Searches for the term ‘fatigue’ have increased by over 100% in the past 12 years. Globally.
The gradual but steady increase for this term is because the consequences of our culture’s obsession with work are becoming harder to ignore.
In fact, three Johannesburg-based psychologists reported to me an incredible 70% of their practice is filled with people needing help with stress and work-related anxiety. Mental health spend has increased by more than 80% since 2011 and according to <a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/12/01/bank-on-this-man/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Discovery Health</a>, depression contributed to over 40% of the mental health issues the country is experiencing.
Working a 40-hour-work week isn’t enough anymore for corporate South Africa. Eighty hours a week was the status quo for South African management consultant, Munene Khoza, and many of her colleagues at her previous consultancy position.
She’s now an entrepreneur and company founder at MINT, and remembers long days and nights.
“That was definitely the company culture,” she explains, “And I can confidently say it was not limited to the company I worked for. A lot of the time, the service offering from management consultancies is much of a muchness – they all help businesses to address complex problems. So one of the main ways to differentiate themselves is completing projects in a shorter space of time. And that of course means longer hours for the consultants.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/investment-guide/2017/11/24/jumping-corporate-ship/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Jumping The Corporate Ship</a>
For Olivia Sitshwele*, her demanding work environment exacerbated an underlying autoimmune disease to the point she was medically boarded and forcibly booked off work for eight months. Her current position at a new company is so much more demanding than her previous role that on top of the medications she needs for her illness, she is also taking nine different medications to help with work-related fatigue.
Long working hours can increase and validate self-esteem and a sense of self-worth for some.
This is true in South Africa, where being perceived as hardworking is a primary driver for much of the beleaguered workforce. With 48,000 jobs lost in 2017’s first quarter alone, according to Stats SA, a very real fear of the business folding or being out of work also plays a part in the working hours dynamic – because, in the end, those long hours are about the impression they create, rather than the work they produce.
The data shows that working, quite literally double, the amount of hours available in a working week, like Munene and her colleagues did, does not necessarily make you more productive.
If anything, the more hours a nation works, the less productive they are. A 2017 study by Expert Market ranked 35 countries by productivity, using GDP per capita data divided by the average number of hours worked by the nation. Mexico came in at number 35, with a yearly average of 2,255 hours. Compared to that, Luxembourg (number one) and Norway (number two) had respectively 1,512 and 1,424 hours a year on average – 32% less than Mexico. The United States came in at number six with 1,783 hours a year, and no African country was listed.
“Working longer hours is not the solution to our productivity woes,” states the study, “While many of us begrudgingly put in overtime hours to get more out of each day, the data suggests that such effort could be doing more harm than good.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/11/15/is-hypnotherapy-the-answer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Is Hypnotherapy The Answer?</a>
Munene describes her own experience: “As a management consultant, getting complex work done for client in record time was the aim, so very often time not overworking was frowned upon – as if your head wasn’t completely in the game. It is a little dramatic to say but I suppose I worry that if I don’t put in the hours that my business may fail and that would feel like professional and social suicide.”
With modern technology and emails on your phone, it’s harder to draw appropriate boundaries between work and home. Governments in France and South Africa have stepped in to help, legislating limitations on the use of “electronic leashes” (so named by French politician Benoît Hamon), allowing employees to switch off without penalty between certain times of the day.
Johannesburg-based clinical psychologist, Julia Halstead-Cleak, the director of Adult Services at the Day Clinic and MD of the Oxford Healthcare Centre, says this culture of work has emotional, relational and even physical consequences.
Somatic symptoms like chronic neck and backache, constant headaches and irritable bowel syndrome are all signs of overwork and are caused by the sympathetic nervous system – which runs the fight or flight response – working overtime.
“Core emotions express themselves physiologically,” says Halstead-Cleak, “and there is a huge culture of success in South Africa, where even children need to be successful and are put in occupational therapy, tutorials and extra-curriculars to fill their parents’ needs to stand out.”
Difficulty sleeping because of constantly running thoughts, an inability to feel pleasure, emotional distance at home and fatigue are all common signs that work is becoming a damaging force in your life. Because of the massive and growing impact of work on emotional well-being, Halstead-Cleak is opening a corporate healthcare facility in 2018 to specifically help with symptoms of overwork, stress and fatigue.
Long days in the office are about what those hours say about you. As The Guardian says, citing the ridiculous work hours by America’s top CEOs: “Today’s top executives are devoted work-worshippers, nearly to the point of perversity. Apple CEO Tim Cook told Time that he begins his day at 3.45AM. General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt told Fortune that he has worked 100-hour workweeks for 24 years. Not to be outdone, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told Bloomberg News that she used to work 130-hour workweeks.”
“If conspicuous consumption involves the worship of luxury, conspicuous production involves the worship of labor. It isn’t about how much you spend. It’s about how hard you work.”
How many hours did you clock before you let yourself read this article?
*not her real name 
<h2>HOW TO DEAL WITH SYMPTOMS OF OVERWORKING</h2>
Feeling fatigued, plagued by aches and pains, and unable to find joy in anything? Julia Halstead-Cleak, Johannesburg-based clinical psychologist and director of Adult Services at the Day Clinic and MD of the Oxford Healthcare Centre, and Richard Middleton, a senior group facilitator at her clinic, share their tips on managing anxiety.
<ul>
<li>Massage: The skin is the body’s biggest organ, and massage can help release the tension it holds.</li>
<li>Mindfulness exercises: This helps with those constantly running thoughts and anxiety that prevent a good night’s sleep.</li>
<li>Breathing exercises: Long out breaths are the key to releasing tension, and are particularly helpful if you’re having a rough moment during the day.</li>
<li>Understand your symptoms: Your body is sending you signs that it’s unhappy, and that things can’t continue in this vein. Re-evaluate and re-assess your work-life balance if you start experiencing ongoing distress to this extent.</li>
</ul>
&#8211; Written by Samantha Steele

Over 80 Hours A Week At Work?

“A lot of people think that I succumb to this ditsy blonde role,” discloses performance artist Jana ‘Babez’ Terblanche. We’re sitting in a chic coffee shop on Kloof Street in Cape Town in South Africa; her pink highlights are a vivid counterpoint to the starchy white walls and tablecloths.
“But actually, I’ve used it as a vehicle, to push things further. Almost to see how far people will accept it.”
Winner in 2014 of the Simon Gerson Prize for outstanding student work at her alma mater, the University of Cape Town, Terblanche has created a striking portfolio that “interrogates the strains on the modern female body, using the breakdown of female archetypes to shift the way that we think about female agency and desire.”
It is fizzing pop culture unbottled and forensically analyzed, repurposed for a fluid feminist agenda. Her preoccupation with the icons that populate the macabre landscape of celebrity glitz and media voyeurism – Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Dolly Parton – has its roots in formative years spent in sparsely-populated mining towns in Namibia, where her only access to a cultural elsewhere was the radio.
“I’m South African, I’ve spent most of my adult life here, but my childhood seems disconnected from everything else,” she says.
“I also feel almost like my childhood was another life, another person. The first time I heard Britney Spears I was like, ‘What is this?’ I didn’t understand. I was in this tiny town in the middle of nowhere, dreaming about an American reality, because I didn’t know what cities meant. So I actually had quite a warped interpretation of the outside world.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/life/2017/11/23/king-kong-musicals/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The King Kong Of Musicals</a>
Her Namibia Series revisits these desert moonscapes where the well of her creativity was first mined; she appears in flowing chiffon against the spectacular umber backdrop of the Fish River Canyon. Her face is hidden – a recurring motif in many of her photographs.
“I cover the face because I want it to stand in for every woman,” she says. “I don’t want it to be personal.”
In Bride, her face is obscured by a mask of roses, swarming like bees; in Hollywood Cerise, she is covered head to toe in a magenta body stocking, her ponytail spilling out like an insistent yellow question mark.
Her work is luridly confrontational but archly self-aware, a good-humoured, interrogational pop feedback loop.
“Initially people thought I was joking,” she laughs. “What is this little girl doing, making art about Britney Spears? She’s walking around in a pink suit, what does that mean? It took a lot of perseverance to say I’m going to stick to my guns, and only if you carry on do people say, oh, she’s still doing this, there must be some merit to it.”
<div id="attachment_34604" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34604" class=" wp-image-34604" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Jana-Babez-Terblanche-Hollywood-Cerise-photo-Jody-Brand-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="450" />Jana &#8216;Babez&#8217; Terblanche (Photo by Jody Brand)</div>
There is plenty of a salty sort of grit too, and a fierce determination to expose misogyny and patriarchal oppression. Nightfall, a performance piece in which she strapped bricks to her feet and walked across Company’s Garden, a famous local heritage site, was inspired by the March 2017 brutal street-corner murder of sex worker Nokuphila Khumalo by the famous photographer and artist Zwelethu Mthethwa.
“After that incident, his work was still being sold in galleries,” she says. “I was so infuriated, I couldn’t believe this. Someone literally profiting off the back of a woman he had murdered. I was going mental. There has to be a point where publicity is bad, but no, there isn’t. So I did this work, in memory of her and in solidarity with sex workers.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/09/20/three-women-three-wives-one-true-story/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Three Women, Three Wives, One True Story</a>
The fallacy of neutral space, the idea that women can ever feel safe outside their own homes, is something she interrogates with passion.
“Space is not neutral at all. On a certain level, men navigate the world without having to be afraid,” she says.
“Walking on the way here, there were three guys in front of me. And I hate the fact that my mind immediately has to go to walking a bit slower – honestly, I had to stop around the corner. I consider this hyperawareness a form of repression that’s not spoken about.”
She talks about the common phenomenon of women feeling compelled to wear ear buds when on the street, just to deter unwanted attention.
“All the space in the world is male space. If there were women-only spaces, men would just get angry about it – men are so fragile. Isn’t that scary, that my mind went there? I thought about men, before I thought about the woman. God, that’s so messed up!”
Terblanche warns also of female complicity, of women who seek to appease male aggression.
“I’ve had so much kickback from women, and I’ve gotten very upset about it, thinking, wow, aren’t we supposed to stand together? But then I realized how strong internalized misogyny is. We’ve all been conditioned, and we have to unlearn these things.”
At its best, with its polaroid tang of glamor and grime, Terblanche’s work stands toe to toe with its clear influences – performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ana Mendieta, and the shape-shifting roleplay of photographer Cindy Sherman. It is provocative and playful, but with a dangerous, hidden razor’s edge.
“I’m always playing a version of myself. We are all playing versions of ourselves,” she says, as the busy Cape Town café characters come and go. “That’s what’s so exciting about performance art. You can be someone else tomorrow.” &#8211; Written by Alastair Hagger

