A new book co-authored by Kader Asmal is likely to cause embarrassment in some of South Africa’s boardrooms, reports Mungo Soggot
SOME of South Africa’s top business leaders come under fire in a new book on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission co-authored by Water Affairs Minister computing Kader Asmal which fingers companies which supported apartheid. Reconciliation through Truth, soon to be published by David Philip, makes a strong case for the truth commission to seek testimony from company bosses who either supported apartheid or whose corporate practices trampled human rights.
The text recalls pro-apartheid statements from men such as Gavin Relly, who took over the helm of Anglo American when Harry Oppenheimer retired in 1982. Relly said at the time he, like Oppenheimer, did not favour ”one man, one vote” as that ”would simply be a formula for unadulterated chaos at this point in time in our history”.
The authors quote Oppenheimer’s official biographer, Anthony Hocking, who said the magnate ”never subscribed to the view that apartheid was morally wrong. In his view, it was at root an honest attempt to cope with overwhelming racial problems.”
Rembrandt head Anton Rupert, now a member of the influential ”Brenthurst Club” which advises the government on economic issues had similar views: ”After many African countries became free they got dictatorships like Idi Amin’s. We have to find a solution that won’t end up giving us one man, one vote.”
The authors Asmal, his wife Louise and Trinidadian lawyer Ronald Roberts show that in the 1960s big business had been even more open in its support of Pretoria. In 1967 the South Africa Foundation, whose members included Oppenheimer and Rupert, said in an advertisement in the Sunday Times that ns should stop apologising for apartheid and instead ”substitute a tone of confident self-assertion which publicised the opportunities of apartheid”.
In 1971, the foundation claimed its propaganda efforts had helped to ”stem the tide of ignorance, criticism and misrepresentation against the republic”.
The Asmals and Roberts say South Africa’s truth seekers have so far not broached the idea of ”corporate war criminals” like Japan’s Kajimi Gumi company, tried in 1945 for using war prisoners and kidnapped Chinese civilians as labourers.
Although the authors hint there is much light to be shed on the details of corporate connivance in apartheid, they signal the collaborating companies themselves were aware of the substance of their ”crimes”.
”In the late-middle 1980s, Anglo American directors privately discussed the fear their company would be remembered as the IG Farben of apartheid, a reference to the company that, through slave labour, became the industrial backbone of the Third Reich,” they write.
The authors also accuse South Africa’s mining giants of exploiting the migrant labour system, killing more than 69 000 workers in the past 94 years, and boasting of the availability of cheap apartheid labour to international investors.
But while the book implies the Truth and Reconciliation Commission should pay more attention to the corporate world’s connivance in apartheid, it does not examine the sensational but unproved claims by human rights campaigners and lawyers that some companies indulged in ”dirty tricks” operations claims which would be ideal material for any truth commission.
One of the most celebrated of these allegations is that Sasol used KwaZulu police hit-squad operatives trained in the Caprivi Strip to help quell strikes in the early 1990s.
During the Goldstone Commission on ”third force” violence, witnesses alleged that nine former Caprivi trainees including a man called Xesibe who was in charge of the trainees were dispatched to Secunda, the hub of Sasol’s sanctions-busting synthetic fuel operations.
MZ Khumalo, Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s right-hand man, told the commission at the time that they were sent as ”ordinary labourers”. Asked how he could reconcile this explanation and the decision to send Xesibe to accompany the men, he said under cross- examination: ”The atmosphere was very tense in the mines and all the places at the time and I was anxious about keeping control of the group that they did not get involved in any of the violence that was taking place there.”
In written argument presented to the commission, lawyers cited evidence from Bongeni Khumalo that a Sasol official had on several occasions asked MZ Khumalo to organise men to act as strike breakers and that MZ Khumalo had personally selected Xesibe and the others to attack strikers. The commission was also presented with a letter sent to the KwaZulu Department of the Chief Minister, in which Khumalo referred to the secondment of Xesibe to Secunda for ”my project”. However, a Business Day article quoted Khumalo denying that Sasol had used KwaZulu police members as hit men at Secunda.
The truth commission is unlikely, at this stage, to hold any hearings on human rights abuses committed by various companies during the apartheid era. Harry Oppenheimer ‘never subscribed to the view that apartheid was morally wrong’