Christo Wiese: Risk and Riches

TJ Strydom

Christo Wiese

Risk & riches

Tafelberg

To dearest Lejanie, the one who still laughs at my jokes

1.

Baggage

‘If a man were to write such a book, a biography, he should tell the truth. And if I tell the whole truth, I’ll embarrass a whole lot of people, including myself.’

Christo Wiese in an initial discussion about this book, 2018

The Slumdog Millionaire theme song bursts over the radio at regular intervals. ‘Jai Ho! … Catch me, catch me, catch me, c’mon catch me,’ sing Nicole Scherzinger and the Pussycat Dolls on a crisp London morning. The tune has been on Britain’s top ten chart for three weeks.

The mercury won’t climb higher than 11 degrees Celsius today. It’s overcast and it looks like rain.

Christo Wiese is on his way to the airport. It takes less than an hour to get from the Ritz Hotel to the terminal. London City Airport is a favourite among business travellers. It’s much closer to the City than Heathrow or Gatwick and has an expedited procedure at the check-in counter.

Wiese wants to catch an early flight to Luxembourg, returning the same day. It’s a Monday in April and at the weekend he attended a wedding in Russia. His flight to Moscow was booked so as to give him the chance of casting his vote in Cape Town in South Africa’s general elections before departing.

‘I have no reason to believe that Jacob Zuma would do a worse job than anyone else,’ the Sunday newspaper Rapport quoted him as saying.¹ Whether his vote was one of the 11,6 million cast that gave Zuma and the ANC a comfortable majority in the 2009 election is his secret. Other business leaders are worried about the new man on his way to the Union Buildings, but Wiese is ever the optimist. ‘What possible advantage is there in being negative? I know our country has problems. All countries do, and you are surely better equipped to handle the challenges and problems where you live and know the territory.’

Today, he is entering uncharted territory.

A customs official searches Wiese’s hand luggage and finds it stuffed full of banknotes. It’s a stash of £120 000 (at the time worth more than R1,5 million) in used £50 and £20 notes. The official questions him about the bonanza.²

It’s from a safety deposit box at the Ritz Hotel, he explains, but until the end of last year it was in a strong box with UBS, a bank, here in London. On the form the official hands him to fill in, he notes that he is carrying the money to keep in safe storage. Wiese also provides a contact number for the relevant person at UBS and gives the details of his accountants.

A while later the officials go through Wiese’s checked-in baggage and discover more notes, some in a poor state, bundled together and bound with elastic bands. They estimate the find at between £400 000 and £500 000. The actual amount is £554 920 (another R7 million).

Now why didn’t he declare this money on the form he had just filled in?

No, he thought they were only asking about the money in his hand luggage.

Wiese explains to the officials that he is a regular visitor to the United Kingdom. He tells them that his company Pepkor has four thousand stores that sell a variety of goods. The money they see here in his suitcases is from South Africa and is the proceeds of diamond deals in the 1980s and 1990s. The money was taken out of his home country in the form of travellers’ cheques and had been cashed abroad and then stored. Owing to South Africa’s foreign exchange controls at the time, the money was taken either to Britain or Switzerland. And now he is on his way to Luxembourg to invest the money there or open an account.

Then why keep the money in a strong box all this time and not in a bank?

He didn’t want to leave an audit trail, as previously in South Africa one was not allowed to keep money offshore. By keeping it in strong boxes there would be no paper trail, he tells the officials.

Wiese is polite and gives his cooperation throughout the questioning. He can go. But his money stays behind in the United Kingdom. The authorities apply to have it forfeited to the state.³ To them this stash of notes looks as if it was laundered.

2.

The retailer

‘It’s always been in my family.’ ¹

Christo Wiese when asked about ‘retail’ in an interview, 2015

The life of a soldier in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was no picnic. You had to undertake long voyages, on rough seas and in appalling conditions. It was a dangerous business. You would sail around the Cape of Storms to reach far-distant islands in the Indian Ocean. You served in inhospitable places where tropical diseases threatened your life. And you battled through oppressive humidity and temperatures at least 10 degrees hotter than in Holland at its worst.

