Douw Steyn, South African tycoon and friend of Mandela, dies at 72

South African business is poorer this week for the passing of larger-than-life billionaire and philanthropist Douw Steyn, whose eye for the limelight was as bright as his once flame-red hair. He died on February 4, aged 72, after a life of building companies, lavish parties, and interactions with Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson.

Steyn may have been secretive about his private life, but was never afraid to splash out in public. He spent his working life carving out an international name in the insurance business with the massive companies he founded – Auto & General and BGL Insurance.

He always had an eye on the future and was among the first to modernise his insurance business with call centres and telesales. Another innovation was monthly policies covering both home and car, which proved hugely successful.

When it was time to expand into the UK, Australia and Turkey, Steyn’s operations delivered on their multi-national potential.

“Douw was a leading visionary and exceptional businessman with skills unmatched today,” says Neil Gopul, the CEO of the South African Property Owners Association.

Friendship with Mandela

Steyn began life as an entrepreneur in 1975, when he set up Steyn’s Insurance Brokers on the way to a net worth, calculated by the Sunday Times Rich List in 2021, of more than £2bn ($2.49bn). He started his working life as a humble quantity surveyor at Eskom’s Megawatt Park headquarters in Johannesburg.

Steyn was one of the first of the business elite to open up to president-in-waiting Nelson Mandela after his release. Many of the conservative white business old guard saw Mandela as a terrorist who would wreck the economy. Steyn, on the other hand, saw the future: a pragmatic leader running a mixed economy nurtured by the optimistic glow of the Rainbow Nation.

When Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison, near Cape Town, in February 1990, Steyn offered his friend a six month stay at the family home in the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Saxonwold. It was here that Mandela edited much of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, some of which had once been smuggled out of prison on toilet paper.

In 1992, Steyn invited Mandela back as the future president navigated his complicated and painful separation from his wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

During these years of friendship, Mandela carried an ivory walking stick, a present from Steyn, at his side.

In 2001, Steyn bought a 10,000 hectare plot in the country’s northern Limpopo Province and poured millions into building the Nelson Mandela Centre for Reconciliation, which the president used as a retreat.

“Steyn was a larger than life character and someone that Madiba (Mandela) regarded as a friend…and over the next two decades Madiba frequently turned to Douw when he needed spaces for retreat or support for his projects.” said the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Showbiz sparkle

Showbiz, as well as politics, counted Steyn as a friend. He invited talk show queen Oprah Winfrey to an elephant safari in South Africa; legend has it that she fell from an elephant on the trip, but was unharmed.

When his young son, TJ Steyn, celebrated a birthday in the late 1990s, Steyn persuaded Michael Jackson to take the boy sweet shopping in Sun City.

“I can still remember security holding back the crowds as the two of us walked around the shop picking up sweets. It was unreal ” TJ once told me at a meeting in the Saxon Hotel in Johannesburg.

TJ later set up the successful Steyn Entertainment, which, among other projects, runs Rocking the Daisies, a Cape Town music and lifestyle festival.

Unwavering support for South Africa

But it was his business success for which Douw Steyn will best be remembered. A monument to Steyn’s stellar career as a shrewd entrepreneur stands in bricks and mortar on the fringes of Johannesburg.

Steyn City – a 2,200 hectare luxury private residential estate north of Lanseria Airport – cost an estimated R10 billion in 2015 ($535m) at a time when the South African economy was shaky. The project created an estimated 28,000 jobs in the construction phase at a time of chronic unemployment.

That was of a piece with Steyn’s unwavering support for South Africa. He poured millions into charities, including feeding schemes for the country’s townships. He also pledged an estimated R370 million ($19m) for relief efforts for South Africa in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A flamboyant billionaire with a strong claim to being a patriot and philanthropist, business in South Africa will be a lot duller without Douw Steyn.