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Christo Wiese. TJ Strydom
Читать онлайн.Название Christo Wiese
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780624085867
Автор произведения TJ Strydom
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
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