23 Facts About Leon Louw

Leon Louw is a South African intellectual, author, speaker and policy advisor.

Leon Louw is the cofounder and former executive director of the Free Market Foundation, a nonprofit organisation ranked at number 123 in a CEOWorld's 2017 list of the most influential think-tanks in the world.

Leon Louw is a regularly featured speaker and writer in South African and international media.

Leon Louw has addressed many prominent organisations, including the US Congress hearings on apartheid, the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the Hoover Institute, and the United Nations.

Leon Louw was born in the town of Krugersdorp on 18 March 1948 to a conservative Afrikaner family.

Leon Louw studied the major works of Marx and other communist writers.

Leon Louw saw the police harass and violently arrest an old black woman who was selling fruit on the street.

Leon Louw went to the police station to secure her release but he realized she had probably lost everything she had.

Leon Louw should be free to trade with any willing, bypassing consumer.

Leon Louw asked his employer to investigate the plight of informal black traders and to provide them with legal defence.

Leon Louw teamed up with Mavundla's African Chamber of Hawkers and Informal Businesses, and worked with others in the black community for black taxi operators, peasant farmers and informal contractors.

Leon Louw's 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.

In 1977, Leon Louw was the Legal Manager at the Association of Chambers of Commerce of South Africa.

Leon Louw was one of the co-founders of the Free Market Foundation of Southern Africa in 1975 and served for many years as its executive director and the face of the organisation.

In 1987, at a conference of the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa in Port Elizabeth, Leon 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.

Leon Louw argued that democracy and economic freedom were interdependent concepts which cannot exist in each other's absence.

Leon Louw was involved communicating between exiled structures of the organisation and the underground movement in South Africa.

Leon Louw met regularly with people in other political formations including AZAPO, the Pan Africanist Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party.

Leon Louw 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 granddaughter Zoleka, who became a close school friend of Louw's daughter Camilla.

Leon Louw co-authored with his wife Frances Kendall two books: South Africa, the Solution and Let the People Govern.

Leon Louw 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".

Leon Louw gave evidence on many occasions to various CODESA and, subsequently, Parliamentary constitutional committees.

Leon Louw is married to Frances Kendall and has three daughters, Justine, Camilla and Katherine.