There is a detail from South Africa’s corporate history that deserves far greater attention than it receives — and it belongs, fittingly, at the beginning of this story. In the mid-1980s, as apartheid entered its final phase and pressure mounted both domestically and internationally, Anglo-American, the most powerful mining conglomerate in the country at the time,did not simply wait for history to unfold. It prepared for it. Under the leadership of its chairman Gavin Relly, and driven by executive Clem Sunter, the company developed a series of scenario-planning models that would later become widely known as the “High Road” and the “Low Road”. The Low Road envisioned a future in which minority rule clung to power, plunging the country into conflict and economic collapse. The High Road imagined a negotiated transition to democracy and South Africa’s reintegration into the global economy.
These were not abstract exercises. Sunter presented these scenarios to the cabinet of F. W. de Klerk and engaged, shortly before his release, with Nelson Mandela. By the early 1990s, the Montfleur Scenario Exercise had expanded this work, bringing together political leaders, business figures, trade unionists and intellectuals to map the country’s possible futures. Business, in other words, had done its arithmetic long before the negotiations began. It had examined the full range of outcomes, calculated what would need to be conceded to preserve the system, and quietly determined that what it was willing to offer would be only a fraction of what it possessed. That is the context—deliberate, calculated, and historically documented—in which one must understand a striking insight from Steven Friedman.
Slaves made a deal with their masters!
It is an image that is difficult to shake: think about it, slaves seated at a table, negotiating with their masters. The force of that idea became clearer to me through an entirely ordinary, domestic experience. Recently, I had to carry out some maintenance on my house. There were cracked tiles, peeling paint, and a roof beginning to yield to the Johannesburg rains. I sat down and worked through the costs — tiles, waterproofing, sealant, labour — and arrived at a figure of roughly R10,000. Enough to see the house safely through winter. But there was something I did not say aloud at the time. I could afford R10,000 precisely because I had considerably more than R10,000. My willingness to spend that amount rested on a quiet certainty: that doing so would not destabilise me. The apparent generosity of the gesture — if it can even be called that — was entirely relative to what remained unseen.
That small moment stayed with me long after the last tile had been laid. This moment serves, in its own quiet way, as a precise metaphor for how inequality in South Africa was constructed—and why, thirty years into democracy, it persists. As liberation became inevitable, those who controlled economic power did not simply yield. They prepared. They calculated, with care, how much they were willing to place on the table—and they ensured that what they offered would not threaten what they intended to keep. Those who came to sit across from them arrived from an entirely different position. They had been worn down by decades of deliberate exclusion. Many were encountering, for the first time, the full material weight of what had long been denied to them. The table was not merely inviting; it was overwhelming. So, understandably, the instinct was to sit at the table and partake in what had always been withheld.
This is not a moral judgement on those who negotiated the transition. It is an observation about power, context and human psychology. When a door has been closed to you for a lifetime, your first impulse when it opens is not to question the architecture of the room. It is to step inside. Yet the room — and the table within it — had already been designed. This is the foundation of Friedman’s central argument: that South Africa is divided not simply by race or class, but by a more enduring distinction between insiders and outsiders. Insiders are those connected to the formal economy – earning, investing, and accumulating. Outsiders remain structurally excluded from these systems.
Under apartheid, this divide was explicitly racial. Today, it is formally economic, though still deeply shaped by the racial architecture of the past. What is striking is not only that the divide persists but also that the original settlement produced a particular kind of insider class — one that inherited access to the economy but not necessarily the freedom to reimagine it. The children of that transition now manage what was conceded, often guided by a psychological inheritance shaped by scarcity, exclusion and the urgency to secure what had previously been denied.
Human development research consistently shows that early childhood — those formative years between birth and roughly seven — leaves a lasting imprint. Values, anxieties and assumptions about the world are absorbed long before they are consciously examined. A child raised in an environment defined by exclusion and precarity does not simply shed those conditions when circumstances improve. The imprint remains, often subtly shaping decisions about risk, wealth and belonging. This is part of the reason inequality proves so stubborn. It is not sustained by policies alone but by deeply embedded patterns of thought and behaviour.
It is reinforced, too, by the values that dominate public life. Worth continues to be measured in terms of wealth, consumption and visible success. The priorities of society reflect the interests of insiders. When water shortages affect suburban households, the response is swift and urgent. When similar or worse conditions persist in townships and rural areas, they often receive less attention. Even the proposed solutions often reproduce the problem. There is near-universal agreement that formal employment is the primary path out of inequality. Yet formal employment is shrinking globally, including in South Africa. Meanwhile, millions sustain themselves through informal economic activity that is dynamic, adaptive and resilient.
Too often, corporate social investment programmes are designed to “formalise” these livelihoods, rather than to support and strengthen them on their own terms. Similarly, social grants are frequently dismissed as fostering dependency. Yet evidence consistently shows that they stimulate local economies and enable recipients to pursue additional sources of income. Properly understood, they are not a burden but a foundation. What Friedman ultimately calls for is not incremental reform, but a shift in imagination — a willingness to confront the structural limits embedded in the original settlement.
Those who came to the negotiating table with power understood something fundamental: you can only give away what you are prepared to lose. What was offered was carefully calibrated. It was enough to secure transition, but not enough to fundamentally redistribute power. Thirty years later, South Africa remains shaped by that calculation. The challenge now is not simply to do more within the existing framework but to question the framework itself. The corporate social investment sector, along with anyone committed to dismantling inequality, faces the task of not only increasing outputs but also expanding participation, reducing exclusion, and deliberately reshaping the underlying architecture of the economy. Because, in the end, the work required is not cosmetic. The renovation goes far deeper than the tiles.
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