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Law, diamonds and politics

‘But my view on life has always been that a person should choose. For me it was between a regular job with a tidy salary and security, or risks and sacrifices.’ 1

Christo Wiese in an interview, 1984

Wiese met his wife at a dance party in Gordon’s Bay. Caro Basson was in matric at the time and Wiese was a final-year law student at university.2 That evening, after dancing with her, he told a friend that she was the one he was going to marry, though he hadn’t caught her name.

About a year later, they met again. A varsity friend told Wiese about the good-looking daughter of a politician he knew. A date was set up and Wiese took Caro to dinner at the home of Professor Francie van Zijl, dean of Stellenbosch’s medical faculty and a man who rubbed shoulders with all the leading members of the government of the day. Most of the guests were politicians.

‘Caro Basson? And whose daughter are you?’ asked the host on being introduced to her.

‘Mr Basson’s daughter,’ she answered.

This Mr Basson was one Japie Basson, a flamboyant politician who had been part of the National Party, but was kicked out in the late 1950s for objecting to the path apartheid was then taking. Afterwards he started his own movement, the National Union, and later joined the United Party, which was the official opposition at the time. In the 1980s, during the final years of his career, he again joined the Nats. He clearly had a few things in common with his future son-in-law: he did not shy away from publicity and had a nose for a deal – albeit of the political kind. In an obituary the Daily News referred to Basson as the ‘chameleon of South African politics’.3

But the couple’s relationship didn’t lead to marriage all at once. Wiese had to court Caro for six years before tying the knot. She later jokingly spoke of being put off initially by ‘this guy’s forwardness’. They finally got married in 1975 in the Dutch Reformed Church in Three Anchor Bay, where his in-laws, Japie and Clarence, were also wed and where Wiese’s son Jacob would years later continue the tradition.

Wiese later quipped that the secret of a happy marriage is ‘inter alia, learning what your spouse’s air conditioning preferences are, prior to tying the knot’.4 He also let on that his wife taught him that while he was allowed to decide the big issues (like the level of the gold price and whether America should go to war in Iraq), all other decisions would be hers to make.

As soon as Caro saw a bungalow for sale in Clifton, she said it was the only place in Cape Town that she wanted to call home. And since getting married, this is where the Wieses have resided, overlooking the iconic Fourth Beach with its distinctive granite boulders. ‘We literally live on the rocks and the ocean is our garden. I always say I have the biggest swimming pool in the Cape and I don’t have to clean it,’ Wiese remarked later.5

The beach bungalow was not the only property he acquired over the years. But not even the mansion of a titled British plutocrat or the most picturesque of wine farms would persuade the Wieses to change their residential address.

Not everyone was fortunate enough to have an idyllic little home by the seaside. Especially not in the South Africa of the 1970s, where the white minority’s oppression of the black majority was sinking to new lows. The government’s decision to impose Afrikaans on black school children as a language of instruction infuriated thousands upon thousands of learners. A poll among black residents of Soweto, the largest black township in the country with a population of around one million, revealed that 98% of respondents were opposed to being educated in Afrikaans. The government nevertheless pushed through with its plans, stipulating that from 1976 mathematics and arithmetic would be taught only in Afrikaans.

On 16 June 1976 as many as twenty thousand school children in Soweto protested against the measures. The police used teargas, and when the crowd did not disperse, they turned to live ammunition. Hector Pieterson, a thirteen-year-old boy, was one of the first casualties. The result was an uprising that mired Soweto in violence, leading to the death of hundreds, and it spilt over into other black residential areas throughout the country. Order was only restored by October the next year. The world watched as South Africa descended into a quagmire of bloodshed and strife.

This pummelled investor confidence. But it also created opportunities. ‘During the Soweto uprising, I bought a business from someone who’d given up on South Africa,’ says Wiese.6 It was a bargain, he adds.

The business wasn’t a little café on the corner: it was a diamond mine.

For those who think that only De Beers is allowed to own such mines, Wiese says: ‘That’s a fallacy. Anybody can own a diamond mine.’7 The business was called Octha Diamonds and the mine was on the banks of the Orange River, about 80 kilometres from where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. The operation was initially developed in the 1930s by Otto Thaning, an adventurer who had left Europe for Africa. Thaning had a daredevil streak in him and loved aeroplanes, suffering injuries on more than one occasion on his pioneering flights. He was later a Danish diplomat in South Africa.

