Obituary: Abe Krok: seller of skin lighteners and builder of Apartheid Museum

ABE Krok, who has died in Joburg at the age of 83, made a fortune riding the apartheid wave - and when it ended he built a museum to showcase its horrors.

He built a business empire with his twin brother, Solly, on the back of huge profits they made manufacturing and selling skin-lightening cream to black South Africans during apartheid.

For a while it was estimated one in three black women in South Africa used the Krok brothers' SuperRose complexion cream, which they had concocted in their mother's kitchen. So popular was it that they manufactured a slightly stronger version for black men under the He Man label.

The creams contained an ingredient called hydroquinone, which permanently disfigured the skin. Mounting public pressure eventually led to a government notice banning them in 1987.

The Krok brothers fought the ban successfully and were allowed to continue selling their creams until the ban was finally implemented in 1990. Then hydroquinone was found to be carcinogenic and banned by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The Kroks sold their pharmaceutical business and built an entertainment and gambling empire. They founded Gold Reef City and were awarded a casino licence to go with it, provided they invested in a community project. In 2001, to cynical guffaws from some, they opened the highly successful Apartheid Museum.

To those who believed the twins had inflicted psychological as well as physical trauma on blacks by exploiting and even encouraging apartheid's "white is better" theme, the museum was seen as a cynical attempt at redemption.

A similar motive was ascribed to Abe Krok's involvement in black football and purchase of the popular PSL club Mamelodi Sundowns, which he bought at a knockdown price from the insolvent estate of convicted fraudster Zola Mahobe.

Abe was born in Joburg 19 hours after Solly on May 29 1929. Their parents had emigrated from Lithuania in the mid-1920s and their father had set up shop as a general dealer.

While Solly studied accounting, Abe did his apprenticeship as a chemist. One of his jobs was to deliver scripts to future prime minister and apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd, who was then editor of Die Transvaler paper.

After moving from their kitchen they started Twins Pharmaceuticals in a small pharmacy in Noord Street, Joburg, using a garage at the back as their factory.

In the 1980s Abe and Solly backed another invention that was initially lucrative, but caused more anguish than pleasure. This was the Epilady, a device their daughters sold to women in the US to pull body hair out by the roots.

Consumers complained that the device was, in the words of one, "a tool of complete torture", and accused the Kroks of misleading advertising. They were sued and had to pay compensation of about $40-million.

Abe Krok spent the last four-and-a-half years of his life in the Milpark Hospital intensive care unit with Parkinson's disease and dementia while his children from two former marriages squabbled among themselves and with his current wife, Rosie, about their share of his money. He was reputedly worth about R1-billion. He is survived by Rosie and six children.