For Europeans, you usually only worked for the Company as a sailor or soldier if you had no other choice. Or perhaps if the family business was not something you could see yourself being tied to for the rest of your life.

This is what the young Benjamin Wiese did in 1712. He borrowed money from his father, Benjamin senior, and joined Captain Jan van der Merkt of the Arion, a ship with a crew of 158 that could carry a cargo of 630 tonnes. He made it to the Cape of Good Hope, where he spent five weeks, and then sailed onwards to Batavia, or what is now Jakarta, in Indonesia.

A year later and he had had enough. Wiese found his way back to the Cape and left the service of the VOC as a soldier, staying on in the colony as a free burgher. His timing was both good and bad. Good, because in 1714 the Arion disappeared in the South China Sea en route to Japan. Bad, because a smallpox epidemic was then ravaging the Cape. Wiese was also felled by disease, though it is not clear whether it was the smallpox or another ailment. But it was serious enough for him to draw up a will, which reveals that he had no dependants at this stage.

Wiese recovered and married a young widow, Hester Mostert, early in 1714. Together they had three sons. In the year of his youngest son’s birth, Benjamin left the Cape, having struggled to find work. He also wanted to attend to his deceased father’s estate in Amsterdam.

Hester followed him a few years later, leaving their sons in the care of the local Orphan Chamber. Whether she or Benjamin ever made it back to the Cape is difficult to ascertain. But they did come together in Amsterdam, as they registered the birth of a daughter there in 1728.

Pieter Wiese, the only one of the three sons with recorded descendants, followed in his absent father’s footsteps, doing a stint as sailor for the Company. But after marrying Margaretha Swart in Stellenbosch, he decided that agriculture was possibly a better life for him. In 1743 he got permission to let his sheep graze at Vaderlandscherietkloof (Dutch Reed Kloof) in the Piquetbergen. To secure the right, he was obliged to put down 24 rix dollars within a month of signature and thereafter pay the Company the same amount annually. In 1748 he also obtained permission to let his sheep graze on a piece of land next to the Holle River. Pieter, it seems, used what money he had for other purposes than settling his debts with the authorities. By 1754 he had already fallen four years in arrears with his annual payments.

And for some time it seemed that the Wiese line might stop right there. Margaretha bore Pieter four daughters before Petrus Benjamin was born in 1751.

While the Industrial Revolution was transforming Britain into a modern commercial and industrial society, the Cape economy still mainly revolved around farming and trading. Apart from children, very little else was produced on the southern tip of Africa.

Petrus Benjamin tied the knot with Isabella Loubser before he was 19 and together they had ten children. The youngest, Tobias, was born in 1791. As a child he experienced the last years of Dutch rule at the Cape. Britain annexed the settlement in 1795 during the French Revolutionary Wars to prevent France from taking control of the strategic trading post. By this time the colony was inhabited by sixty thousand people of whom twenty-six thousand were slaves.

From 1803 the Batavian Republic – the Netherlands, after a rebranding exercise – governed the Cape, but three years later it was back again under British rule. Tobias’s children grew up in a land with English as the official language.

His son Tobias Gerhardus was ten years old, and too young to farm, when slavery was abolished in 1834. Many Dutch-speaking farmers, who called themselves Afrikaners by this time because they had stronger ties with Africa than Europe, embarked on a series of treks deep into the interior to escape British rule.

Tobias Gerhardus was not one of the Voortrekkers. He moved instead to the Cederberg where he married Christina Koch at the age of 45. The closer you were to Cape Town, the less land was available and the more you had to pay for it. The rules and taxes the British brought with them were also much more efficiently enforced if you could see Table Mountain. The farmers tended to move further and further north in search of suitable land.

It was in the district of Clanwilliam, in the region where his great-grandfather had once taken his sheep to graze, that Tobias Gerhardus’s first son, also Tobias Gerhardus, was born in 1871. When he grew up, the younger Tobias Gerhardus moved 80 kilometres further north and settled in Vanrhynsdorp where he married a young widow, Alida Hendrikse.

