Harry Oppenheimer, 91, South African Industrialist, Dies
By MARILYN BERGER AUG. 21, 2000
Harry F. Oppenheimer, the South African gold and diamond magnate who used his great wealth and considerable influence in the fight against apartheid, died on Saturday in Johannesburg. He was 91.
Mr. Oppenheimer was admitted to Kenridge Hospital in Johannesburg on Friday after complaining of abdominal pains and a headache, said Glen Finnegan, a spokeswoman for the family.
Mr. Oppenheimer for decades headed one of the world’s largest multinational industrial and mining conglomerates with resources stretching from Cape Town to London to the Yukon. Called the ”king of diamonds,” he was also the king of gold, platinum, uranium, vanadium and copper, wielding extraordinary power over some of the world’s strategic metals and minerals.
The Oppenheimer empire has been called a ”Chinese puzzle” of majority and minority holdings. The bewildering complex, in addition to effectively controlling the world’s supply of diamonds through the linked De Beers mineral companies, has vast holdings in banking, real estate, pulp and paper, bricks and pipe, coal and potash, locomotives and beer.
As head of the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, Mr. Oppenheimer for a quarter of a century was the most powerful figure in his country’s economy as well as one of the richest men in the world.
He became an important force in South African politics, elected to Parliament in 1948 as a member of the minority white liberal opposition. In that capacity, he spoke out frequently and consistently against apartheid, the country’s policy of institutionalized racial discrimination.
In 1957, he became head of Anglo American, a mining and metals company formed by his father during World War I, and chairman of De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. During the years he was in charge, he presided over an enormous expansion of the business. Anglo American grew to a net value of 24 billion South African rand in 1987 — $3.47 billion at today’s sharply reduced exchange rate — from a value of 65 million rand in 1957.
Mr. Oppenheimer stepped down from the chairmanship of Anglo American in 1982 and as chairman of De Beers in 1984. But he remained active in the businesses in which his family maintained controlling interests. His son, Nicholas, became chairman of De Beers in 1998.
In his political life, Mr. Oppenheimer grounded his opposition to apartheid on humanitarian impulses, often bringing economic principles and a sort of elegant understatement to the argument.
”I’ve never thought that the policy of racial discrimination had been a great benefit to business,” he said, ”because while it may have had the effect of keeping wages low, it also had the effect of keeping labor exceptionally inefficient. I believe that apartheid is something that works against the interest of economic development, not for it.”
Mr. Oppenheimer, who was of Jewish origin, championed the creation of black trade unions, and he lived to see those unions challenge the power of his mining companies. He was influential in ending an employment system that set aside certain jobs for whites only. His industrial group took the lead in creating housing near the mines for blacks, although the new housing accommodated only a small percentage of the three-quarters of a million blacks employed, many as migrant laborers, by his companies. He developed programs to educate blacks to bring them into positions of responsibility in his companies.
Franklin A. Thomas, former chief executive of the Ford Foundation, called Mr. Oppenheimer ”a tireless fighter who tried to change the apartheid system from within.” While he said he wished Mr. Oppenheimer had done more from his special position, he praised his efforts ”to increase democracy in the workplace and to spread it beyond the workplace to communities in which people live.”
The Rev. Leon H. Sullivan of Philadelphia, the framer of the Sullivan Principles, a code of corporate conduct in South Africa, said that Mr. Oppenheimer ”has been a force for good, a progressive influence in South Africa, far beyond the vast majority of business leaders in that country.”
Mr. Sullivan, who, like Mr. Thomas, came to urge international investors to withdraw from South Africa, and disagreed with Mr. Oppenheimer in later years, said he continued to have ”the highest respect and regard for him.”
Mr. Oppenheimer maintained that an expanding economy was a better environment for political change than a contracting economy and therefore remained a steadfast opponent of economic sanctions as a means of pressing the South African government to relax racial strictures.
”I’m not one of the people who think that sanctions have no effect,” he said in an interview in 1987. ”I think they have a very serious effect in South Africa, but I think the effect is bad in that it brings pressure to bear on people who are on your side anyhow. And it certainly doesn’t force the government to change their policy.”
He continued: ”You know these highly nationalistic people in South Africa are extremely allergic to pressure from outside,” and adding, ”In fact they become very bloody-minded about this sort of thing. They’re a tiresome, obstinate lot, our masters.”