When Thaning passed away, his son was not interested in such a substantial South African investment. ‘He gave an attractive option on the mine to a 22-year-old articled clerk, Johan de Villiers, who had only R400,’ says Wiese.8 De Villiers made an offer nevertheless, but it was rejected at around 4.30 on a Monday afternoon. He then approached Wiese and asked him to come in as a partner. This was just the opportunity Wiese was waiting for. He had long had a fascination with gems, especially as he came from Upington. The town has always suffered from a bit of diamond fever, he says. By 8.45 the next morning, the deal was sealed.9

‘I risked everything to buy it with him.’10

Moustaches, bell-bottoms and broad-collared shirts might have been popular in the 1970s, but it was the decade’s other big trend that gave the diamond trade a boost: inflation. Before 1973 a barrel of crude oil traded at around $3. But during that fateful year, the Arab countries of the Middle East took serious offence at the West’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. These large oil producers decide to close the taps. Within a year the price of crude oil quadrupled, causing unprecedented price increases worldwide. Not only did transport costs spike, but most products became noticeably more expensive. And the oil price kept climbing, reaching $40 per barrel by the end of the decade.

High inflation gnaws away at purchasing power year after year, motivating investors to look for asset classes that will retain value. The result in the 1970s was that billions of dollars flooded into gold and diamonds after the oil price shock. Wiese’s timing was impeccable.

He also did his homework. He set out to learn from the experts in Antwerp, the hub of the diamond industry where stones have been traded, cut and polished for four centuries. He visited his mine three times a month. Sometimes he took Caro along, flying out and making a weekend of it. Wiese and De Villiers set up offices in Antwerp and Zurich, and also had plans for New York and Sydney. Wiese also devised a strategy to turn the local market on its head, because he saw more opportunities than just those presented by the international market.

The Soweto riots poured cold water over affluent South Africans. Widespread fears that the country would go up in flames convinced Wiese that the rich would be nosing around for the best way to invest in highly movable assets. ‘A man carrying a handful of diamonds can leave everything and make a new start somewhere else,’ he said.11 So he started Cape Town Diamond Investment Brokers. And the money cascaded in.

But greater powers were at work. The hunger for a proper asset of value attracted investors of the speculative sort, who pushed up prices to dizzying heights. ‘At the height of the 1980 diamond boom, I sensed the market was unhealthy and sold to Johan.’12 According to reports, Wiese received R5,8 million for his stake.13

He sold in February. In August his partner hit a pothole (it sounds bad, but in diamond mining it’s a good thing), which yielded R30 million in diamonds. ‘He paid me out with ease.’14 Two years later the diamond market collapsed and the company was liquidated. Wiese got out at just the right time.

‘Two things you may never do: you may never go into politics, and number two is you may never make movies,’ is what Caro, according to Wiese, told him.15 Films, it turned out, weren’t an attraction for Wiese, but politics was a career waiting to happen.

‘My first love, I always thought, was the law. The theatrics and the intellectual stimulation appealed to me,’ he says.16 Wiese joined the Cape Bar. But his name is not associated with ground-breaking case law. Later on Wiese would refer to himself as ‘a failed lawyer’.17

The life of an advocate was too secluded for his liking, he says, and it involved working with things from the past. If his student days are anything to go by, Wiese was definitely not a behind-the-scenes sort of guy, and he had a nose for politics.

His father-in-law, Japie Basson, was by the mid-1970s the UP member of parliament for the Johannesburg seat of Bez Valley. Basson was opposed to the plan to dissolve his party in 1977. But when the UP was torn apart, he became one of the founders of the Progressive Federal Party (PFP, or Progs). This would also be Wiese’s political home for a few years.

Colin Eglin was the PFP’s first leader, and Helen Suzman and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert were among the other prominent figures in the party. The Progs were opposed to the host of discriminatory laws enacted by the National Party and were not in favour of one group dominating another. Today this might not sound like the most radical of ideas, but the Progs had the view that negotiations between the different groups in South Africa’s diverse population were the way forward for the country.

In 1977, shortly after the dissolution of the UP, Prime Minister John Vorster called a general election. Lawmakers were still warming their seats after the previous election in 1974. Calling an election in 1977 was clearly a tactical move by Vorster to consolidate his majority in parliament, leaving the opposition scurrying to reorganise.

‘Van Zyl Slabbert phoned me, I was in London, he said, “Look, we are looking for candidates, would you consider being a candidate in Stellenbosch?”’18 So Wiese thought about it. ‘I called my wife and I told her and she immediately said, “No, that’s fine,” because she knew that as a Prog there was no chance of my winning Stellenbosch.’

In the end, Wiese was not the candidate in his university town, but contested the seat of Simonstown. His opponent was John Wiley, the sitting MP, and candidate of the South African Party (SAP). He had been part of the UP, but broke away with five other MPs who claimed a name for their party that had last been used in the 1930s.

