The pioneer Johann Peter Ruppert started off as a foreman on the farm Bloemhof, but then worked in Graaff-Reinet as a wagon maker until his death in 1882. According to family tradition he was killed in a shooting accident while hunting, which is not implausible, since the plains of the Karoo teemed with game in those days.4
He and his wife Emma Susanna belonged to the Anglican parish of St James at Graaff-Reinet. In 1865, a few years after their arrival in the town, the colonial government decreed that instruction at all government schools in the Cape Colony would henceforth be conducted in English. English newspapers at the Cape, convinced that the English were the ‘dominant race’, propagated a militant form of cultural imperialism; the Cape Argus dismissed Afrikaans as a ‘bastard jargon’, unworthy of the name ‘language’. Despite this the Ruperts, like many other immigrant families, gradually adopted Afrikaans as their home language. After the marriage of the pioneer couple’s surviving son to an Afrikaans-speaking girl, the family eventually joined the Dutch Reformed Church.
Three of the pioneer couple’s four children died in childhood, two of them of diphtheria within ten days of each other in the epidemic of 1869. Only the eldest son, Anton Rupert’s grandfather Anthony Edward, survived to adulthood. Like his father, he died at the age of 44 years. Emma Susanna died in 1919.
Grandfather Anthony Edward Rupert was a builder. During his last illness in 1906 he wrote a document − it is still in the family’s possession − describing his humble beginnings at the village of Petersburg, plying his trade from one farm to the next. Sometimes he went around on horseback, but when in dire straits he travelled on foot. Before his marriage to Maria Elizabeth Dippenaar in 1885 he rented a house from the coloured congregation of the London Missionary Society for £2 per annum. He had to cover the thatched roof with a canvas wagon tent to keep out wind and rain.
After his marriage his fortunes improved. He built a school at Graaff-Reinet and another on the farm Letskraal, where Andries Pretorius had farmed before the Great Trek. At Petersburg, on the ox-wagon route to Kimberley, he built a church whose cornerstone still bears his name. His reputation spread. In 1899, shortly before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War, he and his family settled in Graaff-Reinet itself, where he restored and renovated houses. Although all building materials had to be transported by ox-wagon, he could complete a farmhouse within six weeks – an achievement that required considerable organisational abilities.5 Ds Rooi Abraham Louw, who had known the builder Rupert at Graaff-Reinet, once told Anton Rupert: ‘Your grandfather was the most hard-working man I ever met.’
The eldest of the skilled builder’s eight children, John Peter Rupert, born in 1888, practised as an attorney at Graaff-Reinet, where his family would live for nearly a century. In this town, with its eventful history, his son Anton was born 28 years later.
Chapter 3
Boyhood years in the Karoo
Anthony Edward Rupert the second was never called by his baptismal names. In his boyhood he was known as Boetie (lit. ‘little brother’), and at university he became Anton. The oldest of three brothers, he was born on 4 October 1916. Jan (John Peter) was born in 1922, and Koos (Jacobus Albertus) in 1929. Both Rupert’s bothers would follow him to the Rembrandt Group. The three brothers in the tobacco industry have been compared to the three brothers Reemtsma in Germany and the three brothers Reynolds in the USA, who built up the biggest cigarette factories in their respective countries.
Their father, universally known as Oom (Uncle) John, was a respected community leader in Graaff-Reinet. In the hard times during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when the Cape Colony was subject to martial law and many Cape Afrikaners, although British subjects, were as poverty-stricken as their fellow Afrikaners and relatives in the war-torn northern republics, he had to go out to work at a young age. After the war he was able to complete his high-school education at the Graaff-Reinet College in 1909.
After serving articles at the local law firm of CH Maasdorp, John Rupert worked as an attorney in towns such as Kimberley, Mossel Bay and Prince Albert, which was booming in the heyday of the ostrich-feather industry. Here he was offered a partnership in a law firm but he smelled a rat and turned down the offer – wisely, as it turned out, since two of the partners were later prosecuted. It left him with a lasting mistrust of partnerships, in contrast to the philosophy of partnership his eldest son would implement so successfully.
John Rupert, who established his own law practice in Graaff-Reinet, took a keen interest in education and child welfare. The secretary of the local Child Welfare Society during his term of office as chairman was the town’s social worker, Tini Malan, who was to marry the later Prime Minister John Vorster. Another future prime minister who crossed his path was JG (Hans) Strijdom, whose uncle brought the young law graduate from nearby Willowmore to Rupert requesting that he employ him as an articled clerk. Rupert was of the view that Graaff-Reinet offered too little scope and advised him to try his luck in the Transvaal. Strijdom evidently heeded the advice and moved to Pretoria and then to Nylstroom, where he became known as the Lion of the North.
Years later, before Strijdom became prime minister, he visited Anton Rupert in Stellenbosch. Strijdom, Transvaal leader of the governing National Party in the 1950s, wanted to break away from the then Prime Minister DF Malan on account of differences about whether South Africa should become a republic. Rupert walked twice around the house with the agitated Strijdom and persuaded him to be patient; he would get his chance as leader. Strijdom did take over from Malan, but became ill and died in office.
John Rupert and his wife both served on the committee of the Dutch Literary and Drama Society in Graaff-Reinet. The deputy chairman was Dr Bennie Keet, eventually a theology lecturer at Stellenbosch who became known for his rejection of apartheid. The names of the Ruperts and Keet appear in a brochure about an exhibition of ‘antiques and curiosities’ held in Graaff-Reinet in 1918, for which several townspeople had contributed antique furniture and possessions of historical value. Anton Rupert’s later interest in antiques was probably stimulated at an early age.
John Rupert became involved in politics as the secretary of the first branch of the National Party established in the town after General JBM Hertzog’s sensational speech at De Wildt on 7 December 1912. Hertzog increasingly differed with the conciliation politics of Generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts as well as their views on the language question, with Hertzog advocating language equality for Afrikaners. He declared himself a ‘definite opponent’ of imperialism where imperial interests clashed with national interests, and stated that he put South Africa first. As a result of his unshakable views Botha omitted him from the first Union cabinet and the Free State judge and war hero Hertzog formed a new party, the National Party (NP). In 1913 Hertzog, who was to become South Africa’s longest-serving prime minister, created a commotion at a Stellenbosch language festival when he read out a telegram from former Free State President MT Steyn, a giant figure in South African history, that contained the following quotation in Dutch: ‘In the mouths of the conquered, the language of the conqueror is the language of slaves.’
The NP grew into the strongest party in Graaff-Reinet as scores of supporters of Botha and Smuts’s South African Party (SAP) joined its ranks. John Rupert’s wife Hester chaired the women’s branch of the party, which would come to power in 1924 in coalition with the Labour Party.
John Rupert’s hobbies were writing and reading poetry and studying languages; he could read nine languages. At the age of 70 he took up French, and could soon read classic works in that language. But he was unable to avail himself of a bursary to the Netherlands in his student years and never travelled abroad.
In his legal career John Rupert appeared in several much-discussed court cases, some arising from the Rebellion of 1914