Nigeria’s advertising and media market is on the cusp of growth. Newly-affluent consumers, new products and communication channels abound but navigating them with a clear marketing and media strategy remains a major challenge. Two things that are not lacking though are enthusiasm and innovation within the Nigerian creative industry and it’s this nascent market that is the core of Dentsu Aegis’s long-term growth strategy.
Dentsu Aegis is a media agency that builds a communication channel between brands and the people who consume their products and services.
And the woman who is driving the company’s foray into the Nigerian market is Dawn Rowlands.
Rowlands took control of the group in 2010 as Chief Executive Officer and increased revenue and staff at the company by 200% within two years. Her key focus now is expanding the group’s reach into Africa with a focus on West Africa’s largest economy.
“The kind of opportunities offered to young creative people by markets like Nigeria is phenomenal,” says Rowlands.
“The South African market is not moving fast enough and consumers here are completely desensitized to the conversations that brands want to have with them. In Nigeria, the market is completely fresh. When banks cold call consumers in Nigeria, they actually want to hear what they have to say. The level of innovation that allows is great!
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“There is still a lot of work to be done in getting the quality of communication and content and that is a result of a lack of global exposure and competition. We can get in there and make a big difference,” she adds.
Rowlands’ career was built on pioneering new markets and what she calls “a relentless pursuit” of what she believed is right.
Born in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, Rowlands considered pursuing journalism as a career but was dissuaded by the lack of press freedom in South Africa in the early to mid-1980s. She pursued advertising instead and attended the AAA school of advertising and entered the industry as a creative.
“The industry was a great deal more fun than it is now. People spent more time on building relationships and we had more fun,” she says.
Rowlands’ first job was as a media assistant at a small agency after which she spent two years at media agency Bates Wells before moving on to its larger competitor Ogilvy &amp; Mather in 1991. Her goal was to become a media director by age 26 – a position traditionally occupied by middle-aged men in the early 1990s. True to type, Rowlands became the youngest female media director at Ogilvy.
“I am one of those people that when someone tells you can’t do something, I stick to my guns,” she says, crediting Yvonne Johnston, former International Marketing Council of South Africa and Ogilvy &amp; Mather Group Media Director as her mentor at the company.
Rowlands went independent three years later by founding the first strategy-only agency in South Africa with partners Peter Vogel and Jim Taylor.
“When you pioneer something, it’s hard for people to see your vision. And that’s ok. Having the conviction to go on is the most important,” she says.
The business went on to flourish and was sold to the Tempus Group in 1999 with Rowlands staying on in the company until 2002. She went on to found an agency operating the outdoor advertising space, which at that stage was a largely disorganized market capturing just 3% of total media spend. The business was sold to Aegis, ultimately leading Rowlands to her current position. She says that the agency has allowed her to exercise her entrepreneurial ambitions.
“As an entrepreneur, you want to work with like-minded people and Aegis is very entrepreneurially wired.”
Rowlands was named Business Woman of the Year in 2012 by the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa; she received a global STEVIE award for Women in Business in 2012 and has served as a judge at Cannes Lions and the Cristal Media Festival Awards.
She lives in Cape Town and is a mother to two teenagers and has been married 16 years.
“My life is my work and my family. I have no hobbies and no time for myself.  My family and my work are everything to me,” she says.

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‘I Stick To My Guns’

On February 5 2013, Annette Kilele and Marie Muyembi both received the same tragic news. Both women are refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo living in Johannesburg.
Kilele’s husband, Kilele Mukuti, and Muyembi’s brother, David Bakajika, were arrested, along with 18 others, by South African police on charges related to a coup attempt targeting their head of state, Joseph Kabila.
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After a month-long and expensive battle, their men were denied bail and were detained for almost two years. However, a surprise decision by the judge changed all that. In late November 2014, Bakajika was released. Mukuti was not.
Both women now face a different set of challenges; Kilele must continue to support her five daughters despite her husband’s incarceration, while Muyembi must help her brother, and his two children that she cares for, come to terms with his traumatic return.
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The Women They Leave

<h3>Shashi Naidoo</h3>
South African businesswoman, model, actress and TV presenter, who recently became one of the founding members of Fashion with Feeling, a non-profit organization in the fashion industry.
HAPPINESS TO ME IS…Having the freedom and access to realize one’s potential and worth.
WHAT I FEAR THE MOST: Living a life without purpose.
WHAT I HATE IN OTHERS: Hate is such a strong and negative emotion. There are differences in others, which we find difficult to qualify with our own values and principles. I try to keep away from any negative behavior that is of no benefit to others or me.
I ADMIRE: My mother and sister have always been inspirational; they have always pursued their passions, and look for the best potential in everyone. One woman who is a great inspiration for me is Navi Pillay; she has gone where many women have not been able to, due to her dedication and commitment to human rights. She was the first woman of color to be a judge of the high court in South Africa; she was a judge of the international criminal court. It’s very important for us to speak up for those who are being deprived of their rights, and I find there is nothing nobler than pioneering one’s life to preserving human rights and equality.
MY LUXURIES: Shoes and handbags. I always remind myself that one day, my daughter will get to enjoy them as heirlooms.
WOULD YOU GO UNDER THE KNIFE FOR PLASTIC SURGERY? Plastic surgery exists for medical reasons and to help us enhance some of our features that we are insecure about. I prefer going to the gym than surgery, because the recovery period is not as painful as going under the knife. I am quite content with myself right now; maybe if gravity takes its toll one day, I will consider getting some work done.
MY THINKING: Keeping your focus is important if you want to make a success of anything. Sometimes we get really busy making a living and forget to make a life, which is detrimental to the mind. So always reward yourself for all your hard work, and take time out to say thank you.
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<h3>Chantel Dartnall</h3>
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Chef Chantel Dartnall is the culinary force behind Restaurant Mosaic at The Orient in Johannesburg that has one of the most diverse (and longest) wine lists this side of the Sahara.
<h4>Describe the food you create in three words?</h4>
Flavorful, botanical, artistic.
<h4>What makes a good chef?</h4>
Passion.
<h4>What make a terrible chef?</h4>
A chef who does not respect himself/herself or the people working with them.
<h4>What is your signature dish?</h4>
This season it has to be Birds of a Feather which is a trio of poultry. Fungi on the Forest Floor which features a beautiful combination of mushrooms. From previous seasons, Lobster Bisque, Duck leg Confit and Cambodian Butternut cream soup.
<h4>Your favorite restaurant in Johannesburg?</h4>
Chef Dario Di Angeli’s Cube Tasting Kitchen.
<h4>Whose cooking inspires you?</h4>
Chef Pieter Goosen at Hof van Cleve &#8211; Belgium, Chef Michel Bras &#8211; Aubrac, France, Chef Pascal Barbot – Paris.
<h4>Which words or phrases do you most overuse?</h4>
Taste, taste and re-taste.
<h4>What or who is the love of your life?</h4>
My lovable black cat, Peanut, short for Peanut Butter.
<h4>What is your greatest achievement?</h4>
Opening the Restaurant Mosaic eight years ago.
<h4>Where would you most like to live?</h4>
Italy for the food and the beautiful ancient cities.
<h4>What qualities do you most admire in other women?</h4>
Self-confidence, self-assurance and being a great leader.
<h4>What would your last meal on earth be?</h4>
Creamy wild mushroom and black truffle pasta and a very big wild strawberry
Mille-feuille and a bottle of Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque champagne.

