ANGLO AMERICAN CORPORATION 95
from
the direct ownership of mineral and other properties, there are
indirect interests in concerns administered by other groups in
gold-mining and other activities, as well as direct interests in some
of these other groups themselves. Moreover, neither the financial nor
the production statistics can throw any light upon two of the most
important aspects of the activities of the group—the provision of the
administrative and technical services needed and the incessant search
for new sources of supply and the investigation of new propositions.
The
basic requirements for expansion can be stated succinctly enough: they
were summed up by Ernest Oppenheimer himself in his 1954 address to the
shareholders of the Anglo American Corporation— 'opportunity . . .
capital, enterprise and courage'. He himself, in that address, drew
attention to the change which had taken place, in the fifty years since
he had been in South Africa, in the conditions of capital supply:
developing world conditions had meant that 'much less overseas capital
for the development of the new countries of Southern Africa is
available from private sources'. It is a tribute to his eminence in the
world of enterprise and to the prestige of the group which he
controlled that, in spite of all the difficulties, it was possible to
raise, between 1946 and 1953, an aggregate of f 48-3 million for the
companies of the Anglo American Corporation Group in the Union and the
Federation, nor do these figures include 'the amounts that have been
allocated from America to finance certain developments in the Rhodesian
Copperbelt on the basis of repayment in metal'.
But
it was not only the conditions of capital supply which were affected by
world events between 1917 and 1957. It is not an exaggeration to say
that capitalistic enterprise was required in that time-period to adapt
itself to circumstances which, if not altogether novel in kind, were certainly altogether unique in scale, while their impact effect was the more considerable in that there was at times an accumulation of adverse circumstances.
Two
great wars with their aftermath of inflation and currency
disorganization, a great depression which also led to currency
disorganization, exchange controls and tariff manipulations and to
violent changes in the price levels of such 'sensitive' commodities as
copper, lead and zinc, as well as of a luxury 'commodity' such as
diamonds, the 'dishoarding' of diamonds due to a considerable volume of
sales by the Russian Soviet regime and the emigre Russian
aristocracy—all these were events which coincided in time with new
discoveries of diamond fields and the opening up of a new copper-field
