) and had supplemented this with massive industrial and commercial interests that by Harry’s retirement dominated the South African economy – Cardo notes that in 1987 “Anglo alone was responsible for 60% of the JSE’s total market capitalisation” (255).
While much of part three follows these extraordinary developments in considerable detail, it also covers the 1959 formation of the Progressive Party from the frustrated liberal grouping in the moribund United Party, and Harry’s immediate support of this Party, a support that was to be lifelong. And it covers the 1976 uprising and Harry’s strongly proactive response in working with (particularly) Anton Rupert (but also with many other business people) to form the Urban Foundation, to work to improve the living conditions of the rapidly growing numbers of urban blacks.
Part three also traces its way through the lives of the Oppenheimers, through Harry’s last years as an executive (although he remained a director of De Beers until 1994) and through our politics, and ends with the blockbuster 2 February 1990 speech by FW de Klerk.
Part four is short and covers the last decade of Harry’s life, 1990-2000.
By now, the Oppenheimer companies were under professional management, and while Harry went to his office almost daily, he was well aware that if he interfered with management he would do more harm than good. He settled for the role of éminence grise, providing advice to both his business associates and his political friends.
He and Mandela rapidly established a cordial friendship, and Mandela saw him as an entry point to big business; he called upon Harry to form a discussion group of business champions, to whom Mandela would add senior ANC people. Called the Brenthurst Group (they met at Harry’s home), they have recently been pilloried as the forum that took the ANC away from social democracy and off to neoliberalism. This Cardo denies firmly – it was a discussion group, he shows, and nothing much in the real world followed from their meetings.
As Harry moved on in his last years, his son Nicky and other Anglo executives decided to list Anglo on the London Stock Exchange and to withdraw De Beers from its public listing. In the process, Anglo increased its share of De Beers to 45%, the government of Botswana to 15% and the Oppenheimer family to 40%. The Oppenheimers, to fund this, drew down their holding in Anglo considerably. Nicky resigned from the vice-chairmanship of Anglo and now concentrated his energies on De Beers. This, too, he was later to end when in 2011 the Oppenheimer family sold their share of De Beers to Anglo for 5,1 billion USD (xxi). The family had stepped out of Sir Ernest’s beloved companies in two deals.
Harry passed on in 2000 and was not there to witness the final sale of the family’s share in the group. It is said that he had been uncomfortable with the delisting of De Beers, but had held his counsel.
Thus ends Cardo’s book. This four-page summary of a 450-page book can do it no justice, for sure, but it does give an interested party a very incomplete introduction, which hopefully will spur on a reader to want “the full monty”.
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Now, four comments on Cardo’s writing style.
Firstly, Cardo has a splendid way of using little-used words: devilling (48), revanchist (50), bombinating (92), virtu (105), crapulent (193), vade mecum (219), languorous (283), mephitic (323), panjandrums (358), discombobulated (378), gnomically (410), propitiation (422). I love this – opening a dictionary is a rare treat, and Cardo’s writing makes one do that.
Secondly, the use of anachronisms in contemporary writing can be great, but they must be carefully chosen and used. I’m not sure Cardo always gets that right, and the result can appear to be pompous.
Harry did not go to Oxford, he “went up” to this university, and then later “went down” (35 and 42); he did not do a degree, but rather “read for the PPE” (210); Bridget McCall “married up” when she married Harry (98); Harry did not follow in his father’s footsteps, but rather “was minded to emulate him” (115); Bridget later “mothered at a remote” (142); Ernest did not eat his breakfast, but “took his breakfast” (142); and Harry was ready for action “once his pen had gleaned his teeming brain” (286). Not great sins, for sure, but maybe more careful editing?
Thirdly, while I have no problem with the macro-structure of the book (the four parts) or with the subdivision into chapters, I have problems with Cardo’s style of jumping from year to year in his text, and from decade to decade, forwards and back, confusingly. A bit more editing?
