Anton Rupert

Died: 19 January, 2006, in Stellenbosch, South Africa, aged 89.

ANTON Rupert was a pioneer Afrikaner billionaire who built a 20 billion fortune from an initial investment of 10 in 1941.

Rupert, who in death has been showered with plaudits from the white and black South African establishment alike, was a man of contradictions who regularly featured in the Forbes list of the world's 500 wealthiest people.

He was an extremely tough and hard businessman who, nevertheless, had exquisite manners and was a dedicated philanthropist, financing, for example, the flying doctor service in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho.

He was an Afrikaner nationalist who succeeded at a time when the South African business community was predominantly English or Jewish of Russian origin. He opposed the harshness of apartheid, clashing fiercely with its ideological architect Hendrik Verwoerd, but did not believe in one man-one vote. One of his favourite dicta was: "What is really needed is one man, one job. If everybody can have a job, then everybody can have the vote. But if you have half the people out of work then I start worrying." When he died, South Africa's unemployment rate stood at 40 per cent. Rupert also liked to warn: "If the black man does not eat, the white man does not sleep."

Nevertheless, he and Nelson Mandela, who almost went to the gallows for his belief in one man-one vote, became close friends.

Although a consummate businessman, he was a dedicated environmentalist and his most lasting legacy may be as the co-founder with Mandela of the Peace Parks Foundation. The vision of peace parks is to create vast biodiversity wildernesses across difficult international frontiers which, in turn, lead to partial surrender of sovereignty and improvement of relations between nations.

Several peace parks have been created along South Africa's borders, including the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, which encompasses the Kruger Park and which, at an eventual 38,000 square miles, will be greater in area than Scotland. On the establishment of the foundation with Rupert, Mr Mandela said: "We face the prospect of conflict on a world scale. The world can learn from us how to use our natural heritage in the form of peace parks and similar projects to the benefit of all."

Despite a reputation as a philanthropist, the fact is that Rupert's fortune was built on a product now internationally reviled as a killer - cigarettes. Dunhill, Peter Stuyvesant and Rothmans were among the brands he eventually created or bought, and he held a 19 per cent stake in British American Tobacco, which earned his companies nearly half a billion pounds each year. An innovator, he came up with brand new ideas - a king-size filter-tipped cigarette; the world's first "luxury length" cigarette and the first mentholated filter-tipped cigarette.

His empire spread beyond South Africa. His offshore enterprises were concentrated in the Swiss-based company Richemont, which produced a wide range of luxury goods, including Cartier, Piaget and Baume & Mercier watches, the exquisite diamond, emerald, sapphire and ruby creations of Van Cleef and Arpels, and the upmarket clothing Purdey, Old England and Chlo companies.

Rupert, the son of a solicitor, was born in the small town of Graaff-Reinet, in South Africa's semi-desert Karoo. He wanted to be a doctor, but his parents could not afford the necessary fees and he instead completed a degree in chemistry at the University of Pretoria. On graduating, he resisted entering Afrikaner politics.

A child of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he noted cynically that the poor did not stop smoking or drinking. If anything, they smoked and drank more. So, in 1941, he bought a bankrupt tobacco company and began churning out pipe tobacco and snuff, helped by his friend Yusuf Cachalia, an anti-apartheid activist, who set up a network of Indian retailers for the future billionaire. He expanded into alcohol, creating the best-selling brandy in South African history. In 1953, he made the biggest gamble of his career, giving Sydney Rothman, the London owner of Rothmans of Pall Mall, a take-it-or-leave-it offer of 750,000 for the tobacco company. There was only one snag. Rupert had only 50,000. He rushed back to South Africa and pleaded with an insurance company to lend him 700,000. The money arrived in London with ten minutes to spare before the deal became dead - and Rupert had acquired the rock on which he would diversify into banking, mining, luxury goods, insurance, private health provision and, latterly, mobile-phone technology.

He was an expert at branding. His Richemont website is exquisitely designed. He created the Peter Stuyvesant cigarette and made it an international money-spinner with the marketing slogan: "The international passport to smoking pleasure". To the end, Rupert himself puffed 12 to 20 Peter Stuyvesant Extra Mild a day.

Rupert poured money into the preservation of Afrikaner culture, although at the height of apartheid, leading Afrikaners denounced him as a "kaffirboetie", literally a "n****r lover," and attacked him in parliament.

He was an intensely private man who lived unostentatiously in the same house in the Cape university town of Stellenbosch for 55 years.

His wife, Huberte, whom he met at Pretoria University and married in 1940, died last year. He is survived by his son Johann, who runs the Ruperts' Rembrandt and Richemont businesses, and a daughter, Hanneli. Another son, Anthonij, died four years ago.