The Performance Artist Playing Everyone

Crossing the Oshoek Border Post from South Africa to Swaziland, I was excited to be visiting the realm of Africa’s last absolute monarchy. Not realizing that it was the Easter weekend, I got caught standing alongside Swazis trying to re-enter their country for the holidays.
I also realized that I was entering a country with the highest incidence of HIV in Africa with a stabilized number reported at up to 30% of the population. While this is not the subject of this article, I must satisfy the curiosity of the reader nevertheless. Social scientists have determined that the itinerant workers with whom I was lining up were one of the major reasons for this scourge.
<div id="attachment_34571" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34571" class=" wp-image-34571" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Swazi-dance-e1512028782448-300x180.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="300" />Swazi women perform a traditional dance. (Photo by Ramdas Iyer)</div>
Being away from home and working in the mines and timber industries of South Africa, these men infect their many wives in a polygamous society, along with their girlfriends. In addition, traditions such as the inheritance of widows from a deceased brother, does not help HIV’s continuing spread.
The border crossing was smooth confirming my notion that the Swazis were a relaxed and nice people. Though lacking in size, this interesting country makes up for it with its rich culture. While the monarchy has its critics, the history of Swazi resistance to the British, Boers and the Zulus has fostered national pride. As a result, local culture is flourishing along with Christianity.
Many Swazis combine Christianity with indigenous beliefs, and religious freedoms are written into the country’s 2005 constitution. However in January, the education ministry instructed all head teachers to ensure that the syllabus would not mention any religion other than Christianity, including Islam and Judaism.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/10/03/professor-saved-african-rainforest/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Professor Who Saved An African Rainforest</a>
Driving into Mbabane, the capital city, I found it to be an attractive and functional place perched in the cool highveld (4,000ft) of the Dlangeni Hills. Swaziland with its population of 1.5 million is a low middle income country where most citizens are ethnic Swazis. The official languages are both Swati and English.
Its ruler, King Mswati III, is one of the world’s last absolute monarchs, and a man who is not too keen on handing his throne over entirely to parliament. The Borgen Project, a nonprofit organization, reports that about half of <a href="http://borgenproject.org/poverty-hunger-swaziland/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Swazis</a> live in poverty. Forty percent of Swazis are unemployed and 70% of the workforce is employed in sustenance farming. But it’s not all bad news. Roads are well-paved and <a href="http://borgenproject.org/combating-rural-poverty-in-swaziland/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">far-reaching</a>. The literacy rate is over 91%, which might be expected when 8.3% of the GDP is spent on education; which is why I saw the entire city swarming with nicely-uniformed schoolchildren in the afternoon.
<div id="attachment_34572" style="width: 260px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34572" class=" wp-image-34572" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Swazi-dance-1-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="375" />A drummer provides the beat for the traditional dance. (Photo by Ramdas Iyer)</div>
In order to find the old Swaziland, which has rapidly modernized itself, I went in search of old villages and cultural events. More than 70% of Swaziland’s population is of ethnic roots, which means that all the traditions and beliefs are upheld throughout the year and are evident in daily life through dress and other activities.
I soon arrived in Mantetenga Swazi Cultural Village, a living museum of old traditions and representing a classic Swazi lifestyle during the 1850s. The village is a large family homestead of 16 huts, each with its own specific purpose as well as kraals for cattle and goats, reed fences that serve as windbreaks and various other structures. The building material is strictly traditional: poles, grass, reeds, leather stripes, earth and dried cow dung. The adjacent 725-acre Mantenga Nature Reserve is made of a combination of middle and highveld habitat, and more than a third of the reserve is covered by eucalyptus (gum) forest. I explored the reserve by foot, with two walking trails leading up the mountain towards the summit of Sheba’s Breast, made famous by the book King Solomon’s Mines written by Sir Rider Haggard, a Victorian adventure writer in 1885. Birdlife in the reserve was good, with wildlife such as baboons, vervet monkeys, nyala, duiker and mongoose regularly seen.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/07/11/a-paradise-in-retreat/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: A Paradise In Retreat</a>
After visiting the village, I patiently waited for a large contingent of dancers to perform the Umhlanga followed by the Incwala dance. There are two main kinds of dances, each done by women and men respectively and done at most of the celebrations and gatherings throughout the year, but predominantly at the two most popular events: Umhlanga in August and Incwala in December. The spectacle I enjoyed seemed to be a hybrid version of both.
<div id="attachment_34573" style="width: 260px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34573" class=" wp-image-34573" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Swazi-dance-2-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="375" />A man performs a traditional Swazi dance. (Photo by Ramdas Iyer)</div>
Umhlanga attracts thousands or women from near and far and once the entire group has concluded dancing and singing, different villages take center stage and put on a display as a sign of respect for the Queen mother. The different villages are distinguishable by their beaded outfits and jewelry. Even the king’s daughters are involved and distinguishable by the bright red feathers they wear in their hair. The king will usually pick his new wife from the crowd of dancers.
Incwala, which means first fruits, is probably the most important and significant of the two. Dancing plays a prominent role here as men gather at the Royal Kraal at Ludzidzini and dance for a few days. Known to be the most honorable on the Swazi events calendar, the Incwala dates are determined by the phases of the moon and begins with a journey to the Indian Ocean to collect water. The third day sees the men slaughter a bull with the fourth day welcoming the arrival of the king who dons his traditional dress and joins in on dances with the other men before returning to his hut to enjoy the first fruit of the season.
However, these aren’t the only dances in Swaziland; other events boast their own dances such as the Sibhaca dance performed by groups of men throughout the country at any opportunity. One cannot but appreciate this gentle land with its handsome men and women and their penchant for dance.

