Michael Cardo
Michael Cardo Discusses His New Book “Harry Oppenheimer: Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty”
Michael Cardo - Discusses His New Book, “Harry Oppenheimer: Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty”
- Michael Cardo is a member of Parliament in South Africa and serves as the shadow minister of employment and labour. He was born in Durban, educated at the University of Natal and the University of Cambridge. From the latter institution, he holds a PhD in history. He worked as a political researcher, speechwriter and policy analyst before being elected to Parliament in 2014. His most recent book is “Harry Oppenheimer: "Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty.” A previous biography, “Opening Men’s Eyes: "Peter Brown and the Liberal Struggle for South Africa,” was also published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Today, Michael is going to be talking about his new book, which I’ve spoken about earlier, “Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty.” He’s going to be in conversation, as those of you who were on earlier, he’s going to be in conversation with Dennis Davis. And a huge thanks to both of you for being on today. And, Dennis, thanks for organising this. Looking forward. Over to you.
Well, this is the book. And I suppose part of my job, Michael, is to convince people to read your book who haven’t read it up to now, because it’s an absolutely fabulous book. And thank you for doing this. And I want to just make this caveat to start with, that it’s such a comprehensive book that it’s absolutely impossible for me to go down all of the avenues that you have dealt with. Because, remarkably, if you read this book, you get a really fine understanding of South African history at the same time. But perhaps, can I start with something that struck me in rereading it for the purposes of this discussion, was the introduction. When you say, “When I started my research for this book, Harry Oppenheimer had ebbed from public consciousness. He’d been dead 17 years. In South Africa, a nation often preoccupied with the past, collective memory can fade astonishingly easily. However, the name was shortly to enjoy a revival. In 2017, the London-based public relations firm Bell Pottinger, long since the agency of choice for clients with a chequered past, was exposed as the mastermind behind a campaign designed to stoke racial tensions in the post-apartheid polity.” And, of course, the whole idea of Hoggenheimer and the Oppenheimers came up again. Why was that that? That, you know, Harry Oppenheimer seemed to still retain, you know, such a central part of that awful narrative?
Dennis, I think it’s a function of the fact that he is such a commanding presence and such a towering figure in South African history. And his life really straddles the history of the South African nation in the 20th century. So he was born in 1908. This is two years before union takes effect in 1910. And that, obviously, is the coming into being of the South African body politic, based on the exclusion of Blacks from citizenship. It’s underpinned by segregation. And he lived such a long life. He dies at the age of 91 in 2000, just before he turns 92. And by this stage, South Africa has become a non-racial democracy based on constitutionalism. So it was very interesting for me that he was present at the very beginning, but also lived through what essentially was the reincarnation of the nation. And throughout that period, I think Oppenheimer became almost a, I hesitate to use the word demonic figure, but he certainly represented, for both white Afrikaner nationalists and, later on, the new Black African nationalist ruling class, something shadowy, something sinister, something omnipotent. And as a result of that, he became a figure to be feared and to be scorned. And I can go into exactly how that took place. I mean, you mentioned the figure of Hoggenheimer, and interestingly, Hoggenheimer, we heard about earlier, some of you would’ve listened to Milton Shain’s lecture, and Hoggenheimer was weaponized against Harry Oppenheimer when he served as a member of Parliament in the 1950s. So he was a member of Parliament for the United Party. He was a great Jan Smuts man. Harry’s father, Sir Ernest, was a friend of Smuts’ and had himself been a member of Parliament in the 1930s when the Hoggenheimer slur had been weaponized against Ernest Oppenheimer. It’s revived against the son Harry in the 1950s, when he becomes a figure of power and influence in the United Party. The National Party had only narrowly won that 1948 election. It’s scared that the UP might reclaim power. So Oppenheimer becomes this figure to be fought in the press. And many, many years later, in the same sort of a way, the new nationalist African ruling class regards Oppenheimer as the sinister embodiment of white monopoly capital, which has echoes with the earlier Hoggenheimer motif.
So I can’t then help but sort of, in a sense, from that, and particularly ‘cause I suspect there are lots of Jewish people in the audience listening to us, to talk a little bit about Harry and this whole vexed issue of Judaism. So just a few things, if I might. I mean, just a few factual things. And then I wanted to ask you a question that doesn’t trouble me, but intrigues me, from your book. My understanding is he had a bris, but contrary to everybody else, this nonsense, you have exposed quite clearly that he did not have a bar mitzvah. So I want to just talk a little bit about that.
Well, there’s a lot to say about that. So first of all, I should really just give a sense for our listeners of how incredibly rich this treasure trove of material at the Brenthurst Library is, which is on the Oppenheimers’ residential estate in Johannesburg. The library itself was built by HFO, as I’ll call him throughout the remainder of this conversation. HFO, his initials, Harry Frederick Oppenheimer. And HFO built the library in 1984, but his father, Sir Ernest, had started collecting Afrikaner long before then, when he was the mayor of Kimberley in the early part of the 20th century. And there’s this wonderful cornucopia of information and source material at the Brenthurst Library. And one of the things I came across was his bris certificate in 1908. And it had become conventional received wisdom, even among Harry Oppenheimer’s own children and grandchildren, all of whom I interviewed, that he would’ve had a bar mitzvah, but I could find no conclusive proof for this. And a few things suggested that he might have not. First of all, the notion came to being that he had had this bar mitzvah in the Kimberley shul, that a plaque had been erected to commemorate it. And that later, when he converted to Anglicanism, the Oppenheimers demanded that this plaque be taken down. It’s a completely apocryphal story. It’s totally untrue. But the interesting thing is that the Oppenheimer family fled Kimberley in 1915. Now, Harry would only have been six, turning seven at the time. The family never returned to Kimberley to live there permanently again.
