Danny, no, it’s not that I don’t acknowledge that some Jewish citizens of South Africa made an effort to bring an end to discrimination, many other groups, even some white Afrikaners, were dedicated and supported Mandela’s struggle.
It is the ambiguity of British and Jewish life during the Apartheid era in South Africa that I query.
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Oppenheimer's family was reported to be worth $2.5 billion, according to Forbes magazine's 1997 list of the world's super-rich.
Oppenheimer, arguably South Africa's most respected businessman, was a vocal opponent of his country's racist regime that sanctioned apartheid for decades.
"Disagreeable though it may be, we must admit that the racial policy which has been pursued here over the last 40 years has made South Africa stink in the nostrils of decent, humane people around the world," Oppenheimer said in a speech in 1989.
But Oppenheimer's role as the leading businessman in South Africa made his position within the racist regime ambiguous.
His labor-intensive mines thrived on a migrant labor system that forced black workers to live apart from their families, and his companies paid black workers far less than whites.
His economic success was considered crucial to the survival of the apartheid government, which ruled until South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994.
The Oppenheimer dynasty began in 1917, when Harry Oppenheimer's father, Ernest, founded the Anglo American Corp., a mining company. Ernest Oppenheimer took control of De Beers in 1929.
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Harry Oppenheimer; Led Diamond Giant - Los Angeles Times
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One of the most influential campaigners against the "Jew-imperialist design" in South Africa was John A. Hobson (1858-1940), a prominent journalist and economist.
In 1899 the Manchester Guardian sent him to South Africa to report first-hand for its readers on the situation there. During his three month investigation, Hobson became convinced that a small group of Jewish "Randlords" was essentially responsible for the strife and conflict.
In a Guardian article dispatched from Johannesburg just a few weeks before the outbreak of the war, he told readers of the influential liberal daily:
In Johannesburg the Boer population is a mere handful of officials and their families, some five thousand of the population; the rest is about evenly divided between white settlers, mostly from Great Britain, and the [native black] Kaffirs, who are everywhere in White Man's Africa the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.
The town is in some respects dominantly and even aggressively British, but British with a difference which it takes some little time to understand. That difference is due to the Jewish factor. If one takes the recent figures of the census, there appears to be less than seven thousand Jews in Johannesburg, but the experience of the street rapidly exposes this fallacy of figures. The shop fronts and business houses, the market place, the saloons, the "stoops" of the smart suburban houses and sufficient to convince one of the large presence of the chosen people. If any doubt remains, a walk outside the Exchange, where in the streets, "between the chains," the financial side of the gold business is transacted, will dispel it.
So far as wealth and power and even numbers are concerned Johannesburg is essentially a Jewish town. Most of these Jews figure as British subjects, though many are in fact German and Russian Jews who have come to Africa after a brief sojourn in England. The rich, rigorous, and energetic financial and commercial families are chiefly English Jews, not a few of whom here, as elsewhere, have Anglicised their names after true parasitic fashion. I lay stress on this fact because, though everyone knows the Jews are strong, their real strength here is much underestimated. Though figures are so misleading, it is worth while to mention that the directory of Johannesburg shows 68 Cohens against 21 Joneses and 53 Browns.
The Jews take little active part in the Outlander agitation; they let others do that sort of work. But since half of the land and nine-tenths of the wealth of the Transvaal claimed for the Outlander are chiefly theirs, they will be chief gainers by an settlement advantageous to the Outlander.
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The Boer War Remembered
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Barney Barnato, a dapper, vulgar fellow from London's East End (born Barnett Isaacs), was one of the first of many Jews who have played a major role in South African affairs. Through pluck and shrewd maneuvering, by 1887 he presided over an enormous South African financial-business empire of diamonds and gold.
In 1888 he joined with his chief rival, Cecil Rhodes, who was backed by the Rothschild family of European financiers, in running the De Beers empire, which controlled all South African diamond production, and thereby 90 percent of the world's diamond output, as well as a large share of the world's gold production.note 3 (
In the 20th century, the De Beers diamond cartel came under the control of a German-Jewish dynasty, the Oppenheimers, who also controlled its gold-mining twin, the Anglo-American Corporation. With its virtual world monopoly on diamond production and distribution, and grip on a large part of the world's gold production, the billionaire family has ruled a financial empire of unmatched global importance. It also controlled influential newspapers in South Africa. So great was the Oppenheimers' power and influence in South Africa that it rivaled that of the formal government.)
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The Boer War Remembered
SA millionaire John Schlesinger:
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At 40 Schlesinger is only beginning. Though his social life has not appreciably slowed down, he has proved himself as industrious on the job as his father. His working day begins at 8:30 a.m., and even on vacation he runs the show from an office on his converted British Fairmile motor torpedo boat. A U.S. Air Force bombardier during World War II, Schlesinger renounced his American citizenship in 1947 (his American wife won a legal separation from him in 1958). Now a South African citizen, he has no use for apartheid. "There will have to be changes here," he says. "The government's policy of separate development is not the answer. South Africa must eventually become multiracial, but in the first instance whites will have to play the dominant role." He is busy doing just that.
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South Africa: His Father's Son - TIME
Doing what? All of them publicly “supported” the Anti Apartheid struggle but fully utilized the cheap black labour to grow their own fortunes. Harry Oppenheimer was one of the richest men on earth. These people were powerful enough to bring about change in South Africa by merely equalizing the salaries of their labour force, but they did not. Why?
John Schlesinger, like thousands of other unbelievably wealthy British and Jewish families, strangely departed from South Africa around 1994, just before or after the release of Mandela. It does not make sense, why leave the country when the struggle and dream you have supported for years was about to become a reality?
Last edited by JoziJoe; 2nd October 2009 at 12:44 AM.
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