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INSPIRATION

“War isn’t pretty. Neither is sexism or racism. Mutu’s genius has been to make them too gorgeous to turn away from,” says Lori Waxman, a special contributor of the Chicago Tribune, referring to Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu’s art.
Mutu, who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is known for her thought-provoking signature collages and artwork, was in Johannesburg in November last year when she exhibited some of her collection at the Goodman Gallery as part of its Africans in America exhibition.
Mutu has a packed schedule and FORBES WOMAN AFRICA is fortunate to get a few minutes of her time at the gallery where we get to see both the artist and her work in a single setting.
In reference to her collage painting, I’m too misty, she starts to explain how the process of mixing the supplies was so fulfilling.
“I used ink, water and paint to create this work, and it is really satisfying for me because things are happening in the making of things – in the ink and color you won’t see in a bottle,” she says.
She is vocal on issues of identity and says when she moved to America from Kenya to study art, thoughts of her being an immigrant occupied most of her thinking.
Mutu brought one of her thought-provoking films called Eat Cake to the month-long exhibition.
The short film is black and white and has a lanky woman with long nails sitting on the ground and eating a big, chocolate cake. Mutu describes the woman in the video as a primal creature.
She says during her pregnancy she was fascinated with urges of eating earth and rock, as compensation for the need for iron.
Other artists who were a part of the exhibition were Ghada Amer, Paulo Nazareth, Alfredo Jaar and Theaster Gates. The exhibition formed part of the In Context series launched by the gallery’s director, Liza Essers, in 2010.
Essers, along with artist Hank Willis Thomas, conceptualized Africans in America, which displayed the “flows, exchanges and continuities between the continent of Africa and the United States”.
“Things are not as simple or as precise or surface as they may come across from the outside. I try to express that to other people – that it is my story,” says Mutu.
The expressive African artist agrees one’s biography in itself is inspirational.
“I think the simple stories about who we are and where we come from, is very inspirational. There is no woman who can look up and say there is no female artist from Africa… we are all here now,” says Mutu, who clearly lets her art speak volumes about her story.

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Her Story In  Ink And Paint

Ask Beverley Joffe what the secret to belly-dance is and her answer might surprise you.
“It’s just decorated walking,” she says, perhaps because the art of moving has always come so naturally to her.
“Since I was little, I was aware that dance was a meeting point between musical expression and the exploration of movement. It has always been a personal discipline as well as a path of surrender. Dance is more than just my love and passion. For me is it an inseparable part of life and an expression of it,” Joffe tells FORBES WOMAN AFRICA.
Joffe began ballet when she was three and made her first stage appearance a year later. She soon progressed to modern dance and jazz and as a young adult trained in London’s West End before heading east to study yoga and Oriental dance. At the time, she was preparing for a career on the stage. Now, as the owner of Babylon Theatre Cafe in Claremont, Cape Town, she owns the stage.
The restaurant is a Mediterranean-fusion, vegetarian, non-alcoholic, Arabic shisha (hubbly-bubbly) establishment and is an embodiment of all Joffe has become. She has not eaten meat for 25 years and not consumed alcohol for a decade-and-a-half as she sought to nourish her body, and the results are self-evident.
Joffe mastered several dance forms including the Indian classical dance Bharatanatyam, worked as a soloist in the United Kingdom and performed with the international Planet Egypt events before returning home to Cape Town to care for her aging mother.
Since being back in South Africa, she has established her own studio, Al-Masrah Academy in Sea Point, and has now branched out into the hospitality industry, where she intends to share all she has learned.
“There is one thing I know without question: when you stand by your truth you will succeed. As an artist I know I can only create from what I know, and what I draw towards me. To many on the outside, it looked like a crazy gamble, but to me the only thing that made sense was to open a vegetarian, non-alcoholic theater restaurant,” says Joffe.
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“Food is the key to healthy body maintenance and physical cell regeneration. We should be eating nutrients and energy. I can’t serve what I would not eat myself.”
Her philosophy starts with her staff, an all-female crew who she has handpicked and trained. Joffe hopes to empower them to become entrepreneurs of their own one day.
“Far from running my staff as a business machine, I train them as I would an athletic team. Feeding them on a vegetarian diet is a power unto itself and I pay very close attention to their health and performance. I see my success for the restaurant alongside their success in skill development and reaching greater standards in life,” she says.
However, the main attraction at Babylon Theatre Cafe is neither the organic, locally-sourced foods and freshly-squeezed juices nor the card games, but the shows on Saturday nights. From 8PM to 11.30PM every week, the restaurant turns into a theater with performers ranging from professionals in the industry to students from Joffe’s studio, who have acquired the expertise to put on their own show.
Joffe continues to teach classes, with the intention of helping women find their inner voice. Her students start as young as nine and she has no age limit on who she opens her doors to. Anyone, at any stage of life, with any or even no level of dance experience is welcomed at Al-Masrah. Classes cost R80 ($6) a session.
“I have never run my studio as a commercial profiteering venture. I offer small group classes and lots of personal growth space for everyone. This created a haven for so many women who needed to unshackle and blossom, learning yoga, bellydance and gaining back their natural confidence and joy,” she explains.
When she is not teaching or working in the restaurant, Joffe has one more project occupying her time. In October 2016, she started the Theatrical Oriental Dance Festival, a three-day event of intense dance workshops and performances across a range of genres. Joffe invited international guests from as far afield as France to teach master-classes and take part in a gala evening. Her intention is to run the festival annually for dancers to “come together and share their work”.
According to Joffe, the magic of art is as much in the creating as it in the sharing, which is why she keeps giving so much.
“Art can only grow and evolve with display, interaction and training, so platforms like this are essential for healthy artistry and inspiration. It’s a mammoth task, but worth every drop of sweat,” she says.