They were effectively driven out of the town. So Ernest was the mayor in 1915. But the fact that they had a German surname, shortly after the sinking of the Lusitania, didn’t stand them in good stead. So they were actually forced to flee the town. Never returned to live there. And Harry goes off to boarding school, to Charterhouse in England in 1922. He would’ve been 13 at this stage. And, of course, Charterhouse wasn’t a particularly philosemitic environment in the tradition of English public schools. In fact, one interesting nugget I came across was when I was doing some research at Oxford University, I went to visit HFO’s old college. He had been at Christchurch. And there, I came across a letter from his old house master at Charterhouse, written to the dean of Christchurch, the college, motivating for his entry into Oxford. And the house master said, “You know, "he is a very fine fellow, this Oppenheimer. He’s bright, he’s interested, he’s engaged, he gets on with the rest of the chaps in the boarding house. He’s not very good at games. The only thing which might stand against him is his name and appearance,” which I’m sure was an antisemitic jibe. But just to backtrack, I’d also kind of-
This was Lancelot Allen, is that right?
Exactly, yeah, and we actually-
Wrote the document. Very funny, that, actually, yeah.
Yeah.
Carry on.
Huge , the historian also went to Charterhouse, and he said that he was one of the most reactionary school masters he encountered at his time there. But, Dennis, another thing I came across was a baptism certificate for Harry’s brother Frank. So Harry had a brother, Frank, born 1910, two years younger than Harry. Died tragically in a drowning incident in Madeira in 1935. And Frank was baptised into the Anglican faith in 1919, at which stage, Harry would have been 10 or 11 years old. So it made no sense to me that the one brother would’ve been baptised, and the other not. And I know for a fact that when the Oppenheimers eventually, after fleeing Kimberley, they settled for a period in Cape Town. And then they went and stayed with Ernest’s in-laws in London, a very well-to-do family of Viennese Jews who’d become anglicised. The father-in-law actually became the president of the London Stock Exchange at one time. And many members of the Pollack family converted during the First World War. So, you know, there’s a notion, certainly among some members of the Jewish community in South Africa, that Harry only converted when he married his wife, Bridget, in 19-
You mean Ernest converted, you mean.
Say again?
You mean Ernest?
There’s a notion that Harry himself only converted much later.
Ah, so, yes.
When he married Bridget Oppenheimer.
Yeah, yeah.
I’m jumping around. So Ernest we know-
Sorry, I’m sorry.
Converted in the 1930s. So Ernest converted in the 1930s because I came across documentary evidence to that effect. There was correspondence between him and the bishop of Johannesburg in the archives in the 1930s. He wrote to the bishop, asking for admittance to Holy Communion. But some people believe that Harry converted later, when he married his wife in 1943, and that Bridget somehow played a role in him losing touch with his Yiddishkeit. That’s not true. I think the conversion took place much earlier. And the fact that his brother Frank was baptised into the Anglican faith in 1919 suggests to me that Harry was, too, at the same time. And that the story of the bar mitzvah was entirely apocryphal. The fact that they had long since left Kimberley, the story about the plaque at the shul was complete nonsense. I don’t think it happened.
So, Michael, I mean, obviously, you know, it’s so compelling that I don’t even want to, I mean, I wanted people to know about this, but not to debate it with you because it’s clear that you’ve done an extraordinary amount of, you know, historical justification for that. But it still intrigues me, to this extent, that when you talk about even the boyhood of Oppenheimer, and you actually say “one would be forgiven for concluding that his personality was fully formed by the age of 15,” there’s a sense of, that you describe him in a manner which certainly wasn’t Jewish at all. You know, that he was much an English gentleman, et cetera. So I suppose I’m fascinated. Ernest Oppenheimer was, of course, a Jew, and he did convert somewhere in the 1930s. We don’t really have to worry about what the date was. So he was sort of a relatively advanced age. I suppose the fascinating thing is they were very Anglican. I mean, Harry was very Anglican, as you make a compelling case. So it fascinates me, the extent to which that any sort of trace of Judaism disappeared, in many ways, other than the strange thing about Tay-Sachs.
Yeah, well, there are many ways to approach that question. So, first of all, it’s true that Ernest converted. We know for a fact he converted in 1935. This was after a series of personal tragedies. So his wife, May, Harry’s mother, died in 1934.
And she was Jewish.
And she, too, was Jewish, the Pollack family. May Pollack, she was Jewish. But Harry had a very different personality to his father. So Ernest was kind of warm and ebullient and avuncular, and he sort of operated on gut instinct. Harry was far more restrained. There was a cool detachment there, which became abundantly evident to me from the letters and the diaries. Now, bear in mind that I had access to letters that were written by him as a school boy. And that personality, that consummate self-restraint, coupled with a consummate self-assurance, I should add, is very much present there from early times. But for all that, he and his father were extraordinary close. They had what I call an almost telepathic connection. So they shared similar interests, principally business and politics, and they spent a lot of time in each other’s company. They used to go on these long walks around the Brenthurst estate when Harry came home for his long school holidays. And he reflected later in life that, you know, only subsequently did he realise that his father was sort of imparting lessons to him from Voltaire’s “Zadig” and “Candide.” So there was this fascinating relationship between the two of them. They wrote to each other frequently when Harry wasn’t in South Africa. So when he served as a Desert Rat during the Second World War, there was this frequent correspondence. It’s very warm and intimate, but one gets the sense that Sir Ernest is much more the warmer, outwardly, of the two. There’s always a little bit of restraint with Harry.