A Land Of Many Dances

On a windy spring day in Johannesburg, South Africa, we make our way through the dusty streets of Braamfontein to the hallowed halls of the Joburg Theatre, a venue often described as the nucleus of the country’s theatrical history. It’s the perfect setting for the retelling of South Africa’s historic hit musical, King Kong, more than half a century after it was first showcased.
Ahead of the play’s Johannesburg run – from September 12 to October 8 – we are here to meet Nondumiso Tembe, the female lead playing Joyce, a role that catapulted the late Miriam Makeba to international stardom in the original production of <a href="https://www.kingkongstagemusical.com/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener">King Kong</a>, which opened at the Wits University Great Hall in 1959 as South Africa’s first black musical. In 1961, the play transferred to London’s West End and was a stupendous success with a 200-performance run.
Tembe, an award-winning actress and singer-songwriter, has credits of her own, including HBO’s Golden Globe and Emmy-award winning True Blood, SABC’s Generations, the military drama SIX on the History Channel and Zulu Wedding opposite Darrin Dewitt Henson.
She walks in to Stages, the restaurant at the entrance of Joburg Theatre, with a beaming smile and a spring in her step. She is relaxed but excited– the opening night is in five days – and rehearsals are on at the theater. Ordering a cappuccino, she gets straight to the interview.
“I think for our generation, King Kong, and the legend of this man has always been alive in our consciousness as South Africans,” she says.
“And many of us were aware of it and perhaps our parents had shared some of the memories and the experience of the production with us but I don’t think we really knew or understood the story or the music in-depth… It was there alive somewhere in the back of my consciousness but I did not know too much about it and in particular, I didn’t know much about the role of Joyce.”
Tembe smiles as she also admits she was not aware Makeba originally played the role.
“I was humbled to be chosen to be part of a play that was incredibly historic, ground-breaking and deeply brilliant at the time. I was hired two weeks before we were meant to start rehearsals and honestly it’s all kind of a blur,” she laughs.
“Before I knew it, I packed up my life in Los Angeles and prepared to be away for an extended period of time. From then, I spent every waking moment researching the production, the period and the role, in particular the music.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/life/2017/09/25/money-witchcraft-beer-metal-soweto/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Money, Witchcraft And Beer &#8211; This Is Metal From Soweto</a>
Set in the 1950s’ Sophiatown in Johannesburg, King Kong tells the true story of heavyweight boxing champion Ezekiel Dlamini who named himself ‘King Kong’ because of his stout physique and fearless personality. The play is a story of love and self-destruction enacted to the invigorating music of Todd Matshikiza.
<div id="attachment_34495" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34495" class="wp-image-34495" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/King-Kong-Print-04-DM-e1511423075127-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="333" />From left to right: Nondumiso Tembe, Joel Zuma, Sanda Shandu, Barileng Malebye and Ben Kgosimore star in King Kong. (Photo by Daniel Rutland Manners)</div>
Dlamini is aptly essayed by actor, singer and dancer Andile Gumbi, who made his Broadway debut as Simba in Disney’s The Lion King.
Born in Vryheid in the then Orange Free State, Dlamini himself became an unwitting symbol for freedom and the wasted power of his people under apartheid. After sudden stardom in the boxing world, Dlamini&#8217;s life degenerated into drunkenness and gang violence.
In 1957, Dlamini was to be a classic Greek tragic figure when, in a fit of jealousy, he killed his girlfriend and at his trial asked for a death sentence, to serve as a warning to others. Instead, the white judge, who refused to take instruction from a black defendant, sentenced Dlamini to 12 years of labor. But, three months later, King Kong is found drowned in a dam on a prison farm. At 36 years old, he had taken destiny into his own hands and, inadvertently, become a legend.
Dlamini’s story bears a striking resemblance to William Shakespeare’s tragic hero Othello; a man consumed by love and his vices. Like Othello, King Kong is said to have ended his own life, unable to live with the devastation he caused.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/09/20/three-women-three-wives-one-true-story/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Three Women, Three Wives, One True Story</a>
On the opening night of the re-imagining of this tragic tale in Johannesburg in September, the theater is abuzz, unlike the quiet venue it had been a few days ago when we met Tembe.
“I’m really excited about this remake,” says South African actress and author Pamela Nomvete, just before the packed show.
“Todd Matshikiza put together a phenomenal musical and John Matshikiza, his son, launched my career in the UK. So for me, it’s like being a part of history because it was so significant at the time.”
The set design on stage is simple, consisting of painted corrugated iron shutters complete with rows of brilliant golden lights, and with the energetic actors and the live nine-piece orchestra led by Sipumzo Trueman Lucwaba, takes you back in time.
The costumes worn by the all-South African cast form an integral part of the musical narrative set in Sophiatown, the legendary black cultural hub featuring Kofifi dance, Kofifi music and other forms of entertainment.
The 1950s was when the ‘Kofifi style’ emerged, just as apartheid was being implemented. Men worked mainly in mines and factories wearing overalls and the only occasions they could wear a suit – an integral part of the Kofifi style – was at funerals, weddings or on payday.
It was a combination of fashion and a rebel lifestyle that defined this period and people who lived it up as best they could.
The South African project described Sophiatown as an area which “developed into the center of urban African music and culture and starting in the 1940s, it began to enrich its musical performances and elements of popular culture. Sophiatown symbolized something greater than the struggle of fitting in socially; it symbolized the fight for survival while having to deal with expensive rent, poverty, overcrowding, unfair wages, and unfair treatment. The people of Sophiatown established a strong community identity”.
The 120-minute play swiftly transforms from the playground to the boxing ring to the shanty town to the shabeen owned by Joyce, when Tembe makes her opening appearance with a soulful rendition of the legendary Back of the Moon, a sensual song written by Todd Matshikiza.
“The music for Joyce was incredibly challenging and sophisticated and multi-layered and really hard to sing. I was forced to buckle down and not think about the implications or the legacy we were carrying or the weight on our shoulders,” says Tembe at our meeting.
“The original script was very thin and the creative team agreed the characters were rather one-dimensional, more archetypes than real, complex, multi-dimensional human beings and we were very clear in our adaptation, not a revival of the original production; we were more interested in telling a human story the audience could relate to.”
<div id="attachment_34496" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34496" class=" wp-image-34496" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/King-Kong-Print-15-DM-e1511423279103-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="333" />Nondumiso Tembe. (Photo by Daniel Rutland Manners)</div>
It was not an easy challenge to accept for the cast.
“There were a lot of holes so we all worked very hard to fill those gaps and make it more rich and dynamic. For me the challenge with Joyce, because she was one-dimensional and didn’t really have a back story; there was the danger of her coming across as a vamp or a man-eater and I was very clear that my greatest nightmare would be for the audience members to walk away from the play thinking she deserved what she got instead of sympathizing with her,” says Tembe.
This was especially important for Tembe because of the current social context in South Africa, where there has been an epidemic of violence against women, and this being a story about femicide, it was critical for her to convey the right message.
“We really didn’t want our audiences to cheer at the end of the tragic scene between Joyce and King Kong and that actually happened when we first staged it, in preview week, so, the writer, Bill Michaelson, who I admire, snuck in, very last minute during preview week, and added a wonderful but very deep and pivotal scene between King Kong and Joyce which we rehearsed with the director for barely an hour and then Andile Gumbi and I had to perform it that very night in front of a paying audience, which was terrifying,” recounts Tembe, letting out a little scream.
Watching that scene in the play makes it hard to imagine the script was enacted without it. The raw emotions portrayed by King Kong and Joyce are paramount to the play’s climax; a pivotal scene providing great insight into the characters – who they are and why they make the decisions they do.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2016/09/01/father-ghanaian-theater/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Father Of Ghanaian Theater</a>
South African actor Andile Nebulane calls the play “magical”.
“It’s brilliant, fun to watch and you cannot fall asleep watching it. The choreography is also brilliant; Greg Maqoma did an outstanding job.”
But he adds: “Although, I do think South African theater needs to move from the third gear into sixth gear. It needs to be shaken up, we need new stuff. We need to stop recycling stories, we need to write, we need to create and we just need to be recognized by stakeholders like government, which does not take us seriously.”
<div id="attachment_34497" style="width: 260px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34497" class=" wp-image-34497" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/King-Kong-Print-06-JK-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="375" />Sne Dladla (left) and Lerato Mvelase in King Kong. (Photo by Jesse Kramer)</div>
When the play was originally staged in 1959, the audience also included Nelson Mandela and his wife Winnie. King Kong toured South Africa for two years, and was seen by 200,000 South Africans, playing to record-breaking multiracial audiences, this as apartheid began to take shape in South Africa. King Kong in part, launched the international careers of Makeba and Hugh Masekela, among many others.
But, it was at this time that King Kong moved to London. The celebration of what had been deemed South Africa’s greatest play was short-lived because of the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960.
But in a fitting tribute to the art form and the local talent the country boasts today, Nomvete says: “I think South African theater is of an outstanding caliber and more people should be coming into our country to watch our shows; King Kong is testament enough of how well professionals in the performing arts are doing their thing and they are doing it well.”
The Fugard Theatre’s King Kong, directed by Jonathan Munby, was also staged at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town before its Johannesburg outing.
“I do think that Mariam Makeba and Todd Matshikiza and the entire original creative team who may no longer be with us are smiling down from heaven and are proud of the steps we have taken and how we have pushed the story and the production forward and caused it to evolve. We are proudly and graciously carrying the torch they originally lit,” concludes Tembe.
The standing ovation the play received more than confirmed that. &#8211; Written by Rofhiwa Madzena

The King Kong Of Musicals

The Instagram influencer marketing industry is expected to exceed $1 billion by the end of 2017, and more than double by 2019. A Santa Monica-based influencer marketing industry Mediakix forecast these figures by studying the #spon #sp and #ad hashtags on the platform, which saw over 9.7 million posts tagged in 2016, with 14.5 million expected for 2017.
While South Africa may be late to the party for most things digital, there are a fair amount of influencers making waves locally. No matter the niche, there are bloggers and influencers who, through their combined digital platforms, are regarded just as important as journalists when it comes to making an invite list; or taking part in a campaign best aligned with their brand. It is predominant with fashion, beauty and lifestyle bloggers in South Africa where some have quit their full-time jobs to focus on being an ‘influencer’.
<div id="attachment_34458" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34458" class=" wp-image-34458" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Aqeelah-Harron-Ally-200x300.jpg" alt="Aqeelah Harron Ally" width="300" height="450" />Aqeelah Harron Ally (Photo supplied)</div>
Aqeelah Harron Ally, a 27-year-old fashion, beauty, and travel blogger at <a href="http://fashionbreed.co.za/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">FashionBreed</a>, from Cape Town, worked full-time for five years before quitting her job, and tells us she could have afforded to leave sooner, but didn’t have the courage.
Ally, who has been blogging for seven years, initially started her blog so she could work for a magazine to ultimately become a fashion editor. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film, Media &amp; Writing, and Drama from the University of Cape Town; and a Diploma in Make Up Artistry.
The decision to quit her job has worked out well for Ally, who says she is much happier now, even though being her own boss can be stressful at times.
“I’ve been lucky because for the last two years, I’ve landed many contracts which span over four, six, or even eight months; this helps a lot with stability, however I’m also fine without those kinds of jobs.”
She has other once-off campaigns that are booked a month or two in advance, and out of the events she attends, about 60% are paid attendance, which is generally tied to a campaign she is already creating content for.
“I seldom get paid just to attend an event and cover it, but I have done it in the past.”
Another digital content creator who quit her full-time job after five years is 26-year-old Anna-Belle Durrant from Parktown North in Johannesburg. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand. She started her blog <a href="https://shesaid.co.za/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">SheSaid</a> back in 2013 initially to share her love for Johannesburg, but it has blossomed into stories about travel, fashion, healthy living and design.
“So far it’s worked out incredibly well; I love that I am the master of my own time and creations, and I’m still very fortunate to work closely with agencies like Cerebra [previous employer],” says Durrant.
To her, blogging is like freelancing; work comes in when it comes in and you just have to go with the flow. “However, I do work with brands on a retainer basis to create content around their offerings; and my campaigns run across all my social channels and blog. When you become a blogger, your mind-set changes completely, what you earn is in line with how much you work… so work hard and you should be ok,” she says.
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However, the industry has been marred by a fake follower problem where users deceive brands into paying them for being an influencer. Mediakix ran an experiment on two accounts proving how easy it is by purchasing fake followers from as little as $3 for 1,000 followers and $4 for 1,000 likes. Once these accounts reached a threshold of 10,000 followers, they signed up for campaigns – and got accepted for two paying jobs each.
The onus of this falls on PR companies or marketing agencies who need to ensure they’ve done thorough research before approaching an influencer. A quick search on Memeburn.com for an article titled Fake followers are a massive problem, as SA duo proves shows the extent of it in South Africa.
Ally says what they’re doing is illegal.
“It is straight-up fraud because you’re telling a brand to pay you for something you can only pretend to offer. Buying followers is selfish and entitled, but more than anything it’s a charade they won’t be able to keep up with because there are so many tell-tale signs that reveal the cracks in the lie.”
<div id="attachment_34459" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34459" class=" wp-image-34459" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Anna-Belle-Durrant-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="450" />Anna-Belle Durrant (Photo supplied)</div>
Durrant on the other hand feels that while you can cheat anything in life, rather focus on your own content and what you need to do to build your brand as the truth always comes out in the end.
Both Ally and Durrant work extremely hard at being full-time bloggers and share similar sentiments that it’s not all freebies, fame, travel and parties. “You’re a stylist, photographer, writer, curator, art director, model, negotiator/businesswoman, social media manager, video maker; the ultimate definition of a jack-of-all-trades,” says Ally.
Durrant compares it to running a magazine that needs to be published constantly except she’s the CEO, photographer, stylist and janitor, all while fighting for invoices to be paid. “It’s a lifestyle of work hard, play hard.”
Ultimately, both find it very rewarding. For Ally, it’s all about the relationships with her readers, and stresses on how much she values it. “YouTube really extended my reach in this sense which has been so great. It’s also been rewarding growing as a content creator and actually getting paid for it. I’m really thankful for this because creatives don’t often get to say that. It’s really special being able to work for brands I grew up loving and respecting, even more so when their international teams fly to South Africa and get closely involved in what we do.”
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Durrant loves that she gets to do things and go to places she could only have dreamed of.
“A highlight was exploring a music festival on the coast of Wales last year. Traveling makes me happy, I get to do that for my job; I honestly couldn’t ask for anything more. I also get to meet really incredible people and work with truly inspiring charities and brands, I have inspiration around me 24/7.” &#8211; Written by Nafisa Akabor