All The Right Moves

You wake up each morning but before getting out of bed you’re already caught up with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. By the time you’ve reached the office, you know exactly what’s trending, which celeb made a faux pas, and what your virtual friends are wearing to work. Sound familiar?
According to the SA Social Media Landscape 2017 report issued by World Wide Worx and Ornico, there are 14 million South Africans on Facebook, 7.7 million on Twitter, 5.5 million on LinkedIn and 3.5 million on Instagram. It’s unclear how many are on Snapchat as users themselves don’t know what their follower count is; however, the last global estimate stood at 2% being South African.
Being on multiple social media platforms is the norm, but how has it changed our behavior? Gregory Eccles, a counselling psychologist practicing in Greenstone Hills, Johannesburg, says social media allows us to share far more of our lives with a large audience than we typically would have, creating opportunities for both greater inclusion of others in our lives, as well as for overshare or compromised privacy.
“Like any other communication tool, it gives us the power to affect change in our lives in good and bad ways, but it is our choice of how we use it that ultimately decides its impact,” says Eccles.
“It also allows us to indulge our inherent narcissism more fully than we otherwise may have been able, but those are desires that were there prior to social media.”
Saaleha Bamjee, a 33-year-old writer and photographer based in Johannesburg, who has since deleted her Snapchat account, says she used to catch up on the network in the mornings and evenings, and when not busy, in the afternoons.
“I joined out of a sense of FOMO [fear of missing out], and at first, followed the popular accounts,” she says. “It soon got tiresome, none of what people were sharing was of any value to me personally.”
There have been reports over the years of people going into debt to maintain an online presence and image, while a fair amount of ‘influencers’ overseas have quit Instagram altogether because they couldn’t keep up with the pressure of leading “fake” lives. Eccles says there is certainly pressure to maintain a certain type of social image, and the same applies to our social media presence.
“While some people may experience that pressure as quite overwhelming, it is ultimately still an action of choice for the most part as to how we present ourselves through social media.”
Bamjee says she made purchases on cosmetics and haircare appliances based on the recommendation of a local beauty blogger, while other purchases were tied to being a photographer.
“On Instagram, if I want to be hired or promote my services effectively, I have to upload quality images; this often involves shopping for food ingredients and props.”
Eccles thinks that social media doesn’t actively force us to make purchases. He says that the one aspect of social media when compared to other communication methods is that it allows us greater control over what we present, but we do not always take that into account when viewing posts from other people – an oversight which potentially mars our perspective of our status relative to others.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen an increase in new hardware such as better technology in smartphones like higher megapixels on the front-facing cameras, and 360-degree cameras, which Facebook has been supporting for quite some time now. These technologies enable us to share more than ever because it’s no longer just a photo; it’s now full-on livestreams through Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, and 360-degree photos and videos of every aspect of our lives.
While the availability of these sorts of tools can make it easier to indulge in our vices, Eccles maintains it is not the tools that are to blame.
“We need to look at our own motivations for why we use all of these tools the way we do, and think carefully about what other options we may have to achieve similar results (sense of social connection) and what the consequences of each method are.”
Eccles believes the problem is deeper than what it appears, and thinks that while consumer culture has an influence on our need to be connected all the time, the bigger influence are our own feelings of social connectedness or isolation.
“The truth is we all have a strong desire to connect socially with others, and social media is often the easiest way to do so. Unfortunately, our interactions through social media are quite superficial, forcing those who choose to fulfil their need for social interaction through social media to require more of it.”
Bamjee subsequently stopped following Snapchat accounts that had a “sameness” about it – a preoccupation with affluence and image.
“I soon realized that I didn’t want to see even more than what was already being shared on Facebook or Instagram. I missed having a conversation where I could ask ‘hey, what’s new’ and actually hear something I hadn’t known about previously.”
Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate our reasons for being on social media and the behavior it dictates. “We have a common urge to place blame outside ourselves – Facebook does this to us or smartphones do this to us, but while they often make it easier to behave in ways that may not be particularly healthy, such as ignoring the outside world in favour of spending all your time on your phone, we cannot ignore our own agency in all of this,” concludes Eccles.
While her time is still being monopolised by other social media platforms, Bamjee says she is happier in the sense that she no longer feels she has to know what’s going on with everyone all the time.

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The Social Media Disconnect

With their colorful costumes and tall stature, the Maasai people of the Great Rift Valley region of East Africa are perhaps the most photographed tribe in the world. Their fierce adherence to an ancient way of life is glorified in coffee table books and travel magazines the world over. The Maasai people of East Africa live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania along the Great Rift Valley on semi-arid and arid lands. The Maasai occupy a total land area of 160,000 square kilometers with a population of approximately 1.2 million people.
I visited the Maasai people of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in 2014. Whilst they live within the confines of the roles they play as glamorous tribals for visiting tourists, they are reportedly constantly battling government initiatives that erode their way of life and meager livelihoods.
Indigenous people such as the Maasai worldwide are between 300-500 million, embody and nurture 80% of the world’s cultural and biological diversity, and occupy 20% of the world’s land surface. Some indigenous people strive to preserve traditional ways of life, and at the same time seek greater participation in current state structures.
But all is reportedly not well for these pastoral farmers since the land they grace has been under threat by mining and wildlife concessions for nearly 50 years. Local indigenous councils have been battling with authorities during this entire period: it seems like both their luck and existence are running out.
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An additional problem for the Maasai apparently is the discovery of vast quantities of helium in the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley. The BBC News in June 2016 reported this find as a “game-changer”, especially as previously-known world supplies are running out.
A group of researchers from Oxford and Durham universities in the United Kingdom, working with the Norwegian helium exploration company Helium One, have discovered what they believe is a vast supply of the element in an unlikely place.
“Their research shows that volcanic activity provides the intense heat necessary to release the gas from ancient, helium-bearing rocks,” according to a statement from the University of Oxford.
“Within the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley, volcanoes have released helium from ancient deep rocks and have trapped this helium in shallower gas fields.”
Robert Richardson, Professor of Physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for his work on “super fluidity of helium”, and has issued a warning that supplies of helium are being used at an unprecedented rate and could be depleted within a generation.
Professor Richardson warned the gas is not cheap because the supply is inexhaustible, but because of the Helium Privatization Act passed in 1996 by the US Congress. The Act required the helium stores held underground near Amarillo in Texas be sold off at a fixed rate by 2015 regardless of the market value, to pay off the original cost of the reserve. The Amarillo Texas storage facility holds around half the earth’s stocks of helium – around a billion cubic meters of the gas. The US currently supplies around 80% of the world’s helium supplies.
Richardson said it has taken 4.7 billion years for Earth to accumulate the helium reserves; we will have exhausted them within about a hundred years of the US’s National Helium Reserve having been established in 1925.
Helium is used in hospitals in MRI scanners as well as in spacecraft, telescopes, nuclear research and radiation monitors. Until now, the precious gas has been discovered only in small quantities during oil and gas drilling. Using a new exploration approach, researchers found large quantities of helium within the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley.
Prof Chris Ballentine of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, said: “This is a game-changer for the future security of society’s helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away.”
The discovery was reported in the US journal Popular Science.
“To put this discovery into perspective,” Prof Ballentine continued, “global consumption of helium is about 8 billion cubic feet per year and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world’s largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 billion cubic feet.”
The Tanzania find could reportedly thus be sufficient to meet global demand for nearly seven years, and may be more than twice as large as the US helium reserve.
This latest find, estimated at 54 billion cubic feet of helium ($3.8 billion), is a major shot in the arm to global helium reserves which have been running dangerously low, with prices rising by 500% in the last 15 years, according to Global Risk Insights (GRI), which provides expert political risk news and analysis on events affecting business, investment, and economic climates worldwide.
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While this scientific find has excited scientists the world over, the other side of the equation is the possible land-use stress to the Maasai people under whose land this discovery has been made. But the Maasai are no strangers to land grabs since the time they moved into the Rift Valley from South Sudan during the 15th century.
During the 16th century, their presence ranged from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean and from the highlands near Nairobi to the Serengeti plains in Tanzania. There they peacefully co-existed with other tribes and often times came to the aid of their neighbors during Arab slave raids. The British, who arrived in the late 18th century, saw the Maasai as a nuisance and negotiated a 1904 treaty to move the Maasai to a piece of land in the Rift Valley.
In the 1950s, in a deal that was very similar to the previous dealings, the British successfully convinced the Maasai to move out of the Serengeti land to the Ngorongoro highlands where fellow Maasai already lived in order to create a better wildlife corridor. The Maasai lost the best dry-season rangeland in their area to the benefit of all the wildlife among which they had lived for so many years.
Realistically, the major priorities of the governments of Kenya and Tanzania are economic growth, and both have relied on tourism and other projects to obtain this.
“Modern society demands resources to maintain a standard of living commensurate with people’s expectations, and a suitable level of environmental quality is inherent to this standard. Trade-offs are inevitably made between the activities that provide energy, minerals, timber, and food and the need and desire to preserve ecosystem services. Such trade-offs are often highly controversial and politically volatile,” writes Lee Gerhard of Kansas Geological Survey, in a conference presentation entitled Meeting Societal Resource and Environmental Requirements into the Twenty-First Century.
The author, a chemical engineer by training, has investigated and determined that there is no chemical way of manufacturing helium, and that current supplies originated in the very slow radioactive alpha decay that occurs in rocks. Commercial helium is produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. Most natural gas deposits also contain smaller quantities of nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide, helium, and other non-combustible materials that must be removed via “upgrading” to produce natural gas with an acceptable level of heat energy.
Once the helium has been separated from the natural gas, it undergoes further refining to bring it to 99.99+% purity for commercial use. The question remains if the helium found in Tanzania would require large operations for upgrading it.
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This author also believes that the environmental impact of recovering the helium gas can be reduced by newer drilling technologies such as lateral drilling and gas fracking without disturbing the land above. In my opinion, the Tanzanian government needs to actively seek the cooperation of the Maasai society while trying to create a formula for sharing royalties.
These profits I believe should be invested into the Maasai society through a structured program to prepare them for modern society through vocational education and other cottage industry enterprises. An international NGO should be used as a vehicle for this equitable transfer. I envisage that in doing so all aspects of the helium issue can be attacked: global scientific progress, GDP growth, and most importantly, allowing the Maasai to earn royalties while holding on to their culture, which is a heritage that belongs to all of us globally.
During my planned travels through Maasai lands and the Rift Valley areas in the near future, instead of capturing images of their enactments of various ceremonies popularized by travel magazines, I am planning on spending time inquiring about their progress with the government agencies regarding the helium issue. Watch this space for more.

