One morning in the mid-1990s, Mary Oppenheimer Slack woke up and decided she wanted her own stud farm.
That is roughly how she tells it, with a casualness that belies the scale of what she was about to build. She was already the daughter of Harry Frederick Oppenheimer, chairman of Anglo American and De Beers, and the heir to one of the largest private fortunes in African history. She had worked in arts administration, chaired charitable foundations, and moved through Johannesburg's elite cultural circles for decades. But horses were what she was really about, and she had been circling the idea of a thoroughbred breeding operation long enough. She made the call. The result, a quarter century later, is Wilgerbosdrift Stud in Piketberg, one of South Africa's most decorated breeding operations and the base from which she has pursued her life's deepest passion with the same rigour her father brought to diamonds and copper.
Born into royalty, obsessed with horses
