Martin Vander Weyer’s thoughts on the world of business
Shell and Barclays were the two highest-profile British companies in South Africa during the apartheid era. Both pursued non- racial business practices as far as they could, but both endured years of disrupted shareholder meetings and flak from the student Left. Shell stuck it out — and shortly after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela declared, ‘We’re glad you stayed.’ Barclays bowed to the protesters and abandoned its network of 900 branches in 1986; when the bank returned in 1995 to open one office in Johannesburg, Mandela told the men from Lombard Street, ‘You should never have sold.’ British companies operating in Zimbabwe today (including Barclays, which has been there since 1912) must be confused as to the right thing to do: the Prime Minister has advised them to ‘reconsider’; Lord Malloch-Brown, his minister for Africa, has suggested they might be pressed to leave as part of tougher sanctions against Mugabe; the Foreign Office has been quietly advising them to stay.
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