Bring Me My Machine Gun by Alec Russell

Author:Alec Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Chapter 7

THE NEW RANDLORDS

I don’t think I will ever be a common businessman.

In my heart of hearts I am a freedom fighter.

—TOKYO SEXWALE,

POLITICAL PRISONER

TURNED BILLIONAIRE, MAY 2008

There is nothing wrong with being “filthy rich.”

—PHUMZILE MLAMBO-NGCUKA,

DEPUTY MINISTER OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY

When the Queen Mother of the Royal Bafokeng Nation strode through the foyer of the single-story office block that serves as the legato (royal palace), members of staff jumped to their feet and muttered “Mmemogolo” (Queen Mother) just as the Bafokeng have to the mother of their nation for hundreds of years. While she was dressed simply in African-print cloth, she had a regal air, and no wonder. After her marriage as a young woman to the last king but two, for more than thirty years she was queen of the Bafokeng’s traditional rural community of some three hundred thousand people in South Africa’s north-western bush. Following the death of her husband in 1995, and then in quick succession a few years later the deaths of her two eldest sons, one of suspected AIDS and the other in a car accident, her third son, age forty, ascended the throne. She was, in traditional African circles, roughly the equivalent of a dowager duchess. Then again, in early 2008, the kingdom had recently acquired a multibillion-dollar fortune in platinum-mining stock, and “industrial grandee” or “heiress” might be a more appropriate tag.

The Bafokeng’s homeland, a tract of about 1,200 square kilometers northwest of Johannesburg, looks no different from the scrubby bush that blankets much of southern Africa. For hundreds of years the Bafokeng eked out an existence there, tending their livestock and fending off most invaders through a mixture of diplomacy and guile. Only the hardiest Afrikaners trekking north from the Cape in the nineteenth century chose to settle there. Yet the Bafokeng kingdom also happens to sit on a section of a two-billion-year-old rock formation that contains nearly three-quarters of the world’s known platinum reserves. Mining companies started full-scale production there in the 1960s, but it was only at the end of the twentieth century that the Bafokeng won their share of the area’s fabulous wealth. After decades of legal battles, in 1999, the tribe won from Impala Platinum, the world’s second largest platinum miner, the rights to an equitable share of the royalties from the platinum mined on their land. Seven years later, the Bafokeng went a stage further and negotiated a deal to convert the royalty payments into shares. Its 13.2 percent stake was the crown jewel in a community-based investment fund, which at the end of May 2008 was valued at $4.9 billion.

The Bafokeng had become one of the wealthier tribes on the continent. Decades of injustice dating back through apartheid to the colonial era had been overturned. It was one of the most dramatic events in the financial revolution that was essential in South Africa if the handover of political power was to have real meaning.

The Queen Mother was the first to concede that gaining the rights to the wealth was only a first step towards rectifying the inequalities of the past.

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