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What You  Don’t See  In Travel Brochures

It’s obvious Nachilala Nkombo has an abiding passion for Africa. Born and raised in Livingstone, Zambia, Nkombo’s interest in development work was influenced by the 1980s when there was a lot of rhetoric in the media about the importance of a free Africa.
“South Africa was the last on the fight for freedom back then, so from time to time, our town would get bombed and the reason why South Africa was bombing us was because we were supporting the freedom fighters. So it got me to develop a sort of consciousness early on in terms of commitment to social justice and understanding our history and how as African people we had equal rights and capabilities contrary to what the system at the time was telling us,” says Nkombo.
Her fight for social justice has seen Nkombo travel all over the world with a commitment to improve the lives of the underprivileged and the poor.
“I took the belief that we as Africans can change the world. When I was growing up, my role models at the time were politicians because they were doing great things and they were leading on big projects that were changing the communities.”
After university, Nkombo’s first role was an internship position in the United States with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
“It was like an organization focusing on human rights and it looked at areas where human rights were violated a lot, like the Middle East. Internally, we were challenging corporate personhood laws. In America, corporates had the same rights as individuals. And we were challenging this because there was no way a human being that was finite can compete with a corporate whose resources are never-ending.”
Then came her role with an American non-governmental organization back in Africa.
The role was to be part of the team going to set up the program in Africa and she was responsible for the pan-African women and youth program, which also had an element connecting with the United Nations.
“We developed curricula for young people in Africa that were leaders and we trained about 300 young activists from different parts of Africa who were already making a difference,” she says.
Nkombo’s continued passion for development work has led her to Denmark and Germany and today as the Executive Director of ONE Africa, her fight to combat social injustice wages on.
“As the ONE campaign, we have a plan that outlines the policy priorities that we are going to focus on in the next four years to deliver our mission that is to contribute to the end of extreme poverty and disease. My responsibility is two-fold, to lead the team in Africa to come up with strategies to deliver campaigns and advocacy that actually work in Africa but also my responsibility feeds into the global strategy so that what we are thinking about globally actually works and is relevant in Africa,” says Nkombo.
The organization has expanded their work in recent months and has teamed up with the Dangote Foundation (spearheaded by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote) to spread their work on advocacy in Nigeria. Nkombo believes making a stance to end social injustice is a mandate for all Africans and it is only by pulling together as one, that we can truly impact the future generation.

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The Chosen One

When Hannah Bellemare was growing up in freezing-cold Skellefteå, a small picturesque town in Sweden known for its ice hockey, she was a lonely girl who chased insects in the garden and ate the wild berries she found. She would also spend hours learning to cook in her mother’s kitchen, rustling up gourmet dishes for her family from the age of 11.
These days, she’s one of the few gastro-sommeliers in the world, based in Philadelphia, in the United States (US), a far cry from her icy hometown. She works in fine dining restaurants around the world pairing wine and food.
“Growing up, I always wanted to taste everything, everything from insects, wild berries in the forest, wine or whatever I could get my hands on. I was curious to know what it would taste like… I bullied my mom out of our kitchen. I took over cooking for the family and wouldn’t let my mom in the kitchen anymore,” says Bellemare in a telephone interview from the US with FORBES WOMAN AFRICA.
“I have always wanted to inspire passion for food, to share my knowledge of food and wine pairing, and to inspire others. I want the world to understand the science behind food and wine pairing.”
Bellemare says she never planned on making a living out of cooking. But the passion developed gradually and as she grew older, she realized her never-ending affair with food and wine.
Graduating with a degree in gastronomy at Umeå University, in Sweden, she turned entrepreneur, launching her own company, Dalalva Wine Tastings, where she taught people all about food and wine pairing. Meanwhile, she studied for a sommelier diploma from The Swedish Restaurant Academy of Stockholm.
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In 2013, Bellemare relocated to Philadelphia to stay with her husband, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, a French professional ice hockey player. She taught for a short while at Drexel University, in the US. She also changed the company’s name to Dalalva Wine Education &amp; Consultation, extending its services to corporate consultations. She also has a website where she posts her cooking videos and recipes.
“There are few people in the world with this specific title [gastro-sommelier]and expertise since most countries don’t even offer gastronomy as a university degree. I would guess there are between 10 to 20 people in the world with this title, but I don’t really know,” she says.
“I create recipes around the wine that I want to use rather than creating a dish and then trying to pair a wine to it. You can change the recipe but you can’t change the wine unless you are a winemaker. My whole life I have been very determined never to let other people’s ideas influence me, I trust my own ideas.”
Bellemare is also writing a cookbook, to cater for those who prefer dining at home and spending quality time with loved ones.
“The recipes in the book are what I call fine dining at home, it’s for people who want to learn about fun cooking techniques, beautiful plating. Some people don’t want to go out and pay dining prices for something they could do at home.”
Bellemare’s work has taken her around the world, learning different cuisines whilst also imparting her knowledge to others.
And she loves coming to South Africa for its bountiful food and wine landscapes.
“South Africa is one of my favorite places in the world, I make any excuse to be there. I find the South African Chardonnays inspiring because they are such quality wines,” she says.
Her recent month-long trip to South Africa was spent on the farms of Stellenbosch and Franschhoek; the farming towns with the oldest vineyards and Cape Dutch architecture in the Western Cape province.
From her mother’s humble kitchen in a pretty Scandinavian town, Bellemare is sharing her rare culinary expertise with the world.

