In 1891, a wealthy businessman named Edouard Lippert was tasked with establishing a timber plantation by the even wealthier Joburg randlord Hermann Eckstein. The area, originally known as Lippert’s Plantation, was soon renamed Sachsenwald, after a forest near Lippert’s home in Germany.
When World War 1 broke out, the German name was anglicised to Saxonwold.
It’s a name that’s become synonymous with the Gupta family and the "Saxonwold shebeen". But Saxonwold is by no means the only thing Lippert and the Guptas have in common.
SA’s first tenderpreneurs
When the Boers beat the Brits at the Battle of Majuba in 1881, marking the end of the first Anglo-Boer War, the ZAR was given back "not only its partial independence, but also its state of bankruptcy", writes author Helga Kaye.
In an attempt to develop the economy of his dusty, agrarian volkstaat, "Oom" Paul Kruger introduced a concessions policy under which tenderpreneurs paid the government for the sole right to produce a particular product in the republic.
While kickbacks and corruption played a part in every deal I’ve come across, some of the early concessions — for things like liquor, jam and sugar — did have some benefit to the economy. That all changed with the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. Suddenly a policy that had been designed to pull one of the poorest countries on the planet up by its bootlaces was being applied to a global epicentre of commerce.
The glitter of gold attracted a new class of speculator, who put the first crop of tenderpreneurs in the shade. None was shadier than Lippert, a Hamburg merchant’s son who’d abandoned his dream of becoming a professional musician and followed his brothers to SA in the early 1880s.
After washing up in Delagoa Bay (now Maputo) and walking the 250km to Barberton, he briefly tried his hand at mining. But he soon realised he’d have an easier time hunting for government concessions than for gold.
Depending on who you listen to, Lippert fast established a reputation as either "a highly cultured and sensitive man with exceptional abilities and charm", or as "red-bearded [and] vulture-like … cold and cutting as steel".
An explosive scandal
In 1887, Lippert was granted a 16-year monopoly on the manufacture of dynamite in the ZAR. According to the terms of the contract, writes CT Gordon, author of The Growth of Boer Opposition to Kruger, 1890-1895, he was allowed to import "all raw materials and machinery free of duty; but not dynamite itself. The necessary factory was to be erected within a year, and once its output was able to meet the entire demand of the republic, no further import of dynamite would be allowed."
As soon as production commenced, complaints about the "inferior quality and danger of the local product" began to surface.
In what was to become an age-old SA tradition, the commission of inquiry set up to investigate these complaints found there to be nothing wrong with Lippert’s ontplofbare stoffen. But still the complaints rolled in.
It soon became apparent that not a single stick of dynamite had been manufactured on SA soil and that the "factory" was little more than a glorified labelling facility. But when it was put to Kruger that Lippert was making a mockery of the government, Oom Paul defended him stoutly, insisting that the dynamite was being manufactured locally.
After much ducking and weaving, the government agreed to conduct tests on the "raw materials" being imported by Lippert.
Journalist Eugène Marais (later to achieve fame as an Afrikaans poet and naturalist) reported on these tests in his fervently anti-Kruger newspaper, Land en Volk. "Rarely has such a scene taken place in a free republic as occurred during the 11 o’clock adjournment of the Volksraad last Saturday morning," he wrote. "The stuff that Mr Lippert alleged was not dynamite exploded with terrific force, throwing great masses of rock into the air."
The debate in the Volksraad following this unusual coffee break was equally volatile. One member demanded that Lippert face criminal prosecution for smuggling. Others insisted that the concession be cancelled altogether. Kruger doubled down. To cancel the contract, he told the council, "would destroy the credit of the state completely and bring rejoicing to our enemies".
Kruger, who had an election to worry about, did temporarily cancel the concession. But once he’d been re-elected president (in dubious circumstances), the dynamite monopoly was, according to Percy Fitzpatrick, "revived in an infinitely more obnoxious form", with the government assuming control of the factory but Lippert and his cronies being reappointed to their previous roles.
Lippert received 25,000 shares, which he apparently sold for £360,000 (R969m today), and a royalty of eight shillings per case of dynamite for the first three years, and six shillings thereafter.
Beating Rhodes at his own game
Lippert was also involved in a dodgy concession for the manufacture of cement, forming the company that would become PPC. But he would save his worst for king Lobengula and the people of Matabeleland.