Fourthly, I must concede that writing nonfiction is more complex than writing fiction. A fiction writer, if he/she senses that his/her writing is getting boring, can drag two characters off for a steamy bonk, and, with the reader again awake, can progress with the turgid section. Nonfiction writers are constrained by the facts of the day – as helpful as it might be for Cardo to detour Harry and Bridget off for some nookie on the back seat of the Bentley, the Oppenheimers did not seem the sort of couple who would have given their biographer such treasure (although one of their children sort of supplied some spicy stuff (280) – here Cardo is careful with his words and quickly runs away). And, if Harry had a sense of humour, Cardo is not letting that secret out. The end result is a large book, filled to the brim with fact after fact, with no spicy stuff and almost no humour – in other words, a long, dry read.
Having finished Cardo’s book, how has it helped us to form an opinion of Oppenheimer and his companies?
Here, I would like to pose and answer five questions.
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If he did not support apartheid, what did he support?
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Question one: Was Harry ever a supporter of apartheid?
Even the briskest of readings of Cardo’s writing leads us to a very clear answer: “No.” From his earliest days in parliament (1948) to our country’s first democratic election (1994), Harry continuously and unfailingly opposed apartheid. Thus this question is easy – the answer is “No”.
Question two: If he did not support apartheid, what did he support?
When Harry entered parliament in 1948, two competing models of the future South African society existed: the Herenigde Nasionale Party proposed the total separation of the country on racial grounds, and the African National Congress had adopted the universal adult franchise as policy at its 1943 national congress. Thus the bulk of South Africans subscribed to one or the other of these options.
For non-NP whites, neither option was acceptable. As we have seen, Harry consistently opposed the first option, and he was equally opposed to the second. When the Liberal Party adopted universal franchise in 1960, Harry said that this was “unwise” and an “abrupt cure that would be more disastrous than the disease” (149). Earlier, in parliament, he had said, “I think everyone in this house is agreed that it is most undesirable to put political power into the hands of uncivilised, uneducated people” (153). In May 1978, addressing the International Monetary Conference in Mexico City, he suggested that nothing could be more “absurd” than to expect foreign investor confidence to surge in the event of “a rapid change-over to majority rule based on one-man-one-vote” (348).
If he found neither apartheid nor universal franchise acceptable, what was, for Harry, the way forward?
Like so many in the white group, he searched desperately for the middle road between apartheid and the universal franchise – a solution that could draw the majority of South Africans, while avoiding the twin disasters of apartheid and universal franchise.
Oppenheimer made two stabs at a middle road scenario.
The first was at his own initiative while a UP MP (155f). In 1956, he handwrote a memorandum setting out his thinking. He proposed a common roll qualified franchise for the House, including for “non-Europeans”, and a tortuous set of arrangements for the Senate that included provision for a veto by white MPs on any legislation assumed not to be to their satisfaction. This proposal was denounced by the ANC and the Liberal Party, and the newly elected UP MP, Colin Eglin, said that in his party “hardly anyone understands the scheme” (156). Despite Harry’s heroic attempts to lobby support, it proved more than his party could endure, and when Ernest died in 1957 and Harry left parliament for business, his idea was stillborn in his party.
The second followed from his abandoning the UP and signing up with the new Progressive Party. Shortly after forming, this party appointed David Molteno, a lawyer who had also been a “native representative” in parliament, to chair a commission that would point the Progs to a way forward on a variety of issues, including franchise rights. Oppenheimer was requested, and agreed, to sit on the commission. Unwilling to risk radical proposals, the commission was given terms of reference which included that “only suitably qualified citizens of a defined degree of civilisation, regardless of race, should be eligible to vote on a common roll and hold office in Parliament” (218).
While the party tried to involve black persons on the commission, the ANC refused to be part of a process that from the outset ruled out the universal franchise.
When the commission proposed a franchise qualified in terms of education levels, income levels and property holdings, Harry proposed higher levels of qualifications (219). When the Congo pulled free from Belgian control in 1960 and whites fled in numbers, Harry noted that “primitive, uncivilised people cannot be trusted with the running of a modern state” (221).
Both the Liberal Party and the ANC rejected the Molteno proposals, and the Progs were left alone to adopt the qualified franchise, which they did. The middle road between apartheid and universal franchise was, for them, to be governed by the qualified franchise.
The year 1974 was a benchmark year for the Progs, for the general election of that year saw a number of new Prog MPs joining their previously lonely Helen Suzman. One of these was the charismatic and brilliant Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, who was speedily roped in to chair a further commission on future options for South Africa. Slabbert’s team proposed broad-based constitutional negotiations for South Africa, with universal franchise, a federal government, a bill of rights, a minority veto and a constitutional court as their desired outcome. The party duly accepted this as their policy going forward.