Forbes-5-edited

Something To Wine About

They began selling skirts out of the boot of their VW Beetle car in 2000 to friends and family. Sixteen years later, their clothes have been worn at the best fashion shows in Atlanta, Washington, Nigeria, London and India.
It didn’t come easy.
On a balmy Saturday morning, we arrive at the Sun Goddess boutique in Sandton City, a plush mall in Johannesburg, South Africa. What hits you in the face is a bunch of Afro-centric ethnic wear on the racks, a pride and fortune of husband and wife team, Thando and Vanya Mangaliso.
Behind the counter is Vanya; fashion design is her forte. This poised award-winning designer has a petite physique and a headwrap; she has a soft handshake and a striking smile.
Her husband and business partner, Thando, concentrates on retail.
Vanya, 43, was the only child at home, always surrounded by cousins, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. She had a passion for reading.
“I grew up in a family of dreamers; grateful for the love of books instilled in me and I guess that continues to fuel my dreams.
“The endless beauty in life, love, family, books, history, the future and our rich heritage. I’m also inspired by the idea of believing there is more and I tend to enjoy the sacrament of work; the desire to rise above mediocrity,” says Vanya.
She worked in the corporate world, in Logistics for Transnet, traveling to different countries: Zambia, Congo and Nigeria, where she noticed that fashion dictated their culture.
“When I’d get off the aeroplane in Nigeria, I’d know I’m in Nigeria, because of their traditional wear. But in South Africa, it was not always the case because fashion didn’t exist as we know it today. It wasn’t always like this. It took a collective effort of community that was transitioning,” says Vanya.
It was those trips that encouraged her to start her own business in fashion.
Vanya’s biggest inspiration is her mother, who always wore Umbaco, a traditional outfit.
She always wondered why people didn’t wear [traditional regalia] regularly. It’s no surprise that she created a business out of this.
“We had to define what the South African aesthetic is. It is not merely taking a normal western t-shirt and put buttons, I mean at the end of the day you have to define the DNA of the South African look.”
Even a good novelist couldn’t have written her story.
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The Mangalisos had five stores in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Managing all shops wasn’t easy. In 2009, they closed three.
“We didn’t have a system that allowed us to manage a shop that was in Durban when we were in Johannesburg so we had to restructure our business. And we opted for the quality of the profit margin as opposed to the quantity,” says Vanya.
They had 150 employees in retail and production but today they have only 20 employees.
The Mangalisos also faced a major setback in their career when their stock of fragrances worth
R2 million ($150,000) got wiped out in one day as a result of a flood at their Rosebank store – a terrible moment.
“I tend not to take things personally at all. It was also a very special and interesting time, making great use of the antagonistic nature of things to rise to greater heights as people,” she says.
In addition to the bad luck she suffered because of nature, there was also an armed robbery at her home in Atholl in Johannesburg, in the middle of the night.
“As it happens you ask yourself how this story is going to end! So helpless, so vulnerable, terrified and sure they clean you out. You can only try to keep calm and be grateful for your lives,” says Vanya.
“I live in the now, fully aware [of living] every moment to the fullest; I tend not to dwell on the dead past or fear the future. I’m also a great believer in letting go of pain once it has served you and so I’m an eternal optimist always looking ahead,” she says.
Even though the Mangalisos struggled with their business, they still believe a loan should be earned.
“When we started the business, we never got a business loan. Having things easy deprives you of being enterprising because as they say necessity is the mother of invention and I think my life is a testament to that,” says Vanya.
Even at their worst time in business, they were creating products to make money. They launched a range of African head gear.
“We’ve become very cut-throat, the business must make money; if it doesn’t make money, we close it. It’s not about your pride; even a fashion line, if it doesn’t make money, we close it. We’ve driven costs down and continued to make sort of the same money,” says Thando.
“With us, it’s all or nothing. If I don’t sell a skirt I don’t eat,” says Vanya.

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‘If I don’t Sell A Skirt I Don’t Eat

The cool highveld breeze snaps the corner of her neon-yellow safety waistcoat as she steps out of the office building into the yard, the white hard hat sitting comfortably on her head.
Fortunate Mdanda takes confident strides in the male-dominated world of metal and machines. There are other women visible through the workshop doors, setting off sparks as they wield welders and grinders.
Under Mdanda’s watchful eye as CEO of Smith Capital Equipment, there is an internship program for women, and the company actively recruits female engineers.
Her background is not in engineering, but her corporate experience in business strategy, process and finance has amply equipped her for the position. If you have a mind for business, there is no need to feel restricted to more traditionally female pursuits.
“I’ve never looked at industries based on gender. I’ve looked at what one can contribute. So it’s a consolidated effort of all the right skills within the business that makes it successful,” she says.
When she with her husband Sipho took ownership of Smith Capital Equipment on November 2, 2015, the management and workforce were in for a major culture change.
After over two decades of democratic governance in South Africa, the company was still caught up in an apartheid time warp, with separate amenities for the races.
With racial and gender barriers swept aside, there was yet another sweeping change. The company’s 84 employees became shareholders.
“We created a shareholding for both management and staff, across race, across gender, so it’s inclusive, it’s a very exciting space for all of us at Smith Capital,” says Mdanda.
But change always comes with some growing pains.
“I must admit at the beginning it is a new concept when people are told they are shareholders. It comes with excitement, but they’re sort of sceptical. What does that bring? Is there money into our pocket immediately? So it took us a while to communicate the upside of being a shareholder and the responsibilities that come with being a shareholder,” she says.
“But now we’re at a space where we all really understand and are excited about being shareholders. People don’t just come in, do their work and walk out. There is transparency, there is excitement in terms of where the business is going, everyone shares in everything, the strategies of the business, the prospects, and we all share in the excitement and the challenges that we face as a business.”
The core business of this 43-year-old company is the manufacturing of on-road aerial platforms and drilling rigs used for water well and hard rock surface drilling in the mining industry and pole planting for new infrastructure. Equipment is locally designed and manufactured, with drilling rigs and aerial platforms boasting over 90% local content.
Then there is the import side of the business, with truck-mounted cranes brought in from Italy, as well as the ongoing service aspect of the business.
Through a recently-introduced rental division, the company encourages local contractors, who experience financial barriers to entry and cannot afford upfront procurement of the necessary capital equipment they need to deliver on contracts they obtain.
Repairs and maintenance as well as regular load-testing are other important facets of the business.
More black industrialists are emerging with encouragement from the government. The biggest barrier to entry has been funding.
“Now with the DFI [development finance institutions] being open to assisting entrepreneurs growing into being industrialists, I see endless opportunities being presented,” she says.
What is important here is that it goes beyond more than purely facilitating funding, but in providing support in skills-training, and opening business opportunities and new markets.
“Sometimes you find you have the best product but you can’t put it out there, you can’t export it because you find every process when it comes to structured processes that you need to go through are actually barriers to making one successful.”
The Gauteng Provincial Government and the City of Ekurhuleni, where Smith Capital Equipment is headquartered in South Africa, have made efforts to make it easier to do business.
Although the company had been exporting for years, it hadn’t been a major strategy.
“Now we’re turning that around, we’re sending units into Africa, which is very impressive. We’re getting enquiries, a lot as well, because our products are African products, not South African products. They are designed for the African terrain. It is different to sending a product anywhere in the world. So we understand what Africa is about, we understand the terrain and we understand our neighboring countries as well, so doing business with them is quite interesting and exciting and there is actually an increase in opportunities that are being presented.”
Smith Capital Equipment falls under the umbrella of Isipho Capital Holdings, which is wholly owned by the husband-wife duo. Their first acquisition was Kholeka Engineering, a manufacturer of truck bodies and trailers, based in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.
“We funded it from our own savings. All we wanted to do was to have the skin in the game and to ensure that we can prove to ourselves that we can work hard and turn the business around. That happened and then came the Smith Capital deal. A few other deals are in the pipeline, so it’s quite exciting,” says Mdanda.
Because Smith Capital Equipment required considerable investment, the Mdandas secured a loan of R41 million (around $3 million) through the National Empowerment Fund (NEF). The company has since been identified as one of the 100 Black Industrialists by the Department of Trade and Industry, has established strong BEE credentials and is ISO 9001 registered.
Looking at the day-to-day operations of Smith Capital and the commitment and enthusiasm of their 84 shareholders, the dreams and plans for an expanding Isipho Capital Holdings seem bright and achievable. The future will tell if this is the birth of a new African business dynasty.
While there is much to do in running the business and creating and building an inclusive culture, there is much industry networking to be done as well.
“Sadly, engineer-run businesses are inward looking, that’s how Smith Capital was. But, with our experiences from corporate, you learn that business doesn’t come to you, you go look for business. You go make your presence felt.”
While she has achieved much in the business arena, she defines as her biggest achievement her and Sipho’s two teenage children – 18-year-old son Luyanda and 15-year-old daughter Noluthando.
No doubt Mdanda is a great role model to Noluthando, as she actively supports the development of women in her industry. Her advice for young women wanting to break into any previously male-dominated industry is to be positive and prepared to learn.
“Open yourself to learning and embrace the opportunities. With anything you do there will be challenges, but if you’re open-minded and positive about it and put in the hours in terms of the hard work, it works out well,” says the CEO who has proven this mantra for success, time and again.