But Wiley wasn’t a ‘Sap’ in the true sense of the word. He was willing to lean to the right to court more conservative voters. The NP became aware of this and took to the idea rather kindly. In 1977 the Nats didn’t even put a candidate into the field for Simonstown, thereby providing a significant boost to Wiley’s chances.

Wiese approached the election with the bright-eyed optimism he would exude as a public figure in the coming decades. ‘It was highly probable that the PFP would be in a position in the next election to field enough candidates to make a bid to take over government,’ he said in the weeks leading up to the vote.19

In actual fact, the PFP had decided not to field any candidates in Nat strongholds. The NP was a formidable political machine and the PFP was the new kid on the block. But Simonstown was an important seat and a hotly contested one. In this mostly English-speaking constituency, Wiese presumably thought he need not worry much about Afrikaner nationalism or unenlightened voters, giving him the opportunity to explain to his audiences just how unsustainable apartheid has become. ‘The Nationalist government had proven beyond all reasonable doubt that it is a government that South Africa can no longer afford,’ he said before the election.

Three weeks before voting day, Wiese and Wiley met in Fish Hoek’s town hall for a debate. It was the late 1970s and there was a lot to discuss – such as the absurdity of the black homelands, the future of South West Africa and domestic stability after the Soweto riots – but this meeting was organised by the Save Rhodesia movement, which had a strong presence in the area in the form of Rhodesians who had retired to the seaside. Rhodesia, which would later carry the name Zimbabwe, was at the time embroiled in its own bush war. Ian Smith and his white minority government were fighting against the military wings of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union.

‘I don’t consider Rhodesia an issue in this election …’ said Wiese at the meeting, upon which the audience wanted to know why not.20

‘South Africa has quite enough of its own troubles,’ he answered.

‘Nonsense. They are our blood brothers,’ a member of the crowd shouted back.

After this confrontation, Wiese was more diplomatic, but some in the crowd jeered when he suggested that Rhodesia’s problems should be left to Rhodesians. Others cheered him on.

Wiley began to read the crowd better as the evening wore on, pledging that he was unashamedly pro-Rhodesian. He referred to South Africa and its neighbour as having common enemies and said that liberals were part of a communist plot for world domination.

White fears of black domination weighed heavily on the election of 1977, and the economic hardships of sanctions and isolation were not a strong enough argument for the PFP to win enough hearts and minds. The Nats won the election with a landslide, capturing 135 of the 165 seats in parliament. The Progs managed 17 seats, enough to make them the official opposition.

Wiese’s father-in-law was one of those 17, but Wiese himself was not. Wiley won 4927 votes to Wiese’s 3306, with about 64% of constituents casting their ballots.

Despite his performance in the election, Wiese climbed the ranks in the party and from 1978 to 1979 was a member of the PFP’s federal executive committee. But when Wiley gave up his seat in 1980 to join the Nats, Wiese did not contest the by-election that followed.

In the meantime, PW Botha had taken over the reins of the NP as party leader and of the country as prime minister after John Vorster’s resignation in the aftermath of the Information Scandal. Botha, an NP stalwart and long-serving minister of defence, talked the talk of large-scale political reforms – difficult to believe after so many years as the country’s foremost securocrat.

Botha wanted to make coloureds and Indians part of government. One of his moves was to abolish the Senate and replace it with an advisory body called the President’s Council. The new body consisted of whites, coloureds and Indians and had the task of developing a new constitutional dispensation. There was no black African representation on this council.

Botha and his inner circle had done the maths and come to the conclusion that the white minority could not go it alone. Conveniently, he saw South Africa as a country of minorities in which all the different groups had to meet each other somewhere in the middle if they were to have a common future. Instead of a black majority, he saw each and every ethnic group as a minority. The Zulus might well be the largest single group, but in Botha’s world they were still a minority when compared to the rest of the population.21

The President’s Council was the forerunner and incubator of the tricameral parliament of 1983, a new constitutional dispensation that gave coloureds and Indians limited participation in the legislative branch of government. The condition laid down for their inclusion, of course, was that white votes would carry enough weight to prevent other groups from exercising any real power.

The PFP, meanwhile, elected Van Zyl Slabbert as leader. He made it no secret that he was opposed to Botha’s reforms as they still aimed to ‘exclude 70% of the people from dialogue and negotiation’.22 Slabbert was also dead-set against participating in the President’s Council. But Basson, by this time chair of the PFP caucus in parliament, announced to the press that he would be willing to serve on the President’s Council. To Slabbert’s great disappointment, he reiterated this view in a parliamentary debate. Shortly thereafter Basson left the PFP. A month or so later, Botha appointed him to the President’s Council.