Staring this reality in the face, Harry, never by disposition a universal franchise man, fell into line and for the rest of his days agreed to universal franchise. As Cardo notes, Oppenheimer had become a “wary convert” (348).
Question 3: If that was Harry’s position, why do so many still believe that he was a fellow traveller of apartheid?
Cardo writes repeatedly that Harry often criticised apartheid, but inevitably from an economic point of view. “As Oppenheimer reflected towards the end of his spell in parliament, the UP’s difference of opinion with the Nationalists was ‘not that the idea of separate development was immoral, but that it is a policy that cannot be carried out’” (151). “His core point was always that apartheid threw sand in the engine of economic progress” (152). “Oppenheimer tended to marshall (sic) his arguments against apartheid by using the nomenclature of an economist. He believed this was likely to make more of an impression on the opposite side of the House than if he were to shower the Nats with moral entreaties or berate them for their presumed depravity” (425).
Imagine for a moment a young black lad in our recent past. His father has been jailed for belonging to the ANC (it is not a crime elsewhere to belong to a political movement), and to support her children his mother has had to become a “full-time, live-in domestic servant”, working endless hours at a starvation wage and seeing her children only very occasionally. The school he attended was kept at a weakened academic level deliberately by the nation’s government to ensure that he could not later get a well-paid job. He lived in permanent hunger and dressed in rags. There was no chance at all of him getting into a tertiary education institution. If his luck held, he may become a taxi driver – or he might starve or turn to crime.
Would that lad feel that the main fault with apartheid was that it held back the economy? Would he be reassured by the argument that it could be successful if there were more money around? Or might he feel that it was a moral outrage, a horrifying system designed to deny black South Africans opportunities and dump them where he and all his neighbours were – in an impoverished world with no upside? Would he not feel that apartheid was a “crime against humanity”?
Harry, and Anglo, by their unwillingness to call apartheid the moral outrage that it was, alienated themselves from this lad and his communities. It was a very bad decision to speak nicely to the men of apartheid to try to get them to change – they were never going to listen to polite argument. By sticking to politeness, the men of Anglo handed themselves over to the distrust of the poor classes.
Question 4: Did Harry and Anglo benefit from apartheid, and could they have done more, particularly for their staff?
Here we are answered by admissions: “Oppenheimer was the first to admit that the companies under his control ‘didn’t do as much as we should have done’” (251); “Early on in the transition (after 1990), HFO expressed the view that, in retrospect, Anglo should have done more to stand up to the old regime and improve the welfare of its black workers” (419); and, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Nicky went further: “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” (426–7).
Does that cut it? Does that put the matter to rest? Probably not.
We have mentioned that in 1922 Ernest bought 20 hectares of Parktown, including a Herbert Baker-designed mansion (33). Soon he renovated one of the cottages on the estate to accommodate his library – this cottage was named Little Brenthurst and was later to be Harry’s home when Ernest was living in the manor house. Then Ernest died, and another house called “Blue Skies” was built on the estate to accommodate his widow (205) – this allowed Harry to occupy the manor. Then, in 1984, Harry appointed the award-winning architect Hans Hallen to design a state-of-the-art library on the property, as Harry’s collection of rare books and manuscripts had outgrown their “library” in Little Brenthurst (362).
Next to join the stable of Oppenheimer homes was the farm Mauritzfontein, just south of Kimberley. Ernest had been stung by the allegation that he was the Member of Parliament for Kimberley while not living there. Harry decided to avoid such a slur, and in 1945 bought a large farm just south of Kimberley, built a home on it and developed it into a top-class stud farm for thoroughbred racehorses, which it still is. A number of Durban July winners, all owned and raced by Harry and Bridget, started life at Mauritzfontein. Harry employed Joane Pim to develop a magnificent garden, mostly from indigenous plants, which is today an oasis in the dusty Kimberley area (279).
On entering parliament, Harry needed a Cape Town residence. He bought a “cottage” on Buitencingel (now Buitensingel) Street from an art dealer, and proceeded to renew it and hang its walls with “the works of Matisse, Derain and Soutine” (124). Its dining room rapidly became the centre of a circle of MPs and others.
