It's not a secret how SA's richest person, Johann Rupert made his money: he was born into it, his daddy was a billionaire. What's rarely spoken about is how Anton Rupert, his father made his fortune

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Anton Rupert was born to an upper class Afrikaner family in Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo. His father earned upwards of £3000 a year in the late 1920s, which is about R4.4m today.

Anton Rupert studied chemistry at the University of Pretoria and graduated in 1936. It was during this time and following years that he "developed a deep sense of Afrikaner nationalism and railed against what he perceived to be the English domination of the South African economy"

From his biography: “Over the next few years, he became increasingly convinced that Afrikaners would have to fight for their own niche in the business world and in public life".

Anton thus embarked on his first business venture, a dry-cleaning business in central Pretoria, called Chemiese Reinigers. The slogan of the company was A Better, Faster and Exclusively Afrikaans Business

In 1940, Anton quit the dry cleaner and joined an organisation called Reddingsdaadbond (RDB), which was a group of wealthy educated Afrikaners who's aim was to fund Afrikaners who wished to start businesses. He was appointed head of the small business division

In 1941 he decided to open a cigarette manufacturing company and invested £10 (+-R12K today). More crucially, he was backed by two major Afrikaner investment firms through his connections with the RDB, establishing
Voorbrand Tabakmaatskappy (Voorbrand)

In 1945, 5 years before Johann was born, Rupert snr established Distillers Corporation, a cooperative that did sales and marketing for Cape wine producers with a £1.3m (R1.32B today) capital investment. DC merged with Stellenbosch farmers’ winery to form Distell in 2000

Anton moved to Stellenbosch in the late 1940s and rebranded his cigarette businesses to Rembrandt which was listed on the JSE in 1956. Like many white-owned businesses at the time, Rupert's success came solely because of the low wages paid to African workers

Rupert leveraged slave labour wages of Africans to expand his interests into banking, mining, printing and packaging, medical services, engineering and foodstuffs. Superprofits enabled him to buy out international tobacco companies, forming Rothmans International in 1972

With Apartheid South Africa facing international sanctions, Anton was forced to form an international conglomerate, Richemont dealing in luxury goods in Switzerland in 1988. Anton retired in 1972, handing over his empire to Johann The Donor. ENDS