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Harry Oppenheimer was a liberal enterprise tycoon who spoke out towards apartheid and was in flip a goal of Nationwide Occasion wrath that was typically colored by anti-semitism.
Concurrently, the migrant labour system that Oppenheimer raised cautious considerations about underpinned the earnings that made Anglo American a South African and world company colossus. Exploitative and downright predatory, Anglo’s reliance on low-cost migrant labour is a stain on its historical past.
No matter one’s views about Oppenheimer and Anglo, there isn’t a query that they performed outsized roles on the stage of South African historical past.
Michael Cardo, an opposition MP (a job his topic additionally assumed from 1948 to 1957 with the liberal United Occasion) has achieved a service to historical past with this absorbing and goal account of the magnate’s life and legacy.
It’s a positive instance of biographical writing, treating the topic with sympathy however not sycophancy. Oppenheimer, in Cardo’s rendering, isn’t any saint, however a captivating determine of his instances.
Born in 1908 within the rough-and-tumble diamond mining city of Kimberley, Oppenheimer’s roots had been German and Jewish. However the Oxford-educated patrician would ultimately convert to the Anglican religion, and he was an Anglophile to his core, a course that had been charted by his father, Ernest, and his personal journey from his father’s modest tobacco store north of Frankfurt.
It was a journey that may take him to a job sorting diamonds in London as a teen, after which to the motherlode of the gem stones in Kimberley.
Ernest had a factor for diamonds and it might set the household on a glittering, dynastic path, although it was not with out surprising detours.
Fleeing the mob
In 1915, the household would flee its Kimberley dwelling at 7 Lodge Highway when a mob, infected by hovering unemployment and the early embers of World Struggle 1, focused diamond retailers with German surnames. The house Harry Oppenheimer was born in was earmarked for burning, and Ernest himself was bodily attacked at one level.
In hindsight, the household – which initially struck out for Cape City – had a first-hand brush with a model of the ethnic cleavages and sophistication battle that may outline South Africa within the twentieth century.
Oppenheimer’s life and profession would in some ways mirror this seething cauldron, though, in fact, his prism would at all times be from a gilded vantage level.
Diamonds would in some ways outline the dynasty, together with the good De Beers advertising slogan, “A diamond is ceaselessly”. It was a marketing campaign that may search new markets corresponding to Japan, the place Cardo reviews that, on the time of Oppenheimer’s first go to to the nation in 1968, “solely 5 p.c of betrothed Japanese ladies acquired a diamond engagement ring”. By 1981, greater than 60% had diamonds on their fingers.
This blazed a path that Anglo nonetheless follows in some methods in its makes an attempt to current platinum as a coveted adornment in Far East markets. The household exited De Beers in 2011, lastly slicing the umbilical wire to what had lengthy been a household enterprise. However Anglo nonetheless follows among the tried and examined routes that Harry pioneered.
As a businessman, he definitely knew what he was doing. Historic statistics underscore the purpose. Cardo notes that in 1957, there have been already 100 firms within the Anglo secure.
In 1982, Anglo was the world’s prime producer of gold, platinum and vanadium. At one level within the late Eighties, the corporate accounted for an astonishing 60% of the JSE’s market cap.
As disinvestment and change management pressures mounted throughout apartheid’s dying decade – successfully locking mountains of capital inside South Africa that was searching for a return – Anglo was hoovering up home companies all around the present.
Politics
However did such financial affect translate into political energy? The Anglophile Oppenheimer was definitely usually at odds with the Nationwide Occasion authorities and its Afrikaner and Calvinist overlords, who at instances branded him with anti-semitic smears corresponding to “Hoggenheime”, a barbed slur for Jewish mining capital.
However Anglo companies flourished beneath apartheid – the Nats had been definitely accommodating when it got here to capital, particularly as Afrikaner companies more and more made their mark. And Anglo was a serious taxpayer and supply of essential export income that additionally offered many an Afrikaner from the platteland with a leg up the company ladder.
