Anton Rupert: The Life of a Business Icon

By Ebbe Dommisse

Anton Rupert is a legend of the 20th century. Here we have Rupert's story, as complete, I suspect, as we will ever have it. Not only the story of fanatical perseverance, but also of someone with exceptional vision...
This book contains many revelations, essential to understanding Rupert, e.g. not only his clashes with Verwoerd, but also ongoing friction with the Nationalist government, the bitter battle with the Sanlam bosses and his quarrel with Louis Luyt.' - Danie Van Niekerk

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Mar 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9780624094760

Ebbe Dommisse

Ebbe Dommisse is op 14 Julie 1940 op Riversdal gebore. Hy behaal 'n BA-graad aan die Universiteit van Stellenbosch en ook 'n MA-graad in joernalistiek aan die Columbia Universiteit in New York. Hy begin in 1961 sy loopbaan as joernalis by Die Burger, waar hy in 1990 redakteur word tot met sy aftrede in 2000. Ebbe is die medeskrywer (met Alf Ries) van topverkopers Broedertwis (1982) en Leierstryd (1990) - en ook hierdie boek met Willie Esterhuyse, Anton Rupert - 'n lewensverhaal.

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PART I

TURNING POINT

Chapter 1

Atomic bombs and parks for peace

ONLY ONCE in his life did Anton Rupert deliberately stay away from his office for an entire day. This was when the news reached South Africa that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, destroying the Japanese seaport. The nuclear horror irrevocably changed the course of history – and Rupert’s view of life.

At that stage he was still in Johannesburg, an inexperienced young entrepreneur with a factory processing pipe tobacco that struggled to keep afloat in tough wartime conditions. That morning in early August when he heard of the devastation of Hiroshima, he telephoned his office to announce that he would be unavailable for the day – he stayed home to ponder on the destructive force of the atomic bomb.

Rupert, with a master’s degree in chemistry, understood that something cataclysmic had occurred. One hundred thousand of the 245 000 inhabitants of Hiroshima perished that day, with a further 100 000 dying in the aftermath. Three days later, the second and last atomic bomb destroyed the picturesque port city of Nagasaki, killing another 80 000 people.

The devastating atomic bombs heralded the final episode of Japan’s participation in World War II. Five days later, Emperor Hirohito acknowledged that Japan had been vanquished for the first time in its history. He expressed the primal fear of Armageddon, the end of the world. The images of total annihilation by the two atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, not only broke Japan’s spirit but stunned the whole of humanity. Since that time, much more powerful nuclear weapons have been developed and intercontinental ballistic missiles have extended their range.

Rupert would later write: ‘Since the unlocking of the power of the atom – since Hiroshima – everything has changed, except our way of thinking. In this atomic era there is no longer any country remote enough to become a place of shelter. The biblical notion that I am my brother’s keeper has become a cold reality; depressions are now global, as is welfare. In this century where at least two nations possess enough bombs to destroy everything, we live like scorpions in a bottle – and he who wants to retain all will lose all.’¹

In future, he realised, humanity could only save itself through coexistence: ‘People simply have to learn to live together.’ Coexistence became the core concept that would inspire Rupert for the rest of his life. The well-known Rodin bronze The Cathedral, which he acquired in the 1960s, stood in his office as an enduring reminder. To him, the sculpture of two right hands symbolised the coexistence between people, the foundation of his philosophy of partnership on which he built his business empire.

This vision of partnership was coupled with social responsibility, which he considered one of the three major responsibilities of a successful business enterprise. Not only should there be coexistence between human beings but also coexistence between humans and nature. At Millennia Park in Stellenbosch, he later campaigned for the development of transnational game and nature parks that required multilateral cooperation between governments of various countries. Peace parks – with peace between people and nations as a desirable prerequisite for the survival of threatened species in spite of a human population explosion threatening the biological cycle – became a compelling vision that brought the octogenarian Rupert to his head office each day.

The Ruperts regularly appear on the business magazine Forbes’ list of the world’s 500 richest people, the billionaires with estimated assets of more than 1 000 million US dollars. Besides the Ruperts, Forbes only lists one other family from Africa: the Oppenheimers, heirs of the South African mining magnate Sir Ernest Oppenheimer and his son Harry.² The main difference between these families is that Rupert started with next to nothing, nor did he depend on the country’s mineral riches as a base.

He started out as a chemistry student with a personal investment of a mere £10 in a small tobacco enterprise, which he developed systematically into an international chain of tobacco interests under the world-famous banners of Rembrandt and Rothmans. Under the banner of SFW and Distillers, Rupert also produced some of the most famous South African wines and spirits. Later he entered the international luxury goods market with the company Richemont, which includes world-renowned brands such as Cartier, Alfred Dunhill and Montblanc.

In addition, he developed into a man for all seasons, with active interests outside the business sphere: conserver of his country’s historical heritage; patron of the arts; navigator of political minefields; benefactor helping others to help themselves. Yet he remained an intensely private person, someone who did not readily grant media interviews and whose private life, like some of his weighty business transactions, was often shrouded in mystery.

His interest in nature and wildlife was the foundation on which his idea of peace parks was built. The translocation of the first herd of elephants from the Kruger National Park to the Limpopo National Park – part of the initial development of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park that was envisaged to extend across the borders of three countries, incorporating national parks in Mozambique and Zim­babwe as well – took place on 4 October 2001, Rupert’s 85th birthday. For him, the first translocation of big game to the envisaged peace park was a birthday present without equal: the realisation of a 10-year-long dream.

Still at Rupert’s side in this great experiment was his wife, Huberte. This strong woman had been a tower of strength and his sounding board since their student days and throughout his career. A week before, on 27 September 2001, they had celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary, the 60th anniversary of their marriage in 1941.

