AngloGold Ashanti CEO Bobby Godsell recently called for “black Oppenheimers”. “We need enriched individuals and we need symbols or role models of dramatic success in the black community,” he writes in Voices for a New Democracy (published by the Centre for Development and Enterprise).
The name Oppenheimer conjures up images of diamonds and De Beers.
Diamonds are pricey but concealable. This has always presented challenges for bourgeois property rights, especially before the advent of high-tech workplace surveillance.
The British government’s 1871 land dispossession of Griquas, Korannas and Afrikaners in the newly discovered diamond fields paved the way for the heroic surge of capitalist mining in our country. However, micro-measures were also essential for an investor-friendly climate. There was the perplexing problem of disappearing diamonds.
The many control measures introduced on the mines at the time are recorded in detail by Jack and the recently deceased Ray [Alexander] Simons in their wonderful history of struggle in our country, Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 (Mayibuye Books). An early 1880s regulation, for instance, prescribed strip-searches of African workers. After every shift they were forced to jump naked over bars and paraded with extended arms before guards who, according to the Simonses, “scrutinised hair, nose, mouth, ears and rectum with meticulous care”.
Nothing personal, you understand. This was not Abu Ghraib. These were not gratuitous measures. They were utilitarian interventions, essential for sustained foreign investment. The diamonds belonged to Cecil John Rhodes and London-based stockholders, not to labourers. That’s how things worked.
The year 1888 was the one of the great merger of diamond companies into De Beers. In that same year, Rhodes and his fellow De Beers directors introduced an innovation to further protect company property — the compound system. This is how the Simonses describe it: “The compound was an enclosure surrounded by a high, corrugated iron fence and covered [with] wire netting. The men lived, 20 to a room … They went to work along a tunnel, bought food and clothing from the company’s stores … all within the compound.” Men due for discharge were confined in detention rooms for several days … wore only blankets and fingerless leather gloves padlocked to their wrists, swallowed purgatives, and were examined for stones concealed in cuts, wounds, swellings and orifices. Nothing personal. These were the requirements of the capitalist market.
Over the past few weeks a number of senior government colleagues have criticised leading personalities in the private sector. President Thabo Mbeki admonished CEO of Anglo American Tony Trahar. Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel criticised the “wanton drive to get rich quickly”, exemplified by exorbitant executive salary increases. I agree entirely with these criticisms. But let’s not get overly personal.
I find other remarks in Godsell’s article illuminating. “In 1971,” he writes, “stevedores went on strike in the Durban docks and 1 000 were fired. The train that took them back passed a train bringing in 1 000 replacements. The stevedores then were manual labourers, not operators, and one pair of hands was much the same as another.” Nothing personal, you understand. A fact.
However, in 1973, Godsell continues, about 30 000 textile workers went on strike in the Frame textile factories in Hammarsdale. “Philip Frame took a crucial decision that his interests would be better served by negotiating a settlement than by replacing those workers … training semi-skilled operators would have taken three to six weeks and the strike could be settled far more quickly by negotiation.”
Again, nothing personal. Frame was not motivated by any particular empathy for workers and their families. It was a marketplace fact that negotiations would better serve his accumulation interests.
When Godsell writes that “we need enriched individuals and symbols or role models of dramatic success in the black community” — who is “we”? That “we” is not us. It is white capitalists who need black capitalists. They need them to foster influence with the government. They need them to sell the myth that the determining reality is capitalists’ subjective attributes, like pigmentation — not cold, marketplace logic.
And they need black capitalists to help draw a veil over the past. A de-racialised boardroom might encourage us to forget that the Oppenheimer empire was built on thousands of daily rectum searches, on fingerless gloves padlocked to wrists, on force-fed purgatives.
As his last fling, Godsell plays the race card. “I believe it is racist to revere white Oppenheimers and criticise black Oppenheimers.”
I’ve got news for you, Bobby. The majority of South Africans have never revered the white Oppenheimers. Nothing personal, of course.
Jeremy Cronin is deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party and an African National Congress MP