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Lifting  Hurdles Even A Crane Can’t

Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), a low-tech option for stabilized premature babies where the tiny baby is swaddled skin-to-skin between its mother’s breasts instead of languishing in an incubator, can save many of these babies’ lives and improve their outcomes.
Premature birth is the leading cause of death of babies around the world. Of the 15 million babies born prematurely each year, around one million of them die, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Of those that survive, many experience cognitive deficits and other problems such as lack of fine motor coordination, attention deficit disorder, poor hearing and vision – problems that often go unnoticed and/or untreated in developing countries.
Yet, despite many studies that point to the benefits of KMC, where the premature baby is swaddled to the mother, father or helper, often in a special stretch cotton or lycra carrier, fed only breast milk where possible, and sent home earlier but with strict year-long follow up, the method has yet to replace more expensive, high-tech options as a mainstream method of care, even – or especially –  in places where incubators, baby warmers and other necessary equipment are often in short supply.
The question is why?
Experts point to several reasons why they believe the practice has been slow to catch on, even in poor countries where it could be so beneficial. A quest for hi-tech options, cultural resistance, a lack of scientific understanding and a failure of the imagination, are some of them.
But proponents of KMC are hopeful that recent findings, as well as new evidence on the developing brain, may trigger a sea change.
A recently-released study done in Colombia, where KMC originated 30 years ago due to a shortage of incubators, tracked down individuals 20 years after they were given KMC as premature babies.
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According to pediatrician and lead researcher, Dr Nathalie Charpak, director of the Kangaroo Foundation in Bogotá, the findings, published in December 2016 in the journal Pediatrics, show that “Kangaroo Mother Care has significant, long-lasting social and behavioral protective effects 20 years after the intervention”.
The study found that the young adults given KMC were less likely to be aggressive, hyperactive or impulsive, and that they had bigger brains, than those in a comparison group that received traditional incubator care.
When the study was started in 1993, the death rate was twice as great in the comparison group. The study also showed that 20 years later, the KMC-raised babies had more supportive families, had performed better at work and school and were better adjusted socially. Although their IQs were only slightly higher than the comparison group, they had more brain matter in areas important for learning and storing information.
But doctors in hospitals in developing countries sometimes shun KMC as a “third rate” solution compared to the state-of-the-art incubators that wealthier hospitals can offer, says Charpak.
But in Africa, where 60% of women still give birth at home or an informal setting, despite the push to get them to deliver in healthcare facilities, and where incubators in hospitals are often broken and in short supply, premature babies run the risk of infection and death due to these equipment problems according to Dr Nancy Sloan, an epidemiologist who has researched KMC globally. What’s more, delays in getting newborns into hospital increases the risk, as most newborn deaths occur on the first day of life.
Given that KMC does not require expensive drugs or machines, it is no surprise that pharmaceutical or other corporate giants are not queuing up to fund studies. But global development goals in recent decades have galvanized energy around preventing baby deaths and the WHO has promoted and published guidelines on KMC since 2003 as part of a strategy to accomplish this. Many studies, backed by the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the WHO and others, point to the clear benefits of KMC in survival rates and outcomes for premature and low-birth-weight babies.
Charpak is hopeful that the results of her study will help spread the message about the overwhelmingly positive benefits of KMC. Scandinavian countries have been pioneering the practice for years; there are big KMC movements in many other developed countries, including the US and Canada; and the method is being piloted in many developing countries around the world, including in some African countries. In South Africa, there are several successful KMC programs in operation.
But, despite what the studies find, including one in Cameroon shown to almost halve death rates of premature babies, resistance persists. Charpak notes that this is particularly evident in some northern countries on the continent.
“We have failed in countries like Algeria, Morocco and Egypt and I don’t know exactly why.”
She suspects, however, that fathers in these countries may balk at the bigger role that KMC requires of them in nurturing the newborn.
KMC takes human resource dedication to teach mothers and their families exactly how to practice it and to follow up the babies at home for months afterwards. It is not just about putting the baby on the mother and ‘saying bye bye’,” as Charpak puts it. Yet it is less expensive than high-tech interventions. She laments that the intensive, hands-on time required is off-putting to many mothers in countries like the US, for example, where pressure to get back to work as soon as possible is great.
While Charpak believes that KMC should only be started after a premature baby has first been stabilized in an incubator, another group of scientists is keen to show that immediate KMC, directly after birth, could save more babies and improve their outcomes too.
Dr Nils Bergman, a perinatal neuroscientist who has been championing KMC for decades, is heading up a large study in Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania and India, which is set to begin in a few months. Also funded by the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the study on 5,000 premature babies hopes to show that “immediate KMC” directly after birth, even on unstable babies, can improve survival rates.
In Bergman’s view, the reason that KMC hasn’t been taken up more widely, despite clear evidence that shows its benefits, is because there has not been enough scientific knowledge to explain why it works.
His research on 128 Zimbabwean infants 20 years ago using immediate KMC showed not only a dramatic improvement in their survival rate (50% up from 10%), he says, but that the babies behaved differently.
“They suckled well, their skin had a different texture and they grew twice as fast. They opened their eyes and looked at you in a focused way. They were real human beings, not protoplasm lying in a box.”
Now, Bergman says, new studies in neuroscience and epigenetics actually show the toxic effects of stress on the developing brain.
“For all mammals, separation from the mother is the greatest stressor known,” he says. Immediate skin-to-skin contact between mother and baby, whether premature or not, is crucial for the baby’s brain development and bonding, he believes, and in his view, “the incubator is the primary cause of toxic stress”.
“Kangaroo Mother Care is not a Third World fix for infant mortality,” he says. “This is something that all babies around the world could benefit from.”
Bergman would like to show not only that immediate KMC increases the chances of survival but that it improves the quality of that survival. He hopes that more funding will become available for follow-up research on the infants on the study.
Sloan also backs the idea of KMC for all babies, particularly on a continent where most women still give birth at home. In the home or community setting, information crucial to determining whether a baby is premature or not – exactly how old the baby is and how much it weighs – is often not known, even when a baby is admitted to a hospital.
Also, women are sometimes stigmatized for giving birth to premature babies, and KMC for them only could stigmatize them further, she says.
Research shows clear benefits for both stabilized premature babies and for healthy babies, Sloan says, and there is no evidence that it causes harm.
“We need to start promoting universal KMC for every baby,” she says.

