The story of
Black Economic
Empowerment
Modern South Africa has experimented with three economic
empowerment schemes. Prince Mashele measures the success of
BEE against its predecessor’s.
E
ven though historians have not chronicled it as such,
the first scheme can be identified as the English
Economic Empowerment (EEE).
When the surface has been peeled off, what
remains at the core of the second scheme is
Afrikaner Economic Empowerment (AEE).
The last scheme is fairly well-known, simply because today’s
legislation proclaims it thus: Black Economic Empowerment
(BEE).
Standing in the twentieth year of democracy and looking back,
people ask: Has BEE succeeded?
The problem is that those who proffer answers to this question
do so as if the first two empowerment schemes – EEE and AEE –
have never existed, or as if they are not connected to BEE.
Yet history reminds us that EEE gave rise to AEE and that
BEE was occasioned by what both EEE and AEE did: impoverish
black people.
The father and champion of English Economic Empowerment
in South Africa is none other than Cecil John Rhodes.
Having left school at the age of sixteen, failing to qualify
for university education, Cecil’s father, the Reverend Francis
William Rhodes, decided that his uneducated son must go and
live in one of Great Britain’s colonies. This is how the famous
Rhodes landed in what is today known as South Africa.
The personal life of Rhodes in South Africa epitomised the
character of the EEE in our country.
Rhodes started out as an uneducated young Englishman. In the
1870s, he joined the chaotic diamond diggers in Kimberly, using
hand hoes and other obsolescent digging instruments.
After breathing the dust of Kimberley, he went back to school
and acquired a degree at Oxford University.
From someone who was physically digging for diamonds in
Kimberly, Rhodes, together with his friends and countrymen
such as Charles Rudd, Barney Barnato, Joseph Robinson, Alfred
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Beit and others, created what we now call the South African
mining industry.
Until recently, mining in South Africa was virtually an exclusive
preserve of the English. They used it to enrich themselves as a
group, and to keep Afrikaners and Blacks on the lower rungs of
the economic ladder.
Two things have facilitated the success of the English in their
EEE scheme: productive work and education. This was done in
the context of a succession of supportiv H