♦ I ♦
T
he world of Africa is
changing fast, so fast indeed that much which could be taken for
granted when work on this book began in 1958 has already ceased to have
significance. Sir Ernest Oppenheimcr died on 25 November 1957 in his
seventy-eighth year. He had become, and was universally recognized to
have become, a world figure: the acknowledged saviour of the diamond
industry; the leader and spokesman of the South African mining world,
the creator and head of its greatest mining house. He had fought the
battles of the mining industry in the South African legislature: he
was, in the field of public service, an innovator and a generous
benefactor to causes he held dear. The following chapters tell, in
considerable detail and largely from hitherto unpublished and
unutilized materials, the full story of his efforts and his
achievements. Such detailed treatment is necessary if full justice is
to be done to the achievement and also to meet the requirements of
historical accuracy. But it seems fitting, also, to preface this full
study by a summing-up, in terms not only of the personal qualities of
the man himself, but in the light of the political and historical
background and of the deeper issues which were involved, economic and
technological alike.
♦ II ♦
Ernest
Oppenheimer's business life covered a span of sixty-one years: he began
at the bottom of the ladder at the age of 16 in 1896 and he died, still
immersed in affairs, in 1957. His active life thus coincided with a
series of changes, political and economic, of a very profound kind. The
urgency of the problems with which the men and women of the present
generation have to deal, which flow from the technological and
political changes induced for the greater part—but only for the greater
part—by the Second World War, has, among other things,
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