Rupert drew inspiration from Albert Schweitzer’s thoughts on reverence for life. The German medical missionary, philosopher and philanthropist, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, devoted his life to healing Africans in his hospital at Lambaréné in Gabon. Reverence for life was also reflected in a poignant bronze statue placed in the entrance hall of Rupert’s office building in Stellenbosch. Here visitors walked past the German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s Mutter mit Zwillingen, depicting a mother cradling her twins in her arms. In a smallish office on the floor above it, next to a reception area watched over by Rodin’s Cathedral, Rupert continued with his daily stint after his retirement.

In his eighties, the once energetic entrepreneur walked with a stoop as a result of a curvature of the spine. He also read with some difficulty, and all correspondence and reading material had to be enlarged by means of a video screen on his desk. Typically, Rupert regarded his weakening sight as an asset – because he was able to read less, he said, he had ‘more opportunity to think’.

On 18 January 2006, Anton Rupert passed away in his sleep in the house at 13 Thibault Street in Stellenbosch where he and Huberte had lived for more than half a century – a mere two months after her death on 6 November 2005.

The life story of this entrepreneur-philanthropist and business legend spanned almost a quarter of modern South Africa’s history by the turn of the 21st century. It started with his birth during World War I in his beloved Karoo.

PART II

FORMATIVE YEARS

Chapter 2

Eastern Cape roots

ANTON RUPERT was born on 4 October 1916 in the historic Eastern Cape town of Graaff-Reinet. He was of German, English and Dutch-Afrikaner descent. His paternal great-grandfather (and the founder of the South African Rupert family) was Johann Peter Ruppert, a native of Prussia and a settler on the eastern frontier. (In time the surname lost its second ‘p’.) On his maternal side, Rupert was a ninth-generation South African.

Johann Peter Ruppert had an interesting history. After the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, he enlisted in the British army, which was recruiting soldiers on the European continent. With the rest of what was known as the German Legion, he was stationed at Colchester, northeast of London. When the war ended, members of the German Legion were given the option to settle on the eastern frontier of the British colony at the Cape. Because of the dearth of women at the Cape, the young soldiers who had been recruited for emigration to what was then known as British Kaffraria were advised to find wives before they departed. On 19 October 1856 the 18-year-old Ruppert married 17-year-old Emma Susanna Grandfield-Crosby, a Colchester girl.

By 1858 a contingent of 2 362 officers and privates of the German Legion, accompanied by only 361 women and 195 children, had been settled in the area later known as the Ciskei, which was drastically depopulated at the time – among other things as a result of the smallpox epidemic of 1857 as well as the Xhosa cattle-killing movement, a consequence of visions reported by the prophetess Nongqawuse. In due course they were joined by a further 2 700 German civilian settlers – friends and relatives of the military settlers.

Johann Peter Ruppert and his companions disembarked at East London. He was initially stationed at Berlin, one of a number of Eastern Cape towns that had been given German names, where he was granted land. But the British government’s plan with the military settlers did not work out as intended. The frontier problems were becoming less acute, and at the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny shortly afterwards, more than 1 000 members of the German Legion volunteered for service in India. Only 386 eventually returned. The German settlers who remained were mostly unable to farm successfully on their small plots of land, much of which was not even arable. In 1861 the legion was disbanded.

Ruppert and his wife were among the settlers who moved to Graaff-Reinet, a town that was also depopulated as a result of the Great Trek. This Karoo settlement with its colourful history was nonetheless one of the biggest towns at the Cape, and would play a major role in Anton Rupert’s life.

Graaff-Reinet is the oldest town in the Eastern Cape and among the oldest in South Africa. It was established in 1786 by the Dutch East India Company as the administrative seat of its fourth district in what later became South Africa. As such, it was entitled to a drostdy (magistrate’s residence). The town was named after the Cape governor Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff and his wife, Reinet. By the time the district was proclaimed, it was already home to about 600 farmer families of Euro­pean descent. In 1795 Adriaan van Jaarsveld led a rebellion against the authority of the Dutch East India Company, which earned the town a reputation as the first Boer republic. Several other uprisings followed but they all petered out eventually.

Two eminent Eastern Cape figures who became renowned countrywide – Andries Stockenström (1792-1864) and the Rev Andrew Murray (1794-1866) – were subsequently regarded as the true founders of the town. The Scottish missionary Andrew Murray Sr, who settled in Graaff-Reinet in 1822, later became moderator of the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). An imposing church building was erected, and he and his wife, Susanna, lived for many years in the beautiful Cape Dutch DRC parsonage that later became known as Reinet House. Members of the London Missionary Society such as Dr John Philip and Dr JT van der Kemp, founder of the Bethelsdorp mission station, also ministered in Graaff-Reinet.

Stockenström instituted the system of local government and was responsible for laying out the charming town with its water furrows. Aged only 23 when he was appointed as the district’s landdrost or magistrate in 1815, he subsequently gained renown as a far-sighted Eastern Cape leader. His views on coexistence in the turbulent frontier region as well as two fundamental principles – truth and justice – that he advocated against the British missionaries, largely resemble the philosophy Anton Rupert was to adopt many years later.

Early travellers described Graaff-Reinet – with its large number of striking buildings set in the horsehoe bend of the Sundays River – as the ‘Gem of the Karoo’. Many were in the Cape Dutch style, but the town also boasted Georgian double-storey houses, Victorian houses with decorative broekielace and flat-roofed Karoo houses. In the 20th century, Graaff-Reinet became the town with the most proclaimed historical sites in South Africa.

The descendants of the rebels of 1795 gradually developed more and more grievances against the British colonial administration, and by 1838 the Great Trek, the migration of Afrikaners to the interior, was in full swing. Several eminent Trekker leaders had close ties with Graaff-Reinet. Gerrit Maritz was a wealthy wagonmaker in the town (his outlying farm Welgevonden was acquired by Anton Rupert’s son Anthonij a century and a half later), and Andries Pretorius of Blood River fame farmed in the district. The marriages of Trekker leaders Piet Retief and Louis Trichardt were solemnised in the local church. Sarel Cilliers was born at nearby Nieu-Bethesda, and Andries Hendrik Potgieter was baptised at Graaff-Reinet.

