Africa: The New Rhodes

Just when many companies are thinking of pulling out of troubled Africa, one is busily building a business empire as big as any since the heyday of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. The new African giant is Lonrho, Ltd., a 55-year-old London-based firm that until 1961 seemed content to run its ranching and mining interests in Rhodesia. Since then, it has been gobbling up enterprises and creating new ones in seven south-central African nations, and it is hungrily casting about for more. Last week Lonrho began operating a 187-mile, $11.2 million pipeline that it built through the jungle to funnel crude oil from the Mozambique port of Beira to a new Rhodesian refinery that will supply the growing markets in Rhodesia and Zambia.

Speculation & Sisal. Lonrho now controls assets worth more than $56 million, employs 30,000 Africans and 2,000 whites in countries that range the political and racial spectrum from apartheid South Africa to black nationalist Zambia. Its $42 million in annual sales comes from a vast array of enterprises: mining projects and ranching in Rhodesia, land speculation in Swaziland, forestry and the new pipeline in Mozambique, sugar and tea plantations in Malawi, coal mining in South Africa, sisal plantations in Tanzania and breweries, newspapers and prospecting rights in Zambia. Lonrho is also planning an $11 million fertilizer plant in Rhodesia, has proposed and is promoting what could be its biggest venture yet: a $140 million railroad linking Zambia and Tanzania.

The man behind Lonrho’s restless expansion is Roland (“Tiny”) Rowland, 46, a 180-lb. six-footer who began his career as a porter in a London railway station, emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1948 and built a fortune from a Mercedes franchise and mineral speculation. In 1961 he traded his motor and mining assets for 30% of the stock of Lonrho, became a joint managing director with Chairman Alan Ball. Ever since, he has been flying around Africa in a twin-engine Beechcraft, persuading the established and emerging nations to do business with Lonrho, acquiring such diverse enterprises as the daily Zambia Times and Chibuku beer. His success has brought Rowland a Rhodesian maize-and-cattle ranch of his own and a creeper-covered English mansion in the exclusive Salisbury suburb of Highlands.

Sensitivity & Smiles. Rowland’s continent-sized expansion of Lonrho has created the inevitable comparisons between him and Empire Builder Rhodes, whose goal it was to bring all Africa under British domination. Although he is an admirer of Rhodes, Rowland makes it clear to Africa’s sensitive new leaders that he craves only a business empire. “I’m not at all interested in politics,” he says, “only in doing business.” He has associated himself with Black Africa’s economic aspirations, underwritten nationalistic-development schemes. During Malawi’s independence celebrations last July, Rowland smiled tolerantly from his dignitary’s seat while Prime Minister H. Kamuzu Banda roared that “all businessmen are crooks.” Rowland could afford to smile. Malawi is dependent on railway and lake transportation systems that are controlled by Lonrho, Ltd.