Kangaroo Mother Care Centre in Bloemfontein Hospital

‘Real Human Beings,  Not Protoplasm  Lying In A Box’

IIt’s a sunny Thursday, and I am at the Mobile Military Health Formation of the SA Military Health Service in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital city, to meet Limpopo-born Molatelo Nkoana, a 31-year-old woman who has dodged more bullets than most.
Nkoana’s running a little late, but then she arrives, sallying into the boardroom. She is on duty and in uniform, and proceeds to tell me about her life and the career she almost embarked on.
After completing her secondary education, Nkoana says she first went on to study and train as a nurse. But that wasn’t to last long; she gave it up midway – to join the military, a decision she would never regret.
“Basically, it was about the money, I was young and wasn’t getting enough money, so I went on the market,” says Nkoana.
The enthusiastic 22-year-old applied, and was recruited three months later, reporting to the Thaba Tshwane military base in Pretoria for basic training. She also trained in Kimberly, Bloemfontein and the Western Cape.
Nkoana had thought only the physically fit could join the military, but soon discovered it offered multiple careers one could explore. With her nursing background and experience, Nkoana chose to be a paramedic.
In March 2013, Nkoana was one of the 200 soldiers of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) selected to go to the Central African Republic (CAR) as part of South Africa’s peace-keeping mission there.
They would go on to fight a series of battles outside Bangui in the CAR. And Nkoana was the only woman on the frontline.
Michel Djotodia, leader of the rebel alliance, Seleka, had declared himself the new president of CAR and forced the then serving president, François Bozizé, out of the country.
It wasn’t going to be an easy task for the SANDF.
Nkoana takes me back to noon on that fateful Friday on March 22, 2013 when she first spotted the rebels; she remembers it all like it was yesterday.
She literally transports me to CAR with her vivid detailing of the series of events that unfolded. As she relates this story of death and danger, I hear the bullets, the gunshots and the rebels roar; I see the ravages of war in CAR.
Nkoana was amongst the first to see the rebels attack.
“We saw a civilian running away from those people, the rebels. I was at the gate of the base’s duty room. I ran to the sick-bay as a medic and told the people that the rebels are coming, the rebels are coming.”
When she reported it, nobody believed her. But she persisted, proceeding to gather her bulletproof vest, helmet, and weapon.
Her fellow soldiers only believed her when the Officer Commander (OC) ordered them to prepare and check what was happening outside the base. He tasked a team from the special force.
Around 5PM, this team was ambushed by the rebels, but they fought back tenaciously, and the rebels fled.
Three men of the special force team returned injured, one shot in the chest, the other had sustained a fracture in his femur and the third was wounded.
For the first time, the base knew it was rough outside.
“As medic personnel, we took them to civilian hospitals outside to get other doctors to help us,” recalls Nkoana.
Around 10PM the following day, the rebels came back again firing bombs. The SANDF could hear the entire din from their base. The Sergeant Major asked Nkoana to go with them to replenish food for the soldiers who had been on night vigil.
She grabbed her medical bag, helmet, bulletproof vest, weapon and left with the men, not hesitating for a minute.
It was around 12PM, when she along with the others drove 15-20 kilometers to the location of the stranded soldiers; it was quiet when they got there, but as soon as the rebels saw the SANDF vehicles, they started shooting again.
“We went out of the car and took cover, and then we started shooting back. While fighting, I managed to get one of the guys that was injured and suggested I take him back to the base because he could not run, fight or do anything,” she says.
The OC opted otherwise and Nkoana and the injured men had to wait even as the bullets rained over their heads.
At 5PM, as they were heading back to camp, the squad was ambushed again. This was when a number of lives were lost, says Nkoana, for the first time sounding emotional.
They did what they did before: stop the vehicle, step out and take cover.
As Nkoana was taking cover, one of the soldiers had been shot in both legs and was screaming out for her. She bandaged him but the chaos was far from over; yet another soldier was calling for one of the two medics that were there. He had almost missed a bullet but it had grazed his neck.
By then, Nkoana and the other medic could see dead bodies all around them. The injured soldiers shouted to them to leave because they were going to die.
“We told them we can’t leave. We are still alive and we can at least take cover with you. Let’s move to a safer place; the guy that was shot in the legs said he couldn’t walk and we should leave him there.”
The team refused and carried him to safety.
Around midnight, the OC called from the base asking for Nkoana. Many of the soldiers were already back at the base, but the young woman had stayed on with the other fighters.
“When they called, I switched off my phone because it was loud and we could hear the voices of the rebels from where we were hiding.
“I switched the phone back on and sent a message telling them ‘we are here, we are hiding, we’ve got two patients and we cannot get out of this cover’.”
Nkoana had full faith she was going to return home to her son in Senwabarwana, her hometown in South Africa’s Limpopo province. It kept her alive.
She thought she would be running on foot back to the camp because there was nothing that could rescue them.
Many soldiers died, but many of the rebels also died, so there was not going to be any mercy towards the SANDF.
Nkoana then received a text advising her and her patients to remain in hiding and stay calm. Around 4AM, she received a call asking if they were still undercover; they were then instructed to somehow make their way to the airport.
“The commander of the rebels was requesting the SANDF to go back to their country,” she says.
But Nkoana and the injured soldiers had to travel another 15 kilometers to the airport; she was still unsure of their safety. Their hideout was next to a tar-road and the rebels were driving up and down firing bullets into the sky.
A peace agreement had been signed, so the soldiers could go back to camp; get their belongings and head home to safety.
“[But] we were not sure the people in the streets knew of the peace agreement because if they see us they will shoot us; the agreements were done at the base and not in the streets,” says Nkoana.
They refused to come out of hiding.
They heard the Casspir (armed ambulance) that was sent to fetch them and the bodies of the dead soldiers, but they were still unsure if it was safe to surface. The vehicle went up and down, back and forth, looking for them.
“Around 7AM, the next day, we decided to go. They sent me a message to just surrender; I then told the guys ‘the Major says we should surrender’. I was the Corporal by then and the guys asked if we should shoot. I told them ‘no, because if you shoot one bullet, they will kill all of us’.”
Nkoana took command of the situation, complying with her superiors at the base.
The drama didn’t end there though.
Just as they got on to the road, the rebels came after them and took their weapons, bulletproof vests, ammunition and they were instructed to lie down. They then had to stand up and walk in a single file not knowing where they were being taken.
On the way, they climbed on to a bakkie (pickup truck) driven by other rebels which took them to their base. The soldiers at the base had started packing, and they had to pack up too. They were all then taken to the airport to head back home to South Africa. Finally, it was all over.
Nkoana was a 27-year-old woman who defied death at the hands of the rebels. She was honored with a bravery medal, invited to the opening of Parliament in South Africa in 2014 and was given the Sword Of Peace.
Like Nkoana, another South African woman was also honored for her bravery fleeing the rebels in CAR, with an equivalent of R3 million ($323,000 at the time) supporting the mission, in her bag.
Susette Gates, a mother of two sons, currently living in Pretoria, was deployed as the financial officer of the South African mission in CAR in charge of payroll. Before being employed by the SANDF, she had been a hairdresser, she says, laughing, when she speaks to us.
Like most people looking for jobs, she had applied for an open post at the Wonderboom military base and been accepted; she continues to work here.
I meet her at this base – she’s not in uniform – and in her own office adorned with family portraits, certificates and medals.
She was the only other woman besides Nkoana selected for the CAR mission. Those fearful moments in CAR are forever etched in her memory.
When the rebels were attacking the SANDF, Gates was watching a horror movie on her laptop at the base. Little did she know the horrors unfolding around her.
Ironically, she was informed about the chaos in CAR on the phone by her sister in South Africa. Only then did she realize there was no electricity and people had left their homes at the camp.
She called out to everyone but was the only one left. She was later relocated to another place where she spent the night.
“The next morning, I went back to get my belongings. The next thing the rebels were in the base and they took everything, they even took the cars,” she says.
“If they could grab food, clothes whatever. I had my money with me; they opened my bag and asked what it was. I told them it was clothes and asked if I could keep it, but the bag of money was under the clothes.”
Gates was released and managed to get away with the R3 million; the money she had hidden under her clothes and that belonged to the SANDF.
The trip to the airport was grim because all she saw was a dry and dirty town, gunshots going off in the background. On the flight back home, she knew there were dead bodies of colleagues on the plane. Gates almost kissed the ground when she landed in South Africa, she says.
Both these women returned as heroes and were honored by South Africa’s Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula in 2014. Of the 185 soldiers who survived the war, the two women stood out amongst the men. Today, there are other women fighting the rebels in the CAR like they did, risking their lives and saving the lives of the men around them.

