Harry Oppenheimer: Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty

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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Unlike Gregory, Cardo did not employ an eminent assistant to help him, let alone pay him in diamonds; see the reference to Herbert Frankel (140).

2 T. Leon, ‘WASP Patriarchy Leaps from the Pages of Oppenheimer Biography’, Business Day, 12 April 2023.

3 See, for example, T. Crawford-Browne, Eye on the Diamonds (Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2012), 108.

4 T. Cleveland, Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 121.

5 Cardo does not mention the key work by Francis Wilson on labour in the gold mines, after which Wilson received Oppenheimer support to establish the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

6 Harry Oppenheimer, ‘Foreword’, in J. Carruthers, ed., The Jameson Raid: A Centennial Retrospective (Johannesburg: Brenthurst Press, 1996), xiii–xiv. I benefited from Oppenheimer funding on more than one occasion. In the early 1970s I was asked by Eric Axelson, then the head of department of history at UCT, to help initiate the process of publishing archival material from HFO’s library. I became co-editor, with Basil le Cordeur, of two expensive, limited-edition volumes published by the Brenthurst Press: The Kitchingman Papers: Missionary Letters and Journals, 1817–1848 (1976) and The War of the Axe, 1847 (1981). I also contributed a chapter to the Press’s later volume on The Jameson Raid (1996) and chapters to its volume The Siege of Mafeking (2001), published after HFO’s death.