Douw Steyn: insurance mogul, Madiba’s facilitator

Douw Steyn, who has died at 72, was famous for starting Auto & General in 1985 and being fabulously wealthy. But above all he was famous for being the friend and benefactor of Nelson Mandela, who showed his appreciation by stating that if it wasn’t for businessmen like Steyn apartheid would not have been defeated.

Steyn, whose greatest admirer was the then president of the apartheid regime FW de Klerk, who extolled him as “an entrepreneur par excellence”, accomplished many notable things such as disrupting the insurance establishment, building Steyn City and constructing the most expensive house in Johannesburg, the R250m Palazzo Steyn with garage space for his 33 sports and vintage cars, which was the typically ostentatious centrepiece of his eponymous  R6bn 2,000 acre luxury residential estate between Johannesburg and Pretoria.

But being in the frontline of the anti-apartheid struggle was not one of them.

Steyn, remembered as a bit of loner, was a visionary who was intensely goal-driven.

In 1992 he asked Dick Enthoven, multi-billionaire owner of Hollard Insurance, to arrange a meeting with former leader of the official opposition, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, who had left parliament in 1986, started the Institute for a Democratic South Africa and begun groundbreaking meetings with banned leaders of the ANC in exile, most memorably in Dakar in 1987.

In his book, The Other Side of History, Slabbert, who fondly imagined that Steyn wanted to offer cash-strapped Idasa financial support to continue its vital democracy project, wrote that in early 1992 he met at his request the somewhat reclusive Steyn “in his enormous (Saxonwold) house, sitting all alone.  He said, ‘Van Zyl, this house is yours to use as you see fit: meetings, workshops, accommodation, etc. All I ask in return is that you introduce me to this new lot’.”

Van Zyl, this house is yours to use as you see fit: meetings, workshops, accommodation, etc. All I ask in return is that you introduce me to this new lot’.

Slabbert invited him to a meeting at Cambridge University in the UK where he introduced him to Thabo Mbeki "and some other ANC heavies".

That, wrote Slabbert, was pretty much the last he saw of, or heard from, the man who had been so eager to meet him.

The next he heard was that Mandela had left Winnie Mandela and moved into Steyn’s mansion where “he was pampered and looked after” and wrote Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela moved out when he became president and the house became the iconic Saxon Hotel much patronised by the rich, famous and well connected.

At its launch in 2000, wrote Slabbert, “Mandela made the speech and his opening line was: ‘It is because of businessmen like Douw Steyn that apartheid came to its knees’. I quietly left. Enough said.”

Slabbert said he had observed with “fascination and  sometimes bewilderment” how BEE had evolved and penetrated South African corporate life.

“Initially it was as crude as Douw Steyn’s request to introduce him to ‘the new lot’. It was as simple as ‘introduce me to a Black with some serious political connections and we can do business’.”

Steyn created a private game reserve in the Waterberg called Shambala, with a dedicated villa for Mandela’s exclusive use where he could enjoy peace and quiet away from the pressures of public life while hosting, at Steyn’s expense and mostly in his absence, international celebrities, politicians and would-be business donors such as Heinz baked bean king and future 31% owner of the Argus Group, Tony O’Reilly, who gave him $100,000.

Born in Brits in the North West in 1952 to parents who were not well off, Steyn became adept at magic tricks and put on shows to earn pocket money. After school he worked as a train conductor to finance his studies at Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg), dropped out, got a Siemens bursary to study business administration in Germany, then joined his father’s real estate business where he decided that finding new ways to sell insurance was the future.

After picking up some ideas in the US he bought a bankrupt insurance company, struck a deal with creditors, renamed it Auto & General and introduced innovations such as telemarketing and an in-house panel beating service for motor vehicle insurance clients. It took off and he started BGL Group in the UK in 1992 which grew into a global business operating across seven countries.

According to the Sunday Times Rich list for 2024 he was the 58th wealthiest person in the UK with a net worth of £3bn.

He died after a long illness and is survived by his wife Carolyn and three children.