Next came Milkwood, the Oppenheimer home-by-the-sea. Built on three hectares of manicured garden adjacent to a strip of beach just north of Durban, it has ten guest suites, a large swimming pool and “every amenity imaginable” (206). At the time of construction (1968), it was the most expensive seaside villa ever built in South Africa (207).
Then London. Here the Oppenheimers bought a villa on Eaton Square in Belgravia, a short walk from Buckingham Palace. Other homes on Eaton Square have housed, over time, two prime ministers (Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin) and luminaries of the entertainment industry (Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison). Today, Roman Abramovich, until recently owner of Chelsea Football Club, and Sarah, Duchess of York, are owners.
Then New York. Here Harry bought an apartment in the Carlyle on Madison Avenue. This luxury establishment housed a five-star hotel of 190 rooms and 60 privately owned apartments. It was known as the “New York White House” in the days of John F Kennedy, who likewise owned an apartment here into which he smuggled Marilyn Monroe for “that famous tryst”. Other residents included Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Recently, Prince Harry and Meghan have stayed there.
And there was the large “Rhodesian” game lodge, and probably much else. Today, the family has bought Tswalu Kalahari Reserve. At 110 000 hectares, it is the largest privately owned reserve in South Africa. Situated in the arid Northern Cape, it presumably costs the family a small fortune to keep it and its unique Kalahari wildlife going.
The Oppenheimers flew between these homes in their private jets, and Harry recalls how his mother was angered when the De Beers private rail coach was not available to hitch onto an “ordinary” train to take the family to the Cape.
These homes were furnished with the same unlimited budget with which they had been bought. Ernest’s collection of Old Masters was supplemented by Harry’s French Impressionists (205). Chairs were from the style periods of Charles II and Louis XV (105 and 205). But particularly, Harry followed Ernest in a love of acquiring old manuscripts: over time, père et fils acquired Churchill’s manuscript of his capture and escape during the Boer War (79), Deneys Reitz’s manuscript of Commando (written in Croxley school exercise books with a fountain pen), Byron’s original handwritten poem “She walks in beauty” and a range of Byron manuscripts and first editions (205 and 431), Alan Paton’s manuscript of Cry, the beloved country (362) and Tolstoy’s letter to Gandhi (362). In fact, the treasure trove became so extensive that Harry created the Brenthurst Press and published a variety of magnificently presented books, many coming from his library’s extensive holdings (362).
Dinner parties at Brenthurst were as lavish as they were regular (often two or three times a week). Food, staff and wines (Château Haut-Brion) were the best available, as politicians, ambassadors, dignitaries and business leaders met and chatted here.
It all was, truly, an extraordinary lifestyle.
Down Harry’s mines, things were different.
It is a worrying lacuna in Cardo’s biography that he avoids describing this world. We have to turn elsewhere to get a perspective here. If a photograph is indeed worth 1 000 words, one can open Ernest Cole’s House of bondage (3) and David Goldblatt’s On the mines (4). The picture becomes clear, and it is disquieting.
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It is a worrying lacuna in Cardo’s biography that he avoids describing this world.
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Here we see young men, stripped naked, standing in a row of 15 against a wall with their hands above their heads, all part of a TB examination. We see ten men in a “shower hall”, some showering, some washing clothes in the puddles of water slopped on the floor – it is filthy and plainly not maintained, and strips its occupants of any dignity they have not already been robbed of. We see a kitchen helper dumping, with a shovel, a lump of nyula – a vegetable mixture – into a tin bowl held by a miner, with a similar helping of a maize meal porridge to follow; this happened twice a day, and that was rations. We see the single-sex dormitories comprising concrete, built-in “beds” against the walls, one on top of another, with no mattresses, cupboards or privacy. And we see the heat, the danger and the cramped world of the below-the-ground workplace. In this workplace between 1900 and 1993, the mining industry had also seen 69 000 miners dying in mining accidents (427). This is all so horrible.
And was this all made understandable by the wages earned?
The following table is from the Rhodes University economist D Hobart Houghton’s book of the time (5). It is self-explanatory and, whatever way you pivot it, it is anguishing.
