of the most talked about. Long after the many copies had been signed or not signed, it was still being discussed.’ The newspaper added that the whole Brown affair was a coup for Wiese and the progressives.
One of the students who attended the monstervergadering and heard Wiese speak was GT Ferreira, later chairman of the FirstRand group. ‘I was very impressed by how smooth the bliksem [bugger] was,’ Ferreira recalled in an interview in 2018.
Wiese ran for the SRC a third time. But it was not as easy before, because being seen as a progressive candidate had its drawbacks. Die Matie reported:
In the early hours of election day, last Monday, some brash and unimaginatively shortsighted people stooped to the most reprehensible and irresponsible conduct ever in our student community. Die Matie wants to express its disagreement, and as such totally distance itself from the smear campaign against the two SRC candidates, Messrs Willem van Drimmelen and Christo Wiese.21
In an effort to discredit Wiese and Van Drimmelen only hours before the SRC election, copies of a so-called ‘blue paper’ were delivered to nearly every room in every residence on campus and accused the two of ‘McCarthyism’ and of ‘condemning the Christian-national principles of the Afrikaner’. (Joseph McCarthy was an American senator who launched a witch-hunt against communists and other leftists in the US government. From the context it is not clear why Wiese was accused of McCarthyism.) Wiese, nevertheless, attracted enough votes for a third term on the SRC. He ran for the position of deputy chairman, but did not succeed.
Only two weeks after the SRC election, there was a momentous event on the national stage: the prime minister was assassinated in parliament. A parliamentary messenger, Dimitri Tsafendas, fatally stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd in his seat in the legislature. At the next SRC meeting Wiese suggested it would be a fitting gesture if the whole student council attended Verwoerd’s funeral.
In his third term on the SRC Wiese looked after the portfolio concerned with a proposed student centre, the Langenhoven Gedenksentrum (later called ‘Die Neelsie’). It was a long-held dream of the student community to put up such a building on campus, but the project had been stuck in limbo for ages. During Wiese’s term he got the ball rolling and by the end of that year Die Matie could report that the foundations of the student centre were soon to be laid.
Wiese did not run for the SRC again, but was appointed convenor of the next election. Besides organising ballot boxes and voting stations, he also chaired a gathering where student were given the opportunity to quiz candidates about their policies. Die Matie reported: ‘Students spoke highly of the brilliant way Christo Wiese chaired the Sirkus [student gathering]. Importantly, he did justice to both those posing the questions and the candidates.’
Eventually Wiese also did justice to his studies and graduated from Stellenbosch University with an LLB degree.22
4.
Pep Stores, take one
‘We made it possible for every family, every father or mother, to clothe their children properly.’ 1
Christo Wiese in an interview, 2013
After his studies, Christo Wiese joined Pep Stores on a full-time basis. The business had been founded by Renier van Rooyen, who married Wiese’s cousin Alice in 1954. After working for a mine and serving as messenger of the court, Van Rooyen acquired a single shop with his lawyer-friend Gawie Esterhuyzen. The store was known as the Bargain Shop,2 and was only five by ten metres in size. The shop sold all sorts of goods, from furniture to clothing and even donkey carts. As part of the deal, the previous owner, Gustav Gottschalk, sat with Van Rooyen each Saturday for two months to teach him the ins and outs of retail.
Soon after taking over, Van Rooyen noticed that clothing was selling better than the rest of his goods. And so he started concentrating on this part of the business and put more effort into procuring supplies. He made trips down to Cape Town a few times a week to source stock directly from factories there. He did so well that soon he couldn’t keep up and had to pull in family members to help with the business. It became clear that there were opportunities to expand.
In 1959 he opened a second shop and called it Upington Volksklere (‘People’s Clothes’). In the meantime, he refined his business model. His focus would be on selling clothing, shoes, blankets and bedding at discount prices in stores where shoppers could browse through the goods on display in their own time. He called the new stores BG Bazaars – the BG didn’t denote anything in particular. Later Van Rooyen quipped that it was short for bakgat (Afrikaans slang for ‘groovy’) or blêrrie goed (bloody good), according to Dr Anton Ehlers.3
By 1965 BG Bazaars had four outlets in various towns in the parched northern parts of the Cape Province. And business was booming. So much so that Van Rooyen described himself as ‘very well off, you know, well established with a nice business’.4 But his great dream was of a nationwide chain of stores.
If you wanted a shop in every town in the country, you needed a better name than BG Bazaars. The initials BG had in any case already been registered by a business in Potchefstroom so Van Rooyen was forced to choose something else. He wanted something that would resonate in both English and Afrikaans. It also needed to be punchy and catchy.
John Lee, a travelling salesman who later worked as a senior buyer for the group, came up with a list of ten names. Some of the options were Van’s, Up’s, NW, Ric’s, Ren’s, Jet and Pep. Van Rooyen immediately took a liking to Pep as it was a word he often used to motivate and encourage his team.
Wiese and his father, Stoffel, were aware of Van Rooyen’s shops, but only really started taking proper notice when he began to look for investors to take his business onto the national stage. But people in that part of the world were a sceptical lot, explains Wiese. ‘They would first suspect he was smuggling diamonds or dagga. If he wasn’t caught by the police, they surmised he might have a sound business sense and was doing something right. Only then would they approach him with the question “Don’t you need a partner?”’ 5
Van Rooyen needed capital – about R250 000. He tested the waters among friends and family in Upington. Many were interested so he felt encouraged to register the company Pep Stores (Pty) Ltd. But Van Rooyen had one condition: to invest in his company, you had to be willing to work for it. And if you wanted to work for the company, you also needed to be prepared to invest in it. This was too big an ask for some and eventually the investors contributed only R50 000. One of them was Stoffel Wiese. ‘My dad sold his businesses and invested in Pep and went on the board. The arrangement was that when I graduated from university I would join the business. Which is what happened.’ 6
In 1965, Christo Wiese was still in Stellenbosch, busying himself with law subjects, campus politics and res life. Later he said that, while still at university, he also invested R5000, half of which he borrowed from his father.7
The first branch of the new business was a shop taken over from BG Bazaars in the railway junction town of De Aar and rebranded Pep. In December of the same year a branch was added in Kimberley, where news of Pep’s low prices spread so fast that hundreds of people queued for the store opening and the local paper reported the next day on the ‘crush’ that ensued.8 A week later, another store opened in Postmasburg. It was now clear that the group was set to expand aggressively. Meanwhile, Van Rooyen found Pep Stores a warehouse in Woodstock, Cape Town, and relocated to the city with his family.
Wiese spent some of his university holidays working at Pep Stores, but when he joined full-time in 1967 – by this time he had a law degree – it was as company secretary and second-in-command. He was also responsible for recruitment.
His biggest job, initially, was to find suitable sites for new Pep shops. By the end of the 1968 financial year the chain had 29 stores. The following year Pep added another 29 and a further 57 the year thereafter. Wiese spent about 20 days of the month away from home as he raced across the country to open new stores and sign leases. ‘I slept in a different town every night,’ he says.9
The 1960s was a time of unprecedented growth for the South African economy. In the second half of the decade entrepreneurs piled into the retail sector. Kloppers, Pick n Pay,