in South Africa.
As a new entrant to the industry Voorbrand was given a maximum allocation of only one percent by the Tobacco Control Board, and that was for snuff, pipe and cigarette tobacco. The latter had to be stored for seven years, until 1948 when Rembrandt was at last able to enter the South African cigarette market. Meanwhile the ‘Afrikaans impostor’ in the tobacco industry faced fierce competition, some of it conducted in underhand ways such as whispering campaigns and rumour mongering.
As early as 1941 Voorbrand received a substantial offer from ME Risien, chief executive of UTC: he was willing to pay £50 000 if Voorbrand undertook not to manufacture cigarettes, thus entrenching UTC’s near monopoly of the market. Stals’s response was swift and categorical: ‘We’re not selling our birthright.’
Rupert, while always courteous and considerate, early on showed the steel that would inspire his employees as well as his competitors with awe. On an occasion when he encountered Risien at a gathering of tobacco manufacturers, the man from UTC inquired somewhat snidely, ‘So how is little Voorbrand doing?’ Rupert immediately retorted: ‘Mr Risien, by all laws of probability we have a good chance of outliving you.’ Risien never condescended to him again, but many years later his son applied to Rembrandt for a job. At that time there was no suitable vacancy.
Times were hard and for the first few years the young company showed a mounting loss. By 1948 it had risen to £30 000 − ‘Not much, if you think back on it today,’ Rupert comments in retrospect, ‘but a loss just the same.’ Its competitors had the benefit of existing quota allocations not granted to newcomers. The inability to manufacture cigarettes did not help either. It inhibited expansion to such an extent that some directors were considering selling their shares. A major lesson he learned from the difficult times during and after the war, according to Rupert, is that Voorbrand was mainly selling products he would typify as C products. He distinguishes three classes of products: A products, better than those of his competitors; B products, which are equal to the products of competitors, and C products, inferior to those of competitors. The lesson he would later impress upon his employees was to launch only A products or at least B+ products. The only other way was imitation or discount prices, which he rejected as not normally options for quality entrepreneurs. Rupert’s exceptional emphasis on quality was to become a supreme feature of the Rembrandt Group.
Another major problem was to find a market for snuff tobacco. This they were able to solve with the help of two Indian businessmen, Yusuf Ahmed Cachalia, who had a textile shop, and Donath Desai. These two individuals assisted Rupert to find outlets for the snuff tobacco with the help of other Indian merchants. Huberte is of the view that the snuff tobacco success is probably what ensured Voorbrand’s survival.
The Ruperts became close friends of the Cachalias and the Desais, visiting each other at home. Both Cachalia, a brother of the activist Mauldi Cachalia, a leading figure in the Transvaal Indian Congress, and Desai were fiercely opposed to British imperialism and later played a prominent role in the political struggle against apartheid. Desai’s daughter Zureena, a medical practitioner, made news headlines as a result of her relationship with Prof. John Blacking, professor in social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. The security police got wind of the relationship and started harassing the family. Desai asked Rupert to intervene, but there was nothing he could do: Section 16 of the then Immorality Act, which prohibited amorous relationships across the colour line, was in full force and spared nobody. The couple had to emigrate in order to marry.7
Pipe tobacco, too, was not without problems. Wartime restrictions on imports of packaging material hit new enterprises hard; they were unable to obtain permits at all. ‘Our packaging was simply not good enough,’ Rupert recalls. ‘Our competitors were established manufacturers, they could make beautiful plastic packets with a lead lining and foam rubber on the inside.’ His eventual obsession with packaging and marketing stems from that early experience.
Voorbrand registered several brand names with Afrikaans and patriotic connotations, such as Oom Bart, Drosdy, Patriot, Landdros (‘the good things from the past improved to the very best in the present – medium strength)’, Voorbrand, Spoor (spur, track) and Vonk (spark). English-speaking customers could buy Stop Press (‘extra special edition’), Bandmaster, Carefree and Sunkist Golden Mixture.
Drosdy, a pipe tobacco, was advertised as ‘a unique discovery: tobacco matured in old wine casks – medium strength’. One of Rupert’s good friends in Johannesburg, the poet WEG (Gladstone) Louw, approved the advertising slogan ‘matured in old wine casks’ for the pipe tobacco. Louw, who was awarded the prestigious Hertzog prize for poetry at the age of 21, also worked at the RDB at the time, in the arts and culture section. Like other friends of the Ruperts, this younger brother of the leading Afrikaans poet and writer NP van Wyk Louw contributed ideas to the new company Voorbrand, which initially stored Drosdy tobacco in old wine casks. The Ruperts also got to know Van Wyk Louw through Anna Neethling-Pohl, sister of his second wife, Truida Pohl. The Rupert and Pohl children had all grown up in Graaff-Reinet.
During the war years while he was still in Johannesburg, Rupert was, without his knowledge, proposed by friends for membership of the AB. Other members of the AB at the time were the prominent literary figures Dirk Opperman and Van Wyk Louw. Rupert’s name was put forward in a circular, as was then customary in the secret organisation. He became member number 3088.
Dirk Hertzog, also a member, points out in his memoirs that the membership of the AB was a little more than 2 000 during the war years, when Smuts had proclaimed emergency regulations forbidding public servants and teachers to be part of the movement. Afrikaners like Hertzog were incensed that Smuts had forced highly esteemed fellow Afrikaners to resign from the public service on account of their AB membership.
On 24 August 1942 Rupert was one of 75 delegates and businessmen at the founding congress of the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut (AHI, Afrikaans Institute of Commerce) in Bloemfontein, another product of the Ekonomiese Volkskongres and an RDB initiative to promote the interests of existing and emerging Afrikaans business people and entrepreneurs. The chairman of the first executive was JG (Kaalkop) van der Merwe, businessman and lawyer from Heilbron in the Free State, and MS (Tienie) Louw of Sanlam was the first deputy chairman.8 In 1949 Rupert became a member of the executive of the AHI and in 1950 chairman of the industry committee, but he eventually resigned because of the growing demands of his international business concerns.
According to a highly secret and confidential circular of 14 January 1944 in the Rembrandt archives at Stellenbosch the production of Voorbrand increased by 300% in 1943 after the company had entered the pipe-tobacco industry in 1942. At that time the company had 40 registered brand names, eleven kinds of packed tobacco and eight kinds of loose tobacco. In a circular in Afrikaans addressed to ‘You as a connoisseur of pipe tobacco’, dated 15 February 1943, Rupert emphasised to clients that Voorbrand makes provision for a variety of tastes and maintains the quality of the various kinds of tobacco. ‘Our factory is totally under the control of Afrikaners and Afrikaans capital. Our tobacco is processed and packed in elegantly designed packets by Afrikaner hands,’ he continued, and invited clients to order directly from the factory at retail prices.
In board minutes, however, it was noted that the appeals to sentiment did not have the desired effect on Afrikaans consumers. ‘Partly as a result of early disappointments of failed businesses and largely because of a sense of inferiority, the Afrikaans public do not regard their own as good enough.’ It was also noted that Afrikaans businesses were generally perceived as ‘expensive’. These seemed to be the reasons why they started manufacturing products with English names, while attempts were also made from early on to enter the markets for black and Indian consumers.
At the beginning of 1943 Rupert presented Voorbrand’s directors with a comprehensive report on the tobacco industry. It included a careful, scientific analysis of the various types of tobacco, drying procedures and additives. There were statistics on the number of tobacco growers, tobacco corporations,
