Leon Louw was born in the town of Krugersdorp on 18 March 1948 to a conservative Afrikaner family. After his mother died in his infancy, he was raised by relatives in Potchefstroom, where he attended preschool and started primary school. When his father remarried, he was moved to the new family home in Johannesburg where he completed primary school and attended secondary school. After matriculating, he studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand, after which he completed his BJuris degree through the University of South Africa whilst serving legal articles at a law firm. At university, he became a Marxist and anti-apartheid activist. He studied the major works of Marx and other communist writers. As an activist participating in anti-apartheid demonstrations and underground meetings he often found himself at odds with the law and the police. He went on to work with Winnie Mandela, and other anti-apartheid leaders, and did courier work for the ANC.
Activism
Louw experienced a “philosophical shift” during his early twenties when he was an article clerk at one of South Africa’s leading law firms. His activist life took a new turn due to an event that changed his life and led ultimately to the work he does now: Louw asked his employer to investigate the plight of informal black traders and to provide them with legal defence. After telling him that it was “none of their business”, his employer reluctantly allowed Louw to work pro bono for illegal street vendors, taxi operators and cottage industries. It was at this point that Louw first found himself questioning Marxism, especially its anti-business and anti-individual liberty dogma, which he would later abandon, by virtue of what he observed “in the real world”, as he puts it, and under the influence of a colleague who introduced him to Ayn Rand’s Objectivistphilosophy. In defence of informal traders, Louw began to work with a trade unionist from the National Union of Mineworkers, Laurence Mavundla, who, like Louw, had been enraged by the notorious “Granny Moyo” incident – she died due to head injuries suffered when tossed into a police van – and other atrocities perpetrated against what Louw saw as aspirant black capitalists. He teamed up with Mavundla’s African Chamber of Hawkers and Informal Businesses, and worked with others in the black community for the liberation of black taxi operators, peasant farmers and informal contractors. His work entailed representing street vendors in court cases, reclaiming their confiscated merchandise, seeking injunctions against illegal raids, arrests and brutality, confronting and obstructing police who were harassing small enterprise owners, and organising or joining protest action. A widely used online biography describes Louw's past and present activism as follows: In 1977, Louw was the Legal Manager at the Association of Chambers of Commerce of South Africa. Louw was one of the co-founders of the Free Market Foundation of Southern Africa in 1975, and is currently the Executive Director of the organisation. He often represents the FMF in print and broadcast media, and at FMF events. In March 1981, Louw said of affirmative action: In the early 1980s, Louw was the Chairman of the Commission of Inquiry into Ciskei Economic Policy. In 1987, at a conference of the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa in Port Elizabeth, Louw said that the struggle against apartheid was about winning freedom, not power, for black South Africans, and that whites were concerned that a black government would be coercive. He argued that democracy and economic freedom were interdependent concepts which cannot exist in each other's absence. In the same year, at a symposium in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, Louw said that a peaceful solution to apartheid South Africa's race conflict would be to include blacks in the freedoms whites had until that point enjoyed. Whites, on the other hand, would require security of their already-existing freedoms, against a potentially-vengeful black government. Above all, the solution must include "the abolition of apartheid, full equality before the law and citizenship for all". Despite Louw’s activism he never joined any political organisation. His low-level courier work for the ANC, and general political networking, involved communicating between exiled structures of the organisation and the underground movement in South Africa. He met regularly with people in other political formations including AZAPO, the Pan Africanist Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. He was chairman of one of South Africa’s illegal non-racial schools, the Woodmead Montessori Primary School, which was attended inter alia by his children and by Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s grand-daughter Zoleka, who became a close school friend of his daughter, Camilla. Through the school, his activism and one of his books endorsed by Ms Mandela, he and his wife, Frances Kendall, befriended the Mandela family. They helped Winnie Mandela in her work to support families of detainees, and Ms Mandela arranged daily transport from the distant Soweto to their school for her granddaughter and a dozen or so other Soweto children. Louw met and got to know many South African and foreign political, business and intellectual luminaries, including Thabo Mbeki, his father Govan Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, FW de Klerk, Dr Anton Rupert, Harry Oppenheimer, Clem Sunter, Marinus Wiechers, Dr Sam Motsuenyane, Helen Suzman, Alan Paton, Nthato Motlana, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Chief Buthelezi, Dirk Hertzog, Jan S Marais, Andreas Wassenaar, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, Hendrik Verwoed Jr, Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow Coretta Scott King, Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan, Israel Kirzner, Margaret Thatcher, and Walter E. Williams amongst many others.
Books
Louw co-authored with his wife Frances Kendall two best-selling books: South Africa, the Solution and Let the People Govern. He ghost-wrote a novel set in India, The Deal Maker, and co-authored Towards Freehold - Options for Land and Development, and McGregor’s Economic Alternatives. He has contributions in many publications, and wrote Habits of Highly Effective Countries, which is a statistical and empirical analysis of the characteristics associated with countries considered “winners” and “losers”.
Louw and the Free Market Foundation were major contributors to the CODESA process in which the current democratic constitution of South Africa was negotiated. He was also the convenor of what became known as the “business caucus”, through which business leaders negotiated successfully for the inclusion of property rights in the Bill of Rights. He gave evidence on many occasions to various CODESA and, subsequently, Parliamentary constitutional committees. He was told years later by one of the secretaries that these submissions generated a great deal of interest and made a significant contribution to the inclusion of various provisions. The FMF’s submissions contributed, for instance, to the devolution of exclusive powers to local and regional tiers of government, the inclusion in the limitation clause of the requirement that limitations of rights must be “justifiable in an open and democratic”, and the inclusion of the administrative justice clause, the freedom of trade clause, and the rule of law as a justiciable foundational provision in the first section of the Constitution.
Louw is married to Frances Kendall and has three daughters, Justine, Camilla and Katherine. His current interests, recreations and hobbies include philosophy, classical music, travel, the outdoors, chess, jogging, cycling and gym.