Their son Christoffel Hendrik (Stoffel), born circa 1906, pushed even further north to farm. In the Gordonia district there was plenty of land for cattle farmers, and crop farmers too found more and more opportunities thanks to irrigation from the country’s largest river, the Orange (later renamed the Gariep). Upington, founded in 1884, had emerged as the region’s most important commercial centre.

In 1935 Stoffel married Jacoba Wilhelmina Hendrina (Kotie) Wasserfall from the Boesmanland. They had four children. One of them was born on 10 September 1941 in Upington. He was christened in the Dutch Reformed Church in Keimoes and named after his father, Christoffel Hendrik.

When Benjamin Wiese (junior) left the Netherlands in 1712 to start a new life, possibly to avoid going into the family business, he probably never thought his great-great-great-grandson Christo would one day make a fabulous fortune from a business very similar to that of Benjamin’s father. For Benjamin Wiese (senior) was a koopman – a retailer.

3.

Barefoot

‘There are those who dream of the day they will see their ideals realised, that they will achieve what they had been striving, toiling and working for. In this way our Father helps them to keep the faith through the darkest night as they then know they are working and persisting and persevering for an ideal, a dream.’

Christo Wiese in a school essay, 1958

As a child Christoffel Hendrik Wiese wanted to become a ‘magistrate’.¹ This was a big job as the region where he grew up was the largest magisterial district in South Africa.

Upington, where he attended primary school and his first years of high school, is a town of extremes. The country’s longest river runs through it, the airport has the longest civilian landing strip in the world, and in summer temperatures easily rise to above 40 degrees. It is ‘a beautiful but harsh part of the world’, where Wiese learnt that life is ‘not always a bed of roses and sometimes you just have to get on with it’.² And it is better to take on such a hot place barefoot rather than with socks and shoes. ‘Not because I didn’t have shoes, but because it was nice to walk barefoot there.’³

Wiese’s father, Stoffel, was the owner of a garage and was also a farmer in the Kalahari. The combination was typical of Upington in those days, says Wiese.⁴ His father taught him never to take something from your own store’s shelves without writing it down. Also, that people of all ranks, creeds and races should be treated equally. ‘He got on with everyone.’⁵

His mother, Kotie, also ran her own business in town – a bridal shop and florist. From her he learnt not to trouble himself with things he could do nothing about, but rather ‘focus on those things you can do something about and then go ahead and do something’.

For Wiese there has always been a sense of being involved in business. And an interest in politics. He says he is from a ‘Bloedsap’ family. At the time Afrikaners had for decades been divided between the Nats (members of the National Party, or Natte in Afrikaans) and the Sappe. The Sappe were the political descendants of Jan Smuts, who, as leader of the South African Party (SAP) and, later, the United Party, championed cooperation between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites. Upington had long been a Sap stronghold, but in 1948 the Nats won there and never lost again, tells Wiese.⁶

The Nats were the followers of JBM Hertzog and, later, DF Malan, who sought to protect Afrikaans culture and had plans for the economic upliftment of Afrikaners, many of whom lived in poverty. In the general election of 1948 the Nats unexpectedly won the most seats, thanks to overwhelming support from Afrikaners for, among other reasons, a new policy called ‘apartheid’, which would later become a byword for segregation and racial discrimination.

By this time Wiese had barely learnt to read and write. ‘I had a wonderful time growing up. By today’s standards we were not rich people, but in our environment we were well-off because my father had a new car every year or two,’ says Wiese.⁷

In a school essay he later referred to the home he grew up in as a place where he could ‘find peace, rest and happiness’ and added this about his parents: ‘For their love, guidance and discipline I am sincerely grateful.’⁸

In standard 9 (today’s grade 11) he was sent to the Hoër Jongenskool or ‘Boishaai’ (Boys’ High) in Paarl for the last two years of schooling. He was not the poorest boy in the school – he had a bicycle and a camera.

The late 1950s were dry years in the world he hailed from and in an English essay he described it like this: ‘The turbulent dust-devils dance across the lifeless flats – the only signs of movement on the stricken earth engulfed by vibrant waves of heat. The whirls of thick, red, suffocating dust seem to mock the death that triumphs over all.’ Not a bad rendering of the Queen’s English for a boy from the platteland. It also probably explains why he achieved the second highest marks in English in his last year at Boys’ High.⁹

Wiese did well at school, but he wasn’t the top student. He finished tenth in his matric year and was the third best student in German.