These ”masters,” the Afrikaner nationalists who controlled the government from 1948, tried to have as little to do with Harry Oppenheimer as possible. Despite the enormous power conferred on him as the head of a group of companies that that were a leading force in the South African economy, Mr. Oppenheimer was never asked to dine with the prime minister in the first 34 years of rule by the National Party, the political form Afrikaner nationalism.
In 1982, he was finally invited, along with his house guest, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, to dine with Prime Minister P. W. Botha. By 1987, he said, he had seen Mr. Botha three or four times in the preceding year. But in the past, he recalled then: ”He objected to sitting down to the same lunch table with me. You see, I was not a very popular figure with him.”
And he said, ”I feel that in the direct political way I was able to achieve virtually nothing except to keep what I considered a voice of common sense and humanity alive.”
Mr. Oppenheimer said in the 1987 interview he believed that the growth of the economy had ”made the apartheid policy more and more implausible,” and that the government was moving away from it. ”What they’ve not done is to make really significant movement on sharing political power.”
A little more than two years later, Mr. Botha’s successor, F. W. de Klerk, legalized antiapartheid groups and began moving toward negotiations with them for a democratic constitution.
Majority rule, Mr. Oppenheimer said, would have to come in stages, with guarantees for the rights of various groups in the country. ”I think if you try to insist on having no guarantees for group rights, the effect would be that you won’t get any movement at all,” he said.
Mr. Oppenheimer was not someone to loudly take credit for his accomplishments and even less for his charities, which included the ”usual thing” as he put it — hospitals, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides, and seed money for education, especially for blacks. A particular interest was the Urban Foundation, which he helped establish, dedicated to improving the environment in which black South Africans live in the cities.
He was known for his refined sensibilities and exquisite taste. In Little Brenthurst, the palatial home in Johannesburg he inherited from his father, and in the seaside ”bungalow” he built near Durban, he had a collection of Picassos, Sisleys, Goyas, Dufys, Degas and Chagalls. He was particularly fond of a Renoir he bought in London for $:40 while a student at Oxford, where he developed a reputation as a generous host when he took friends on Champagne picnics.
He collected manuscripts of English poets and had a special regard for Lord Byron, whom he admired for a ”curious combination of the romantic and the practical.
Mr. Oppenheimer also had a major collection of Africana, and took special delight in a private press he established to publish manuscripts. ”I started about 10 or 15 years ago,” he said in 1987. ”I’ve been having a great deal of fun out of that.”
He maintained a private game preserve and kept a stable of racehorses. His wife, the former Bridget McCall, was an avid bettor. Mr. Oppenheimer, who was not exactly a wagerer himself, used to be seen going down to the equivalent of the $2 betting window in Durban to place her bets.
A modest man of medium height, with a slight stammer, he spoke four languages — English, Afrikaans, German and French. In conversation he was direct, engaging his guests with genial, but penetrating, brown eyes.
Harry Frederick Oppenheimer was born on Oct. 28, 1908, in Kimberley, South Africa, six years after his father, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, had emigrated from Germany by way of England. Young Harry became the heir apparent of the family’s business empire when a brother died. From his childhood he was prepared for the position he was to to occupy. He studied politics and philosophy at Christ Church College at Oxford, where he was tutored by Sir Roy Harrod, a British economist.
Mr. Oppenheimer volunteered for military service early in World War II and became an intelligence officer with an armored-car regiment of the South African Army. While still in the army he married Ms. McCall. She and their two children, Nicholas and Mary, as well as five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren survive him.
His father, the son of a Jewish cigar maker from Friedberg, Germany, converted to Anglicanism in the 1930’s. Harry followed in his path, as he did again when, at 40, he was selected to represent the Kimberley constituency in Parliament. There, like his father, he was a voice for liberalism.
But Mr. Oppenheimer’s first term, which started in 1948, coincided with the victory of the National Party led by Prime Minister Daniel Malan, which under successive leaders would rule South Africa for more than 40 years.
When Mr. Oppenheimer left Parliament in 1957 to take over the family business empire after his father died, he threw his moral and financial support to the relatively liberal Progressive Party.
Once, when a state television interviewer asked him whether it had ever occurred to him to follow another career, he responded with customarily dry wit: ”I chose my father with discretion and I found myself in a certain position. And, I mean, like the prayer book says, I have sought to do my duty in the station in which it pleases the Lord to call me.”