Two presidents of later Boer republics, Jacobus Nicolaas Boshof of the Orange Free State and Thomas Francois Burgers of the Transvaal, hailed from Graaff-Reinet. Further down the line, a future prime minister of South Africa, Dr DF Malan, left his position as minister of the DRC in Graaff-Reinet to become editor of Die Burger, the oldest Afrikaans daily newspaper, in 1915. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, founder-leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), went to school in Graaff-Reinet and now lies buried there.

Many other cultural leaders, businesspeople, educationists, medical doctors and agriculturalists put their stamp on Graaff-Reinet. The town was quite ‘cosmopolitan’ – the strong Afrikaner presence was complemented by English-speaking families such as the Murrays and Haywards, and Jewish families such as the Mosenthals and Herbsteins, as well as initially a smaller group of black people and a considerably larger population of Coloured people.

Johann Ruppert arrived in Graaff-Reinet during a worldwide depression in the aftermath of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The demand for wool had declined and the town’s thriving grape-growing industry was hit by an outbreak of powdery mildew. In 1868 the disease was brought under control through the use of sulphur, and the town became renowned as a source of brandy and witblits (home-distilled raw spirit), which was distilled on a large scale.

After the discovery of diamonds in 1867, fortune hunters from all over the world flocked to Kimberley via Port Elizabeth and Graaff-Reinet. At one point there were more than 60 outspan sites for ox-wagons in the town, which had become the gateway to the north. A further boom period followed when, in 1879, the town became the terminus for the new railway line from Port Elizabeth from where travellers could continue their journey to the burgeoning interior by ox-wagon. Cleghorn & Harris’s first department store in South Africa opened in Graaff-Reinet, and at one stage the town had no fewer than four newspapers.

Ruppert started off as a foreman on the farm Bloemhof but then worked as a wagonmaker in Graaff-Reinet until his death in 1882 – according to family lore he was killed in a shooting accident while hunting. Three of the four children from his marriage with Emma Susanna died in childhood, two of them within 10 days of each other during the diphtheria epidemic of 1869. Only the eldest son, Anthony Edward Rupert, Anton Rupert’s grandfather, survived to adulthood. Like his father, he died at the age of 44. Consequently, the Ruperts have never been a large family.

The pioneer Ruppert couple belonged to the Anglican parish of St James in Graaff-Reinet. In 1865, a few years after their arrival in the town, the colonial government decreed that instruction in all government schools in the Cape Colony would henceforth be conducted in English. English newspapers at the Cape, convinced that the English were the ‘dominant race’, propagated a militant form of cultural imperialism; the Cape Argus dismissed Afrikaans as a ‘bastard jargon’ unworthy of the term ‘language’. Despite this, the Ruperts (like many other immigrant families) gradually adopted Afrikaans as their home language. After the marriage of the pioneer couple’s surviving son to an Afrikaans-speaking girl, the family eventually joined the Dutch Reformed Church.

Grandfather Anthony Edward Rupert became a well-known builder. Initially he plied his trade from one farm to the next, sometimes going around on horseback but travelling on foot when in dire straits. In 1885 he married Maria Elizabeth Dippenaar and eight children were born of their marriage. After the wedding he built a school at Graaff-Reinet and another on the farm Letskraal, where Andries Pretorius had farmed before the Great Trek. At nearby Petersburg, on the ox-wagon route to Kimberley, he built a church whose cornerstone still bears his name. In 1899, shortly before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War, he and his family settled in Graaff-Reinet itself, where he also restored and renovated houses.

The eldest of Anthony Edward’s eight children, John Peter Rupert, born in 1888, practised for many years as an attorney at Graaff-Reinet, where the family would live for nearly a century. His son Anton was born 28 years later.

Chapter 3

Boyhood years in the Karoo

ANTON RUPERT – the eldest of three sons – was born on 4 October 1916. Named after his paternal grandfather, Anthony Edward, he was known as Boetie (lit. ‘little brother’) in his boyhood and became Anton at university. His brothers Jan (John Peter) and Koos (Jacobus Albertus) were born in 1922 and 1929 respectively. Both Rupert’s brothers studied law but did not enter the legal profession, and would later join the Rembrandt Group.

Their father, known as Oom (uncle) John, was a respected community leader. In the hard times during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when the Cape Colony was subject to martial law and many Cape Afrikaners, although British subjects, were as poverty-stricken as their fellow Afrikaners and relatives in the war-torn Transvaal and Orange Free State republics, he had to go out to work at a young age. After the war he was able to complete his high-school education at Graaff-Reinet College in 1909.

After serving articles at the Graaff-Reinet law firm of CH Maasdorp, John Rupert worked for attorneys in towns such as Kimberley, Mossel Bay and Prince Albert before establishing his own law practice in Graaff-Reinet. He took a keen interest in education as well as child welfare. The secretary of the local Child Welfare Society during his term of office as chairman was the town’s social worker, Tini Malan, who was to marry BJ (John) Vorster before he was interned during World War II and became prime minister of South Africa in 1966.

John Rupert also had an early encounter with JG (Hans) Strijdom, who had grown up in nearby Willowmore and would later precede Vorster as prime minister. Strijdom’s uncle brought the young Stellenbosch law graduate to Graaff-Reinet to discuss the possibility of Rupert employing him as an articled clerk. Rupert was of the view that Graaff-Reinet offered too little scope and advised him to try his luck in the Transvaal. Strijdom moved to Pretoria and then to Nylstroom, where he became known as the Lion of the North.