The nearest university to Paarl is in Stellenbosch. But Wiese found his way to Cape Town. ‘My dad held a very strong view that good United Party kids who went to Stellenbosch became Nats and he wouldn’t have that.’¹⁰

Wiese signed up to study law at the University of Cape Town (UCT), but realised by the middle of his first year that he hadn’t chosen his courses properly or registered for the right ones. ‘I went to certain classes, particularly where there were good-looking girls,’ he quipped later. But it was not a recipe for success and he left Cape Town without a degree. Later, in his curriculum vitae, he described what he did after his short stint at UCT simply as ‘boer’ (farming).¹¹

‘My less than illustrious academic record made me return to Upington with the firm conviction that I was not cut out for academics. I wanted to be a businessman.’ Wiese’s father agreed. He bought a radiator repair business and they moved into a building in town from where they would operate. ‘I swear … it was the only building in Upington where the sun was shining 24 hours a day,’ he says. Upington is not known for its mild summers. On top of that, the carbide used to repair the radiators was applied at high temperatures. The heat, he says, made him think that it might not be such a bad idea to go back to studying.

Wiese, by that time, already had a few balls in the air. Within two years he was part of management at the Upington Afrikaanse Sakekamer (Afrikaans Chamber of Business) and was sent as a delegate to attend the congress of the Handelsinstituut (Commercial Institute), first in Pretoria and the next year in Cape Town.¹²

But this was not the life for Wiese. And someone noticed. Renier van Rooyen, who was married to Wiese’s cousin and was running a few stores in Upington at the time, persuaded the young man to return to university and gave him the financial support needed to study at Stellenbosch, according to the veteran financial journalist David Meades.¹³

When Wiese arrived in Stellenbosch in 1963 at the age of 21, he was relatively old for a first-year. Once again he registered to study law. He stayed in Wilgenhof, the oldest men’s residence (koshuis) in town. The koshuis – known among its residents as ‘Willows’ or simply ‘Die Plek’ and which is jokingly called ‘Bekfluitjie’ because of its resemblance to a harmonica – is steeped in tradition and had been home at one time to rugby legend Danie Craven.

Wilgenhof, in those days, was a relatively enlightened place among the Stellenbosch residences. Dagbreek, further up the road, had a reputation as an incubator for National Party politicians such as prime ministers Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster. Wilgenhof’s best-known political figure is the anti-apartheid activist Beyers Naudé. Wiese landed in res with the future leader of the parliamentary opposition Frederik van Zyl Slabbert. Later James Wellwood Basson, a blond boy from Porterville nicknamed ‘Whitey’, was also in Wilgenhof with Wiese.

Just as in Upington, Wiese was soon busy, becoming involved in student affairs. He was a first-years’ representative on the Law Society. He also joined the Debating Society and served as its treasurer in his second year. Here was a man who could clearly think on his feet. His contemporaries describe him as a very effective public speaker.

Wiese was elected to Wilgenhof’s house committee in his second year. That same year he stood as a candidate for the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). In an election issue of the student newspaper Die Matie, he undertook, as part of his policy statement, ‘to establish a basis for closer cooperation between English- and Afrikaans-speaking students on a foundation where they can cooperate without sacrificing their own principles.’

Wiese attracted enough votes to be elected as one of the SRC’s 14 members. He was handed the portfolios of Societies and Public Relations. Part of Wiese’s job was to make submissions on behalf of the student societies that applied for funding from the SRC. But general policy, leading ideas and matters of the day were also discussed at council meetings.

At an SRC meeting in 1965 Wiese suggested a tour to Angola in the June–July holiday.¹⁴ Still part of the Portuguese colonial empire, Angola was a very exotic destination for a group of Afrikaner students in the mid-1960s.

At the next meeting of the SRC, a matter of greater political importance was discussed. Wiese proposed that the SRC reject an application by the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) for official recognition as a student society at the university. Nusas was a liberal, mainly English-speaking student organisation that campaigned