Abstract
The struggle for racial or ethnic group worth is an important socio-political issue in societies where a minority ethnic group, like the English-speaking whites in South Africa or the Chinese in
Malaysia, dominates the economy but not the political system.
There are two routes to the empowerment of an economically backward group. In the Afrikaner
case, economic mobilisation formed part of a general ethnic mobilisation. While the Afrikaner controlled state after 1948 massively aided all whites, Afrikaner business increased its market share through serving a niche market. It received little ethnic patronage from the state or assistance from English corporations. A quite different from of advancement is that driven by the state, which imposes on large corporations the obligation to promote the economic empowerment of a racial group. While the first form facilitated the rise of the ethnic group as a whole, the latter one benefited mainly a business and middle class elite that may remain dependent on continuing state support.
JEL Classification: N17, N37, N97
Keywords: Afrikaner business, entrepreneurship, economic empowerment
Asked just before his death whether he knew of any cases of an Afrikaans business being empowered by an English corporation, the entrepreneur Anton Rupert replied: “I cannot think of any, and I am very grateful for that.”1 Fred du Plessis, executive chairman of Sanlam, the corporation that once dominated Afrikaans business, denied that political power helped Afrikaans business to succeed. “The Afrikaner can look back not because he was privileged to receive state grants, but because he was capable of putting himself forward and fighting for his economic position” (Cape Times, 8 July 1986). An academic study of the Afrikaner economic advance paints a completely different picture. It attributes the Afrikaner’s strong economic upsurge after 1948 mainly to the decision of the agglomerate Anglo American Corporation to sell a mining house under its control “at a fraction of its value” to a subsidiary of an Afrikaans insurance company (O’Meara, 1996:120, 141). A recent history of the political economy stated that the National Party government gave “massive handouts” to Afrikaner farmers, financial capitalists, small traders and workers (Fine et al., 1996:148). Neither the business leaders nor the academics substantiated their claims.
This article is not concerned with the massive preferential treatment that whites received from government for most of the twentieth century as part of a policy, endorsed by virtually all whites, to establish a secure white dominant group. State aid specifically to Afrikaner-dominated commercial agriculture is left out of consideration, although farmers provided much of the capital for some of the Afrikaans businesses discussed here.
Instead the article concentrates on the ethnic nature of Afrikaner entrepreneurship and on the question whether English corporations or the state tried to assist Afrikaner corporations. While English speakers were a minority within the white minority and largely excluded from political power, in 1910 they dominated the economy, the bureaucracy and the professions.
Read the full article in PDF format here: Ethnic Business and Economic Empowerment: The Afrikaner Case, 1915 – 1970.