In the early 1950s Strijdom, at the time Transvaal leader of the governing National Party (NP), visited Anton Rupert in Stellenbosch. He wanted to break away from the then prime minister Dr DF Malan on account of differences about whether South Africa should become a republic. Rupert walked twice around the house with the impassioned Strijdom and persuaded him to be patient; he would get his chance as leader. Strijdom did take over from Malan, but became ill and died in office.

John Rupert became secretary of the first branch of the National Party established in Stellenbosch after General JBM Hertzog’s sensational speech at De Wildt on 7 December 1912. The Free State judge and Boer War hero Hertzog had served in South Africa’s first Union cabinet, with Gen Louis Botha as prime minister, and allied with Botha and Gen Jan Smuts in the South African Party (SAP) in 1911. Hertzog, however, increasingly differed with the conciliation politics of Botha and Smuts as well as their views on the language question, with Hertzog advocating language equality for Afrikaners. He declared himself an opponent of imperialism where imperial interests clashed with national interests, and stated that he put ‘South Africa first’. Botha omitted him from the cabinet in 1912, and in 1914 he formed a new party, the NP. In 1913 he created a commotion at a Stellenbosch language festival when he read out a telegram from MT Steyn, former president of the Orange Free State republic, that contained the following quotation in Dutch: ‘In the mouths of the conquered, the language of the conqueror is the language of slaves.’

The NP grew into the strongest party in Graaff-Reinet as scores of supporters of the SAP joined its ranks. John Rupert’s wife, Hester, chaired the women’s branch of the party, which would come into power in 1924 in coalition with the Labour Party.

John Rupert’s hobbies were poetry and linguistics; he could read nine languages. But he was unable to avail himself of a bursary in the Netherlands in his student years and never travelled abroad. He appeared in several much-discussed court cases, some arising from the Rebellion of 1914 during World War I.

Among others, he defended the editors of Graaff-Reinet’s Onze Courant and the Aberdeen paper Nuwe Tijd when they were charged with sedition on account of reports on Gen Manie Maritz’s treasonable act of joining the Germans with his troops during the Rebellion. The charges were eventually withdrawn. On another occasion he defended the editor of Onze Courant, JA (Sambok) Smith, later a leading figure in the Ossewa-Brandwag, when the paper was sued for reporting that the British airforce had bombed cities in a neutral country. The report turned out to be true and again the charge was withdrawn. Rupert also appeared frequently for Coloured people, sometimes pro bono. Coloured townspeople referred to him as Groot Seur (big sir) and Anton was later called Klein Seur (little sir).

John Rupert counted among his good friends and clients the local DRC minister Rev Jozua Francois Naudé and his wife, Mrs Ada Naudé. Rev Naudé had been one of the six Bittereinders (bitter-enders) who refused to sign the terms of surrender at Vereeniging at the end of the Anglo-Boer War. He was a co-founder of the Afrikaner-Broederbond (AB), the secret organisation established to promote Afrikaner interests as a counterweight to the Freemasons and Sons of England. The couple were the parents of Dr CFB (Beyers) Naudé, anti-apartheid activist, and three of their daughters were named Ligstraal, Hymne and Vryheidster. Beyers was named after the legendary Cmdt Gen Christiaan Frederik Beyers, under whom his father had fought in the Anglo-Boer War and who drowned in the Vaal River during the Rebellion of 1914-1915.

Rev Naudé also chaired the governing body of the Hoër Volkskool in Graaff-Reinet, the first Afrikaans-medium high school in the Cape Province. John Rupert was a co-founder and for 21 years honorary secretary of the governing body of this school, where Anton was to matriculate.

In 1922, a year before Boetie Rupert started school, the Hoër Volkskool moved into the stately premises of the erstwhile Midlands Seminary. The principal, Dr G von W Eybers, who had obtained his doctorate in London, was a firm believer in mother-tongue education. Already in 1919 he had started teaching in Afrikaans instead of Dutch. This unleashed an educational language dispute in the town that resulted in the establishment of the Union High School, an English-medium boarding school that numbers the Springbok wing Chum Ochse among its former pupils.¹

Moreover, the language question caused a rift in the DRC after Rev Naudé delivered his inaugural sermon as the new minister in Afrikaans in 1921. Aggrieved members of the congregation, many of whom considered Dutch the appropriate language for church services, protested vehemently against the use of ‘kitchen Dutch’ in the ‘Great Church’ of the Murrays. It ended in schism when the ‘New Church’ seceded.

Anton Rupert’s wife, Huberte, recounted that her father-in-law had lost clients during Mrs Naudé’s court case because it offended some people that he helped to defend her – a portent of the loyalty principle that would later count for so much in Anton’s career. ‘But he did it for his friend Jozua, who was going through a rough time. And when Anton’s father died in 1961, he thought he would ask Beyers to bury his father.’ Dr Beyers Naudé, then minister of the DRC congregation of Aas­­voëlkop in Johannesburg, consented to the request and conducted the funeral service in the Great Church in Graaff-Reinet.

John Rupert met his future wife, Hester Adriana van Eeden, the sister of a friend, on a train from Port Elizabeth to Klipplaat, a small railway siding near her father’s farm in the Jansenville district. They were married in December 1915 and a year later Anton was born in their stone house at 110 Cradock Street, Graaff-Reinet. The original home of his birth no longer exists; the tennis courts of the Laer Volkskool were constructed on the site. The family later moved to 84 Cradock Street, where they lived across the road from Dr Karl Bremer, later minister of health in the Malan administration.

Anton Rupert was born two years after the outbreak of World War I. In South Africa, the increased unanimity after the formation of the Union in 1910 was a thing of the past, and the country was once again divided on account of Botha and Smuts’s decision to invade German South West Africa (now Namibia) and fight in support of the British Empire. A rebellion broke out after Gen Manie Maritz joined the German forces. Although the Rebellion of 1914-1915 was quelled, resistance grew against the conciliation politics of Botha and Smuts, especially after Hertzog had proclaimed his compelling policy of ‘South Africa First’ in his De Wildt speech. Smuts’s execution of the rebel leader Jopie Fourie also earned him bitter reproaches that would dog him for the rest of his life.