When It Pays To Be Online

Zimbabwe native Arikana Chihombori-Quao wears many labels beyond her always-stylish designer suits. She’s a physician, founder of medical clinics, and an entrepreneur who includes among her properties, the historic US-based Africa House, and South Africa’s Durban Manor Hotel.
But the one label she embraces with the most pride is that of Ambassador to the US on behalf of the African Union (AU).
“In this new position, my mandate is to promote the longstanding and historical, cultural and economic relations between Africa and the US,” she states. “More importantly, to mobilize the African diaspora, which we define as ‘people of African descent living outside of Africa’.”
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It’s the perfect job for a woman whose passion and pride for Africa and the diaspora is deep-rooted.
“I have seen diasporans come to the Americas with absolutely nothing, but through hard work, they are now professionals in a position to look back and take Africa to the next level. They are highly adaptable and totally indestructible.”
She counts herself among them.
Like many first-generation immigrants, Chihombori-Quao traveled to America to pursue an education.
A graduate of Fisk University and Meharry Medical College, she holds a Bachelors degree in General Chemistry, a Master’s Degree in Organic Chemistry, and a Doctor of Medicine Degree.
“I intended to go back home after school,” she says. “But then I got married, had children, and my family back home dwindled. Suddenly I realized I’d spent more than half of my life in America. The reasons for going back home were no longer there.”
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After completing her medical residency in 1992, Chihombori-Quao settled in Murfreesboro, Tennessee – located in the southern region of the US – to open a medical practice. Soon after, she, along with her husband, Ghanaian physician, Saban Nii Quao, opened a chain of family medical clinics in the state.
Her entrepreneurial DNA led her to purchase the historic Durban Manor Hotel – once a whites-only all-male hotel and club – now a place for cultural heritage tourism and intellectual engagement. In a greater ironic twist, she purchased a 15,000-square-foot plantation, sprawled across 30 acres of land on the hills of Gallatin, Tennessee, christening it Africa House.
“We encourage Africans to look at it as a place where they can not only hold lavish events but have something they can call ‘their home’.”
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Alongside her career and business investments are her humanitarian efforts to promote women’s rights around the globe, and improve healthcare systems in Africa.
During her tenure as Chair of the African Union-African Diaspora Health Initiative (AU-ADHI), she led a delegation of medical professionals made up of other diasporans and ‘Friends of Africa’ living in Tennessee. They used their own money and resources to travel back to Africa on missions in Malawi, Equatorial Guinea, and elsewhere, to improve healthcare in the most deserved regions. The delegation donated supplies and trained healthcare workers in the various district and regional hospitals.
Still committed to engaging and promoting the efforts of the diaspora, Chihombori-Quao now does so through her new official role as the AU’s permanent ambassador.
“It begins with reaching out to the diaspora,” she explains. “It takes a village to raise a child. There are many who say ‘Africa doesn’t matter’. We need to come together as one to raise the physical boundaries in Africa. But to do that, we need first to decolonize the black mind. We need to take time to sincerely inventory who we are and how we were colonized; otherwise the battle is going to be lost.”

Highly Adaptable And Totally Indestructible

Unrefined shea butter imported from Africa is in high demand these days by skincare manufacturers worldwide. But few companies that create products made with the in-demand raw materials are certified for quality control – Amina Gerba’s Kariderm was the first.
Her cosmetics line is one of three businesses the native Cameroonian launched in her adopted Canada homeland, which includes Kariliss that distributes haircare products made with shea butter, and Afrique Expansion, a public relations and consulting firm that promotes a coming together of Africa and the Americas.
Likewise, Gerba’s Africa Business Forum – a gathering of more than 500 business leaders – is held biennially in Canada to promote Africa as a destination for North American investors.
“I immigrated to Quebec for school from my home in Bafia – the only girl of 19 children in my family who had a chance to go,” states Gerba.
“I never expected to stay. But it was during my studies that I noticed the potential of Africa was not highlighted.”
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A 1996 visit to Burkina Faso inspired Gerba to visit the Songtaaba Cooperative, an association of women producers of raw shea butter. A chance meeting with the president of the co-op resulted in a partnership where she was entrusted to promote their raw material worldwide.
“We started small, importing just a few kilograms of shea butter for our line of products. We soon realized that the quality of the material was not perfect,” she explains. “There were a lot of impurities that generated waste. To remedy the situation, we sent one of our trainee engineers from Ontario to help the association improve the quality of their production. After three years of technical assistance and supervision, we managed to obtain the organic certification for the shea butter, and ultimately grew the co-op from 20 to more than 2,000 women producers.”
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Gerba’s fair trade skin and haircare ventures are not only profitable for the cooperative – with a percentage of sales going directly to the producers – they also have a social component.
“Through Kariderm Social Funds, we’ve financed a nursery inside the premises of the cooperative that offers first aid material, medical drugs, and is managed by a professional nurse specially recruited to take care of the co-op members and their families,” she says.
“A vast majority of women there still do not benefit from any social or private insurance coverage for their health needs, and they only see a doctor at the latest possible stage of illness. So, we’ve also put health insurance systems in place which cover the basic drug needs of participating women.”
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Giving back and supporting women entrepreneurs in Africa is a priority for this diasporan.
“It’s clear to me the economic empowerment of women is the only way for African women to aspire to gender equality. To do so, they must first have access to education and then have the financial resources to assume their family responsibilities and ensure their economic inclusion in society.”
For her part, she created, with her daughters, The Gerba Foundation, a not-for-profit whose mission is to facilitate access to schooling for children from underprivileged communities in Africa.
“I am living proof of the impact education can have on a girl&#8217;s life. It’s what gave me all of my chances today, to evolve in a world of men and negotiate fairly with them.” &#8211; Written by Shirley Neal

