mental gymnastics and I jump to conclusions!’
As a child he often played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with the other boys. On one occasion one of the town’s pranksters, Robey Leibbrandt, was involved. Leibbrandt, the Olympic boxer and Nazi sympathiser who would receive a death sentence for treason during the Second World War, had been born in 1913 and as a teenager went to school in Graaff-Reinet. His father, a Boer combatant described by Smuts as one of his bravest men when clemency was granted to Robey in 1948, was stationed at Graaff-Reinet as an officer in the permanent force from 1914 to 1924. One day during a game Robey and his brothers hanged the son of the school principal with a rope from a tree. Fortunately, his toes were touching the ground and some older men cut the rope to release him. The much younger Boetie, who had just started school, witnessed the incident.
In 1928 the school magazine included an essay by the twelve-year-old Boetie that gave an indication of his later interest in wildlife. Describing a visit to the Pretoria Zoo, he wrote: ‘The first thing which attracted my attention was the gorgeously coloured speaking-parrots. Then I came to the cage of the gorilla – a mighty big and strong animal. After a few minutes walking I came to the monkey cage from where I walked to the hippopotamus, a very large animal with the largest mouth I have ever seen.’ He concluded: ‘I thoroughly enjoyed this well-spent and interesting afternoon.’
When Boetie was in Standard 6 he went on what was meant to be a one-day visit to his uncle Fred Knoetze, a printer at Somerset East who published the local newspaper. The driver who had given him a lift there forgot to pick him up and he spent a whole week with his uncle, who showed him everything at the printing works. ‘The whole printing process, the type faces, the colour samples absolutely fascinated me,’ he related later. This early interest in printing, colour and form would culminate in the scrupulous attention that Rupert as a master of marketing would give to each new product in the tobacco and liquor trade.
In Standard 8 he obtained four distinctions and was among the ten top students in the Cape Junior Certificate examination. In 1933, his final year at school, he was one of a class of 35, some of whom had started school in 1922, the year the Volkskool was founded, and had completed their entire school career there. At a reunion of eighteen of the surviving members of that class 50 years later Anton Rupert − by then an honorary citizen of Graaff-Reinet − on behalf of the three Rupert brothers presented the school with a Bill Davis sculpture entitled His Hands, inspired by a poem by the Afrikaans poet WEG Louw.
Anton matriculated in 1933 with three distinctions, for English (lower grade), Chemistry and Physics, and a remarkable 92% for Mathematics. His marks for Afrikaans (higher grade), Latin and History were slightly lower, but he averaged 78,9% and won a £10 prize for the best matriculant at Graaff-Reinet. By then he was finding schoolwork boring and was glad to put it behind him. He had just turned seventeen and was planning to study medicine.
That was not to be. By 1933 the Great Depression had hit South Africa. The Wall Street crash happened in 1929, when the Dow Jones index dropped from 312,76 to 230 points in five days. The slump continued for three years to a low of 40,56 points and American industrial shares fell by as much as 90%. The ripples spread around the globe, as far as South Africa. Here, meanwhile, rural poverty in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War had led to rapid urbanisation: between 1900 and 1926 the rate of urbanised Afrikaners rose from 10 to 41%. By 1933 the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry on the Poor White Question found that the number of desperately poor whites had grown from an estimated 106 000 in 1921 to 300 000, hence 30% of Afrikaners and seventeen percent of the white population as a whole. The Great Drought of 1933-1934 did not improve matters and many more farmers were forced to migrate to the cities, where they were largely dependent on welfare organisations and many women eked out a living for their families by running boarding houses.
The Hertzog government’s stubborn insistence on sticking to the gold standard exacerbated the situation. In 1931 England devalued its pound but South Africa, a gold-producing country, did not follow suit. Exports became uncompetitively expensive: South African wool cost 40% more than that of Australia. Currency speculation caused an outflow of capital and South African mining houses, which sold gold for sterling, hoarded their profits abroad.
The Ruperts did not escape the general hardship. John Rupert’s annual income dropped from £3 000 to £120. The family car stood idle in the garage for several years. At the age of sixteen young Anton had sufficient prescience to realise that South Africa would be compelled to leave the gold standard. His father, trusting Finance Minister Klasie Havenga to stick to his word, refused to believe him. This led to what was to be Anton’s first business deal. He had been begging his father to exchange his paper currency for gold. On 28 December 1932 Havenga announced that South Africa was abandoning the gold standard. John Rupert manfully admitted that his son had been right. He opened his safe, which contained seven gold pounds. ‘Take them, you deserve them,’ he said. Each pound was worth 27 shillings instead of 20 − a lucky windfall for a young man who had to make his way through university.
Nonetheless he had to review his plans for the future. The only two medical faculties at the time, at the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, were way beyond his means. For £100 a year he could do a BSc at the University of Pretoria. At the beginning of the 1934 academic year he enrolled.
Commenting on this life-changing decision in later life, he said: ‘I have often thanked Providence for things I didn’t get when I wanted them.’
Chapter 4
Student during the depression
Early in 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, Anton Rupert left the Karoo for Pretoria, the administrative capital of the Union with a burgeoning Afrikaans university. On 26 February he registered for a first-year BSc course at what was popularly known as TUCs1 − the University of Pretoria (UP), his alma mater, of which he would later become chancellor and Alumnus of the Century. The course was designed to serve as an admission qualification to a medical degree at one of the other universities.
His decision to attend the UP instead of the older universities of Stellenbosch or Cape Town was directly related to his love for Afrikaans. When he read in a newspaper report in 1933 that the city council of Pretoria had withdrawn its annual contribution to the UP on account of the university becoming an Afrikaans-language institution, he decided that this was where he wanted to study, as one of the first generation of Cape school children who had been educated fully in Afrikaans.
In Rupert’s first year he was in Sonop men’s residence. The first ten days the newcomers were subjected to a gruelling initiation programme. Most of it happened at night, so they got precious little sleep. They were tossed out of their beds, had to crawl through a stream, which they were told contained hidden barbed wire, and sent on long-distance jogs across the city on senseless errands like counting the steps of the Union Buildings. The young entrepreneur sized up the situation and, on his way to purchase a box of matches for a senior student at the railway station several kilometres away, he stopped off at the house of his former headmaster Dr Eybers, who had moved to Pretoria in the meantime. From him he borrowed enough money to buy a dozen boxes, which he hid on the sports grounds in case he was sent on the same silly errand again. At the end of the ten days two first-year students were in hospital and a third in a psychiatric institution. On 7 March 1934 the rector, Prof. AE du Toit, put a summary end to all initiation in the residences and instituted a committee to investigate the matter. On its recommendation, initiation rituals entailing physical exhaustion and nocturnal activities were declared taboo.
In the midst of this ordeal Rupert for the first time in his life wrote an intelligence test. The result was sufficiently impressive to secure him a bursary of £40 per annum for three years. On his slender budget it was a substantial amount. By then the Depression was affecting student numbers at the UP. In 1930 there had been 1 074 students. By 1934 enrolment was down to 829, including extramural students, plus 25 in Johannesburg. Those on the Pretoria campus knew each other well and Rupert
