Leon Louw is a South African intellectual, author, speaker and policy advisor. He is the cofounder and former executive director of the Free Market Foundation, a nonprofit organisation. He is a regularly featured speaker and writer in South African and international media. He 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.
Early life 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 (1965–1968), after which he completed his BJuris (1969–70) 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.
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. He saw the police harass and violently arrest an old black woman who was selling fruit on the street. He went to the police station to secure her release but he realized she had probably lost everything she had. The incident led him to reconsider his communist leanings:I then pondered; I thought, but hold on a sec, if I’m a communist, I don’t want her to be free to trade. It should be banned. Yet, this was such an outrageous, offensive thing to see and it just went against every sinew in my body and that caused me to ponder. And then I thought, well, she’s doing no harm. She should be free to trade with any willing, bypassing consumer. And then I thought, well, you know, is the same true of a bank? Is the same true of Microsoft to multinationals? And I thought, well, why not? Why shouldn’t everyone enjoy precisely the same freedom of enterprise as she should? 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, 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 Objectivist philosophy. In defence of informal traders, Louw began to work with a trade unionist from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), 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 violence perpetrated against what Louw saw as aspirant black capitalists. He teamed up with Mavundla's African Chamber of Hawkers and Informal Businesses (ACHIB), and worked with others in the black community for 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. 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 (FMF) in 1975 and served for many years as its executive director and the face of the organisation. After a "bitter and public split" with the board of directors, he resigned in 2022. In 2023 he formed a new pro-market policy institute, the Freedom Foundation. In March 1981, Louw said of affirmative action:
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