But just going back to the question of his Jewishness, I certainly think that Jewish kinship networks shaped the first seven-odd years of his life. I think he started losing his connection to his Jewish roots probably from the time that he entered Charterhouse. And then, certainly, when Sir Ernest himself started the Anglo American Corporation in 1917, he became involved, I think, in a business environment and a sort of cultural milieu that was, for want of a better description, quite WASPish, not on the flying insect sense of the term, but there was a distinctly gentile, WASP sensibility to Anglo American. And a number of the executives I interviewed for the book reflected on the fact that, in fact, Jews did not prosper at Anglo American. It was very much a WASP, gentile environment. And for many people, HFO’s personality was emblematic of a certain style of WASPness, for want of a better way of putting it.
I want to move on from this because there’s so much to cover, but just one final point in this. As I understand it, Harry was, or HFO, let’s keep to the title here, HFO was interviewed by John Robbie rather late in life, who, I think, asked him about the question of his Jewishness. And as I understand from you, for once, Harry was not as unflappable as he normally was. Is that true?
He was characteristically utterly imperturbable, is the word that one of his-
Imperturbable. Okay, yes, thank you.
Yeah, his senior executives used that precise word. You know, he was totally imperturbable. The only time some of his confidants saw him rattled was when he went to see P.W. Botha at . So you had this sort of thuggish, brutish finger-pointing, bellicose bully, who was the one person that HFO felt slightly rattled by. But so he was normally unflappable, but, yes, he was asked this question by John Robbie, and he wasn’t keen to go down that road. You know, it wouldn’t have been in HFO’s style or manner to, you know, shout the question down. He would’ve done it very subtly and delicately and skillfully. He just didn’t want to discuss it. But, you know, Dennis, he did actually nurture important relationships with people in the state of Israel. And he became much more interested in his Jewish origins later in life. And, in fact, his eldest granddaughter married a Jewish man, and she converted back to the Jewish faith. But HFO undertook his first visit to Israel in 1968. He went with his great friend Edmond de Rothschild and his wife, Nadine. Rothschild was a great benefactor, as you know, to the state of Israel. And he went there at the invitation, I think, of the Israel Diamond Association, with the invitation of Israeli diamond cutters. But it was very much a below-the-radar visit. But he enjoyed this visit to Israel, and it started a number of visits in the subsequent years. So he was also a great friend of a man called Ludwig Jesselson, with whom he was involved in business. And Jesselson sort of served as HFO’s guide to the Holy Land. You know, they went there in 1982. They visited Yad Vashem. They had an audience with the prime minister at the time. HFO befriended the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. And the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum was established to honour him in Israel in the 1980s. So he took an interest in the state of Israel. He made many very important friendships with Israeli people, and he became interested in his family history. He lost many relatives during the Second World War, in which he fought, and it became a source of interest for him later in life.
If I could move on from that, you’ve mentioned Ernest. And I did want, I see Thomas getting on, also. Let me eschew some of the questions I was going to ask about Ernest. But the theme of dynasty comes through in this book in an incredibly powerful way. That Harry, that clearly, as you said, had this symbiotic relationship, but Harry saw himself, as you describe it, as having to carry on, and which he did enormously successfully, develop the dynasty. It seems that you make out a case that he saw that as almost the central theme of his life.
Absolutely. I should hasten to add, he himself would never have used the word dynasty. I mean, he would’ve regarded it as pretentious. Dynasty is my own usage.
No, I’m happy to go with that
Yeah, but you are absolutely right. As I reflect in the book, he had a very powerful sense of manifest destiny. You know, he had this line, I won’t be able to recall it exactly, but it was something along the lines of, you know, “It wasn’t for me to question the field into which I was born. "You know, I was always going to go into politics.” He had a sort of almost divine sense of destiny, and this is key from a very young age. And he regarded it as an obligation, a responsibility to carry on what his father had started. He had inherited this formidable fortune, formidable legacy, left by Ernest Oppenheimer. Ernest Oppenheimer died in 1957, when Harry was still a member of Parliament. This causes him to leave Parliament on the eve of the 1958 election so that he can become chairman of Anglo American and De Beers, and devote himself full time to the business empire. And he increases the extent, the scope and the reach of the empire. One of the things I say in the book is that Ernest Oppenheimer only even really conceived of Anglo American as a sub-Saharan African enterprise. By the time HFO stands down as the chairman of Anglo American at the end of 1982, and as the chairman of De Beers at the end of 1984. He stayed on for two years to see De Beers through a rough patch in the international diamond trade. The greater group of Anglo American and De Beers really has a footprint on every continent. He expands it, does HFO, massively internationally. Meanwhile, at home, it becomes not simply a mining company. It becomes a massive conglomerate that is fully diversified into industry, with its tentacles in hotels, property, construction, finance, you name it, everything. So he really expands the empire himself. And I think if there is a golden thread that runs through his life, it is the sense of duty, obligation, destiny and, ultimately, dynasty, though not a word he himself would’ve used.