An important consequence of the Rebellion was the establishment of the Helpmekaarvereniging, a mutual-aid society to assist rebels with the payment of fines and compensation claims, at a time when the poor white problem was worsening in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War. (‘Helpmekaar’ means ‘help one another’.) Following from the Helpmekaar movement’s first fundraising drive that yielded £250 000, a national congress was held in Cradock, near Graaff-Reinet, on 22 November 1916 – the year of Anton’s birth – to investigate the problem of poverty. It turned out that there were 105 518 indigent whites, 39 021 of them in dire straits, and that a quarter of the country’s 280 000 white children were not attending school at all.

Although the congress was unable to do much to stem the impoverishment, the Helpmekaar movement became one of the most important organisations that furthered the economic development of Afrikaners. The mustering of Afrikaner capital during World War I also led to the establishment of a number of large Afrikaner enterprises that became success stories, notably the media company Nasionale Pers (later Naspers) in 1915 and the insurance giants Sanlam and Santam as well as the Koöperatiewe Wijnbouwersvereniging van Zuid-Afrika Beperkt (the KWV, Cooperative Wine Growers’ Society of South Africa Ltd) in 1918.

A major driving force behind the Helpmekaar movement was Rev JD Kestell, who would later be a decisive influence in the young Anton Rupert’s life. Kestell conducted the funeral service of former president MT Steyn, who was buried at the foot of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein that commemorates the women and children who died in British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War. In his last speech on the day of his death, 28 November 1916, Steyn had said in the memorial hall in Bloemfontein: ‘The Helpmekaar has been born from God.’

In Anton Rupert’s boyhood years quite a number of Coloured people, who then still had the vote in the Cape Province, lived in the town of Graaff-Reinet. He was to consider the later removal of Coloured people from the centres of towns such as Graaff-Reinet and Stellenbosch under the Group Areas Act one of the great follies of the NP.

Anton’s mother, Hester, one of 10 children, was a caring, loving woman who had a great influence on her eldest son. He often quoted moral guidelines she had given him from the Bible, such as: ‘Of what use is it to conquer the world and lose one’s soul?’ And: ‘Cast your bread upon the waters: for you shall find it after many days.’

After Dr DF Malan’s departure from Graaff-Reinet, Mrs Hester Rupert became the secretary of Jong Zuid-Afrika (young South Africa) in 1915. This association, originally called Zonen van Zuid-Afrika (sons of South Africa) as a counterweight to the Sons of England, with the aim of promoting a common South African patriotism, had changed its name in 1912 when it was decided to admit women as well. In due course the executive committee sided with Hertzog and the NP against Prime Minister Louis Botha.

Mrs Rupert’s father, Mr Jacobus Albertus (Oom Kootjie) van Eeden, a Cape Patriot and co-founder of JH (Onze Jan) Hofmeyr’s Afrikanerbond, South Africa’s first political party, also had a significant influence on his grandson Anton. Up to his death at the age of 84, this successful farmer often discussed national affairs with his grandson.

Oom Kootjie, who died in 1944, as did his daughter Hester, was a descendant of one of the oldest Dutch families in South Africa. The progenitor of the Van Eedens, Jan Janse van Eeden (Jan van Oldenburg), had arrived at the Cape in 1662 and in time farmed on the farm Kromme Rivier (of which the later Bergzicht was a part) outside Stellenbosch. As mentioned before, on his mother’s side Anton Rupert was a ninth-generation South African.

Oom Kootjie had a chequered history. His father died at Somerset East when he was nine. As he wrote later, he was then ‘indentured to a wealthy farmer, one C Buys, as wild and untameable by nature’. There he had to chop wood along with three other boys to burn bricks for an irrigation furrow. ‘Truly, all of this reminds one of the Israelites with Pharaoh in Egypt,’ he remarked.

He also attended a farm school before returning after five years to his mother, who had in the meantime married a well-to-do farmer from Jansenville, CJ Grobler. Oom Kootjie was again put to menial work, this time as a goatherd, but ran away to fight in the frontier war. After he was wounded he turned to transport riding until he married Anna Gertruida Lötter, also an orphan. They bought livestock with savings he had earned, and he engaged in some daring land speculation that gave him ‘a big boost’.

After 14 years he bought Gannavlakte, a farm on the Sundays River in the Jansenville district, for £3 250. In contrast to the later water scarcity in the Karoo, abundant water for irrigation could be pumped from the river in those days. This enabled him to establish a large and prosperous farm. Besides having actively participated in politics since 1884, inter alia as district chairman of the Afrikanerbond for more than 22 years, Oom Kootjie was also assistant field cornet, chairman of the school committee, an elder on the church council, and a member of the rinder­pest and sheep scab committee.

During the Anglo-Boer War he was interned at Port Alfred for a while. As young boys, his two eldest sons, Frederick (Frik) and Francois (Soois) – elder brothers of Mrs Hester Rupert – joined the passing Boer commando of Cmdt Willem Fouché on 7 March 1901. After enduring hardship on commando, they surrendered to British forces. As a Cape rebel and British subject, the 17-year-old Soois was found guilty of the capital offence of high treason by a military court in Graaff-Reinet. However, he was granted clemency by Lord Kitchener and received a prison sentence of one year. Soois benefited from the Peace of Vereeniging: having served only six months in the prison at Grahamstown, he was released and could go home with a free railway pass.