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Heroes Among Men

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The Rainbow Nation’s  Whites-Only Town

African jazz legend Thandi Klaasen saw and sang through it all; many years of hunger, oppression and an acid bomb thrown into her face.
When she surrendered to life, her memorial drew the finest of the last 50 years – many of whom listened to her rich voice as children.
On a chilly afternoon in Johannesburg, a hall of mourners – musicians, politicians, family and supporters of Klaasen – gathered at the Germiston City Hall, to tell her stories. Strangely, there was not even a single tear. It was a hall filled with clapping and laughter.
There were rows of chairs, in the middle front seated the family wearing white t-shirts with Klaasen’s face printed on them. Baroque floral arrangements flanked the stage, and scores of reporters filled the hallway.
Klaasen died of pancreatic cancer on January 15, at the age of 86 after being admitted to Thelle Mogoerane Hospital in Vosloorus, east of Johannesburg, on December 9, 2016.
To the world, she was known as a music giant with a golden voice, a sense of humor and Tsotsi Taal, a township slang, the language of Sophiatown, where she was born. To her children, she was a mom who loved sharing her stories.
Her daughter Lorraine, also a musician, took to the podium sporting a hat and black and white brogues. The clothes were her mom’s favorite.
She started her five-minute eulogy by greeting the audience: “Sanibonani, dumelang, hoe gaan dit, hoezit?”, a way that Klaasen greeted people.
“My chest is so tight and it’s like somebody put a rope around my throat,” said Lorraine.
“Music made my mom very happy. It was not about how she sang the songs but how the audience reacted.”
Lorraine likened her mom to a rose that looks pretty, but if not watered, wilts and dies.
“Every time my mom visited me in Canada, I took her to schools, senior citizens’ homes and HIV/AIDS foundations; every place where my mom could speak and inspire people I took my mom and so she became alive. But when we came back home, I noticed she was withering away musically.”
It was the end of a story that began in 1931 when the world was in the throes of depression.
Born to a shoemaker father and a domestic worker mother, Klaasen started her career as a teenager, singing in churches for a handful of coins. She decided to become a singer after seeing a jazz group perform at her school.
Not many knew she was also a tap dancer.
Klaasen knew poverty, apartheid and hardship and poured it into her work.
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“I had no chance to say goodbye to romance
I had no time to leave it all behind
It was the place I knew
Where my dreams came true
Until they broke it down
Sophiatown”
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These are the lyrics from her popular song, Sophiatown, narrating a sad tale of how black people were removed from the cosmopolitan suburb of Johannesburg.
In 1977, the star was attacked with an acid bomb that disfigured her face and put her in hospital for a year. It is said that a rival hired thugs to assault the singer; to this day, no one knows who it was.
Klaasen used to say: “They have burned the face but not the voice.”
Sadly, the great voice is no more.
She was also well-known for her role in the international musical, King Kong, by composer Todd Matshikiza singing alongside great voices, such as Dorothy Masuka, Dolly Rathebe and Miriam Makeba.
Fellow musician Don Mattera, leaning on a stick, described Klaasen as a queen who never needed protection.
With a career that spanned over five decades, she has received a string of awards, including: The Woman of Distinction Award, in Canada in 1999, and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the South African Music Awards.
Many said they’ll remember Klaasen for her humor, feisty personality and conviviality.
“She had the special gift of making wine disappear in seconds,” said Nandi Ndlovu, a granddaughter, as the hall erupted in laughter.
Legendary musician Abigail Kubeka said Klaasen was a lady of style.
“I remember when she was still married to her husband, Lucas; she once told me that ‘hey Abi, I once cooked because Lucas had asked for a mutton curry’, and as you know she used to love her wine, so she cooked this mutton and it happened that a dish cloth fell into the pot and she wasn’t aware. So she dished up for the husband, so as he was eating with a fork, he noticed a dish cloth. He then asked ‘Thandi, what have you cooked?’.”
Her response was “Ag man, Lucas jy het gese jy soek mutton curry (no man, Lucas you said you wanted mutton curry)”, and then Lucas said “ja mutton curry maar die is ‘n dish cloth curry die (yes, mutton curry, but this is a dish cloth curry)”.
“Rest in peace, Thandi, and don’t cook mutton cloth or dish curry again,” Kubeka said, before getting back to her seat next to Masuka.
Kubeka described Klaasen as a courageous woman who stood up in the face of the apartheid regime.
“She was so brave you took her to London and she was Thandiwe all the way you like or not. She was never apologetic about who she was,” she said.
Zanele Dlamini, 38, who played a young Klaasen at the Market Theatre, a tribute to jazz legends, performed Sophiatown.
“When I first heard that she passed away I was hurt a lot. Playing mama Klaasen wasn’t easy but she helped me a lot even though she wasn’t fine health-wise. I last saw her in August, but before her death, I used to communicate with Lorraine, who told me she wasn’t talking anymore. I wanted her to see herself in me. Even though she was sick I wasn’t ready for her death,” said Dlamini.
“She lived her life; a life of tragedy and finally she’s in peace,” said Lorraine.
To these musicians, she lives on; her song will never die.

Author: Forbes Woman Africa

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