Yeah. Can I, just then, you mentioned Parliament. Of course, like you, you’re still a member of Parliament as I-
Yes.
Understand, which is very good.
It was a little more civilised in his day.
No, you make- very good speeches, I should tell you, because, you know, I once heard your speech on, not flattering you, on the trade and industry because, of course, my interest in being the judge president of the Competition Appeal Court, thought it was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard in Parliament. But that’s another matter. But what I did want to ask you was his time in Parliament. There were a couple of things that intrigued me. I mean, he comes there at 48, at exactly the time that Smuts loses power. You describe the fact that Strauss is, as everybody would recall, a very poor leader, and De Villiers Graaff becomes the leader. Was there any suggestion that Harry might become the leader?
Oh, absolutely. A number of the Young Turks, the progressives, the liberal wing of the United Party, people like Helen Suzman, Colin Eglin, Zach de Beer, all of whom became very close, personal friends of HFO, a number of them were elected in 1953. And they were confronted with this big, lumbering beast of United Party, which was factionalized. It had, you know, extreme right-wing figures who really thought that the party should offer a paler imitation of the National Party’s platform. It had a sort of centrist group. And then there was this younger group of progressives who really wanted to take the party in a liberal direction. And a number of them pinned their hopes on Harry Oppenheimer. But he didn’t see himself in that role. He didn’t regard himself as the leader of a political party. Many people speculated at the time that he might, if United Party returned to power, inherit Jan Hofmeyr’s mantle and become a very successful minister of finance, because he was the United Party spokesperson on finance and economic affairs. And he was extraordinary erudite, he was very well-read, he was very well-clued-up. And he delivered these concise, to-the-point, incisive speeches in Parliament. So there were hopes pinned on him in that regard. But as far as leadership itself went, he wasn’t up for it.
Even though he didn’t exactly regard Graaff as a great leader.
No. Yes, it was told to me that Harry thought that Graaff was much more interested in tending to his cattle. You know, he was a farmer, and that he was much more in tune with what was happening agriculturally than politically.
Can I ask on that? Harry, HFO, as you describe his time in Parliament, which, of course, parallels his father’s earlier time in Parliament, fascinated me, your account, that the way he dealt with the question of apartheid was through an economic prism. That his speeches were essentially, as I understand your argument and the speeches that you cite, he was less, as it were, vociferous about the notion. That’s probably the wrong word with him, but there’s certainly less emphasis on the moral injustices of apartheid, and much more so that apartheid was unworkable economically. And-
That’s very much the case. So what I say in the book is that he tended to express himself in the language of Homo economicus. He wasn’t one for the discourse of social justice, and he didn’t believe that making moral entreaties to the National Party would sway them in any way. He thought it was a safer bet to couch these rational arguments against apartheid in economic terms. But he did genuinely believe that apartheid was completely economically unfeasible. You know, when he was elected to Parliament in 1948, this was very much at the time of the Fagan Commission, which had been set up to look into the matter of urbanisation and pass laws and the future sustainability of segregation. Smuts had famously said, just a few years before then, in the mid-1940s, that segregation had fallen on evil days. So there was a moment in the 1940s, interestingly, from a wide historical perspective, of potential reform. It wasn’t a dead certainty that the Nats were going to get into power in 1948 and implement apartheid. There was a window of opportunity, especially after the end of the Second World War, when many soldiers had returned from up north, HFO among them, infused with the fight against fascism, imbued with liberal democratic notions of citizenship. So when HFO entered Parliament, the United Party was sort of tentatively thinking about reforms to the segregationist order.
And HFO had always, all along, from the word go, thought that apartheid and economic prosperity and economic flourishing on the part of South Africa were completely incompatible. And, in fact, this was worked up into the so-called Oppenheimer thesis. It’s sometimes referred to as the O'Dowd thesis after Michael O'Dowd, who was the chairman of the Anglo American Chairman’s Fund, sort of Anglo’s in-house intellectual, one of many. I mean, Anglo, unusually for a corporate, really did attract people who were intellectuals and thinkers and had strong convictions about corporate citizenship. And O'Dowd really worked this argument up. I call it the Oppenheimer thesis in the book. And it said that, you know, Blacks and whites in South Africa are economically entangled. For the country to prosper, they need both to fully participate in the economy. Both need to be able to use their opportunities to the maximum. Black South Africans need to be upskilled so that they can take on more complex roles in the labour force. And that apartheid absolutely worked against us. You know, for HFO, apartheid was a mad, zealous ideological scheme that was completely and utterly impractical. But he hesitated to, I think, say that it was immoral or morally bankrupt, even though I do believe he himself thought that. He didn’t think it was a particularly politically persuasive tack to adopt in trying to get the National Party to move away from this ideologically sclerotic regime.
I wanted to, just on that, moving on, I mean, as you describe it, by the time Harry Oppenheimer retired as Anglo American chair in ‘82, this was one of the most powerful corporations in the world. It was one of the largest foreign investors in the United States. It was the dominant company in South Africa. And he was wined and dined by all sorts. I mean, you describe how, interestingly, he actually met with JFK, with Kennedy and so forth, which I find fascinating, and you’re very welcome to deal with that. But I suppose the real question is, there’s a sort of anomaly that on the one hand, he’s the most powerful businessperson in South Africa by a country mile, has both the kind of financial and intellectual gifts which accompany that, and yet there’s this strange anomaly about what influence he really had. 'Cause the Nats, National Party, of course, on one level, regarded him as an absolute quintessential enemy. And the question I think you raise over and over in different contexts, and so interestingly, is the extent of, if I could put it, Anglo American’s complicity in the system as opposed to its opposition. And, in a sense, his own ambiguity in relation thereto.