The Van Eedens’ fourth son, born on 27 March 1901, was christened Smart­ryk (meaning grief-stricken, sorrowful). His name expressed the emotions of thousands of Afrikaners, also in the Cape Colony, who had suffered and been pauperised as a result of the war. Many were on the brink of famine. The British government’s meagre offer of £3 million compensation for war damage at the end of the war caused further bitterness. Louis Botha, the first prime minister after the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, was offered £900 in settlement of his claim for £20 000. He returned the cheque.

A war story that made a profound impression on Boetie Rupert was that of the Boer hero Gideon Scheepers, who was executed by firing squad at the age of 23 by the British at Graaff-Reinet. Cmdt Scheepers, commemorated with a statue and a memorial stone in the town, was a master scout who led a successful guerrilla raid into the Cape Colony before he was captured.

In Anton’s own view, the story of Scheepers as told to him by his father, who had been present at the verdict of the British military court on Church Square in Graaff-Reinet when he was 13, changed his life. The prosecution of Scheepers was a show trial intended as a lesson to Cape republicans – while in Rudyard Kip­ling’s words, the war had been ‘no end of a lesson’ to Britain itself. Scheepers, who had persuaded many Cape rebels to join the Boer forces and by his own testimony had captured about 1 300 British soldiers as prisoners of war, was convicted of 30 alleged war crimes by the British officers and sentenced to death.

On the orders of Maj Gen John French, the sentencing and executions of those who were tried had to be carried out in public. Blindfolded and sitting on a chair, the ill Scheepers faced a firing squad of the Coldstream Guards on the day after the verdict, 17 January 1902, which was his mother’s birthday. His body was placed in a grave at the scene and covered with quicklime, but was probably removed that same night and disappeared without a trace.

Scheepers was one of eight people executed at Graaff-Reinet at a time when most of the towns in the Cape Colony were under martial law and military censorship. Like the concentration camps where 28 000 Boer women and children died, and the scorched earth policy of the British commander-in-chief Lord Kitchener in terms of which hundreds of farmhouses were burnt down and herds of livestock destroyed, the executions of Cape rebels and Boer prisoners of war elicited bitter resentment. Some 40 rebels lost their lives in that way in the Cape Colony. As elsewhere, the executions hardened the attitudes of republicans in the divided Graaff-Reinet.

The martyr’s history of Scheepers, who was not a Cape rebel but in fact hailed from the Eastern Transvaal and was a commander of the Free State artillery, became one of the saddest from a war that left a lasting scar on the history of South Africa. His grave was never found. On her 100th birthday in 1956, his mother said she had not forgotten, but forgiven: ‘Let us rather live together in love and peace as an undivided people.’²

As a young boy, Boetie Rupert was introduced to other Boer heroes. One of them was Captain Henri Slegtkamp, who had been a member of Danie Theron’s Reconnaissance Corps along with the Scot Jack Hindon. On a visit to Graaff-Reinet, Slegtkamp captivated the young Rupert with his Boer War stories. He had come to South Africa as a young Dutchman ‘in search of adventure’; he had fought in the Transvaal against the Jameson Raid of 1895/6, described by the historian CW de Kiewiet as ‘one of the most notorious incidents in the history of the British Empire’; and he had immediately gone on commando when the Anglo-Boer War broke out.

At the Anglo-Boer War centenary in 1999, Rupert bought the file on Scheepers, previously in the possession of British Intelligence, from a Cape Town bookseller. It contained Scheepers’s last letters (to his mother, to Pres MT Steyn and to Gen Christiaan de Wet) and his diary entries, as translated by John Gregorowski, who had worked in the Martial Law office at Graaff-Reinet. There were also unique photographs of Scheepers and other Boer prisoners of war taken in the local prison by the Graaff-Reinet photographer Ivie H Allan.

The monument to Scheepers and others executed at Graaff-Reinet had another sequel, one that made a lasting impression on the future industrialist Rupert. After the war, the town council was not willing to make money available for the monument, which depicted a dying Scheepers cradled by Gen De Wet. It was then unveiled in 1908 on land donated by Jurie Laubscher, owner of the local doll factory. He employed more than 70 workers who manufactured the famous Graaff-Reinet Doll, of which there are several examples at Reinet House in Graaff-Reinet.

‘When the Pact Government of the National and Labour parties came to power in 1924 after the mineworkers’ rebellion in Johannesburg, they introduced the first progressive labour laws,’ Rupert recalled. There were strict requirements for the physical layout of factories. ‘Oom Jurie Losper, as he was known, couldn’t meet those requirements and Graaff-Reinet’s largest factory had to close down.’

In Rupert’s childhood days, Graaff-Reinet was a typical country town: no electricity, no running water and no tarred streets. Drinking water was collected in a tank from the runoff of rainwater from rooftops. Irrigation water that was dispersed via furrows came from Mackie’s Pit, a perennial spring that produced 2 million gallons of fresh water daily on the site where the town dam is today. This water was boiled and used for ablutions. Piped water was not available until the late 1920s. Lighting for studying at night was initially provided by candles or paraffin lamps. In due course electricity was supplied, with a bulb hanging from a wire in the centre of a room. At a shilling a unit, electricity was expensive at the time.

‘I come from one of our oldest Karoo towns where I grew up without indoor piped water, a bathtub with a drain, or electric lighting in my youth,’ Rupert recounted in his collection Wie in wondere glo. ‘There was no radio, no hearing aids, no radar, no jet planes, no diesel, no ballpoint pen, no self-winding watch, no camera flash, no tape recorder, yes, not even any tissues.’³

In the early 1920s John Rupert still drove his Model-T Ford on the dirt road to Beaufort West, from where he travelled by train to attend a court case in Cape Town. In the mid-1920s he acquired a Chevrolet that was eventually displayed at the Transport Museum housed in the restored station building in Heidelberg, Gauteng. The vehicles were later moved to the Franschhoek Motor Museum on the Rupert farm L’Ormarins.