Shea’s A Force

Once upon a time, Africa alone was home to 26 million elephants. The giants roamed the continent knowing not what lay in store, that their habitats would dwindle and so would their majestic numbers.
From millions, they are now in their thousands, falling faster than trees – all for their ivory tusks.
Approximately 97 elephants are gunned down daily by poachers for their tusks. This means by 2030 there could be no elephants left in the wild.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the African elephant population dropped from 550,000 in 2006 to about 350,000. In East Africa, the decline is far more alarming – from 150,000 to about 100,000.
Other parts of the world have also seen a drastic decline of the elephant population. In Asia, it’s estimated less than 50,000 elephants still roam the region; more than half of them in India.
These figures are frightening – what deforestation and poaching can do.
Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times said: “Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fueling conflicts across the continent.”
It’s hard not to notice the mammoths disappearing.
<div id="attachment_34014" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34014" class=" wp-image-34014" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Paula-Kahumbu-e1509005131550-300x214.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="357" />Paula Kahumbu. (Photo supplied)</div>
Dr. Paula Kahumbu, the CEO of WildlifeDirect, a Kenyan conservation NGO, is currently leading a campaign, Hands Off Our Elephants – civil society, corporations, government agencies as well as other conservation organizations in a unified approach towards ending the poaching crisis in Kenya.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, to an English mother and Kenyan father, Kahumbu is one of eight siblings. Being out in the wilderness as a child interacting with animals made her the committed eco-warrior she is today.
“My mother was often home alone and because we were so many, mother would literally tell us to get lost and we would do just that,” says Kahumbu.
“We’d go exploring – catching anything you can imagine; birds, mice, snakes, frogs. We’d go fishing and swimming in the rivers, make our way through to forests and swamps. We spent our entire childhoods in the wilderness.”
“We did the kind of stuff you would never allow children to do today actually but it was very safe at that time,” she continues.
Soon, these trysts led to an encounter with Richard Leakey, a Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician.
“We didn’t know all that much about wildlife so we would visit our neighbor, Richard Leakey, head of the Kenya Museum Associates. He was someone who knew a lot about animals and whenever we would spend time with him he would teach us about their ecology, behavior, and the like.”
Between the 1960s and 1980s, elephant poaching was at a dramatic high, according to the Convention of International Trade and Endangered Species (CITES).
“When I finished high school, it was very difficult at that time to get into university. My parents could not afford to take us to the local university,” says Kahumbu, who then, just as she had done countless times as a girl, returned to Leakey.
She knocked on his door, which at the time was at the National Museum, and said, “I want to be a ranger”. That got her in.
“There was one particular place I wanted to go to, Kora National Park, best known for the lions and George Adamson who is famously known as Baba ya Simba, which translates to ‘father of lions’. My dream was to be his ranger. And Richard Leakey said ‘are you sure about this’? I was 17 years old and that’s all I wanted to do. I ended up in a research facility which focused on monkeys and that’s when I realized the importance of science in studying animals,” says Kahumbu.
That was the motivation for years of study. Kahumbu was the first in her family to attend university.
“My mum was not keen on the idea of a career in animal conservation… She sent me to secretarial college because she thought that the safe [career] option is to be a secretary because everyone needs a secretary. I detested it and the day I ran to Richard Leakey’s office was the day I ran away from secretarial college.”
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Kahumu did a lot of field work early in her career.
“I went to some of the remote corners of the country, some really dangerous areas to study this wildlife. This left my mother very anxious.”
Her “conservative” mother always threatened: “I am going to speak to this Richard Leakey because it’s unacceptable that a young woman can live in the bush for months on end counting monkeys on her own.”
Her father, on the other hand, encouraged her. Kahumbu clearly broke boundaries.
“I remember my male colleagues were very angry with me because it was very uncommon for a woman, particularly a Kenyan woman, to be working in the forest usually by herself, so they would beg me to stop but of course I never did,” she says.
That did not deter her from her course.
“My son was actually born when I started working on my PhD and he was two-and-a-half years old when I had to spend extended periods of time in the wilderness conducting my research. I worked in a rainforest on top of a mountain with huge trees.”
Kahumbu and a small team of researchers were studying trees, a main source of nourishment for the elephants.
“We wanted to gauge how elephants living and eating in the forest was changing the landscape of the forest. My son was still so small, I would sit him on a mat, give him some toys to play with and go on measuring trees.”
“One day, the trees started moving as though they were being consumed by strong winds, it was actually a herd of elephants calmly making their way through the forest… But we were so busy we had not noticed they had moved in around us and I hadn&#8217;t really realized they were around us until I was about to measure what I thought was the trunk of a tree and then I realized it was the leg of an elephant,” she laughs.
“When I did [realize], I slowly tiptoed backwards and picked up the baby.”
<div id="attachment_34015" style="width: 512px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34015" class=" wp-image-34015" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Paula-Kahumbu-elephants-e1509006154685-300x214.jpg" alt="" width="502" height="358" />Paula Kahumbu observes elephants. (Photo supplied)</div>
Kahumbu was persuaded to study elephants after her bachelor&#8217;s degree and “was offered an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead the stocktake of ivory in 1989 in Kenya”.
“I had to measure every single tusk, which is a great source of information about the sex of the elephant and age. We gathered data from about 3,000 tusks and drew a timeline as every tusk had a marker of when and where it was seized.”
What the timelines showed was alarming. The tusks got smaller and smaller. This showed poachers were going for smaller elephants, calves essentially.
“Juxtaposing the data with the demography of animals, we saw there were no adults left, the species was basically finished because there were no longer breeding individuals; poachers are going for any kind of elephant, even if it had half a kilogram of ivory.”
Following that, Kahumbu decided she was not going to study the pachyderms, not only because they were virtually extinct but also because there was the threat of her becoming a target for poachers in the area.
“So, for my master’s degree, I decided to study monkeys and even from time to time, when we were out doing research in the wilderness, we’d hear gunshots and subsequently come across dead elephants on our trail and I remember thinking, ‘thank goodness I’m not studying elephants’ because every single day, I would be heartbroken.”
For three years, she refused to study them.
After her master’s, she became a senior scientist at Kenya Wildlife Service. While there, the organization hired 30 young Kenyans to conduct research on elephants.
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The ban on poaching was now in place so their task was to work out how to save the remaining elephants as well as replenish the population. This formed the thesis of Kahumbu’s PhD.
When she became CEO of WildlifeDirect, she led a campaign exposing the poaching crisis in Kenya, leading to major reforms in the laws and practices against ivory poachers and traffickers.
Poaching dropped by 80% in three years. Kenya burned her entire ivory stockpile of 105 tonnes in April 2016, an event that garnered global attention.
“The world was very surprised – how was it that a country suffering economically would forego millions of dollars’ worth of a payout to prove a point?” says Kahumbu.
It was a start, and conservation continues.
“Even after decades of working in this area, I still can’t understand the inhumanity and greed of poachers. The elephant is an extraordinary animal. They can live in any habitat except the ocean. They can climb close to the ice on Mount Kilimanjaro, they can live in deserts as they do in Namibia and northern Africa. They can live in forests and in savannahs. Elephants can also eat almost anything.
“They are a lot like humans in that way because they can easily adapt to an environment. Their brain is three to six times larger than the human brain, designed to store vast amounts of information. Further, elephant families are actually governed by females because the male leave the herd at an early age and only return to mate.”
The trade of ivory is inextricably linked to the trading of slaves. Kahumbu explains, in the late 1800s, the British could not take ivory out of Africa without the help of slaves because they did not have the means to carry it. Ivory was stolen from the homesteads of people in the Congo.
“In those days, Africans did not see the monetary value poachers saw; they would use the tusks as fence posts around their homesteads and the British would raid these villages and steal all the ivory and ship it to Zanzibar and Mombasa and then it would be taken to Europe. It was so valuable, 100 tons a year were being shipped out to be used as billiard balls.”
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And then ivory found its way to America; the volume of ivory coming into one part alone gave birth to two cities on the back of ivory trade and slavery. Business boomed. Technology was developed to transform ivory into how we know it today – thin veneers used as piano keys and hair combs.
“That was a major driver. And by the end of the 1800s, there was about 1.2 million elephants – a drastic decline. In Japan, ivory was a symbol of luck, pens and stamps were made with ivory and of course this caused the trade to skyrocket in the region.”
At the moment, various species of the elephant are on the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) list of critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable and threatened animals, sharing the list with another dwindling animal – the rhinoceros. The illegal rhino horn trade has decimated the world’s rhino population by more than 90% over the past 40 years.
But has the world awakened to the plight of these animals?
According to research, the common strategy adopted by many countries is to destroy stockpiles of ivory. An article in The Guardian quotes WWF: “This has been the case not only for African countries but also some developed countries that have intercepted ivory originating from Africa. The idea is to remove the ivory from the market and thus reduce the incentive for people to engage in smuggling. In Kenya, the problem of elephant poaching has spiraled out of control and destroying ivory has become the common practice in dealing with the stockpiles.”
The torching of stockpiles of ivory has not been the only way governments have tried to mitigate the poaching of elephants. Countries such as France, China, the United States, and the Philippines have destroyed ivory worth millions of dollars. However, South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe oppose the destruction of illegal ivory; this according to an article published in National Geographic in 2016.
But does destroying ivory translate to less poaching? The Conservation Trust, a nongovernmental organization sites that in 2015, elephant poaching was at its highest level in more than three decades.
The ornaments made from the tusks form part of a billion-dollar industry – prevalent and as dangerous as ever.
Kahumbu’s Hands Off Our Elephants has generated unprecedented public and political awareness and support for wildlife conservation in Kenya.
According to WildlifeDirect, the most severe financial penalty for convicted poachers was $400, and fewer than 4% of convicted offenders were going to jail, a safe haven for poachers. Since then, the Kenyan government has allocated $20 million for anti-poaching activities.
In January last year, Kahumbu partnered with media and wildlife authorities to launch Kenya’s first wildlife documentary series, NTV Wild. It shines a light on issues of poaching and the very real prospect that in the near future, the world may be without elephants.

Will There Be Any Elephants Left In 2030?

Pnina Tamano-Shata’s earliest childhood memory is receiving a bag of fudge at a refugee camp in Sudan. Since then she has traveled a long way, becoming the first Ethiopian woman to hold a seat in the Israeli parliament and host her own current affairs show on mainstream TV.
Born into a religious Jewish family in the Wuzaba village in northern Ethiopia, Tamano-Shata’s grandfather was a Rabbi (Jewish spiritual leader). He could trace his lineage to the first Jews who arrived in Ethiopia between the first and sixth centuries. A staunchly religious community, they practiced their rituals completely isolated from Jews in the rest of the world.
When Tamano-Shata was three years old, word arrived of a new way to travel to the Jewish homeland, Israel, and thousands set off.
“We were very afraid of the Ethiopian authorities at that time. On the way we were attacked by robbers, women were raped and children disappeared. We ran out of water before we reached the refugee camp in Sudan and a lot of people from our community died,” she recounts.
From 1934 to 1999, four waves of Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel. They number more than 125,000 today.
“Trucks came to take us to an airplane that was waiting for us at a secret meeting point. I remember the Israeli soldiers. They gave us water and candies and bananas.”
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Tamano-Shata, her father and four siblings were separated from her pregnant mother and two sisters.
“Our truck arrived on the tarmac but my mother’s had broken down along the way. People were dying in the refugee camp and we didn’t know if she had also died or not. It was a very hard year for me until the Mossad (Israeli secret service) located her and brought her to Israel. I always say I am lucky because I found my mother and since then God has been taking care of me.”
But life in Israel was also difficult. The country was struggling to integrate these newcomers from mostly rural, remote regions of Ethiopia into a relatively modern country. Tamano-Shata received her first pair of shoes only after arriving in the Jewish State.
“In the first two decades after we came to Israel, the government’s policy was to help and help and help. It was like we were the poor in need. They invested a lot of money but forgot a really important thing – to ask us what we wanted. Only in the third decade did we find our voice and start saying to the government it’s not a problem of money, you need to work more on integration.”
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As a new immigrant, she was painfully aware of the language barriers, cultural differences and lack of knowledge of how their new country worked that prevented many Ethiopians from advancing. She became an activist at an early age, studying law and then moving to journalism and ultimately politics.
“Because of its history, Israel was created to be the home of the Jewish people no matter where they came from. But I don’t think the government understood the challenges black immigrants faced, which are different to those experienced by Jews who came from Russia and elsewhere. For Ethiopian Jews, a Jewish minority in Ethiopia and a black minority in Israel, there was suspicion on both sides at first.”
Over the years that suspicion has eroded in no small part because of the integration and success of people like Tamano-Shata. In recent years, she has turned her attention to getting more women into government because although 52% of Israelis are female, less than 30% hold high office.
“We see progress at the municipality level but unfortunately the ultra-Orthodox (very religious) parties still motivate for legislation that keeps women from top positions. Also, Israel’s biggest problem is security and that’s another reason why women are kept outside the main issues.”
She has always been a great advocate of social issues, arguing that they are part and parcel of security.
“We need to speak loudly and work hard. But never forget where we came from. Our old generation sacrificed a lot to come home to Jerusalem, to the land of our forefathers.&#8221; &#8211; Written by Paula Slier and Andre Toporvski Dryzun

