Customers complained because deliveries were not punctual. A valuable lesson from these first experiences was that quality and service delivery, in short, value for money, was crucial to the success of a business enterprise. It is not surprising that ‘the customer is king’ would become one of the chief maxims in the Rembrandt Group. They were contemplating getting Huberte to run Chemiese Reinigers, but before that could happen Rupert had launched out in a very different direction.
Yet the business was not a total failure. ‘But people were reluctant to put their money in dirty laundry – you could not get capital for it,’ Hertzog wrote in his memoirs. ‘We then thought they may put their money in liquor. We bought a bottle store and behold, the first thousand pounds we received came from a dominee; all his life he fought against the devil and then he put his money in it.’
When the partners eventually sold the dry-cleaning business, the money came in handy at an opportune time. For Rupert, the venture represented a beginning that was inspired by a dream as well as an unyielding resolve to be successful. In years to come he would often quote the Flemish adage: ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way – the will itself becomes the way.’
This will to succeed was reinforced by the nationalist and republican ideals prevalent among Afrikaners at the time. The Reddingsdaad movement, inspired by Ds Kestell, was actively promoting the very kind of venture in which Rupert and his partners were engaged. The aim was to mobilise Afrikaners to go into commerce − and, ultimately, industry as well − rather than stay within the safe confines of the professions. At that time teaching, the church and the law were the limits of their ambition. Afrikaners had started off as farmers, the first courageous immigrant entrepreneurs on the continent with which they had come to identify, but the cumulative effects of the Anglo-Boer War, the Great Drought and the Depression had reduced many of them to penury. Poverty had eroded their cultural, religious and educational life and in the urban slums, many Afrikaner families lapsed into social disintegration and moral depravity. In an article on the Reddingsdaad movement, Diederichs expressed the need for the economic advancement of Afrikaners as follows: ‘It is the poverty that tears families apart, forcing thousands to the slums in the cities, where crime and social evils abound. It is the economically backward position of our people that makes us a nation of employees, dependent on others for their daily bread. And thus it lies at the root of a sense of dependency and a sense of inferiority that eat into the soul of our people.’
Among many English-speaking compatriots there was little empathy for the distress of poor Afrikaners. Sir Robert Beattie, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, was quoted by the writer MER (ME Rothman) as casually telling a public meeting that ‘poor whites’ were ‘intellectually backward’ and that ‘something inherent in the Afrikaners’ was the reason why the phenomenon of poverty was taking on such alarming dimensions in their case.1 While the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry on the Poor White Question had refuted the allegation about intellectual inferiority, Afrikaners were manifestly not holding their own in the urban, capitalist structure that came in the wake of the mineral discoveries. The commission’s statistics on the poor white problem were, as noted already, horrifying, with 300 000 out of a total white population of 1 800 000 classified as poor whites. The Stellenbosch economist Prof. CGW Schumann calculated that the per capita income of Afrikaners in 1936 averaged £86, as opposed to the £142 of other South African whites.
This was the situation that Kestell and other concerned Afrikaner leaders sought to address with an ‘act of rescue’. Rupert had been deeply moved by Kestell’s appeal when he visited Bloemfontein for the arrival of the Ox-wagon Trek on his birthday in 1938. In later life he often pointed out that a man of the cloth, Kestell, had motivated him to embark on a business career, starting out with virtually nothing. In certain respects the Reddingsdaad campaign and the spirit it embodied foreshadowed the Black Economic Empowerment movement of post-1994 South Africa, though the earlier movement was not based on the transfer of capital with favourable financing schemes or share options.
A year after the Great Trek centenary, in October 1939, the Eerste Ekonomiese Volkskongres (First National Economic Congress) was held at the initiative of the Economic Institute of the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Associations, FAK, the cultural front of the Afrikaner Broederbond, AB). The overriding goal was to rouse the impoverished, demoralised people to take on the challenges of entrepreneurship. But, like both Rupert and Hertzog with their first venture, they would need capital.
Capital and capitalism had been a bone of contention among Afrikaner intellectuals for some time. Early in the century Gen. Smuts, in A century of wrong, had thrown down the gauntlet to tyrannical international capital, which British imperialism in South Africa represented at the time. By the 1930s pent-up resistance to British imperialism was still rife among Afrikaners, alongside an aversion to hated excrescences of capitalism, as expressed through DC Boonzaier’s cartoon character, the arch-exploiter Hoggenheimer, who featured regularly in the Afrikaans daily Die Burger. But by 1939 Hitler’s national socialism and Stalin’s communism − both epitomising the totalitarian state − were looming as a counter threat. The Afrikaner intellectuals who were spearheading the economic struggle did not reject capitalism outright, but instead advocated a variant that became known as volkskapitalisme (national capitalism). Prof. Wicus du Plessis stated at the congress that the new economic movement had as its aim ‘no longer to tolerate the Afrikaner nation being devastated in an effort to adapt itself to a foreign capitalist system, but to mobilise the nation to conquer this foreign system in order to transform it and adapt it to our national character.’
One after another prominent Afrikaans intellectuals made a case for the mobilisation of capital to launch Afrikaner businesses that were capable of achieving that aim. One outcome of the congress was the founding of Federale Volksbeleggings (Federal National Investments, FVB), which would do just that. The other – the answer to Ds Kestell’s appeals over the years for the economic upliftment of Afrikaners – was the establishment on 8 December 1939 of the Reddingsdaadbond (RDB). Its task would be to dispense funds to suitable applicants who wanted to venture into business.
This was the organisation that finally lured Rupert away from academia. Various people had been prodding him to join it and in the end he was invited by his partner Dr Nic Diederichs himself, by then at the helm of the RDB. At the end of 1940 Rupert resigned from his post at the University of Pretoria. He abandoned his studies − the doctorate in chemistry and his legal and commercial courses − and stepped out into the world outside the ivory tower. At the age of 24 he found himself heading the small-business section of the RDB at its headquarters next to the railway station in Johannesburg on the bustling Highveld, the centre of South Africa’s industrial heartland.
In this decisive period of his life Rupert acquired an intimate knowledge of the needs of small-business entrepreneurs. His mentor was Dr AJ Stals, another remarkable man who would have a lasting influence on his life. Rupert had a deep respect for Stals, the kind of Afrikaner he would probably typify as a member of the Afrikaner aristocracy. He relates that Stals, the son of a tenant farmer at Tulbagh in the Western Cape who obtained doctorates in medicine and law at the universities of Berlin and Dublin, did not hesitate to scrub floors for his widowed mother during holidays at home. After 1948 he became a member of Malan’s cabinet, but died within three years. Stals’s political views were moderate – according to his wife he walked out of a National Party congress where unfavourable decisions were being taken about the rights of coloured people. In this respect, too, he influenced Rupert, who said in later life that if Stals had lived long enough after 1948, coloureds would never have been removed from the common voters’ roll. When a close friend of Stals once commented that he was not a good politician because he was too fair to indulge in nepotism, Rupert’s response was, ‘If fairness makes you a bad politician, I don’t belong in politics. My father was therefore right to turn down political positions.’ In fact, he came to believe that Afrikaners managed to build their economic muscle for the very reason that in times of crisis, like during the Second World War, they channelled their energies into non-political fields.2
In the early 1940s Stals was a director of Volkskas Bank and Voortrekker Press, two of the rather few sizeable Afrikaner businesses at the time. Twice a week he travelled from Pretoria as financial adviser to help Rupert vet loan applications from prospective