To his credit score, Cardo pulls no punches in his evaluation of Oppenheimer’s liberalism and its evolution, knowledgeable partly by briefly seeing motion in North Africa towards the Nazi army throughout World Struggle 2.
“Within the Nineteen Forties, and for a very long time thereafter, Oppenheimer’s liberalism didn’t lengthen to affording equal civil rights to blacks, not to mention any scheme for multi-racial power-sharing… He believed in political, not financial, segregation. This was a conservative and paternalistic type of liberalism, to make certain,” Cardo writes.
Oppenheimer, in his crusty older years, would usually inform international correspondents that whereas in South Africa he could have come throughout as liberal, “at coronary heart I’m simply an old school conservative”, in response to Cardo. But when so, it was a nuanced conservatism – or maybe a “paternalistic type of liberalism” – and but his picture was broadly that of a liberal, although one moulded in South Africa’s advanced historic context.
Oppenheimer seen apartheid usually by means of an financial lens and believed, on that entrance, that it was “illogical and immoral”. However he thought the UP’s eventual adoption of a common franchise as celebration coverage “unwise”. But, as early as 1959, he was in favour of abolishing go legal guidelines and inflow management.
“Oppenheimer was at all times cautious to border his objections to apartheid when it comes to realpolitik. Apartheid – or ‘separate improvement’, because it got here to be styled – was unworkable. It made no financial sense. The entire thrust of financial improvement in South Africa tended in direction of racial co-operation and integration…
“As Oppenheimer mirrored in direction of the tip of his spell in Parliament, the UP’s distinction of opinion with the Nationalists was ‘not that the thought of separate improvement is immoral, however that it’s a coverage that can’t be carried out’,” Cardo writes.
Such contradictions had been a mirrored image of South African liberalism on the time.
Migrant labour
As early as 1948, Oppenheimer was “arguing that the migrant labour system was economically unsound (though low-cost migrant labour had served the mines nicely sufficient as much as that time). There was a robust case, he contended, particularly on the brand new mines opening within the Orange Free State, for housing to be offered to the wives and kids of as much as 10% of the black labour drive.”
Which will have appeared comparatively progressive on the time, however Anglo continued to depend on labour drawn from poor rural areas corresponding to neighbouring Mozambique and the previous homelands – a workforce that perished by the hundreds in South Africa’s deep and harmful mines, and that noticed its actual wages decline for many years till the Nineteen Seventies.
Oppenheimer, and Anglo due to their mining pursuits and reliance on brutally exploited migrant labour, had been lengthy seen as key pillars that propped up apartheid.
“Ruth First, the South African Communist Occasion activist banned by the federal government after the occasions at Sharpeville (in 1960), summed up this view: ‘A daily critic of apartheid, he (Oppenheimer) has most likely achieved greater than anybody else to gasoline the financial machine on which the energy of white supremacy relies upon’,” Cardo notes.
First, who can be assassinated by a letter bomb in Maputo despatched by apartheid brokers in 1982, articulated a view that in some ways has endured, and it’s hardly one that’s restricted to the Marxist left or radical political events just like the EFF.
The migrant labour system did certainly assist to swell Anglo’s coffers, and South Africa continues to be grappling with its pernicious legacies.
Learn extra in Each day Maverick: How the twilight of South Africa’s migrant labour system spawned a social apocalypse
Mandela ‘deal’ delusion
But Cardo is bang on in taking pictures down the notion that Oppenheimer, as one of many alleged forces of “white monopoly capital”, struck a behind-the-scenes take care of the revered Mandela to keep up white financial supremacy.
“The notion that Mandela and Oppenheimer covertly brokered an financial pact is fantasy, a self-serving fiction invented by the left to elucidate why the Rainbow Nation’s glory pale, and why ‘the revolution’ was derailed,” Cardo writes.
“The one accord reached between South Africa’s black and white elites was the Structure; there was no comparable financial covenant.”