One of Boetie Rupert’s earliest memories was a visit to his Colchester-born great-grandmother Emma Susanna – ‘the tiny old woman’ – at an old-age home in Cape Road, Port Elizabeth, shortly before she died in 1919. She had lost her husband, the first Rupert in South Africa, as far back as 1882. His mother also showed him a letter to her from great-grandmother Emma that ended with five crosses and a message in her native English: ‘And remember to give my love to Anthony.’

In Anton Rupert’s boyhood years, the most important people in South African country towns and villages were the minister of the local congregation, the school principal and the magistrate – authority figures who left a stamp on generations of Afrikaners who grew up in the rural areas. Sundays were strictly Calvinist in Graaff-Reinet, a town very much under the influence of the Murrays, who like other austere Scottish church fathers had become ministers of the South African DRC. Children had to attend church and Sunday School, sport on Sunday was considered sinful and even sewing was forbidden on the sabbath lest the needle pierce God’s watchful eye.

His brother Koos confirmed the strict Calvinist culture in which they had grown up. ‘For many years our father was friends with the school principal and the minister. But my father never went to church; he preferred mountain climbing. He wrote a poem about the Valley of Desolation (a deep kloof with majestically stacked dolerite pillars that the Ruperts preferred to call the ‘mountain cathedral’): This is the church where I want to sit, this is the church where I want to pray. We would go to church with my mother. I didn’t like Sunday school. Rev Naudé would sometimes cry on the pulpit and it upset me a lot.’ Koos added: ‘We weren’t even supposed to go walking on Sundays. This was the Scots’ influence.’

Although their mother was devout, she did not flaunt her religion. And whatever his religious convictions, their father’s values were Calvinist: an ethos of hard work, integrity and sobriety. The absence of rigid orthodoxy on the part of his parents, however, left Anton with a lasting aversion to rules and regulations that curb innovativeness and individuality. While he was opposed to an inflexible orthodox attitude to life, he internalised the discipline, diligence and integrity of Calvinism.

Boetie Rupert started school in 1923 at the age of six. Although there was no school uniform for these primary-school children, they did have to wear shoes. On his first day of school Boetie was pushing his newborn baby brother Jannie’s pram and ended up in a water furrow. His brand-new shoes and outfit were drenched, and he had to go home to change into old clothes and shoes before venturing out on his school career.

He completed the first two levels, Sub A and Sub B, in one year. Although he was left-handed, he was not forced to write with his right hand as was common practice in those days. This was due to the recommendation of Dr Karl Bremer, who had recently returned from abroad, that he should continue writing with his left hand.

One of his classmates was Bremer’s daughter Elizabeth (Van der Merwe, a writer of children’s books). She recalled that in Sub A he had sat with her at a little square table for four. The other two classmates were Hendrik Momberg and Marié van Schalkwyk (married name Pallister), the daughter of Dr Bremer’s partner Dr Johannes van Schalkwyk, who was the author of Raad in tyd van siekte (advice in times of illness), the first medical manual in Afrikaans.

Initially Boetie Rupert’s scholastic performance was mediocre. Elizabeth recalled that their teacher Miss Bella Laubscher, daughter of the owner of the doll factory, had called him to the front of the classroom in Sub B. He hung his head while she said he had come ninth in the class but he could do much better.

The public rebuke hit home. Soon he was top of his class. Elizabeth, who wanted to compete with him, was never able to overtake him. In Standard 7, her last year in Graaff-Reinet (Dr Bremer subsequently moved to Cape Town as a member of parliament), she was again unable to match him. When she went to his mother, whom she addressed as ‘Missus’ Rupert, to bemoan her fate, Hester Rupert consoled her.

Boetie, who could read before he went to school, was a voracious reader, mostly of children’s books at night. And he had a thirst for knowledge. He scoured the well-equipped town library for newspapers as well as magazines like Scientific American and the Illustrated London News, besides reading nearly all the books. In a parental home where there was no shortage of love, his mother sat up with him at night while he studied and read, and brought him a hot drink at bedtime.

The Karoo, with Graaff-Reinet on a wide plain at the foot of the Sneeuberg mountain range and alongside the imposing Spandau Kop and the Valley of Desolation, made an indelible impression on the young schoolboy. He often accompanied his father on long walks in the veld.

Rupert considered it ‘an absolute privilege’ to have grown up in the Karoo. Years later he pointed out in a newspaper interview that many of the great faiths came from the desert – Moses, Jesus and Mohammed had all been desert dwellers. ‘That is where you get seven-year droughts, where the starry skies make you aware of your puniness, and where you are forced to think.’ By contrast, he quipped, Karl Marx found his inspiration for the communists’ bible, Das Kapital, in the vaults of the British Museum.⁴

He loved not only the Karoo but also its people. In later years, on hearing that the CEO of a large company had refused to contribute to the Peace Parks Foundation, he remarked indignantly: ‘And he comes from Cradock!’

The young Anton spent time at his father’s office, learning about the legal profession and legal issues as well as the importance of meticulous attention to detail. He noted later that successful businesspeople such as Harry Oppenheimer of Anglo American and Donny Gordon of Liberty Life devoted infinite attention to detail. John Rupert often impressed on his son: ‘Honesty is the best policy. Your word should be your bond.’ Another statement that stayed with Anton all his life was a trenchant judgment: ‘I don’t fear the devil, but I fear a crook.’

A cherished value of his father’s that Anton quoted frequently in later years was that one should be wary of the seduction of praise: ‘Today they shout hosanna, tomorrow they crucify you.’ When giving someone a compliment, he would sometimes add that it entailed responsibility: you had to live up to it.

Even as a young boy Boetie Rupert already followed politics. His introduction to radio was a crystal set broadcasting the 1929 election results. He was 12 years old at the time and a great admirer of Gen Hertzog, who was to remain prime minister for 15 years after coming into power in 1924. According to Elizabeth van der Merwe, Anton showed her a scrapbook with a photo of Hertzog when they were in Standard 4 or 5 and said: ‘This is my hero!’