Lippert’s involvement in Lobengula’s territory dated back to 1886 — the same time that Cecil Rhodes was getting his claws into the region. Lippert, however, claimed his plans for Matabeleland were "solely commercial in nature" and devoid of political significance, while Rhodes was "combining far-reaching political aims with similar business enterprises".
After a few rounds of shadow boxing, the two rivals decided to join forces. But this didn’t last long. True to form, "Rhodes ceased to abide by the agreements arrived at and the promises made," Lippert later wrote. "This brought about a rupture between us and our friendly relations were destroyed for all time."
Unless, of course, rekindling the friendship would make financial sense …
When doubts were raised in the UK and SA press over the genuineness of Rhodes’s claims to Matabeleland, Lippert hatched a cunning plan. Rhodes’s prized Rudd Concession conferred on his company the mining rights in most of Matabeleland, Lippert observed, but it granted him no powers above ground. On April 22 1891, Lippert got Lobengula to sign a document granting him these surface rights.
"Since Rhodes now had all the mineral rights below the surface," said Lippert, "and I had the entire surface rights it is unnecessary to indicate the legal problems that arose from this. A bitter struggle set in between us."
After nearly coming to blows with Rhodes on a boozy afternoon at the Kimberley Club, Lippert travelled to Cape Town to plead his case with Cape governor Sir Henry Loch and the German consul-general.
At the meeting, Loch played hardball, disputing the veracity of Lippert’s agreement with Lobengula (there was no proof that Lippert had paid the £1,000 stipulated in the contract). But Lippert’s detailed protestations must have made an impression, because Charles Rudd (of Rudd Concession fame) met with Lippert the following morning to discuss the possibility of Rhodes buying him out.
As the author and historian Martin Meredith notes, in exchange for Rhodes getting the Lippert Concession, "Rhodes agreed to give Lippert £50,000 [R146m today] worth of shares, £5,000 in cash and the right to select an area of 75 square miles in Matabeleland with all land and mineral rights there".
To complete the deal, however, "Lippert first needed to renegotiate his concession with Lobengula to put it on a firmer legal basis, while leaving Lobengula under the impression that he remained an enemy of Rhodes and implacably opposed to his designs".
So in September 1891, Lippert and his young wife Marie left Joburg for Matabeleland in a carriage carrying £1,000 for Lobengula.
Marie documented the trip, sending regular sketches and letters to her family in Germany.
After crossing the Waterberg and the Limpopo River, the couple spent a few days with Chief Khama ("a civilized and peaceable old gentleman") in what is now Botswana. At Tati (Francistown) they bumped into Rhodes’s business partner (and Lippert’s cousin), Alfred Beit, with whom they spent a few days drinking "German beer … burgundy and champagne" and eating "beautifully preserved French fruit and vegetables".
A month after leaving Pretoria, the Lipperts finally arrived at Lobengula’s capital, Gubuluwayo. A few days later, they got to meet the king, who was in Marie’s words, "quite shapelessly fat, with very short legs and bloodshot little eyes … and yet he could not be anything except a king".
After keeping his guests waiting for hours, Lobengula came out and sat under a scaffolding draped with fresh meat. "It was the only shady place, and a drip of blood and the smell of meat did not worry Lobengula," Marie wrote. "A large piece of cold boiled beef" was placed before the couple. "Three pieces I manfully ate, but the king continued to insist that women who looked like wasps" should eat more.
Lobengula, who’d had more than his fair share of troubles with the white man, wanted to be convinced that Lippert and Rhodes remained enemies, and he strung the negotiations out for weeks. Eventually, after a month of lying through his teeth, Lippert got what he had come for.
As Marie reported: "The king has received his £1,000 sterling and is to get £500 a year, which the Chartered Co [Rhodes, in other words] pays; in return he leaves the country to the whites and his suzerainty is acknowledged after all. For the Chartered Co this settlement of the land question is of immeasurable value; hence they have been able to pay a high price [R146m, remember] for the concession."
But the highest price of all would be paid by Lobengula (who died three years later, in dubious circumstances) and the Ndebele people. They would go on to be denied their land and their dignity by the British SA Company, the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, the white supremacist state of Rhodesia and the Shona-led government of Robert Mugabe.
Some would argue that they are still waiting to get it back.
Dall is the co-author, with Matthew Blackman, of Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in SA
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