The Oppenheimer’s Brenthurst Group – named for the household’s sprawling Johannesburg property – was certainly concerned in wide-ranging discussions with Mandela and the ANC as they ready to imagine – and after they gained – energy. However the ANC was within the driver’s seat. Cardo notes that the labour and change management regimes which emerged within the mid-Nineties had been strikingly at odds with Oppenheimer’s hopes for a “absolutely liberalised economic system”.
Certainly, Mandela’s conversion from the full-scale nationalisation advocated at present by the EFF was prompted by the communist bosses of Vietnam and China within the ultra-elite setting of Davos.
“… neither Anglo nor Oppenheimer induced Mandela to show his again on nationalisation, which he famously did in February 1992 within the rarified environment of Davos, spurred on by the socialist leaders of China and Vietnam,” Cardo pointedly writes.
Mandela, he continues, stated: “We both preserve nationalisation and get no funding, or we modify our angle and get funding.”
So if there’s a “smoking gun” right here that shot nationalisation down, its barrel was directed from Asia, and never some shadowy WMC hand.
That is an space the place Oppenheimer and Mandela, who had a relationship that dated again to the Nineteen Fifties, definitely did discover some frequent floor.
The wooing of international capital has lengthy been a theme in South African financial historical past, and attracting outdoors funding stays a key plank of the present administration, even because it oversees a failing state that’s the greatest impediment to that aim.
“The pursuit of international capital kinds a particular thread in Oppenheimer’s chairmanship of Anglo and De Beers. He understood it to be an iron legislation of South African financial historical past that, for the reason that discovery of deep-level gold, the nation relied on a gentle influx of international capital,” Cardo writes.
One instance was a speech Oppenheimer gave in 1959 to the London Institute of Administrators entitled, “Is South Africa a Good Threat?” The time period “danger” – be it political, financial, social or environmental – has taken centre stage in present company discourse. But it surely has lengthy performed a job in funding selections and the deployment of capital, and Oppenheimer had his nostril attuned to such winds.
Cardo factors out that purely from the attitude of an investor looking for returns, South Africa was certainly a danger nicely price taking on the time, because the nationwide revenue over the previous 20 years had soared to 2 billion kilos, from 375 million kilos in 1937, whereas the economic system had diversified into manufacturing.
The withering distinction with the present state of affairs on this entrance may hardly be extra stark.
Vibrant forged
On a lighter notice, this work can also be peppered with telling and pleasant anecdotes. There’s a vibrant forged of characters who share the stage with Oppenheimer, and they’re certainly not as saintly as Madiba.
Take Charles Engelhard Jr, an American tycoon who turned a pal and enterprise affiliate of Oppenheimer. His father had constructed up a affluent US-based enterprise processing and refining valuable metals and bequeathed his hard-living son a fortune. Junior first visited South Africa within the late Nineteen Forties and added to his nest egg by manufacturing strong gold artefacts and ashtrays for Far East markets.
“At their level of departure,” Cardo writes, “they had been melted down into gold bars. On this method, Engelhard circumvented South Africa’s bullion laws and earned himself a spot within the pantheon of fictional villains. Apparently, Engelhard was the inspiration for the character of Auric Goldfinger, James Bond’s larger-than-life adversary within the 1959 novel Goldfinger.”
As we speak, Zamas Zamas, whose treacherous work is a legacy of the migrant labour system, are fingered for his or her function in the same felony enterprise. These on the prime of those illicit and enriching worth chains are following a path first trod by one among Oppenheimer’s buddies.
After all, one other Bond movie primarily based on an Ian Fleming novel of the identical title can be entitled, “Diamonds Are Eternally”.
Oppenheimer’s legacy could or will not be ceaselessly, however his life and work have been nicely documented on this positive guide, which can also be in some ways a mirrored image on South Africa’s tumultuous twentieth century.
Harry Oppenheimer died in 2000, however contestation over his reminiscence will reside on. DM
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