Leon Louw

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.{{Cite news|title=Time to heed the voice of capitalism|date=28 February 1977|work=The Star}}

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,{{Cite web |last=Hogg |first=Alec |date=2022-07-25 |title=FMF vs Louw: Just one more symptom of hardening attitudes |url=https://www.biznews.com/undictated/2022/07/25/fmf-leon-louw-hardening-attitudes |access-date=2025-03-30 |website=BizNews.com |language=en-GB}} he resigned in 2022.{{Cite web |last=Cohen |first=Tim |date=2022-07-22 |title=Free Market Foundation president Leon Louw resigns following organisational fracture |url=https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-07-22-free-market-foundation-president-leon-louw-resigns-following-organisational-fracture/ |access-date=2025-03-30 |website=Daily Maverick |language=en}}{{Cite web |last=Khumalo |first=Sibongile |title=In scathing farewell, Free Market Foundation founder Leon Louw quits |url=https://www.news24.com/fin24/companies/in-scathing-farewell-free-market-foundation-founder-leon-louw-quits-20220722 |access-date=2025-03-30 |website=Business |language=en-US}} In 2023 he formed a new pro-market policy institute, the Freedom Foundation.{{Cite web |title=Home |url=https://freedomfoundation.co.za/about |access-date=2025-03-30 |website=FREEDOM FOUNDATION |language=en}}

In March 1981, Louw said of affirmative action:

: "The most offensive aspect of affirmative action is the way it humiliates blacks. It implies that they are inferior, that they are not good enough to handle legal equality with whites. It is the most devious and arrogant form of white pseudo-liberal paternalism."{{Cite news|title=Is affirmative appropriate?|date=27 March 1981|work=S.A. Financial Mail}}

In the early 1980s, Louw was the Chairman of the Commission of Inquiry into Ciskei Economic Policy.{{Cite news|title=Doing more by doing less|date=28 November 1980|work=S.A. Financial Mail}}

In 1987, at a conference of the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa (IDASA) 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.{{Cite news|title=Meeting of minds the key, says Slabbert|date=11 May 1987|work=Pretoria News}} He argued that democracy and economic freedom were interdependent concepts which cannot exist in each other's absence.{{Cite news|title=Democracy is a struggle for freedom, says Louw|date=11 May 1987|work=The Star}}{{Cite news|title=Democracy, economic freedom go together|last=Orpen|first=Barbara|date=8 May 1987|work=Port Elizabeth Evening Post}} 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, he said that the solution must include "the abolition of apartheid, full equality before the law and citizenship for all".{{Cite news|title=Peace in SA if demands are met|date=3 December 1987|work=The Citizen}}

Despite Louw's activism he never joined any political organisation. He was involved communicating between exiled structures of the organisation and the underground movement in South Africa.{{Citation needed|reason=repeats uncited claim above|date=June 2016}} 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 granddaughter Zoleka, who became a close school friend of Louw's 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 she 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 intellectuals from politics and business, including Thabo Mbeki, his father Govan Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, F.W. de Klerk, Anton Rupert, Harry Oppenheimer, Clem Sunter, Marinus Wiechers, Sam Motsuenyane (former president of the FMF), Helen Suzman, Alan Paton, Nthato Motlana, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Dirk Hertzog, Jan S. Marais, Andreas Wassenaar, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, Hendrik Verwoed Jr, Coretta Scott King, Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan, Israel Kirzner, Margaret Thatcher, and Walter E. Williams.