Well, look, there was complexity because many people, with some justification, believed that Anglo American did very well off the back of this terrible triumvirate of the migrant labour system, the pass laws, but also the single-sex compound system, which Black mine workers were forced to live in, in often inhumane and squalid conditions. And that Anglo did very well, thank you very much. HFO’s point of view was that actually, Anglo American would’ve done even better had it not had to operate within these mad apartheid strictures. But he believed that business could only do so much. It could exert pressure, directly, indirectly. It could nudge towards reform. But that really, the decision makers, the people who made things happen, were the politicians in cabinet. And until they saw the light, until they realised that apartheid is unworkable, that something needs to take its place, until that happened, business could only achieve so much. But he used the mechanisms at his disposal. I mean, he became involved in reformist initiatives from, I would say, the mid-1970s on. So the key turning point in South African history, as we know, is the Soweto uprising in 1976. And HFO gets together with another very successful magnate, Anton Rupert, at the time. And they start something called the Urban Foundation, which really lobbies for the socioeconomic upliftment of Black township dwellers. And it also doesn’t strike an overtly liberal ideological pose. It sort of lobbies the government to reform, and it meets with some success. You know, National Party cabinet ministers end up listening to some of the very good, pragmatic policy proposals put forward by people in the Urban Foundation. And HFO gets involved in a whole lot of other business initiatives in the late 1980s, even though he’s retired by this time, sort of nudging the National Party to enter the future. But just going back to that other thing that you picked up on, him dining with JFK at the White House. You know, I must tell this little nugget-
No, please.
That I find interesting in the book. HFO never dined with the National Party prime minister in South Africa until 1982. So he was elected to Parliament in 1948. Didn’t meet with a single National Party head of state outside of Parliament on a personal level until 1982. And the fact that he gets together with P.W. Botha for dinner in 1982 is only because of the intervention of HFO’s great friend Henry Kissinger, who obviously has a channel to P.W. Botha at that time and says to him, “Look, I really think that, you know, Harry Oppenheimer has something to offer here. You know, he offers wise counsel. He may be able to help you indirectly behind the scenes. I think it would be a very good idea if you broke bread.” And it’s for that reason that HFO goes to dine with P.W. Botha only in 1982, but he was meeting with JFK much earlier than that. He was invited to the White House in 1962 through the offices of HFO’s great friend, this legendary, larger-than-life American businessman-
Charles Engelhard.
Charles W. Engelhard, who flies around in his own private plane called the Platinum Plover. He was the king of platinum. A fascinating figure. Apparently the inspiration for the James Bond character Goldfinger. And HFO and Engelhard strike up this most unlikely relationship. You know, Engelhard-
That’s what I was about to say. They seemed totally different, yet they were very-
Oh, absolutely. There’s a great story told that they once were on a plane together. They were flying, I think, on Engelhard’s private plane. And Engelhard was desperately trying to strike up a conversation with HFO. And HFO, you know, was there, meticulously dressed, very neat, reading Shakespeare. And Engelhard eventually gave up trying to make small talk with him and read a comic book instead. So you had these two figures, one reading Shakespeare, and the other, a comic book, but they were both born into a dynastic tradition. They inherited family businesses, both made a great success of them. They shared an interest in horse racing. Engelhard was a great horse owner and breeder, as was HFO. Important part of his life. Anyway, back to Kennedy. So Engelhard gets HFO an invitation to the White House in 1962. He also suggests that HFO might like to make the gift of a very nice Civil War painting to Jackie Kennedy. And one of the things I came across in Bridget Oppenheimer’s paper, she kept these massive scrapbooks for every year of their marriage. They got progressively fatter, and she threw everything in there, her old racing cards, newspaper cuttings, family letters, photographs. And one of them is a handwritten letter from Jackie Kennedy, saying, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheimer, it was so fabulous to meet you.
Wonderful to have dinner with you. And thank you so much for the gift of this lovely Civil War painting. I’ve given it pride of place in the Red Room. It’s simply the best painting we have in the White House.” So it was interesting to me that HFO could interact with heads of state internationally, on the global stage, but this wasn’t perfected at home. Incidentally, the other person that he was a great admirer of, he was a great admirer of two people in particular who he thought were the quintessential statesman, Ben Gurion and Charles De Gaulle. So he goes along to see Charles De Gaulle when De Gaulle was still in office, at the Elysee Palace. And De Gaulle, as you know, is about seven-feet tall. HFO was a very slightly built man. And he goes along to see De Gaulle, and De Gaulle sort of barks at him, You know, what do you want? And Oppenheimer is slightly, you know, taken aback, caught off-guard. And he said, “Well, you know, I’ve come to seek your advice on how we might approach the South African situation, based on your experience in Algeria.” But he, Oppenheimer, sort of dryly concedes in his own handwritten account of the event that, well, actually, I’ve come along to see you as I would the Eiffel Tower, because, you know, you’re sort of a public spectacle, something to be marvelled at. But he had a very interesting audience with De Gaulle, and he met with world figures, world leaders, both in business and politics throughout his life, even though in his home country, he didn’t engage with the political office-
And power wielders of the day because of South Africa’s peculiar parochial political dynamics.
