Now the once energetic dark-haired entrepreneur walks with a stoop as a result of a curvature of the spine. He also reads with some difficulty, and all correspondence and reading material have to be enlarged by means of a video screen on his desk. A solar eclipse 60 years ago may have caused his eye problem. In October 1940 in Graaff-Reinet he and his youngest brother Koos, who has similar eye problems, watched a total eclipse of the sun through film that possibly did not offer adequate protection. Typically, Rupert regards his weakening sight as an asset – just as more than once in his career he tried to convert a disadvantage into an advantage. Because he is able to read less, he ‘has more opportunity to think’.
The remarkable life story of this entrepreneur-philanthropist, a business leader regarded as one of Africa’s legends, covered almost a quarter of modern South Africa’s history by the turn of the century. It started nearly nine decades earlier with his birth during the First World War in his beloved Karoo, the vast semi-desert in the interior of South Africa where the Rupert family became part of the land and the land became part of them.
PART II
FORMATIVE YEARS
Chapter 2
Eastern Cape roots
The first Rupert arrived in South Africa in 1857.
Johann Peter Ruppert, the founder of the South African Rupert family and Anton Rupert’s great-grandfather, was a native of Prussia. According to family lore he came from Gräfrath near Solingen, although his death certificate in the Cape Town archives gives his birthplace as Trier, the oldest city in Germany. He was one of the many German founders of Afrikaner families – 33,7% of Afrikaners of the period from 1657 to 1867 were of German descent, the second-largest group after those of Dutch descent (34,8%).1
After the outbreak of the Crimean War (1854-56) Johann Peter Ruppert enlisted in the British army, which was recruiting reinforcements on the European continent. With the rest of what was known as the German Legion, he was stationed at Colchester near London under the command of Major-General Baron Richard von Stutterheim. The war ended before the Legion was sent to the Black Sea, and Ruppert and his comrades were given the option to settle on the eastern frontier of the British colony at the Cape. With the cost of the frontier wars a drain on the treasury, the British government was keen to settle military pensioners on smallholdings so that they could be called up for military duty when the need arose.
The volunteers were told that there was a dearth of women at the Cape and were advised to find wives before they set forth. On 19 October 1856 the eighteen-year-old Ruppert wed seventeen-year-old Emma Susanna Grandfield-Crosby, a Colchester girl. Thus the South African Ruperts − Ruppert soon lost its second p − are descended from British and Prussian stock.
By that time the Cape, strategically situated on the sea route to the East, had burgeoned into a prosperous colony. Trade in wine and wool was flourishing and the government could launch large-scale public projects. But there was a serious shortage of skilled labour and European immigrants could help fill the gap.
Two events had given rise to the shortage of labour. Many craftsmen and workers died in the smallpox epidemic of 1857, while the ‘national suicide’ of the Xhosa in the same year, the consequence of visions reported by the prophetess Nonqwase, resulted in large-scale loss of life.2
By 1858 a contingent of 2 362 officers and privates of the German Legion, accompanied by only 361 women and 195 children, had been settled in the drastically depopulated frontier area later known as the Ciskei. In due course they were joined by a further 2 700 German civilian settlers, friends and relatives of the military settlers.
Johann Peter Ruppert (private number 1678, in the third company of the German Legion’s second regiment) disembarked in East London. According to family tradition he was musically talented, and a violinist in the military band. He was initially stationed at Berlin, one of a number of Eastern Cape towns that were given German names, where he was granted land.
The British government’s plan with the German settlers in the buffer zone at the frontier did not work out as intended. The frontier problem was becoming less acute and, at the outbreak of the mutiny in India, over 1 000 members of the German Legion volunteered for service on that subcontinent. Only 386 eventually returned. The ones who remained were mostly unable to farm successfully on their five-acre holdings, much of which was not even arable. In 1861 the German Legion was disbanded.
Johann Peter Ruppert and his wife were among the settlers who moved to Graaff-Reinet, where the Ruperts would have a lasting influence. This Karoo town with its colourful history had been established in 1786 as the centre of the fourth district at the Cape, with a drosdy (magistrate’s residence) as the seat of local government, and a military commandant. The district encompassed a vast area stretching from the Indian Ocean almost to the Gariep River, with an indigenous population ranging from the Xhosa in the east to the Griqua and San in the west. By the time the district was proclaimed there were already 600 farmer families of European descent.3
As early as 1795 the people of Graaff-Reinet showed their mettle when they rebelled against the authority of the Dutch East India Company, earning a reputation as the first Boer republic. The town also has a niche in early South African history as the home base of eminent figures like Andries Stockenström (1792-1864) and Andrew Murray (1794-1866), moderator of the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). Murray ministered in Graaff-Reinet alongside members of the London Missionary Society like Dr John Philip and Dr JT van der Kemp, whose views differed greatly from his.
In the confrontational climate of the eastern frontier Stockenström, the district’s first landdros or magistrate, later lieutenant-governor of the Eastern Cape, stood for coexistence with the indigenous population and advocated truth and justice as fundamental principles. The views of this influential and far-sighted leader resemble the philosophy Anton Rupert was to adopt more than a century later.
Stockenström was responsible for laying out the charming town, which, with its water furrows, was known as the ‘Jewel of the Karoo’. Set in the horseshoe bend of the Sundays River, it boasted an imposing church and parsonage (later the Reinethuis), as well as Cape Dutch, Georgian and Victorian residences cheek by jowl with flat-roofed Karoo houses. Today it is a picturesque museum town with 220 proclaimed historical sites, the most in any town in South Africa.
The descendants of the rebels of 1795 gradually developed more and more grievances against the British colonial administration, and by 1838 the Great Trek, the migration of Afrikaners to the interior, was in full swing. Several eminent Trekker leaders had close ties with Graaff-Reinet. Gerrit Maritz was a wealthy wagon maker in the town, with an outlying farm called Welgevonden, eventually owned by Anton Rupert’s son Anthonij. Andries Pretorius of Blood River fame farmed in the district. Two provincial capitals − Pietermaritzburg and Pretoria − were named after them. The marriages of renowned Trekker leaders Piet Retief and Louis Trichardt were solemnised in the local church, and Andries Hendrik Potgieter was baptised there. Another prominent Trekker leader, Sarel Cilliers, was born at nearby Nieu-Bethesda.
Two presidents of later Boer republics − JN Boshof of the Free State and TF Burgers of the Transvaal − hailed from Graaff-Reinet. Further down the line, Dr DF Malan, later prime minister of South Africa, left his position as minister of the DRC in Graaff-Reinet to become the first editor of Die Burger, the oldest Afrikaans daily newspaper. And Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, founder-leader of the Pan Africanist Congress, the Africanist resistance movement that broke away from the African National Congress in the late 1950s, went to school and now lies buried at Graaff-Reinet.
Many other cultural leaders, business people, educationists, medical doctors and agriculturalists put their stamp on Graaff-Reinet. The town was quite ‘cosmopolitan’; the strong Afrikaner presence was complemented by English-speaking and Jewish families as well as initially a smaller group of black people and a considerably larger population of coloured people.
The first Rupert arrived in Graaff-Reinet during a worldwide depression in the aftermath of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The wool market was flat and mildew was wreaking