Boetie and a friend decided to build their own crystal radio. For an aerial they chose a length of galvanised wire, which they wanted to fasten to the roof of the house. While they were on the roof, the aerial dropped onto the power lines – luckily they weren’t touching it – and caused a short circuit that left the entire neighbourhood without power for hours. His father was furious.

It was at about the same time that Boetie and Elizabeth one day stood on a street corner below a billboard advertising cigarettes as they watched a municipal vehicle procession. The young Rupert told her South Africa should not be importing such cigarettes: ‘We should be making them ourselves.’

He was expressing a sentiment that had been gaining ground among Afrikaners for quite some time. Already on 19 November 1880 Di Afrikaanse Patriot mentioned as ‘one of the many chords we struck which have resonated in the hearts of thousands of Afrikaners and continue to reverberate’ that ‘foreign fortune seekers are completely in control of commerce in our country’, that ‘they enrich themselves by taking unfair profits’, and on top of that use local farmers’ own money to keep them under once these foreigners have become prosperous.⁵

Rupert developed an interest in industry and in museums at an early age. Port Elizabeth was where the Ruperts spent their holidays. There they would often visit Grandmother Rupert, who lived in the city from 1923 till her death in 1930, and their father’s younger sister, Miss Florence Rupert. Aunt Florrie, a teacher, took the young Anton to the local snake park and the museum, as well as to various factories around Algoa Bay. Places they visited included the first assembly plants of Ford and General Motors, the Wool Exchange, the Pyotts biscuit factory and the Mobs shoe factory. Anton recounted later that as a boy he already ‘gained a fair impression of the start of our industrial enterprises’.

‘Coming from Graaff-Reinet where there was no industry, it was a dream and a magical world to me to see how something was manufactured … sweets, biscuits, shoes, yes, even how a car was assembled, because in those days our industrial enterprises consisted mostly of assembling,’ he told visitors at a Port Elizabeth show in 1967. ‘Today you have already entered the second phase of manufacturing here, and one can think with greater pride that a car is closer to being locally manufactured than in those initial days.’⁶

South Africa’s transition from agriculture and mining to an industrial country left such a lasting impression that it influenced his choice of career. ‘Production has always fascinated me. Later at university I realised how important industry was as a source of employment opportunities,’ he said in a radio interview.⁷

Boetie did not excel at sports, although he enjoyed a friendly game of tennis and rugby. Later in life, when a journalist from the US magazine Fortune asked Rupert what his favourite forms of exercise were, he remarked: ‘I do mental gymnastics and I jump to conclusions!’

When Japie Heese founded the Voortrekker movement for young people at the Hoër Volkskool in the late 1920s, Boetie was one of the first members and wore the movement’s little green badge in his buttonhole. In 1931 it became a countrywide movement as an Afrikaans counterweight to the Boy Scouts.

As a child he often played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with the other boys. On one occasion one of the town’s pranksters, Robey Leibbrandt, was involved. Leibbrandt, later an Olympic boxer and Nazi symphatiser who would receive a death sentence for treason during World War II, had been born in 1913 and as a teenager went to school in Graaff-Reinet. His father, a Boer combatant described by Smuts as one of his bravest men when clemency was granted to Robey in 1948, was stationed at Graaff-Reinet as an officer in the permanent force from 1914 to 1924. At a stage Leibbrandt Sr rented Grandfather Rupert’s house. One day during a game, Robey and his brothers hanged the school principal’s eldest son, Von Welfling Eybers, with a rope from cypress tree. Fortunately his toes were touching the ground and some older men cut the rope to release him. The much younger Boetie, who had just started school, witnessed the incident.

In 1928 the school magazine included an English essay by Boetie, then in Standard 5, that gave an indication of his interest in nature and wildlife. Describing a visit to the Pretoria Zoo, he wrote: ‘The first thing which attracted my attention was the gorgeously coloured speaking-parrots. Then I came to the cage of the gorilla – a mighty big and strong animal. After a few minutes walking I came to the monkey cage from where I walked to the hippopotamus, a very large animal with the largest mouth I have ever seen.’ He concluded: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed this well-spent and interesting afternoon.’

His interest in printing, colour and form – culminating in the scrupulous attention that Rupert as a master of marketing would give to each new product in the tobacco and liquor trade – also took hold at an early age. When Boetie was in Standard 6 he went on what was meant to be a one-day visit to his uncle Fred Knoetze, owner of a printing establishment in Somerset East who published the local newspaper Somerset Budget, during the October holidays. The driver who had given him a lift there forgot to pick him up, so he spent a whole week with his uncle, who showed him everything at the printing works. ‘The whole printing process, the typefaces, the colour samples absolutely fascinated me,’ he related later.

In Standard 8 he obtained four distinctions and was among the top 10 students in the Cape Junior Certificate examination. In 1933, his final year at school, he was one of a class of 35, some of whom had started school in 1922, the year the Volkskool was founded, and were therefore the first pupils to have completed their entire school career there.

Fifty years later, in March 1983, 18 of the surviving members of that class attended a reunion. Anton, by then an honorary citizen of Graaff-Reinet, presented the school with a Bill Davis sculpture on behalf of the three Rupert brothers – Anton, Jan and Koos – who had been pupils there from 1923 to 1943. The sculpture, titled His Hands, paid homage to the two Louw brothers who had gained fame as poets: NP van Wyk Louw, who was married to the former Volkskool pupil Truida Pohl, and Gladstone (WEG) Louw, who was a director of Historical Homes of South Africa for many years. The theme of the sculpture was derived from WEG Louw’s poem ‘Golgota’, from which Anton quoted during the presentation.

Anton matriculated in 1933