Anglo American’s closure of the Rand Daily Mail — almost 40 years later, it still hurts

Australian-based global miner BHP Billiton’s play to buy Anglo American could signal the demise of what was once the flagship of South African business.

BHP has made it clear that it really wants Anglo’s South American copper assets, while the platinum, diamonds and iron ore would be spun off into new entities, a move which Anglo itself has now proposed.

If the dismemberment of Anglo comes about, should we mourn the death of a good corporate citizen or celebrate the passing of a relic of colonial times?

Writing in Daily Maverick, Taddy Blecher is effusive in his praise for the mining house, for the millions it has ploughed into education and good works in recent years. What he describes is nothing less than a national treasure.

Read more in Daily Maverick: There is more at stake in the Anglo American-BHP debate than meets the eye

“Over the 45 years in this journey that we have had support from Anglo American, we have repeatedly and on multiple occasions witnessed the beating heart and soul of Anglo American, when it comes to the well-being of our communities,” he writes.

Anglo is indelibly a part of South African history, but that is not always a good thing.

Does its role in reaching out to the ANC and smoothing the way to a democratic South Africa mitigate the ruthless exploitation of the migrant labour system, and the poverty wages that the company was built on and that preceded the unionisation of the mines in the 1980s?

It was on the back of this cheap labour model that South Africa industrialised, the JSE boomed and shareholders reaped the dividends.

Shortly after democracy came, the company moved its headquarters from South Africa to London and now has only a secondary listing on the JSE. There are three South Africans on the board of 10 directors who head up the firm – but two of them are non-executive directors.

Blecher’s gratitude is understandable.  In August 2023 Anglo donated their old corporate headquarters in inner city Johannesburg to the Maharishi Invincibility Institute (MII), Blecher’s NGO which does incredibly good work helping to educate neglected inner-city youth.

But it is worth reminding readers of another, darker “real and permanent” contribution to society that Anglo was responsible for: the closure of the Rand Daily Mail, an event which, arguably, struck a blow against South African journalism that it has never recovered from.

I was a reporter on the Mail at the time, so while history in South Africa moves on quickly, there are still some of us with long enough memories to recall what happened.

In the 1980s there were two major English-language newspaper groups – South African Associated Newspapers (SAAN) and the Argus Group. Through complex interlinked entities Anglo American effectively controlled both of them. This was thanks to the huge profits the company was able to rake in during the apartheid era, but was unable to move out of the country because of tight exchange control regulations.

Back then, Anglo effectively controlled 40% of the value of companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange – everything from breweries to paper mills to newspapers.

Both of Johannesburg’s English-language broadsheets – SAAN’s Rand Daily Mail in the morning and the Argus’ Star in the afternoon – were ultimately owned by the same conglomerate that was referred to as South Africa Inc.

They were both “liberal” newspapers, according to the widest definition, but culturally worlds apart. The Star was our version of the grey lady, solid but safe and stodgy. The Mail was more edgy, the paper of the underdog, but it was also the paper that ambitious young journalists strived to work for.

It had a succession of brilliant editors such as Laurie Gandar, Raymond Louw and Allister Sparks, and a stable of journalists that earned it a reputation as one of the best newspapers in the world.

Closing it down just as the final chapter of apartheid was about to be written was an act of profound corporate short-sightedness.

Anglo simply failed to appreciate that a free press is not something that can be bought at the supermarket or a car dealership that can be closed down when it fails to meet its quarterly targets.