My earliest memory of the Rand Club was provided in 1980 when my boss, our feisty financial editor Penelope Gracie, refused to attend a meeting as the rules demanded she could only enter through a side door. Almost a century after its 1886 founding, women had been granted access to the Club, but definitely not through the front entrance. With such archaic rules, the once exclusively white Anglo Saxon male club has been on borrowed time since the Apartheid Regime ended in 1994. But it has managed to keep going, barely, though a post-1994 transformation policy spearheaded by the aggressive recruitment of black and female members. A terminal challenge, however, was the corporate exodus from downtown Johannesburg top Rosebank and Sandton. The Rand Club, at 33 Loveday Street, was created by a group of Rand Lords including Cecil John Rhodes, Hans Sauer and Hermann Eckstein, whose portraits still dominated the historic wall coverings last time I visited some years ago. The impressive building, which wouldn’t be out of place among the clubs in London’s Mayfair, was constructed in 1904. It was refurbished after a fire 10 years ago, suggesting that even while on life support, there were some who believed it could survive. Maybe it will, but in a very different location. – Alec HoggÂ
by Ed Cropley
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 1 (Reuters) – After more than a century as an oasis of Victorian grandeur and increasingly anachronistic monument to British imperialism in the heart of South Africa’s biggest city, Johannesburg’s Rand Club is closing its doors.
Founded by British colonialist and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes in 1887, the year after the gold rush city came into being, the club served as the watering hole of South Africa’s richest and most powerful men during most of the 20th century.
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, it grudgingly went with the times, admitting blacks and women even though the stuffed animals and portraits of exclusively white ‘Rand Lords’ adorning its walls attested to the old South Africa that was meant to have been buried with apartheid.
However, the writing was on the wall with the exodus of big banks and law firms from downtown Johannesburg during the 1990s as violent crime soared and the richest gold mines in human history started to run dry.
With Rhodes now widely despised in South Africa as a megalomaniac and racist – his statue was removed from the University of Cape Town this year and another was defaced with an angle grinder – the club was never going to recapture its former glory.
“The demographics have changed,” said general manager Dave Lobban, a former apartheid secret policeman whose first job at the Rand Club in the late 1990s was as a somewhat improbable flower-arranger.
“Everybody has moved out, and the executives that are still around are having to work every hour that God sends.”
The ornate four-storey Victorian building, home to what is said to be the longest bar in Africa at 103 feet (31 metres), is to undergo a year-long facelift, after which it will reopen, probably as part-club, part-hotel, Lobban said.
However, nothing of historical value is being sold or thrown away, from Zulu spears thrown on the battlefields of Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift to the dead members’ billiard cues that still stand, by long-standing tradition, in racks in the basement.
“The Club has been running so long but it can’t carry on as it is. It will be reopened, but it will be a different place,” Lobban said. “But the billiard queues will still be there. That’s Club rules.”