Wiese also parted ways with the PFP, citing the party’s ‘boycott attitude’.23 He described the President’s Council as the biggest step to date in South Africa on the road of negotiations and an honest starting point in the quest for a generally acceptable constitutional regime. ‘It should be clear to all objective observers that the Prime Minister and the Government, by inter alia the appointment of the President’s Council, are sincere in following the route of negotiation with and between all population groups of our country.’ He described the PFP’s attitude to the President’s Council as ‘illogical and ill-considered’ from a party that put great store by negotiation politics.24

Van Zyl Slabbert did not like this description at all, especially from someone he had known since university and with whom he got on well. ‘If I and my party are stereotyped as seeking confrontation and radicalisation, we find ourselves in good company with moderate black and coloured leaders,’ Slabbert said.25

To follow a political chameleon, who happens to be your father-in-law, isn’t necessarily a big deal. But the timing of Wiese’s move left a bad taste with the Progs. Wiese severed his ties with the party only ten days before the by-election in Simonstown.

The Cape Town daily Die Burger ran the story on the front page under the heading ‘Slag tref PFP in Simonstad – Wiese uit oor boikot’ (Disaster strikes PFP in Simonstown – Wiese out due to boycott).26 Not even the popular cricketer Eddie Barlow, who took on Wiley in Wiese’s place, could win Simonstown, widely seen as an opposition stronghold.

Wiese got stick in the press and Wiley’s re-election was big news, even in the north where the Rand Daily Mail carried it as a front-page lead story. But Wiese shrugged it off, saying that his departure was not timed to influence the by-election.

For Wiley, his re-election took his career to the next level. Botha appointed him minister of environmental affairs. But in 1987 Wiley died suspiciously of a gunshot wound to the head, reported in the press as suicide. Wiese at the time described Wiley as ‘someone who left behind a proud legacy for his country and his people’.27 Three decades later a book by Chris Steyn and Mark Minnie reveals that the legacy might not be quite as positive. In The Lost Boys of Bird Island Wiley is named, along with former defence minister Magnus Malan, as part of an alleged paedophile ring and of a bloody conspiracy to keep it quiet.

While a member of the Cape Bar, Wiese missed the excitement of business. While in the diamond business, he missed the Bar, which he referred to as ‘the best club in town’. Behind the scenes, plans were being made for him to return to another club, one from his home town and with just as much excitement as the diamond industry, politics or the legal profession.

Early in 1981, Wiese returned to Pep Stores.28 By the middle of the year he was executive deputy chairman. In November the company announced that Renier van Rooyen would call it a day as executive chairman and that Wiese would be taking over from him.

Barely 40 years old and at the helm of the country’s most exciting retailer: now that was something to celebrate. Wiese hosted a birthday party and invited good friends and some of Cape Town’s who’s who. ‘It was a fancy affair, because 40 is an important milestone in the life of a millionaire,’ one of the guests, who chose to remain anonymous, told Beeld.29

Wiese booked out an entire restaurant in Bloubergstrand for the occasion. It was champagne and exotic starters and the best cuisine under the sun, according to the newspaper report. And that was even before dessert. ‘Big was the surprise when every guest finds a big, simple doughnut on his plate. Few felt up to it, especially after they’d just had their fill of mouthwatering dishes.’ But then came the announcement: three of the doughnuts contained a diamond each. And the guests, of course, knew about their host’s involvement in the gemstone business. They chewed their doughnuts carefully. Beeld continued: ‘One guest who saw the doughnut as too daunting a task, pinched it thoroughly, felt nothing and pushed it onto the plate of another guest. She, in turn, broke the doughnut in pieces, revealing a lovely diamond to the value of R500.’

The other diamonds were not found that evening. Beeld dispelled any remaining suspicion: ‘It has been learnt that several of the guests have adjusted their bathroom habits for at least the next two days in light of the circumstances!’

The story travelled. A year later, one of Johannesburg’s well-to-do socialite couples splashed out on a celebration for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Ruscilla Joubert, the hostess, told the Sunday Times that she’d heard of a party in the Cape where diamonds were in the dessert. Not to be outdone, she decided on a bit of extravagance of her own, persuading the caterers that besides caviar and other delicacies, the consommé needed a touch of bling – 22-carat gold dust to be precise.30

The Sunday Times did some digging on the Cape Town party that had inspired Joubert and discovered it was not so much a case of keeping up with the Joneses as keeping up with the Wieses. ‘It was a party for intimate friends after Christo had sold his diamond mine,’ Caro told the newspaper.

Recall that Wiese’s partner in Octha Diamonds had bought him out the previous year. But was the dessert such a big win for the lucky woman who found the stone? ‘We put a few zirconias into some tiny cakes for fun,’ Caro continued.

The newspaper talked to her husband too. ‘Their total value was R40,’ said Wiese.