Israel Is Home From Home For This Ethiopian

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It was her work in the dull, dour hospital corridors, day and night, and a particular distaste for the scrubs she had to wear every day, that made Felicia Tshite come up with a way to inject a pop of color into the theater of life and death.
Tshite, a medical doctor, also incidentally a Top 25 finalist of the Mrs South Africa pageant taking place in Johannesburg in October, took her passion for fashion to the operation theater with her own line of apparel for doctors named the Dream Doctor Collection.
The idea was born in 2014, when she visited a fabric shop for the first time, and loved the touch and feel of fabric.
“It was like I had this drip of love in me and I just couldn’t stop,” recounts Tshite.
But she had to keep her enthusiasm on hold as her studies consumed most of her time.
“When you are studying to specialize, there is no time for anything else. It’s just books, books and more books. So finding time to share that attention with my collection, let alone family, was not easy but I knew I had to.”
A wife and mother of two, Tshite was determined to succeed as an entrepreneur and was not ready to let anyone dissuade her. Her husband supported her.
“I have been married to that man for 18 years, and through those years, our love has grown from passion to compassion. With that has come constant support for one another and right now he is supporting me every step of the way,” says Tshite.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/entreprenuers/2017/08/02/success-bag-entrepreneur/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Success Is In The Bag For This Entrepreneur</a>
Tshite has been a doctor for over a decade, but always nurtured aspirations that went beyond medicine.
“It was my big dreams and not having just one goal that gave me an idea of what to call the collection,” says Tshite.
With her bulky medical books on one side and a sketch book on the other, she studied and drew at the same time.
“I remember saying to God ‘you can’t be flashing me with all this love for this collection and then have me fail my exams’, so I knew that no matter what, I had to pass so I could have a platform to advertise my collection on.”
Tshite couldn’t tell anyone of her plans so she kept it under wraps. Only her family knew.
By the time people got an inkling of her collection, she had a complete fashion line ready to show, pamphlets and business cards ready to be distributed, as well as a website.
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Like any business, starting the collection was not easy. All she had was one tailor, one sewing machine and a garage that doubled as a studio.
“I had to step away from working for the government as a doctor because they wouldn’t allow me to sell my collection to them and work for them. I needed to expand on the collection and grow personally so I took the risk and started from the bottom,” says Tshite.
Starting from scratch meant Tshite learned through challenges how the sector worked.
“I started off selling to my own colleagues who would see me [wearing] the collection. Now I am able to sell to more individuals, from students in the healthcare sector, to nurses and doctors in the private and public sector. We now sell about 1,500 pairs of scrubs annually.”
But is it hygienic wearing scrubs not made by the hospital or of a specific material?
“People think scrubs have to be sterilized but that is not the case; they have to be clean. What has to be sterilized are; the surgeon’s arms before they enter the theater room; then the gown, latex gloves and the linen pack used to dress the patient’s bed.
“There is no regulated material used, the reason hospitals use 100% cotton is because they wash all the scrubs and other linen using one temperature on the machines,” says Tshite.
Tshite has been able to expand her range. Starting off with just one collection put together in her garage, today, she offers platinum, gold, silver and bronze ranges in various price points. Having worked in the health sector, she knows her target market well.
It may seem that Tshite has exchanged her stethoscope for a measuring tape, but she hasn’t. She practises as an aesthetics doctor twice a week. Be it medicine, fashion or an upcoming beauty pageant, she seems to have her work cut out for her. &#8211; Written by Keketso Majoe

Fashion In The Operation Theater?

When we talk about the sharing economy, there are a lot of connotations around it, both positive and negative. The first two companies that come to mind are Airbnb and Uber, with the latter having its fair share of controversies regarding regulation not just in South Africa, but around the world.
Airbnb has been a pioneer of the sharing economy, with currently over 3 million listings spread over 65,000 cities in 191 countries. Since its inception in August 2008, the San Francisco-based company has hosted over 160 million guests globally, and that number continues to grow.
The astronomical rise of Airbnb that has shaken up the hotel industry is now worth over $31 billion (at the time of print), and raised over $1 billion in its latest round of funding (March 2017), bringing its total raised to date at over $3 billion.
It’s crazy to think that the company putting a huge dent in the hotel industry owns no property, at all.
In March 2017, the company shared some interesting insights through a report called <a href="https://press.atairbnb.com/app/uploads/2017/03/WomensReport_print_3-2-17_v1-2-1.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Women Hosts and Airbnb: Building a Global Community</a>. It said that while it cannot tear down the obstacles to empowerment women face worldwide, its platform is powered by a growing community of women hosts who are connecting with guests, each other and their local communities.
Airbnb says historically, female hosts have outnumbered their male counterparts around the world; and an estimated over 1 million women host on Airbnb, making up 55% of the global Airbnb host community. Additionally, women host at 120% the rate of men.
The company’s female hosts have been earning a significant income around the world, and in 2016 alone, South Africa came third by most earnings per host at over R25,350 (nearly $2,000), behind the US at $6,600 and Spain at $3,600.
Airbnb estimates that over 50,000 women around the world have used income from its platform to support entrepreneurship for themselves, launching a business, or as direct investment capital for a new business they are starting. The report also stated that globally, 62% of single mother hosts use their Airbnb income to help afford their home.
The South African economy has been boosted by R2.4 billion ($184 million) in 2016, which is an estimated sum of guest spending and host income, said Airbnb in a post in May 2017.
South African hosts saw over 400,000 guest arrivals into their homes last year alone, a massive spike from the 38,000 back in 2014.
The estimated income and guest arrivals in South Africa came from 16,000 Airbnb hosts spread across the country who are ‘regular people’.
“A typical host is 45 years old and 40 percent of them are freelancers, entrepreneurs or self-employed,” said the company.
Lize Hartley, a 28-year-old executive head within the telecommunications industry living in the Cape Town CBD, lets out a property she bought that is five blocks away from her current apartment.
Making the decision to become a host on Airbnb was a ‘no-brainer’ for Hartley, who had been renting out her guest room initially.
“I crunched the numbers, working out what kind of occupation rate and average price per night I needed to cover my bond and other costs; I was lucky enough to put down a higher-than-average – in terms of percentage – deposit, which also helped remove some of the risk,” says Hartley.
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Most of Hartley’s guests are international travelers – she estimates this to be about 85% – and thinks her listing shows up relatively high on the list due to good reviews.
“Once people land on your listing, good reviews are important, as are good photographs, which I had done professionally as soon as the place was ready to be rented.”
Hartley thinks the biggest element of empowerment is that Airbnb is a means for people to own property, who otherwise might not have been able to.
“It is especially important to me as a woman; we know that women don’t own nearly as much property as men do worldwide, without even delving into patriarchal property rights, wage gaps, and other systemic injustices that hinder women from owning property.”
Moreover, there’s no income disparity between Airbnb hosts based on gender, so the platform acts as an equalizer in a world where women have to fight for equality every day, says Hartley.
Buying a property to let out on Airbnb has always been an investment for Hartley, who looks at the long-term focus, rather than a means of increasing her disposable income. “I don’t treat the money I get from this as supplementary income, instead, all of that money goes straight into paying the bond off more quickly.”
Guests that Hartley got to know better, even returning ones from the US, have been interesting, she says.
“From lawyers working in Baltimore alongside the Black Lives Matter movement, to former national cross-country skiers, and art lovers opening galleries on the other side of the world, we really have met some incredible people.”
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Another already empowered female with a successful career is 43-year-old humanitarian aid Belinda Bowling from De Waterkant, in Cape Town, whose Airbnb hosting has gone on to create a micro-business.
“It’s been fantastically empowering for my housekeeper and business partner, Nozi, who looks after the house on a day-to-day basis, without whom I couldn’t make this venture work successfully,” says Bowling.
Nozi has got an iPhone now, and we are able to communicate on bookings as if in the same room together, through the use of innovative apps that support the Airbnb phenomenon, she says.
“She’s also training up other unemployed women from her community, and sometimes outsources to them during busy times; she’s creating a micro-business, and becoming much more financially independent.”
“I’m enormously grateful for this outcome of this venture,” adds Bowling.
<div id="attachment_33785" style="width: 320px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-33785" class=" wp-image-33785" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Belinda-Bowling-high-res-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="310" height="465" />Belinda Bowling (Photo supplied)</div>
Bowling built her house in Betty’s Bay nine years ago, which was more of an emotional investment, rather than a financial one, she says.
“It was a home for me in South Africa that gave me much-desired roots, bearing in mind my then transient and nomadic life working in humanitarian aid and international development.”
Due to her emotional commitment to the house, the decision to rent it out was something she avoided until 18 months ago, when it became a financial necessity.
“Returning home to work in Cape Town, I could no longer afford to maintain a second home that didn’t generate any income.”
Despite being wary of having strangers in her house and personal space, the perceived risks implicit in holiday rentals and the horror stories about nightmare guests, Bowling’s experience has been nothing but a very positive one, with a few lessons learned along the way, she says.
The experience and the income has both exceeded Bowling’s expectations, and some of her guests from Betty’s Bay have come to stay with her at her home in De Waterkant.
“I think Airbnb is a lot like Tinder, it matches people very successfully based on their interests, intentions and tastes. This is what makes it so disruptive and revolutionary – it’s highly personal, despite being a [impersonal] tech platform.”
Airbnb homes are (mainly) just that: (bespoke) homes, says Bowling.
“Not hotels, or mass market villa rentals all crammed with the same furniture. So the chances of the relationship being a positive one is much higher right from the starting point.”
Bowling loves hosting on Airbnb because being a part of ‘special family times’ has been most rewarding, from the ‘glam pad’ for the bride and her bridesmaids to a temporary home for first-time parents wanting to bond with their little one.
“These are intimate experiences that live with guests forever, and it’s an honor to be a part of that.”  &#8211; Written by Nafisa Akabor

