A Man of Africa The Political Thought of Harry Oppenheimer, by Kalim Rajab.

A Man of Africa The Political Thought of Harry Oppenheimer, by Kalim Rajab. Penguin Random House South Africa, Zebra Press. Cape Town, South Africa 2017. ISBN 9781776092116 / ISBN 978-1-77-609211-6

A Man of Africa The Political Thought of Harry Oppenheimer by Kalim Rajab. The head of a business empire, Harry Oppenheimer played an influential yet controversial role in South Africa's younger history.

Kalim Rajab  

A contested legacy

What role can moderates play in a society calling out for revolution? How far should establishment figures be prepared to go in fighting for change? And should such leaders' focus be on building and developing a flawed country for future leaders to inherit, or on tearing it down in order to correct its foundations? This collection examines what is increasingly a contested history in South Africa. Its focus is on a struggle 'waged not in the trenches of armed resistance but in the trenches of the boardroom', to use a description employed by a framer of the South African constitution. And its subject was once described by Andrew Young, Martin Luther King Jr's chief lieutenant, as ca kindred spirit... one of the most humane and sensitive businessmen anywhere in the world'. But others disagreed, and disagreed sharply. 'There are many realities,' writes the Indian novelist Amish Tripathi, 'there are many versions of what may appear obvious. Whatever appears as an unshakeable truth, its exact opposite may also be true in another context. After all, one's reality is but perception, viewed through various prisms of context.' Context and perception are crucial for evaluating the life and work of Harry Frederick Oppenheimer. A great baron of commerce and worldwide industry - in many ways one of the builders of modern South Africa, the continent's most sophisticated economy - he was also a member of the global business elite from the 1930s to the 1990s, a progressive politician between the end of the Second World War and 1958, and an esteemed political-economy thinker and leader of men for most of his life. At a time when white men of real power in South Africa were creatures happily dug into their burrows, here was a titan prepared to forge a new path. 'We have to believe as businessmen,' he said in 1982, 'and by our practice demonstrate that the pursuit of business efficiency and the search for a free, more just society are not contradictory objectives but in fact two aspects of the same thing.' In many ways he seemed to have been a philosopher trapped in a capitalist world. For the person who loomed so large over South African society, and whose group employed hundreds of thousands of men, was instinctively of a retiring, donnish nature, arguably more suited to the cloistered halls of academia than hard-edged commerce and politics; to come across him within the corridors of his power base at Anglo American and De Beers would have been to witness an exercise in reticence and self-effacement.* Yet titans do not remain at the top for long without a flinty core. Essentially he was no different. And such was his complicated nature that even while carrying off the exquisite grace of which Mandela spoke, he was ruthlessly able to pursue the most hard-nosed of deals. Here was a man whose life spanned both white dominance and formalised apartheid. The two overlap, but given South Africa's caustic history of racial power relations going back centuries, the former encompasses far more than just the latter. As a riposte to this, he saw himself as a classical liberal committed to individual freedoms and the pursuit of economic justice. [...]

This is an excerpt from A Man of Africa The Political Thought of Harry Oppenheimer, by Kalim Rajab.

Title: A Man of Africa
Subtitle: The Political Thought of Harry Oppenheimer
Author: Kalim Rajab
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Zebra Press
Cape Town, South Africa 2017
ISBN 9781776092116 / ISBN 978-1-77-609211-6
Softcover, 15 x 24 cm, 217 pages, several color and b/w photographs