Source: D Hobart Houghton, The South African economy, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1964.
This table was for the entire industry – was Anglo different, better?
In the early 1960s, Harry appointed the “talented Afrikaner” (222) Wim de Villiers, a “straight-talking engineer with a PhD” (222) who was also an avowed National Party supporter, to do an appraisal of Anglo’s productivity and wage scales. De Villiers was “appalled by the pittance Anglo American paid its black workforce” (222).
Plainly, this is not all Anglo’s fault. Blame must first go to an uncaring government, which refused to legislate or inspect hostel living conditions, and which would not legislate minimum wages or allow the existence of trade unions that could fight for the rights, the working conditions and the wages of these wretched miners. That was the first sin.
But the next group of sinners is undoubtedly the mining houses. They took the capitalist gap of a disinterested, in fact downright poverty-supportive government, and made hay (profits?) while the sun shone and the spotlight was off. And what huge profits they made. Cardo outlines a situation, on the passing of the baton from Ernest to Harry, of an institution with world-beating profits and a “sturdy” cash reserve (161). No, these appalling working conditions and wages could not be explained away by “hard times”.
So, we have a Gini coefficient, Oppenheimer family versus black workforce, that races off to infinity. It is a terrible criticism of the mining houses, Anglo and the Oppenheimer family. A criticism that is not answered by “We got some things wrong – sorry”. A more tangible apology is surely called for.
Question five.
I mentioned there were to be five questions, and this is to be number five.
This question comes from the brilliant, gruff and to-the-point businessman Johann Rupert, who had got peeved by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s chasing around of the Oppenheimers.
Rupert asked: “Would you have preferred Ernest Oppenheimer to have settled in Australia rather than in South Africa?” (428).
That question takes us out of the areas I have outlined already, which give us anguish, and throws us into appraising the Oppenheimer balance sheet in terms of all of its assets and liabilities, not just the painful ones.
And, in truth, there is much else to consider. The gold and diamond industries, just for starters, have been dominant players in the development of the South African economy: they have created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and many of them were well-paid jobs; they have attracted huge amounts of capital to South Africa, as well as skills and entrepreneurs who have developed other aspects of our economy; and they have been the principal provider of foreign exchange for South Africa, without which economic growth would have stalled and been stultified. These companies have led in the businesses of technical advance and managerial competence, they have provided a stimulus to general economic advance, and they have demanded, and got, electricity and transportation networks to be established.
Would other players have caused all of this without the energies of the Oppenheimers, père et fils?
I doubt it. There were many mining companies operating in South Africa before Anglo. They were all foreign-owned and seemed to be willing to settle for much humbler developmental horizons than was Anglo. They never seemed to be able to pull together the enormous amounts of capital that the Oppenheimers did. And they were no better employers, either.
In short, then, the balance sheet, when fully considered, points out that South Africa is a net winner from the energies of the Oppenheimer family and their many companies – although, as we have noted, there were many, many losers, and they were always the poorest and least protected citizens of our country.
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Cardo’s book fills a great hole in the bibliographical history of our country.
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What is now to be my final word on Michael Cardo’s book?
Cardo’s book fills a great hole in the bibliographical history of our country, for it is a thorough inspection of the life and works of Harry Oppenheimer – and more, for it begins with a useful introduction to his father and what happened before Harry. That these two businessmen were central to the development of South Africa’s economy hardly needs arguing. Surely they didn’t develop our economy together, alone. There were many others. But they were the giants. And now this is recognised in this excellent book by Cardo.
Buy it and read it. With a sense of history and, I hope, with a sense of social justice also. For there is much to be criticised in the Oppenheimer legacy.
Notes:
(1) On the 10th anniversary of Ernest’s death, Harry published an outstanding tribute to his father in the Anglo in-house journal, Optima, which is re-presented on the website of the Brenthurst Library.
(2) Robin McGregor, Who owns whom: The investor’s handbook, Juta and Co, Ltd, Cape Town, 1988 edition.
(3) Ernest Cole, House of bondage, A Ridge Press Book, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, 1968.
(4) David Goldblatt, On the mines, with an accompanying essay by Nadine Gordimer, C Struik (Pty) Ltd, Cape Town, 1973.
(5) D Hobart Houghton, The South African economy, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1964.
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