The Sharing Economy: 400,000 Guests At Home

Besides family, South African restaurateur Yente Pienaar shares something else in common with world tennis legend Roger Federer.
And that is the word ‘serve’, which she does well in her restaurant, far from the flashy center courts of Wimbledon.
A second cousin to Federer, 29-year-old Pienaar owns and runs the Meet on Milner restaurant on Milner Street in the heart of Waterkloof in South Africa’s capital Pretoria.
On any given day, the place is teeming with locals and diplomats – few know she is related to tennis’ numero uno.
“I wouldn’t say people come here because of who I am related to. Like only some people know we are second cousins. I have only seen [Roger Federer] twice. He has never been here but my aunt and uncle [his parents] have a couple of times,” says Pienaar.
Multi-faceted, as a young student, she won entrepreneur of the year at her high school, the Saint Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls, Pretoria. Today, she has the drive and savvy to compete with any man in the restaurant business.
Meet on Milner is a sophisticated meeting place covered floor-to-ceiling with art, bringing to life the quiet, sleepy street and neighborhood it is located in.
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Born and raised in Kwaggafontein, in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, Pienaar combined her love for cooking, fashion and photography to start her restaurant at the age of 25.
“My mom hated cooking. In the evenings, we would have a choice between toasties or avo on toast. So I got really fed up, and would trade my McDonald’s for cucumber sandwiches. Then I just started making my own food and then later started my own herb garden,” says Pienaar.
This love for cooking continued into her high school years. Pienaar was never one to settle for the ordinary, she would always use her skills to make life better and brighter.
“Even though I went to a nice boarding school, the food could get boring, so I always [enhanced] my food by buying stuff from Pick n Pay. I would always have extra stuff so people would come to me and say, ‘please, like spice up my dish’.”
With an upbringing that advocated imagination and a go-getter’s attitude, Pienaar had dreams and the zeal to fulfill them.
“I always knew when I was small that I wanted to be the editor of Vogue and I wanted to have a restaurant. Those were the two things on my list. So I have got a restaurant now, and it’s been four years,” says Pienaar.
Next on her list is to be an editor, and she is determined.
“I went to TUKS where I studied visual communications. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to go into the arts field. Then I did my honors in drama and film, and that’s another thing I really like and I would like to make a film one day. Creative art directing is what I like.”
The same passion Federer has for the racket, she has for the ladle.
Her restaurant is an amalgamation of two outlets that were earlier a tea room and a 75-year-old pharmacy.
“When I was working at a guest house, I would always drive by the tea room and think this was just a great location.
“I came here with my mother and told her there was such potential. Then I spoke to my parents and told them that I don’t know how this all works, could they help me with a loan, and then they said they would see,” says Pienaar.
It took Pienaar two visits before she could strike a deal with the owners of the tea room. At first, the price was too high and Pienaar left with no deal but she was not ready to give up.
As she traveled back and forth to work daily, she could see the shop was getting emptier attracting fewer customers. It was then Pienaar went to put her offer on the table again.
After being persistent, the owners of the tea room finally gave in to her offer and she began the renovation process.
With the help of her parents, she started her restaurant.
“They are like my bank, my interest-free bank,” she says.
However, Pienaar was not done. After opening up Meet on Milner, she asked the owner of the chemist next door to sell her his store if he ever retired.
“I thought he would retire in maybe two or three years but he came back to me about five months later and told me he is ready to retire. I was shocked and I sure wasn’t ready financially but I knew I wanted the space, and so did many other people, so I bought it.”
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Meet on Milner attracts the residents of Waterkloof and diplomats from the embassies nearby.
“The food and the service are just different from other restaurants. Your meal always looks different from the last one you had which makes it taste like a new experience every time,” says Beau van Zyl, one of the regulars here.
“I love how the staff takes time to know us, even Yente. And as you can see they even have linen table cloths which you just don’t see anymore,” adds Claudia Dalebout, another regular customer.
Pienaar now plans on incorporating more theme events at the restaurant, such as ‘singles mingle’, as she met her boyfriend here. And then some.
“I love Johannesburg and I would love to expand into Johannesburg. Maybe the next year or so, I could have a ‘Meet on…’ on any street,” adds Pienaar on her future plans.
“I guess the next challenge for me is to become the editor of Vogue. I think Africa needs a Vogue, don’t you?” she says, with a smile.
More hits than misses, Pienaar seems to be making all the right moves.  &#8211; Written by Keketso Majoe

The Link Between Federer And Food

The incessant rain was becoming too much to bear especially given the steep and slippery terrain, so I asked my naturalist guide Theo to find a place where we could rest.
I was in a pristine rainforest known as Ranomafana in the central highlands of Madagascar on a three-week trip in April to observe and photograph the natural history and geology of south central Madagascar. We sat protected by rain, beneath the eaves of a primitive cabin once used by a scientist who the local villagers considered “the mother of Ranomafana”.
That lady was none other than Dr. Patricia Chapple Wright, the world’s leading lemur expert, who’d spent time in these cabins in the mid 1980s while searching for extinct lemurs and in the process discovered two new species.
I had no knowledge of Wright, or the amazing work she had done for the conservation of this 145 square mile rainforest, which along with a 500 square mile buffer zone is home to many endangered species. Those include several species of lemur that she almost certainly saved from extinction. As a result of Wright’s determined efforts, Ranomafana National Park was created by her in 1986 and became a World Heritage Site for its unique biodiversity in 1992.
Lemurs are our primate cousins that never evolved into Homo sapiens but possess 90% of our DNA. They had been the least studied primates, since they are only found in Madagascar where they evolved for over 80 million years in relative isolation.
While in Madagascar, I had made up my mind to reach out to Wright and thank her for her yeoman service to science and conservation.
Upon my return to New Jersey, I emailed her lab in Stony Brook University, New York, where she is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Primatology.
In my letter, I expressed my sincere intent to meet her and perhaps interview her for FORBES WOMAN AFRICA. My letter to her was more successful than her own early efforts to meet the chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, when as a young scientist she had naively attempted to write to Goodall in Tanzania.
She had simply addressed her mail to “Jane Goodall, Gombe Stream, Tanzania” and perhaps that mail still sits in a dead letter office in Tanzania.
To discover the real Patricia Chapple Wright I read up on her in every media source available. I watched the movie Madagascar: Island Of Lemurs narrated by Morgan Freeman that featured her.
The BBC series on Madagascar which showed her work with lemurs was a great supplement to my knowledge of the flora and fauna there. Her first book High Moon Over The Amazon: My Quest To Understand The Monkeys Of The Night was an interesting read about her childhood, her “hippie” life in the 60s followed by a long stretch as primate scientist and raising a daughter as a single mother in the jungle.
This book revealed her warm persona, her motherly instincts, her love for nature and her sacrifices to achieve scientific credentials through hard field work in Manu National Park, Peru, in the 70s, a good two weeks journey from civilization.
Her second book, For The Love Of Lemurs: My Life In The Wilds Of Madagascar, gave me an idea of her amazing years observing, documenting and studying the behavior of lemurs, especially the golden bamboo lemur and the greater bamboo lemur both of whom she discovered in Ranomafana.
It was an amazing read covering the difficulties of a young woman scientist in the middle of a rainforest in a politically isolated land with multiple tribal customs and taboos.
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Her scientific journey began four decades ago in New York City when in 1968, as a young housewife on her way to a Jimi Hendrix concert with her husband, she got trapped in a Greenwich Village pet store, Fish &amp; Cheeps, during a rainstorm.
She eventually went home owning an owl monkey that she had fallen in love with at the store. It was the counter culture era in the United States with anti-war protests, hippie culture, women’s rights and African-American equality movements. Therefore raising a monkey, albeit an exotic one, was not considered unusual.
The young Wright was a social worker in New York despite having a biology degree from Hood College in Maryland. As Barbara J. King, nature commentator at NPR (National Public Radio) put it: “That connection with an owl monkey led to a radical life change. Eventually Wright headed to graduate school and then to Madagascar to do research. She has discovered new lemur species and helped create a national park — all while helping the local people along the way. Her efforts have blossomed into a worldwide movement to save the lemurs, considered to be among the most endangered vertebrates.”
After raising the owl monkey for a year she wanted to find a mate for it. Not finding much information on the subject in libraries, she reached out to the anthropology department in CUNY (City University of New York) and came to know that owl monkeys are natives of the Amazon and jungles of Central America. The young Wright decided to take her painter husband and new-born daughter, Amanda, to Brazil to find a mate for her owl monkey. The family eventually came home with a mate and soon the monkey pair had an offspring.
Wright’s observation that the male monkey took all offspring-raising responsibilities defied common perceptions among primatologists that only females nurtured offspring. Her curiosity of this behavior led her to travel to Costa Rica for several months, again with her young family, to study owl monkeys. She came back with sufficient information to publish a pioneering research paper. Her attempt to publish was spurned because she was not a bona fide scientist as she did not have an advanced degree. So she began her PhD studies at CUNY under the tutelage of Dr. Warren Kinzey, a well-regarded scientist.
Her field studies took her to Manu National Park in Peru, where she spent nearly two years studying the behavioral aspects of owl monkeys. Her book High Moon Over The Amazon details her experiences in Peruvian rainforests including stories of facing jaguars, vipers and army ants while raising a young daughter.
Later, working as a research associate for Duke University’s primatology lab, she was sent to the Philippines and Borneo to study the Tarsier monkeys of Southeast Asia. Upon her return, her professor assigned her to Madagascar to search for a new species of lemurs, and especially the greater bamboo lemur, considered extinct.
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This assignment began her three decades of field work in Madagascar which had been closed off to Westerners for more than a decade in the 70s. The economic infrastructure had fallen apart, there were no paved roads and people resorted to slash-and-burn subsistence farming, which meant slashing and burning the rainforest.
Wright was so frustrated with Madagascar and writes: “My journey was just one disappointment after another, until I came to <a href="http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/centre-valbio/about_us/ranomafana.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ranomafana</a> in the Southeast. I stopped in a village because it had hot mineral springs and I needed a bath. Later, the villagers guided me into this gorgeous forest, where I camped. In the forest, I spotted something that I thought was the animal I’d been searching for. It wasn’t. It was actually a species new to science, the golden bamboo lemur. Not long after that, I did see a greater bamboo lemur. It wasn’t extinct after all.”
In 1989, she became a MacArthur Foundation “genius” Fellow. In 1995, she was awarded the Chevalier d’ Ordre National (National Medal of Honor of Madagascar) and in 2004, the Officier d’ Ordre National from the President of Madagascar in recognition of her conservation work.
She is busy commuting between two continents; she is the founder of Center ValBio, a modern research campus in the rainforest of Madagascar. As professor of anthropology and standing member of National Geographic’s Committee on Science and Exploration, she is today considered the world’s top primatologist and lemur expert.
Conducting over 40 biological expeditions in Peru, Sarawak, Philippines, Paraguay and Madagascar over the past four decades, she is the author of several research papers focusing on behavior, predation, rainforest ecology, climate change and conservation studies especially of Malagasy lemurs.
In 2013, Wright was one of only 26 resident members to gain election to the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States. In 2014, she won the Indianapolis Prize for Conservation, the most prestigious award for nature conservation. She has written many books including Madagascar: Forests of our Ancestors, Tarsiers: Past, Present and Future and Girl Power: Ladies Led in the Lemurs. &#8211; Written by Ramdas Iyer

