Rogues have stalked South Africa’s corridors of power for centuries
It may just be time to toss the history setwork books.
Painted as an “irreverent history of corruption in South Africa”, Matthew Blackman and Nick Dall’s Rogues’ Gallery cuts away the toopolite-to-say aspects of the country’s past to show that fiends have ruled for as long as anyone can remember.
While South Africans are understandably livid over having to suffer the state capture malaise, Jacob Zuma and his cronies are merely the latest in a long line of money-grubbing miscreants to have pillaged state coffers.
The plod-along history books assigned to schoolchildren and students may have changed content since 1994, but still fall short in terms of exposing the greed.
And there has been a lot of greed over the centuries.
This is where Blackman and Dall come in. Both authors possess wit so dry the beleaguered Eastern Cape dams would be incredulous, which makes Rogues’ Gallery as entertaining as it is informative.
The similitudes between what transpired in the early days of the Cape under Adriaan van der Stel and the Zuma years are uncanny, and they hardly spare the rod in pointing them out.
In reference to Vergelegen, the sprawling estate Van der Stel came to call home, they write: “Even today Vergelegen stands head and shoulders above the competition as arguably the fairest Cape wine estate of them all.
“But don’t let the noble proportions of the Cape Dutch architecture, the magnificent gardens and handsome camphor trees fool you.
“Although no fire pools were seamlessly landscaped into Vergelegen’s grounds, it is the eighteenth-century equivalent of Nkandla.”
To put it bluntly, Van der Stel used VOC (Dutch East India Company) money and labour to build his opulent compound.
British governors carried on this tradition when it was their turn to preside over SA’s affairs.
In one of the more infamous episodes of Lord Charles Somerset’s tenure at the helm, he completely ignored advice that there was no threat of war with Xhosa chiefs on the eastern frontier, but told his masters in Britain exactly the opposite.
He stated that the Cape Colony “must augment the Cape Corps with immediate effect” but it was later pointed out that this was “a premeditated and gross deception”.
It was suspected the beneficiary of this move was Lord Charles’s son, Captain Henry Somerset, who was to rise quickly through the military ranks.
It perhaps is no surprise that Cecil John Rhodes features prominently on the rogues’ honours list.
Certainly this controversial figure has won his fair share of attention in democratic SA, particularly among students.
But that is only the tip of the iceberg.
One suspects had Rhodes been alive today, he would have sat proudly on the boards of the country’s most thuggish retail companies.
The mustachioed minerals man seemed to have no qualms in paying people to sabotage infrastructure in cases where he stood to benefit financially, nor did he take issue with manipulating the press to portray rivals in a less than favourable light.
Rhodes’s racism and subjugation of people of colour is now widely documented, but his attitude towards white competitors was also abhorrent.
“So many of Rhodes’s business and political actions appear to have been littered with lies, criminality and corruption.
“There can be little doubt that corruption was in Rhodes’s DNA, and that this was directly proportional to his rise in both South African business and politics.”
Of course when it comes to state capture as we know it today, there is no sugarcoating the fact that the apartheid government has a lot to answer for.
The current iteration of the ANC regularly trots out this line to mask its failings, but even when the populist blame game is cast aside, it rings true.
The nucleus of apartheid’s rot was the Afrikaner Broederbond, a vile collection of Nazi sympathisers who were appointed to top positions when the National Party came to power.
“The scale of the capture was immense,” Blackman and Dall write.
“What made it even more remarkable was that this was not an elected party setting up their stall, but a secret elite organisation with only a few thousand of what journalists Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom famously called ‘Super Afrikaners’ in its ranks”.
One of their number, Nico Diederichs, was said to have accumulated enormous wealth thanks to his dodgy interests and ties to Anton Rupert of the Rembrandt group, yet this perception proved incorrect by the time he crossed over to whatever world lay beyond.
That was because his son, Nico Junior, blew the family fortune.
The authors note: “Over the years the ‘good doctor’ seems to have loaned his son R850,000 [about R45m today], of which Klein Nico managed to pay back precisely zilch.
“In comparison, Zuma seems to have had much better luck with his sons.”
These are only some of the scoundrels Blackman and Dall have picked out.
Others include homeland looters the Matanzima brothers and that Great Lion of Bophuthatswana, Lucas Mangope.
Yet there are so many more who have plundered and continue to plunder this country to the point of despair, and it is hoped the authors view Rogues’ Gallery as the first in a series of books that exposes them all.
So much of what is written today is lifeless or devoid of the necessary context that the public quickly loses interest, but when you have writers such as these who are able to single out the rotten apples for the ridicule they so richly deserve, that is something worth investing in — as readers should in this book.
Rogues’