After his mother’s remarriage she reclaimed him, but he was again put to menial work, this time as a goatherd on his stepfather’s farm. He ran away to fight in the frontier war. Wounded, he turned to transport riding and married Anna Gertruida Lötter, also an orphan, who bore him ten children. After some daring land speculation he bought Gannavlakte, which he developed into a prosperous farm. It boasted an orchard, vineyards, a smithy, a brandy distillery, a mill, flocks of sheep and ostriches, whose plumage was worth a fortune in those days.
Even though he had little formal education, Oom Kootjie was a prominent member of his community and district chairman of the Afrikanerbond for over 22 years. He often addressed the annual sports meetings on Union Day (31 May) on a farm in the Jansenville district, and wise words from this grandfather Anton Rupert learnt to respect were quoted in a newspaper report: ‘. . . the common fault on the sportsground, as well as in life, is to look at the man who is behind you. If we could keep the man in view who is ahead of us and make it our object to catch up with him the number of poor people would certainly decrease.’2
He was interned at Port Alfred for his pro-Boer sympathies in the latter days of the Anglo-Boer War, when Boer commandos were invading the Cape Colony and recruiting young Afrikaner rebels. Two of these were Oom Kootjie’s eldest sons, Frederick (Frik) and Francois (Soois), who joined up in 1901. After enduring hardship on commando they surrendered to British forces. As a Cape rebel and British subject Soois, aged seventeen, was found guilty of the capital offence of high treason by a military court in Graaff-Reinet. He was granted clemency by Lord Kitchener and received a prison sentence of one year, but benefited from the Peace of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902 and only served six months.
Oom Kootjie’s youngest son, born in 1901 while his older brothers were on commando, was christened Smartryk − grief-stricken, sorrowful. In the aftermath of this war that would be regarded as the beginning of the end of British imperialism, the name expressed the emotions of thousands of Afrikaners, also in the Cape Colony, who had suffered and been pauperised as a result of the conflict. Many were on the brink of famine and the British government’s meagre compensation for war damage caused further bitterness. General Louis Botha, 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 the young Boetie Rupert was that of the legendary scout and Scarlet Pimpernel of the Boer forces, Gideon Scheepers, executed at the age of 23 by the British after being convicted of 30 alleged war crimes. In Anton Rupert’s own view, the story of Scheepers as told to him by his father, who as a thirteen-year-old boy had been present at the verdict of the military court on Church Square in Graaff-Reinet, changed his life.
The prosecution of Scheepers was a show trial intended as a lesson to Cape republicans – while in Rudyard’s Kipling words, the war had been ‘no end of a lesson’ to Britain itself. On Major-General John French’s orders the execution was carried out in public. Blindfolded, sitting on a chair, the ill Scheepers faced the firing squad of the Coldstream Guards on his mother’s birthday, 17 January 1902. His body was put in a grave on the scene and covered with quicklime, but was probably removed that same night. His remains were never found.
Like the concentration camps where 28 000 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 burned down and herds of livestock destroyed, the show trials and executions of Cape rebels and Boer prisoners of war elicited bitter resentment. Scheepers, for instance, was not a Cape rebel but hailed from the Transvaal and was a commander of the Free State state artillery, therefore rather a prisoner of war than a disloyal British subject. Some 40 rebels were executed in the Cape Colony, with eight executions taking place in Graaff-Reinet. As elsewhere, the executions hardened the attitudes of republicans in the divided town.
The long search of Scheepers’s mother for his remains was never rewarded. On her hundredth birthday in 1956, she said she had not forgotten, but forgiven: ‘Let us rather live together in love and peace as an undivided people.’3 Scheepers became a legend in South Africa that also inspired Afrikaans poets. In his moving poem ‘Gebed om die gebeente’ (Prayer for the bones), Dirk Opperman reflects the plea of the grieving mother of Scheepers, an expert heliographer:
Bless, Lord, all the bleached bones of our struggle –
that we as one great nation in the tough terrain
with every scrap of roofing iron and every wheel
and, like tin foil behind clean glass, the white, the black, the brown,
may catch your sunlight, Lord, and signal each to all.4
Opperman, a close friend of the Ruperts, captures with his imagery the idea of partnership and coexistence that would run as a leitmotif throughout Anton Rupert’s career, after he had been inspired at a young age by the legend of Scheepers. At the Anglo-Boer War centenary in 1999 Rupert bought a priceless file on Gideon Scheepers, previously in the possession of British Intelligence, from a Cape Town bookseller. It contains Scheepers’s last letters and diary entries, as well as unique photographs of Scheepers and other Boer prisoners of war.
A monument to Scheepers and the others executed at Graaff-Reinet, unveiled in 1908, was erected on land donated by Jurie Laubscher, owner of the factory that manufactured the famous Graaff-Reinet Doll. The later fate of this doll-making factory with its seventy workers was something that made a lasting impression on the future industrialist Rupert. When the Pact Government of the National and Labour parties came to power in 1924 after the mineworkers’ strikes in Johannesburg, they introduced progressive labour laws with strict requirements for the physical layout of factories. ‘Oom Jurie Losper, as he was known, couldn’t meet those requirements – and Graaff-Reinet’s biggest factory had to close down,’ Rupert remembers.
In Boetie Rupert’s childhood days Graaff-Reinet, like most country towns, had no electricity, running water or tarred streets. Drinking water was collected from the runoff of rainwater from rooftops. Gardens were irrigated from furrows fed by Maggie’s Well, a perennial spring that produced two million gallons of fresh water daily on the site where the town reservoir is today. This water, boiled, was used for ablutions. Piped water did not come till the late 1920s. Lighting was provided by candles and paraffin lamps. When electricity finally arrived, it was expensive at a shilling a unit. In the early 1920s John Rupert drove a Model-T Ford, which was replaced with a Chevrolet in the mid-twenties. Later the vintage Chev was displayed in the Transport Museum at Heidelberg, Gauteng.
One of Boetie Rupert’s earliest memories was a visit to his great-grandmother Emma Susanna at an old-age home in Cape Road, Port Elizabeth, shortly before she died in 1919. His mother also showed him a letter to her from this Colchester-born ancestor, which ended with five crosses and a message in her native English: ‘And remember to give my love to Anthony.’
Port Elizabeth was where the Ruperts spent their holidays. Grandmother Rupert lived there from 1923 till her death in 1930. So did her daughter Florence, Aunt Florrie, a teacher who introduced Boetie to experiences that stimulated his early interest in industry and museums. He was taken to the snake park and the museum and, when he was old enough in the early 1920s, 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. Years later Anton Rupert told visitors at a Port Elizabeth show: ‘Coming from Graaff-Reinet where there were no industries, it was a dream and a magical world to me to see how “something” was manufactured.’5
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.6
In Port Elizabeth he also saw his first talkie, ‘The singing fool’, starring Al Jolson. Before that he had seen only silent films, like the cowboy films of Tom Mix. But he never became a film enthusiast and showed no particular interest in the cinema in later years.
In Anton Rupert’s boyhood years