a letter Gen. Smuts wrote to Pres. MT Steyn in 1901, describing the devastation of the country and the abuse of women and children. The article made a lasting impression on Huberte because the quoted letter included a reference praising her great-grandmother Lenie Riekert.10
A year later, on Saturday, 27 September 1941, the couple were married in the Gereformeerde church in Krugersdorp. (Rupert was Dutch Reformed, but Huberte belonged to the smaller sister church popularly known as the Dopperkerk.) The wedding, a major social event in the close-knit Afrikaner community, was covered in great detail in Die Transvaler.
After the reception the couple drove off in Rupert’s battered little DKW, registration number TK 714. The canvas roof leaked so that when it rained Huberte had to open an umbrella to keep dry. They were embarking on a life in which she was to be a constant support at Rupert’s side, having taken to heart the advice given to her before the wedding by Sen. Martin Vermeulen, father of her student friend and bridesmaid Theresa Vermeulen: ‘You are going to marry a leader of people, a man of whom we expect much. Decide early on that you want to be his helpmate. Someone must keep the home fires burning.’
PART III
BUSINESSMAN
Chapter 5
Small beginnings in business
Rupert’s change of direction, his entry into the business world, was small and modest, but it was to be like the mustard seed from which a giant tree would grow.
His business career started on a modest scale while he was still lecturing at the UP. Rupert, his student friend Dirk Hertzog, then an articled clerk at a Pretoria law firm, and Dr Nic Diederichs, later minister of finance and state president, decided to open a dry-cleaning business. This was consonant with a conviction that Afrikaners had to fight their way out of national obscurity, if not inferiority, by non-political means. Hertzog shared the view that too few Afrikaners were involved in commerce – for many years they had restricted themselves to agriculture and the professions. The choice of dry cleaning was based on sound reasoning: wartime austerity meant that new clothes were hard to come by and dear, so people had to wear what they had − and have it cleaned regularly. Besides, with his training in chemistry Rupert felt he was cut out for the business.
The dry-cleaning business, Chemiese Reinigers Edms Beperk (Chemical Cleansers Pty Ltd), was situated at 535 Voortrekker Road, Pretoria. Four partners each contributed £100 to the starting capital of £400: Rupert borrowed his £100, repayable with interest, from the fourth director, Hertzog’s half-brother Dawid de Waal Meyer, then South African trade commissioner in Canada.
The name itself tells a story. Their advertisement in Ons Reddingsdaad (Our Act of Rescue), a brochure published by the head office of the Reddingsdaadbond (RDB) in 1941, appealed directly to Afrikaner nationalist sentiment and shows how these new entrants into the commercial world initially saw their market:
Always support the True Afrikaans CHEMIESE REINIGERS (like you, we prefer this name to the erroneous, anglicised word: Dry-cleaners).
We undertake chemical cleansing (dry-cleaning) of every kind of garment, carpets, etc., as well as refurbishing of hats.
Our equipment is the latest and the best. Our workers are specialists.
A BETTER, FASTER AND EXCLUSIVELY AFRIKAANS BUSINESS. Ask your Dealers to send your clothes to us.
Directors: Dirk Hertzog, BA, LLB; Anton Rupert, MSc. [Our translation.]
Their advertising provided an early lesson to an entrepreneur who would later gain international renown for his sophisticated marketing techniques. In retrospect Rupert himself admitted that the word ‘chemical’ was an unfortunate choice − after all, dry-cleaning was meant to obviate the use of chemicals. And the focus on an exclusively Afrikaans clientele narrowed their market considerably. An appeal to sentiment was not a winning recipe, as some of his tobacco products would also later prove. Rupert noticed that the competitors to whom they later sold the business focused on serving a wider market comprising both language groups.
The new business also faced other problems. It was wartime and the benzine for the cleaning process had to be used and reused. Their German manager did not replace the filters of the machines regularly and white tennis shorts were returned to the customer a pale shade of grey. Customers complained because deliveries were not punctual. A valuable lesson from these first experiences was that quality and service delivery, in short, value for money, was crucial to the success of a business enterprise. It is not surprising that ‘the customer is king’ would become one of the chief maxims in the Rembrandt Group. They were contemplating getting Huberte to run Chemiese Reinigers, but before that could happen Rupert had launched out in a very different direction.
Yet the business was not a total failure. ‘But people were reluctant to put their money in dirty laundry – you could not get capital for it,’ Hertzog wrote in his memoirs. ‘We then thought they may put their money in liquor. We bought a bottle store and behold, the first thousand pounds we received came from a dominee; all his life he fought against the devil and then he put his money in it.’
When the partners eventually sold the dry-cleaning business, the money came in handy at an opportune time. For Rupert, the venture represented a beginning that was inspired by a dream as well as an unyielding resolve to be successful. In years to come he would often quote the Flemish adage: ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way – the will itself becomes the way.’
This will to succeed was reinforced by the nationalist and republican ideals prevalent among Afrikaners at the time. The Reddingsdaad movement, inspired by Ds Kestell, was actively promoting the very kind of venture in which Rupert and his partners were engaged. The aim was to mobilise Afrikaners to go into commerce − and, ultimately, industry as well − rather than stay within the safe confines of the professions. At that time teaching, the church and the law were the limits of their ambition. Afrikaners had started off as farmers, the first courageous immigrant entrepreneurs on the continent with which they had come to identify, but the cumulative effects of the Anglo-Boer War, the Great Drought and the Depression had reduced many of them to penury. Poverty had eroded their cultural, religious and educational life and in the urban slums, many Afrikaner families lapsed into social disintegration and moral depravity. In an article on the Reddingsdaad movement, Diederichs expressed the need for the economic advancement of Afrikaners as follows: ‘It is the poverty that tears families apart, forcing thousands to the slums in the cities, where crime and social evils abound. It is the economically backward position of our people that makes us a nation of employees, dependent on others for their daily bread. And thus it lies at the root of a sense of dependency and a sense of inferiority that eat into the soul of our people.’
Among many English-speaking compatriots there was little empathy for the distress of poor Afrikaners. Sir Robert Beattie, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, was quoted by the writer MER (ME Rothman) as casually telling a public meeting that ‘poor whites’ were ‘intellectually backward’ and that ‘something inherent in the Afrikaners’ was the reason why the phenomenon of poverty was taking on such alarming dimensions in their case.1 While the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry on the Poor White Question had refuted the allegation about intellectual inferiority, Afrikaners were manifestly not holding their own in the urban, capitalist structure that came in the wake of the mineral discoveries. The commission’s statistics on the poor white problem were, as noted already, horrifying, with 300 000 out of a total white population of 1 800 000 classified as poor whites. The Stellenbosch economist Prof. CGW Schumann calculated that the per capita income of Afrikaners in 1936 averaged £86, as opposed to the £142 of other South African whites.
This was the situation that Kestell and other concerned Afrikaner leaders sought to address with an ‘act of
