It is worth listening closely when Harry Oppenheimer speaks. Not only does the company he chairs – the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa – overlap with every other major mineral producer in the southern half of that continent, including de Beers…but his is a voice raised against the South African government’s policy of Apartheid…

“One thing at least seems clear”, he said, “nowhere can a stable social order be established in an environment of poverty. Government policies which aim at social and racial solutions at the cost of economic development are sure to be self-defeating”.