From your book, it also appears that he had a very close relationship with Margaret Thatcher.
Yes. So, Thatcher-
And I wonder whether you wouldn’t mind just telling what I think was a hilariously funny story, about Margaret Thatcher wanted to come for dinner, and Bridget Oppenheimer having nothing to do with it because she’d organised dinner for the gardener’s retiring.
Exactly. So Robin Renwick, who was the ambassador to South Africa at the time, rung up Oppenheimer at his office at 44 Main Street in Johannesburg and said, “You know, Mrs. Thatcher’s coming to South Africa. Would you be able to have her for dinner at Brenthurst?” HFO said, “Well, I better check with”, he called her Widgey. He had a slight speech peculiarity, which made him say his Rs as Ws. So he called his wife, Bridget, Widgey. Anyway, he phoned up Widgey at Brenthurst and he said to her, “You know, Renwick wants us to invite Margaret Thatcher for dinner. Can we do it next Wednesday night?” And Bridget, who was sort of very tall, imposing, commanding, domineering woman, much taller than HFO, answered him curt. She said, “No, we can’t,” and put the phone down. And so HFO phoned her back, and sort of very gingerly and politely said, “Widgey, why can’t we have Mrs. Thatcher to dinner next Wednesday night?” And she said, “Well, we’ve already organised dinner for Phineas,” one of the retiring gardeners at the Brenthurst estate. So Mrs. Thatcher couldn’t come for dinner at Brenthurst, and she had to make do with lunch in HFO’s office at 44 Main Street at Anglo’s headquarters instead.
So I want to just move on, rolling on into the '70s and into the '80s, the case you make, which I think is also correct, is that with all the criticism, legitimate, indeed, in many ways, of Anglo American, it was still a more enlightened employer than the other mining houses. What role did it then play in kind of ensuring that Black trade unions developed in South Africa? I’d be curious to get your answer on that.
So, you know, as many of your, our listeners will know, Black trade unions weren’t recognised until deep into the 1970s in South Africa. And HFO, on behalf of the Anglo American Corporation, believed that you needed to be able to talk with Black mine workers as an organised body through trade unions. So he was advocating for various labour market reforms, but principally, the recognition of Black trade unions with full rights, from a relatively early stage. And in this sense, he was in the forefront. The other mining houses, by comparison to Anglo, were quite set in their ways, quite conservative. You know, HFO always resented the fact that when Minorco’s bid. Minorco was the international affiliate of the Anglo American group. So when Minorco launched a hostile takeover bid on Consolidated Gold Fields in the late 1980s, Cons Gold responded by sort of saying, “No, we don’t want anything to do with Anglo American. It’s sort of emblematic of the apartheid state. It’s sort of deeply imbricated in the apartheid state apparatus.” Meanwhile, Cons Gold was a particularly high-bound mining house. But Anglo American led the way, both on the front of the recognition of Black trade unions, but also through the Chairman’s Fund. It was, I think, relatively ahead of its peers in the mining industry by taking this notion of corporate social responsibility very seriously from the early 1970s. So HFO detected a sea change economically from about 1972. And the Anglo American Chairman’s Fund becomes very involved in investing in the upliftment not only of Black township dwellers, which was done by the Urban Foundation, too, but ploughing money into various good causes from which Black South Africans benefit and are given the access to opportunity which the apartheid state would have otherwise denied them. So Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who strikes up a friendship with HFO, from a fairly early stage, persuades Anglo American, through the Chairman’s Fund, to give a lot of money to the establishment of the Mangosuthu-
Technology, yeah.
In Natal.
And I wanted to ask you about that because it strikes me, in the book, you cite Oppenheimer, HFO himself, as saying, “In the South African context, I may seem to be liberal, but at heart, I’m just an old-fashioned conservative.” And the reason why I’m interested in that, two or three reasons. One is he had a clear relationship, Buthelezi, bearing in mind that Buthelezi just died, and there’s been a lot of discussion about the violence that Buthelezi spewed upon South Africa at various times, which I was certainly a witness at a particular point when I was living in Johannesburg. And secondly, there was, for a long, long time, whilst he was certainly, I agree with you, and you noted, realising the incongruence or the incompatibility between an economic system that was going to develop in apartheid, he clung for a long time to either some form of qualified franchise or consociational democratic system, which essentially thought, in one or other way, to dilute the consequences of majority rule.
Yeah, that’s very true. So one of the things I point out in the book is that HFO wasn’t a liberal in the fashion of other South African liberals, like Alan Paton, who was a friend of his, or Peter Brown, you know, about whom I also wrote a biography. The liberalism of that cohort of liberals, which found institutional expression through the short-lived Liberal Party, formed in 1953, disestablished in 1968, because of the Prohibition of Political Interference Act, which effectively prevents Blacks and whites from belonging to the same organisation, the liberalism of the Liberal Party is far more social democratic. It allows for much more of a role for the state in the economy because it realises that apartheid is going to leave a legacy of structural inequality that needs proactive addressing by the state. Whereas the progressives are much more traditional, classical liberals. They remain in business after the Prohibition of Political Interference Act was passed in 1968. And their liberalism is channelled through more traditional parliamentary mechanisms. Whereas the Liberal Party, for example, in the 1960s, was engaging in all sorts of extra-parliamentary avenues to give life to its liberalism. Now, HFO wasn’t alone in remaining wedded to the qualified franchise for a very long time. The Progressive Party-
Yeah, sure.