The Professor Who Saved An African Rainforest

Earning more money than her boyfriend proved to be dangerous for Thembisa*, but it didn’t start out that way. Their relationship bloomed from a serendipitous meeting on a bus, but four years later, Bongi* was still taking the bus while Thembisa owned a car and paid for all their household expenses.
Then she bought him a laptop for his birthday. This generosity was the catalyst for all of Bongi’s pent-up frustration and most importantly, his feelings of disempowerment: it boiled into a physical fight so violent she ended up in hospital for a week.
“Often, men can experience feelings of shame and inadequacy at not feeling that they are providing,” explains Clinical Psychologist Richard Middleton. “A central aspect of masculine identity, for many men, is that of being a provider.”
Money has, and always will be, an issue in relationships: because money isn’t about the money – money is about power. Money is about freedom. Money is about choice. And money becomes a symbol of so much more than its Rand value when it’s in a relationship.
As financial advisor Lisa Linfield says: “Money isn’t one dimensional.” This becomes even clearer when there is an income inequality in a relationship, and, as Linfield explains, the money becomes a way to “express the state of the relationship”. Existing issues and dynamics will get played out in the finances. Clinical Psychologist Annette du Toit puts it another way: “The money becomes a metaphor.”
Now, Thembisa’s story may not be the norm, but the relationship wage gap is not a new phenomenon. What’s new about it is in 2017, women are increasingly out-earning their partners and becoming the main breadwinners.
Though this works for many couples, in patriarchal South Africa, both women and men struggle with a power dynamic that is against both their heritage and their expectations. Alison*, a managing director, is now, after a series of unplanned events, out-earning her husband.
She explains: “My husband and I are both Afrikaans – a traditionally patriotic culture, and the cherry on top is that he is a farmer. Although we are both modern, liberal and progressive thinkers, there are certain ingrained cultural quirks which are hard to shake.”
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One of these was directly linked to decision-making and the role of head of the household. As she told me, “I wouldn’t say it caused trouble in our relationship – but it blurred the lines of authority. My husband unconsciously started leaving all important financial decisions to me – a burden I felt too heavy to carry along with being the breadwinner. He on the other hand felt that the breadwinner had the ‘luxury’ of making such decisions. So although I am the breadwinner, I wanted all traditional roles to remain… something he felt he could not do as it was ‘my money’.”
Money, in fact, is more often than not a key indicator of a relationship’s success. “One of the best predictors for divorce is financial disagreements,” says Linfield, quoting a university study by Jeffrey Dew that “those who argue about money once a week are over 30% more likely to get divorced than those who disagree only once or twice.”
Annette says, “The dynamic isn’t any different to when women are financially disempowered in a relationship. The difference is that it’s not a social norm for men to be perceived as disempowered.” Though the wage gap is still a very real phenomenon in the South African workplace, more and more women are climbing the career ladder and secretly changing a long-standing dynamic.
Why secretly? I can only guess. What I know for certain is that of the seven sources I interviewed for first person stories, whether in good or bad relationships, cutting across the race, gender and career spectrum nationwide, all except one asked to be anonymous. My best guess is it’s probably because, as one source said, “I don’t want to embarrass my husband.”
Embarrassment is a very real fear. Franco Pellegrini, a Peruvian Italian sound engineer and stay-at-home-dad, has found the social shaming associated with having his wife as the main breadwinner an unfortunate phenomenon in South Africa.
“For men, it’s not really common,” he says, “There’s a lot of judgement, and when I say I look after the kids, a lot of men will say ‘my wife does that’.”
It’s commonplace at social gatherings for men to make snide off-hand comments that imply being the nurturer is an easy role; comments, Pellegrini says, that often infuriate their wives doing the exact same thing. And as a ‘stay-at-home’ dad, Pellegrini finds it frustrating how society and infrastructure are heavily skewed towards women as the nurturers.
Most classes are called something along the lines of ‘Moms and Tots’, few malls have gender-neutral or male baby-changing rooms, and a lot of people assume Pellegrini, as a lone male, has an illicit agenda with their children. One thing that helps with this is his group of like-minded, stay-at-home dads who meet once a week to bond, commiserate, and drink wine. Society aside, Pellegrini’s relationship with his wife works financially. His wife’s income is seen as ‘theirs’ and his contributions are valued as highly as hers – even if they don’t match Rand for Rand.
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Another successful relationship is Ayanda* and her husband. Ayanda finds being the main provider extremely rewarding, and loves that her husband encourages her ambition. “Practically, at the end of the day, it’s about the long-term view,” she says, “He is my best friend and we support each other, each doing what we do best for both of us.”
What both relationships are doing right is seeing the money as something practical, not linked to worth, and aligning their long-term goals with what each can contribute to the relationship. As Linfield says: “Secret-keeping, and looking at money as ‘yours, mine and ours’ can cause a lot of trouble in a relationship.”
Managing a relationship wage gap can be challenging, with a wide range of factors affecting the relationship; the main trick though is to respect and value each other.
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR MONEY (IN A RELATIONSHIP WAGE GAP)
<ul>
<li>MAKE A MENTAL SHIFT: Don’t think “I am earning R50,000, he is earning R20,000”, rather think “We are earning R70,000” and plan how to use that money for your shared future.</li>
<li>MONEY EXPRESSES HOW YOU THINK: As financial advisor Lisa Linfield says, money becomes an expression of your personality. Are you a saver or an adventurer? Understanding you and your partner’s financial needs will help immensely.</li>
<li>PAY PROPORTIONALLY TO INCOME: Happy Ngale, a financial wellbeing consultant at Alexander Forbes, has this handy formula to help you work it out:Income 1 (higher income) + Income 2 = Total income 
Income 1/total income x 100 = % split 
g. R50,000 + R20,000 = R70,000 
R50,000/R70,000 x 100 = 71%. 
Therefore Income 1 would pay for 71% of the joint bills meaning Income 2 pays 29% towards the joint bill.This balances the payments and creates a fair share towards the joint bills.</li>
<li>DO YOUR FINANCIAL PLANNING TOGETHER: Transparency really is your best friend here! Retiring together one day is your long-term financial goal, so make sure your sights are aligned to the same end result.</li>
<li>VALUE WHAT YOUR PARTNER BRINGS: As Annette says, this might not be money! Looking after the children, managing the household, and other tasks all are as important as a financial contribution.</li>
<li>IF IT’S NOT WORKING, REEVALUATE: If you do feel the financial situation isn’t working – if the breadwinner is feeling too much pressure, or if you simply don’t have enough money, or if one partner is unhappy, it’s perfectly OK to have a look again at your financial agreement and come to one that makes both partners happy. This might mean one of you going back to work, or one of you working less, advises Kerri Lutz, Wealth Coach and Financial Advisor for Women.</li>
<li>CHOOSE A CARETAKER: As John Manyike, Head of Financial Education at Old Mutual, explains: “Having a joint bank account is a convenient way to manage day-to-day spending and saving, but it can be problematic if one of you is not financially disciplined. Couples must identify who the financially responsible one is and agree on who is best-suited to taking care of the household budget.”</li>
<li>BE TRANSPARENT: Don’t keep financial secrets. Know what’s happening with both of you so you can plan accordingly, for your joint future.</li>
</ul>
(*not their real names)
<ul>
<li>Written by Samantha Steele</li>
</ul>

Author: Forbes Woman Africa

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA