Apartheid finally ended for Markus Jooste on that fateful day when he killed himself above the rocks where the Indian Ocean crashes onto the southern shores of Africa’s Deep South. He killed himself on one of the most important days on the South African calendar; the day when South Africans remember the Sharpeville Massacre of 21 March 1960.
I cannot associate anything even vaguely “brave” about Jooste’s last act among the living, nor do I feel “a bit confused and a lot traumatised”. Such claims are terribly Nietzschean. It was he (Nietzsche) who conceived of suicide, or “voluntary death”, as courageous, laudable and deserving of reverence… In the case of Jooste, it is difficult to sustain the idea that (his) suicide was a consequence of meaninglessness.
Allow me a brief ompad. Life is invariably a result of accident or chance, after that, drawing on our own resources (this is an important point), we give it meaning. Until he killed himself, Jooste’s life had meaning. He spoke, for instance, about his passion and the inspiration he took from working with a “class of directors like Bruno Steinhoff, Jannie Mouton, Christo Wiese”. This is the elite capitalist class I often refer to.
He also said he was a bad loser, that he was disciplined and shared a “high regard” for Amazon. His life, Jooste said, “has always been about relationships” and about trust. He added that his objective (as part of Steinhoff) was to be “a listed, very well-run corporate governance company in an environment where a 100% full-blooded entrepreneur can live out his dreams. That, really, is our culture”.
It is in these iterations where meaning to Jooste’s life is found, and as he explained in that interview, he used the resources given to him by the privileged standing of the Afrikaner, which Jan Petrus van der Merwe described in his doctoral dissertation as “a white population group”.
As the last of the summer wines were running out last week, Jooste probably saw in his rear-view mirror, disappearing into a tiny dot, the prestige and privileges that he had enjoyed throughout his life, and that all of it was coming to an end.
There was a time, probably, when he would have got away with things because of his place in society, a privileged white man in a world created and maintained by privileged white men, and where white men watched each other’s backs. For Jooste that time ended in the minutes and hours before he pulled the trigger that killed him.
I have never ascribed to the belief that one should not speak ill of the dead. There are some among the dead of whom nothing remains but their legacies of cruelty, venality and the legatees of their worst acts of inhumanity — and in Jooste’s case, the greed remains.
It is difficult, at the best of times, to imagine that there is no such thing as a “victimless crime” — otherwise it would not have been a crime. In other words, if smoking a joint is a “victimless crime”, then smoking a joint should not be a crime.
After he killed himself, the Financial Times wrote about his crimes, crimes for which he faced the prospect of arrest and which “plunged [South Africa] into a crisis in 2017”, without any reference to the social and historical contexts of those crimes.
Every crisis is the child of an earlier crisis and has to be understood in the multiplicity of contexts (social and historical) and not simply as an accident or a set of bad behaviours unmoored from history and society.
From Giambattista Vico, we reach the understanding that human history has to be understood as the history of societies and not individuals. Historical analyses have to, therefore, consider society as the appropriate unit of analysis.
Afrikaner solidarity and the old white boy network crumbling
Jooste belonged to that most prestigious group of Afrikaner business people whose economic power and influence, and the vertically segmented privileges of more than 300 years of white dominance and control, did not match their loss of political power and influence from about 1990 onwards.
Much of their wealth and opportunity and open doors were purposefully built and enabled by political influence. The Broederbond was almost always at the centre of white power, in general, and Afrikaner power in particular. It was white solidarity that helped sustain their power (it is really hard to associate Jooste’s rise and ultimate death with “bravery” and it is even more difficult to feel “confused and traumatised”).
For most of the apartheid era, the wealth of Jooste and his former billionaire and millionaire colleagues did not fall from the sky from about 27 April 1994. It was all accumulated through “a very powerful sense of fellowship, solidarity and commitment… [and]… intense comradeship”. It was vertically segmented.
Reading the extract of Rob Rose’s book, “Steinheist”, one gets a sense of the centrality of Stellenbosch in the Jooste saga. We should remember that notwithstanding the entry of black students to the university, Stellenbosch remains the stronghold of a “Mafia” which I would suggest is a new name for the old boys club that got their start under Afrikaner Christian Nationalism, and today represents what Deon Wiggett described as an “Afrikaner-industrial complex seated in the town. Its members include Johann Rupert and Jannie Durand from Remgro; Dr Edwin Hertzog from Mediclinic International; Jannie Mouton of PSG; and the now-embattled figures of Christo Wiese, Whitey Basson and Markus Jooste.”
In this sense, the Broederbond has not fully dissolved, it simply adopted a new name, so to speak, and like a children’s colouring-in book the basic story remains the same — the colours are all that can, and have been changed. Wiggett goes to great pains to avoid referring to anyone of this old boy club as “criminals”. To save my bacon (and my income) I should probably echo that sentiment.
Jooste and his gabbas are all well-meaning and upright citizens filled only with innocence and goodwill. As the Afrikaans in me would add slyly: Hulle staan regop, maar ek kannie sê hulle is opreg nie…
With respect to the Stellenbosch mafia, Wiggett explained, “born and bred secure in comfort, they form less a mafia than a Broederbond 2.0 — leaner than the legacy ware and optimised for a captured South Africa.”
It is clear, then, or it should be, that I am quite unoriginal in tying the current old boys club to the embedded (and vertically segmented) privileges of being white and an Afrikaner, in a “Broederbond 2.0… optimised for a captured South Africa”.
When considering the statement made above, that apartheid ended for Markus Jooste on 21 March 2024, an important element is this: whenever something, anything went wrong, at the height of white dominance and control, a quick word in the right ear (of well-placed politicians including Cabinet ministers and prime ministers) would protect the Afrikaners from “becoming slaves in the land of their birth”. These passages were drawn from Dan O’Meara’s research on the Broederbond as “the Class Vanguard of Afrikaner Nationalism”.
It should be said that there are Afrikaners who have embraced the changes that came after 1990, and who did not cling to the vertically segmented privileges that guaranteed or promised immense wealth in a democratic future.
Jooste and his colleagues continued to amass wealth through “old boy networks” to which they simply added dark-skinned faces to somehow sanctify their continued accumulation.
However, South Africa became a democratic country in 1994, and for people like Jooste, there were no longer sympathetic ministerial ears and the solidarity they enjoyed for decades, arguably for centuries, was not spread wider across today’s elite capitalist class.
This does not mean that there are no longer people who began their passage to wealth and power as a direct result of Afrikaner Christian Nationalism with its attendant old-boys network. It simply meant, in some ways, that if you screw your brethren (and they are all white men) you will be abandoned.
Jooste was abandoned. There was no longer the protection of apartheid, of white privilege. That system was kept alive by “old boys’ networks” (and their new members); as a system, it was no longer available to Jooste. Apartheid finally ended for Jooste.
The National Prosecuting Authority that Cyril Ramaphosa refreshed with the appointment of Shamila Batohi as National Director of Public Prosecutions in 2019 has been slow at bringing accused people to justice.
Batohi assembled what was the best legal team comprising Michelle le Roux SC, Wim Trengove SC and Michael Mbikiwa, to act as prosecutors in the Steinhoff case. Justice may be slow at getting to the criminals in the system, but its arc eventually reaches its target. Or, as the Sunday Times editorial explained last Sunday, “justice was closing in on Jooste — slowly but surely”.
What remains left to say about Jooste’s death are the words of the former Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, when he heard about Steve Biko’s death:
“It leaves me cold.” DM