Itself only change of tack as late as 1978. And, yes, even through the 1980s, his realisation that South Africa would one day become a non-racial democracy where Black people were in the majority, even though he realised that, there were all sorts of caveats about Black majority rule. And I suppose his friendship with Buthelezi, his flirtation with consociationalism in the 1980s, which wasn’t unique to him. I mean, there was a whole-
No, no, I appreciate that, but he was one of.
But he was one of them, and he admitted it. You know, you’ve quoted the line, which I mentioned more than once in my book, is that, you know, “By South African standards, I may seem a liberal, but really, I’m just an old-fashioned conservative.” And he was very deeply embedded in the Tory establishment. I think properly viewed, his politics were boring. He was a conservative, and he acknowledged as much. But for all of that, all that, there were ambivalences and contradictions and flaws within his liberalism, he made an absolutely essential contribution to the transition to non-racial constitutional democracy in South Africa-
And just on that- And on that, because I’m running out of time and there’s so much more we could talk about. There is a thesis that he and Mandela cobbled together. I don’t need to tell you this, but for the audience, I mean, there are many, you know, there’s a radical thesis or a populist thesis, I think a populist thesis is a better description, that he and Mandela cobbled together, this deal, which essentially has denied most Black South Africans the benefits of democracy, in other words, to preserve business. I accept that that never happened, but I suppose what I’m interested is what influence did he have, in your view? 'Cause you’ve describe many interactions later in life. What influence did he have on the trajectory of the ANC, at least in the early years, seeking to kind of cleave to some form of market economy theory?
Well, in general, he was a consummate wielder of soft power. So he always had channels to influential people after 1994, once the ANC came to power, even though he was, by that stage, retired. But what I say in the book is that there’s this line of thinking, and it brings us back to how we opened this conversation, with Hoggenheimer and- There’s a school, very much propounded today by the likes of my colleague in Parliament, Julius Malema, and his party, that Oppenheimer, as the embodiment of white monopoly capital, covertly brokered this deal with Mandela to keep the edifice intact, the economic edifice inherited from apartheid, intact. Yes, hand over political power, but economically, things wouldn’t change. And this was very much fueled, this line of argument, by the fact that there was this semi-secret conclave called the Brenthurst Group, which met in the seclusion of Oppenheimer’s Brenthurst estate, in the library itself. No one knew about these meetings until a couple of years later. And this was really, interestingly, undertaken at the behest of the ANC. So this wasn’t business. This wasn’t Oppenheimer, this wasn’t Anglo American organising these meetings. The impetus- From the ANC. And really, they were extending feelers.
They realised by this stage, a lot had happened on the global stage, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism. You know, the ideological rug had really been pulled out from under the ANC. And they realised they had to start moving in a market-friendly direction. And all sorts of things caused them to do that. HFO wasn’t the decisive, determining, driving factor in that regard. But the fact that these secret meetings took place at the Brenthurst estate did fuel speculation by the kind of people who punt the line of radical economic transformation, that somehow Mandela and the top brass of the ANC had been captured by the white corporate establishment. That’s vastly overdone, vastly overplayed. You know, it was said to me by people who were at those meetings, that actually people were excessively polite. The white corporate establishment didn’t exact any significant concessions from the ANC in those meetings. You know, they would’ve wanted a fully liberalised labour market. They would’ve wanted things which they simply didn’t get. And the ANC, despite moving in a more market-friendly direction, still had a deep antipathy, aversion, suspicion towards business. So this idea that Mandela and Oppenheimer cozied up to one another, that Oppenheimer bought him and the ANC top brass, or promises riches, it’s all vastly overplayed by the proponents of radical economic transformation of a leftist faction within the tripartite alliance.
My final question. At the end of your book, towards the end, you describe how Anglo American are now a shadow of what they used to be. De Beers were sold off. Would Harry Oppenheimer, when he reflected on this, this giant that he created, and we spoke about dynasty, even though he wouldn’t have used that word, would he have been enormously saddened by the fact that Anglo are such a small operation in relative terms today, that De Beers are no longer under the control of the family?
Well, look, Dennis, it goes back to the theme of manifest destiny and dynasty. Oppenheimer was a dynast, my word. He was an empire builder. His father had obviously founded the empire and built it initially, but Harry Oppenheimer vastly expanded the empire. And no emperor wants to see the sun set on their empire. So I’m sure it would’ve been a cause of some sadness and regret, to see the family no longer involved in Anglo American and De Beers. But what I do reflect on in the book is the realisation that HFO came to later on in life, is that, you know, families change over time. And he came to accept that. And I think that even though the family is no longer involved in the way that it was, that Nicky Oppenheimer, Harry Oppenheimer’s son, certainly did well, actually, to sell the family stake in De Beers in 2011. You know, it certainly did well by the family. He monetized the family’s wealth when that happened. And the succeeding generations are now involved in various business and philanthropic enterprises on the African continent in a different way. And I think HFO would’ve probably come to understand that times change, families change. Sometimes they have to change in order to retain a sense of continuity, counterintuitively. And so I think he would’ve accepted that, even though it wouldn’t have warmed his heart that the Oppenheimer name is no longer synonymous with Anglo American and De Beers.
