friend that she was the one he was going to marry, though he hadn’t caught her name.
About a year later, they met again. A varsity friend told Wiese about the good-looking daughter of a politician he knew. A date was set up and Wiese took Caro to dinner at the home of Professor Francie van Zijl, dean of Stellenbosch’s medical faculty and a man who rubbed shoulders with all the leading members of the government of the day. Most of the guests were politicians.
‘Caro Basson? And whose daughter are you?’ asked the host on being introduced to her.
‘Mr Basson’s daughter,’ she answered.
This Mr Basson was one Japie Basson, a flamboyant politician who had been part of the National Party, but was kicked out in the late 1950s for objecting to the path apartheid was then taking. Afterwards he started his own movement, the National Union, and later joined the United Party, which was the official opposition at the time. In the 1980s, during the final years of his career, he again joined the Nats. He clearly had a few things in common with his future son-in-law: he did not shy away from publicity and had a nose for a deal – albeit of the political kind. In an obituary the Daily News referred to Basson as the ‘chameleon of South African politics’.3
But the couple’s relationship didn’t lead to marriage all at once. Wiese had to court Caro for six years before tying the knot. She later jokingly spoke of being put off initially by ‘this guy’s forwardness’. They finally got married in 1975 in the Dutch Reformed Church in Three Anchor Bay, where his in-laws, Japie and Clarence, were also wed and where Wiese’s son Jacob would years later continue the tradition.
Wiese later quipped that the secret of a happy marriage is ‘inter alia, learning what your spouse’s air conditioning preferences are, prior to tying the knot’.4 He also let on that his wife taught him that while he was allowed to decide the big issues (like the level of the gold price and whether America should go to war in Iraq), all other decisions would be hers to make.
As soon as Caro saw a bungalow for sale in Clifton, she said it was the only place in Cape Town that she wanted to call home. And since getting married, this is where the Wieses have resided, overlooking the iconic Fourth Beach with its distinctive granite boulders. ‘We literally live on the rocks and the ocean is our garden. I always say I have the biggest swimming pool in the Cape and I don’t have to clean it,’ Wiese remarked later.5
The beach bungalow was not the only property he acquired over the years. But not even the mansion of a titled British plutocrat or the most picturesque of wine farms would persuade the Wieses to change their residential address.
Not everyone was fortunate enough to have an idyllic little home by the seaside. Especially not in the South Africa of the 1970s, where the white minority’s oppression of the black majority was sinking to new lows. The government’s decision to impose Afrikaans on black school children as a language of instruction infuriated thousands upon thousands of learners. A poll among black residents of Soweto, the largest black township in the country with a population of around one million, revealed that 98% of respondents were opposed to being educated in Afrikaans. The government nevertheless pushed through with its plans, stipulating that from 1976 mathematics and arithmetic would be taught only in Afrikaans.
On 16 June 1976 as many as twenty thousand school children in Soweto protested against the measures. The police used teargas, and when the crowd did not disperse, they turned to live ammunition. Hector Pieterson, a thirteen-year-old boy, was one of the first casualties. The result was an uprising that mired Soweto in violence, leading to the death of hundreds, and it spilt over into other black residential areas throughout the country. Order was only restored by October the next year. The world watched as South Africa descended into a quagmire of bloodshed and strife.
This pummelled investor confidence. But it also created opportunities. ‘During the Soweto uprising, I bought a business from someone who’d given up on South Africa,’ says Wiese.6 It was a bargain, he adds.
The business wasn’t a little café on the corner: it was a diamond mine.
For those who think that only De Beers is allowed to own such mines, Wiese says: ‘That’s a fallacy. Anybody can own a diamond mine.’7 The business was called Octha Diamonds and the mine was on the banks of the Orange River, about 80 kilometres from where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. The operation was initially developed in the 1930s by Otto Thaning, an adventurer who had left Europe for Africa. Thaning had a daredevil streak in him and loved aeroplanes, suffering injuries on more than one occasion on his pioneering flights. He was later a Danish diplomat in South Africa.
When Thaning passed away, his son was not interested in such a substantial South African investment. ‘He gave an attractive option on the mine to a 22-year-old articled clerk, Johan de Villiers, who had only R400,’ says Wiese.8 De Villiers made an offer nevertheless, but it was rejected at around 4.30 on a Monday afternoon. He then approached Wiese and asked him to come in as a partner. This was just the opportunity Wiese was waiting for. He had long had a fascination with gems, especially as he came from Upington. The town has always suffered from a bit of diamond fever, he says. By 8.45 the next morning, the deal was sealed.9
‘I risked everything to buy it with him.’10
Moustaches, bell-bottoms and broad-collared shirts might have been popular in the 1970s, but it was the decade’s other big trend that gave the diamond trade a boost: inflation. Before 1973 a barrel of crude oil traded at around $3. But during that fateful year, the Arab countries of the Middle East took serious offence at the West’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. These large oil producers decide to close the taps. Within a year the price of crude oil quadrupled, causing unprecedented price increases worldwide. Not only did transport costs spike, but most products became noticeably more expensive. And the oil price kept climbing, reaching $40 per barrel by the end of the decade.
High inflation gnaws away at purchasing power year after year, motivating investors to look for asset classes that will retain value. The result in the 1970s was that billions of dollars flooded into gold and diamonds after the oil price shock. Wiese’s timing was impeccable.
He also did his homework. He set out to learn from the experts in Antwerp, the hub of the diamond industry where stones have been traded, cut and polished for four centuries. He visited his mine three times a month. Sometimes he took Caro along, flying out and making a weekend of it. Wiese and De Villiers set up offices in Antwerp and Zurich, and also had plans for New York and Sydney. Wiese also devised a strategy to turn the local market on its head, because he saw more opportunities than just those presented by the international market.
The Soweto riots poured cold water over affluent South Africans. Widespread fears that the country would go up in flames convinced Wiese that the rich would be nosing around for the best way to invest in highly movable assets. ‘A man carrying a handful of diamonds can leave everything and make a new start somewhere else,’ he said.11 So he started Cape Town Diamond Investment Brokers. And the money cascaded in.
But greater powers were at work. The hunger for a proper asset of value attracted investors of the speculative sort, who pushed up prices to dizzying heights. ‘At the height of the 1980 diamond boom, I sensed the market was unhealthy and sold to Johan.’12 According to reports, Wiese received R5,8 million for his stake.13
He sold in February. In August his partner hit a pothole (it sounds bad, but in diamond mining it’s a good thing), which yielded R30 million in diamonds. ‘He paid me out with ease.’14 Two years later the diamond market collapsed and the company was liquidated. Wiese got out at just the right time.
‘Two things you may never do: you may never go into politics, and number two is you may never make movies,’ is what Caro, according to Wiese, told him.15 Films, it turned out, weren’t an attraction for Wiese, but politics was a career waiting to happen.
‘My first love, I always thought, was the law. The theatrics and the intellectual stimulation appealed to me,’ he says.16 Wiese joined the Cape Bar. But his name is not associated with ground-breaking case law. Later on Wiese would refer to himself as ‘a failed lawyer’.17
The life of an advocate was too secluded