Cyril Ramaphosa, leading candidate in the race for president of the ANC and of the country, is a custodian of Tiny Rowland’s legacy.
Polishing his Struggle credentials, a ritual routinely undertaken in the build-up to the ANC’s elective congresses, Ramaphosa need not bother about the implications that this potentially ruinous characterisation carries. In an ideal situation, being custodian of this legacy would spell an end to presidential ambitions. In South Africa, public intellectual discourse is dominated by those to whom Rowland is a closed book, enabling Ramaphosa to fly under the radar.
In the race for being first at the feeding trough, Ramaphosa is pitted against Jacob Zuma’s securocrats in the ANC, whose design is to have Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma at the helm.
Casting Ramaphosa in the role of custodian of Rowland’s legacy is a far bigger stick to lash him with than the CIA connection, a vilification that is way past its sell-by date in political contestations.
The think tank in the Zuma camp is incapable of theorising ways in which Ramaphosa’s presidency would be Rowland’s triumph.
Anyone with a decent historical imagination would not struggle to discern how Ramaphosa evolved into a dependable repository of Rowland’s legacy and, by extension, British imperial interests.
This evolution is intricately linked to his leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the basis of his Struggle credentials.
When established, the NUM was vetted by the apartheid state. On the recommendation of the Wiehan Commission, PW Botha legalised black trade unions.
The largest employer in the mining sector, Anglo-American, was just as keen to have black miners organised and Bobby Godsell was appointed to manage relations between the employer and black miners, heralding a new era in the sector. A very warm friendship developed between Ramaphosa and Godsell, which should have taken the shine off Ramaphosa’s glowing Struggle credentials, but South Africa is yearning for a heroic individual to cancel out “Msholozi”.
So the NUM was formed in a non- adversarial environment. From the point of view of mine owners and the state, it was an instrument of social and, to some extent, political control of the black workforce.
Botha’s version or chapter of apartheid social engineering, Total Strategy, was as total as its designation suggests. It was at once the militarisation of the apartheid administration, through the deployment of demobilised South African Defence Force (SADF) personnel in key aspects of social, economic, educational and cultural life in society.
This was the moment of apartheid’s total hegemony before the eruption of popular violence, in the Vaal in September 1984, spoiled the party. It was from this major unrest, which was to last a decade, that the NUM’s profile was enhanced. It was not spectacular workplace successes that underpinned its Struggle credentials. The political unionism of Cosatu helped enhance the NUM’s profile and, with it, Ramaphosa’s Struggle credentials.
It was during this hiatus in apartheid’s total hegemony that Rowland entered the equation. Instantly, Ramaphosa’s destiny became intricately linked to Rowland’s legacy.
Rowland becomes one of the critical components of Botha’s Total Strategy in the economy and gets the opportunity to invest in mining in 1987. This is when the NUM organised a work stoppage that was to become the subject of a grossly embellished and romanticised narrative.
It is one that deliberately understated and minimised the long-term impact of the dismissal of nearly 50 000 mineworkers.
Rowland promised to be a formidable foe, who, if Ramaphosa had tussled with and triumphed over, would have merited glowing Struggle credentials. But who was Rowland? As chief executive of the London Rhodesia Mining and Land Company (Lonrho) from 1962, he was a latter-day Cecil John Rhodes. His lifelong pursuit was to prolong white minority regimes in southern Africa. He shot to prominence in 1974, when Lonrho was exposed for busting sanctions imposed on Ian Smith in what was then Rhodesia.
In helping Smith, he was inspired by the desire to prevent or at least delay the transition to a black government in Rhodesia. Yet he could not stop history’s march, as the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (Zanla) - the armed wing of the Zimbabwean African National Union (Zanu) - pushed Smith’s government to capitulation within five years. When he failed to prevent or delay the transition to a black government, Rowland sought a dependable ally that would safeguard both his and British imperial interests.
In a recent radio interview with Power FM’s Iman Rapetti, it was revealed that Rowland was bankrolling Joshua Nkomo.
He supported Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu) in the first democratic elections in 1980. It lost and, sensing Robert Mugabe’s unconcealed contempt for British imperialism, Rowland headed south, moving Lonrho’s operational headquarters to Joburg.
In South Africa, he extended his friendship with BJ Vorster by joining the inner circle of Botha’s ruling oligarchy at the time when the level of state violence was accelerating, as militarisation of the administration gained momentum.
Botha was undermining even the democratic niceties of a white minority state as his cabinet, the National Security Council (NSC) was overloaded with securocrats with a military background.
Rowland is reported to have been instrumental in the conceptualisation of Constructive Engagement, Ronald Reagan’s Reagonomics in respect of the African continent. As Margaret Thatcher’s confidante on matters related to Africa, Rowland had a hand in Thatcherism.
At the cutting edge of Thatcherism and Reagonomics, the West’s grand design to contain Moscow-backed, left-wing formations across the globe, including the NUM, he was the former’s poisoned arrowhead.
He is known to have landed at Waterkloof Airbase whenever he wanted.
Rowland made friends on the left of the political divide as well, if it advanced imperial interests, and, by extension, his own. As stated, he supported Zapu in the 1980 elections.
He bankrolled Kenneth Kaunda and was embraced by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It is claimed that even Oliver Tambo had use of his private airplane, a Gulfstream.
Initially, Rowland’s business interests in South Africa dealt in luxury vehicles, but in 1987, the year of the NUM’s historic work stoppage, Lonrho sunk its first shaft on the Highveld platinum belt.
Rowland continued to serve as CEO until he was forced out in 1993. He had amassed a personal fortune amounting to a staggering £200m and had taken Lonrho’s annual revenue from £158 000 in 1962 to £272m in 1989. In 1998, Lonrho was split into two entities - Lonhro plc and Lonrho Africa plc.
The former was renamed Lonmin in 1999 and became a mining-focused operation.
In its 25 years of mining the South African platinum belt, from 1987 to 2012, when the massacre occurred, Lonmin continued to be a colonial operation in the same way as its progenitor, Lonrho. So, when Shanduka acquired a stake in Lonmin in 2010, it was not only legitimating a colonial operation to the benefit of British aristocracy, who continued to be represented on the board, but it was also actively prolonging forms of colonialism.
Some argue that Ramaphosa’s link to “Tiny” is tenuous.
But the basis of Struggle credentials is an uncompromising disposition in dealing with all manifestations of colonial domination.
Partnering with Lonmin, a colonial corporate entity with a history of rapaciously battering the subcontinent, is treachery of unimaginable proportions. It is not Lonmin’s role in the Marikana massacre that should have deterred Ramaphosa from any relationship with the firm.
It is Lonrho’s colonial history, which left a trail of destruction in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Malawi and finally South Africa that should have repulsed him. Rowland must be resting in peace knowing that the subcontinent will remain a safe investment destination for the British imperial interests he represented his entire adult life.
* Lebelo is an author and historian.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.