Michael, I just want to quickly go through, 'cause we’ve run out of time, but I want to just touch on some of the questions.
Q&A and Comments:
I noticed some, Dennis Glover saying, “I was one of Harry’s angels, teams of medical professionals that flew in Oppenheimer’s plane to then-Swaziland to perform surgeries.” It’s an interesting insight.
Yeah, another wonderful philanthropic involvements.
Yeah, lots of people talking about that that might well have, you know, that worked for him.
Somebody says, “Oppenheimer was a capitalist who exploited South Africa at the height of apartheid in South Africa, when the government was paranoid about communism. They allowed South Africans to trade with communist Russia when South Africans were not allowed to travel to the communist East. Harry Oppenheimer’s son-in-law, who was high up in Anglo American, was seen in the Bolshoi Ballet. Is that true?
Yes, it’s true. Gordon Waddell was spotted at the Bolshoi Ballet. Some people actually bizarrely thought it was Harry Oppenheimer himself. And as I write in the book, there was almost a chance of him going to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, but the National Party caught wind of it and he called the trip off. But, anyway, to cut a long story short, yes. Gordon Waddle was married to HFO’s daughter, Mary. It was her first husband.
An alliance .
Spotted at the Bolshoi Ballet in the 1980s. And there was a correspondent from one of the big newspapers who spotted him and wrote about it. But when Gordon Waddle was contacted to corroborate his presence there, he flatly denied it, and everybody else denied it, too. So it was almost as if he hadn’t been there, but, in fact, he was.
There are just a couple of questions. One, which I did want to ask, and I didn’t have, I just alighted over, this issue somebody raised, of course, about Anglo American operation being persona non grata in America. And that, of course, deals with the questions of the antitrust, I think, with regard to De Beers. That seemed to, for some time, prevent Harry Oppenheimer from actually going to America.
Yeah, long, complex, convoluted backstory to De Beers’ issues with the American antitrust authorities. For a period in the 1970s, no director from Anglo American or De Beers did step foot on American soil because they knew they were going to be arrested and subpoenaed. And this kept HFO away from the US for a period, I think, of roughly about four years. And unfortunately, it coincided with him and Bridget just having bought a property. They bought a suite at the Carlisle Hotel in 1970 or ‘71. And almost immediately after that, they ran into trouble again with the Department of Justice. And for a number of years, they didn’t go there. And this greatly upset one of the directors of De Beers. One of the Rothschilds apparently resigned his seat on the De Beers board-
Because he wanted to keep going to New York.
On Fifth Avenue.
Yeah, Michael, the final question, which I was going to ask you, but it’s amazing how many people, when you attend these, know so much themselves. Coran Hughes, 'cause I’m very impressed by this, says, "I recall an evening at the Market Theatre when HFO’s PA at the time, my friend, had written his speech and he was subjected to criticism.” I think they’re referring to that-
Patrick.
Q - Debate between Cyril Ramaphosa and Harry Oppenheimer at the Market Theatre, convened by Anton Harber. And I think it was Patrick Esnouf, who was the PA, who thought he’d lose his job the next day. Do you want to just briefly mention what happened?
A - So Bobby Godsell and Patrick Esnouf, and Patrick Esnouf was HFO’s PA at the time, persuaded him that it would be a good idea to share a platform with Cyril Ramaphosa, who was then president of the NUM, in 1986. And HFO was very undecided about . In fact, he was quite resistant. But they persuaded him. And when they arrived at the Market Theatre in downtown Johannesburg, in Bloemfontein, they were sort of confronted by an audience of Ramaphosa’s sympathisers, who were chanting anti-capitalist anthems, dancing and ululating. You know, HFO thought that he was going to be encountering a sort of a very low-key crowd of Johannesburg’s gray-head bien-pensants. He didn’t expect all this excitement and rambunctiousness. He was somewhat taken off-guard. And Ramaphosa launched into a scathing attack on the gold mining industry and Anglo American’s part in it. But HFO handled it very much in his stride. And it was actually an important moment because it showed that Black and white prominents and Africans could share a platform, could converse and engage without everything degenerating into violence, disorder and anarchy. But, yes, Patrick Esnouf, who I interviewed about this, did fear that he would lose his job, and he actually offered to resign. And HFO said, “Don’t worry. You know, when I was in Parliament in the 1950s, I encountered far worse from the Nats. They used to heckle me.” P.W. Botha, who also was elected to Parliament in 1948, and was a real thug and a real bully, was one of the people who used to heckle Oppenheimer when he got up to the podium to deliver his speeches.
That part of your book really amused me, for the absolute irony of the whole situation, that we’re talking about a different Cyril Ramaphosa to the one that’s the president now, in many ways. Michael, I just want to thank you so much for being so generous. But more than that, for writing what is an extraordinary book. You know, I’ve got to interview two people, two books which both have stuck out for me. There’s yours and there’s Jonny Steinberg’s, which we’ll do next week, on Winnie and Nelson. And what is remarkable about both these books for me is that you learn so much about South African history by looking at Oppenheimer, but in a sense, reading so much, you’ve culled this in an eloquent, unbelievably eloquent and persuasive style. So congratulations for that, and thanks so much for doing this.
Thanks, Dennis. I enjoyed chatting to you.
And thanks to the audience for asking some interesting questions.