FAREWELL TO A COLOSSUS
Though hardly acknowledged now, the man who launched the careers of Whitey Basson and Christo Wiese also founded a gigantic retail machine
enier van Rooyen isn’t a household name like Anton Rupert, Harry Oppenheimer or Patrice Motsepe, but it is no stretch to describe him as the forgotten colossus of SA business. Most people don’t know it today, but Van Rooyen, who passed away in Durbanville in Cape Town at the age of 86 this month, is the true invisible hand that shaped Pep, the clothing retailer so nearly brought to its knees by the 2014 merger with Steinhoff.
It’s a tale that echoes that of many other entrepreneurs, who built up durable SA brands, but who’ve been entirely misplaced in the swirl of history.
The story began in the little Northern Cape town of Kenhardt in 1931. As the child of a poor livestock speculator, Renier took a series of odd jobs, including working as a part-time court messenger in Upington, where he saw the ruinous impact of debt orders.
“Not only were people being enticed by easy credit to buy things they couldn’t afford, but in most cases, companies that were forced to issue debt summonses lost most of the money owed to them,” wrote his son Johann van Rooyen in a book about his father’s life.
So Renier van Rooyen hit on a plan to sell “bread-and-butter products” for cash, “at low prices and high quality”. In 1955 (aged 23) he opened The Bargain Shop, which morphed into BG Bazaars. In 1965, family members in Upington (including Stoffel Wiese, father of a law student named Christo) funded a new store chain. Renier drew up a list of 10 names, including Van’s, Up’s, NW, Ric’s, Ren’s and Pep. “Renier was instantly captivated by the [name Pep] … it corresponded with his own boundless energy,” wrote his son.
In September 1965, the first Pep store opened in De Aar. Soon, Pep stores were popping up all over SA, and many column inches were spent on covering Pep’s opening specials, like trousers and shoes for 99c apiece.
“In Bloemfontein, 4,000 people broke the glass door of the new Pep shop and had to be restrained by 15 policemen — broken shop windows due to overenthusiastic shoppers were frequent occurrences,” wrote his son.
But Van Rooyen also provided the platform for two
Rlarger-than-life business personalities, who grew out of Pep: Whitey Basson and Christo Wiese.
In 1971, Van Rooyen spotted Basson, then a promising 25-year-old accountant from PWC, working on the audit of Pep’s accounts. He picked him to be Pep’s finance director.
In recent months, Basson described Van Rooyen as the “finest retailer” he ever worked with. “He and Len Shawzin from Truworths were the only retailers I know who could open a box of trousers and say, this one you can sell for R5.99, this one you can sell for R7.99, and these are awful, give these ones away,” said Basson.
In 1979, Van Rooyen agreed to Basson’s proposal to start a food division, and buy a small eight-chain grocery company in the Western Cape for an effective R900,000. This was to be the origin of the modern Shoprite. Though Wiese worked as the deputy to Van Rooyen from 1966, he left in 1973 to work as a lawyer for a spell. “Renier was the number one guy,” said Wiese in an interview. “I would not have had it any other way — he was a better number one than I would have been. But I also knew that I wasn’t really cut out to be a number two.”
In 1981, Wiese returned as chair of Pep when, inexplicably, a few weeks short of his 50th birthday, Van Rooyen walked away from the empire he’d created. Van Rooyen, who sold two-thirds of his shares to Wiese for R7m, said he was tired and worried he’d lose interest in the business. “I have a garden, and I never get into it; I have a yacht, and never get onto it,” he told the FM at the time.
But Van Rooyen was also disillusioned with the country’s politics. “There are laws on the books which should not be there — particularly the Group Areas Act and the Immorality Act — but nothing seems to be done to get rid of them,” he lamented in August 1981.
So in 1985, at the height of PW Botha’s grand apartheid, Van Rooyen emigrated to the US. He returned in 1996 and started an investment company called Harwill — an ill-fated venture that failed.
But the company he founded, Pep, grew into a monster under Wiese’s stewardship. Then, in 2014, Pep was folded into Steinhoff, much to the anger of many of Pepkor’s managers, who disliked Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste. Since last December’s Steinhoff collapse, Pepkor has been steadily trying to distance itself from Jooste’s company.
For some time, Van Rooyen had been battling with his health. But his son says that on his birthday, Wiese and Basson “would make a point of visiting him, even in the care facility where he’s been for the past few years”.
Pep may be stronger than Steinhoff right now, but it’s far more precarious than when Renier van Rooyen walked away from it in 1981. The point is, it’s easy to think of conglomerates like Pep as faceless corporate entities, and the people behind them as unicellular free-market automatons.
But that would do an immense disservice to the legacy of people like Van Rooyen. As a young man from poor beginnings he created, in the arid Northern Cape, a company that still pays 48,000 people a salary every month.
I have a garden, and I never get into it; I have a yacht, and I never get onto it