Barely two years after his first sip of wine, Joseph Dhafana was head sommelier at the iconic La Colombe restaurant in Cape Town and began to explore making his own wine. His Mosi Wines and Spirits is a household name today.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
“We can’t all be actors or artists to tell our stories but I chose to tell mine by bottling it.”
</blockquote>



With its prolific wine region and world-class restaurants, Cape Town has long been the jewel in South Africa’s tourism crown. Yet the industry isn’t powered by good food and wine alone, but rather, by the dedication of its people. People like Joseph Tongai Dhafana, sommelier, wine judge and founder of Mosi Wines and Spirits. Impressive title aside, it’s Joseph’s story that truly sets him apart.



Dhafana now lives in Cape Town but grew up in Zimbabwe, an entire world away from his current life. He was raised in Chirumhanzu in the Midlands province, by parents who were subsistence farmers.



“I remember waking up as early as 03:00, going to the field to till the land with an ox-drawn plough. Then, when the sun rose I would run back home via the river to take a bath and get ready for a 12km walk to school – sometimes barefoot,” he explains. “These early mornings before school were very tough but they made me who I am today.”



This resilience is what would ultimately change the course of his life forever. In 2008, at the peak of Zimbabwe’s crisis, Dhafana made the difficult decision to leave his home country in search of better opportunities in South Africa. “Leaving was very painful and I had never dreamed of living outside Zimbabwe,” he says.



Initially, he worked as a gardener in Riebeek-Kasteel, a small town 80km outside of Cape Town, which led him to work in the garden for a local bar. Here, he moved to washing dishes and waiting tables and was soon promoted to barman, where life took another fortuitous turn. Here, Dhafana celebrated his 29th birthday and had his first taste of wine – a sparkling wine from nearby Riebeek Valley Wine Co. His first thoughts? “I didn’t like it,” he says simply. “I remember, the wine was quite tart and astringent with cutting acidity and that was very foreign to my palate.” He adds, “Now I can describe it but back then I had no words to explain how I felt. They now call me the ‘wine poet’.” &nbsp;



Despite a rocky start, this taste of wine awakened something in Dhafana, and before long he had enrolled to do a course at the Wine &amp; Spirit Education Trust; he joined the Cape Wine Academy and eventually, the South African Sommeliers Association, the Michael Fridjhon Wine Judging Academy and Court of Master Sommeliers Europe. Barely two years after that first sip, Dhafana was head sommelier at the iconic La Colombe restaurant and began to explore making his own wine.



“I had saved money and bought grapes to make a barrel each of Chenin Blanc and Syrah… in Riebeek-Kasteel, where it all started.”



Today, Joseph’s Mosi Wines and Spirits – named after breath-taking Victoria Falls nestled between Zimbabwe and Zambia – is a household name. Regularly appearing on the wine lists of the country’s top restaurants, there is no denying that his hard work and determination have paid off. “Seeing people swirling and sipping my wine just melts my heart,” he says. “I believe wine is a bottled story and this brand has a lot to say.”



Dhafana’s story is nothing short of remarkable, but as he says, there are a lot of stories like his out there. “I am proud of the person I am today but I am thankful to those who helped me.” He doesn’t take this gratitude lightly and now helps others wanting to enter the industry. “The journey has just started because I am already helping young up-and-coming sommeliers and wine stewards to do better than what I did.” And it doesn’t end there. Along with his work as a sommelier and a wine judge, he also helped establish and captain Team Zimbabwe at the World Blind Tasting Championships in 2017 and 2018, documented in the documentary, Blind Ambition. He is a board member of the Black Cellar Club, a non-profit that aims to promote a responsible wine and beverage industry in South Africa and is a judge for the country’s biggest annual restaurant awards, hosted by Eat Out magazine.



Having triumphed over immense challenges, Dhafana’s continued commitment to wine has enriched the industry. “We can’t all be actors or artists to tell our stories but I chose to tell mine by bottling it,” he adds.

Joseph Dhafana image supplied

From Zimbabwean Refugee To ‘Wine Poet’ In South Africa

With Covid-19 becoming a reality for countries across the globe, the remote working mode has become the new normal. Nestpick released a study in July highlighting the destinations most attractive to digital nomads in search of a new home, taking into account legislation as well as livability factors such as weather, cost of living, and equality.



In their methodology, a number of factors were taken into consideration such as cost of accommodation, speed of internet, access to home office rentals, remote workers’ immigration etc. Each country was overall rated out of 100. The only African country to be on the index is South Africa with Cape Town ranked 16. The top five cities globally are Melbourne, Australia; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Sydney, Australia; Tallinn, Estonia, and London, United Kingdom.



<h1 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-most-expensive-cities-in-africa">Most expensive cities in Africa</h1>



Prior to the pandemic, the cost of living was already a question up in the air. Mercer’s 2021 Cost of Living City Ranking of 400 global cities has in a recent report cited N’Djamena (Chad) as the most expensive city in Africa for expatriates with Lusaka (Zambia), the least expensive.



“The rankings provide an important insight for multinationals on the cost of recruiting or relocating an expatriate in Africa, and also help human resources leaders to structure a remuneration package to attract the right skills for an assignment,” Mercer said in the report.



 Based on the ranking, N’Djamena moved up two spots in 2021 from 15th to 13th place, while Lusaka moved from 201 to 208 in the rankings. The report went on to say that given the impact of the pandemic on African economies, organizations could use the cost of living rankings to consider implementing regional pay structures. This will enable people to move more efficiently across borders by mitigating some of the key challenges when it comes to cost of living, pay competitiveness, and purchasing parity.

Clouds Over Lion’s Head and Table Mountain from Helicopter

The Global Cities Digital Nomads Will Love

Doubles match full view – Christiaan Kotze

An Evening When The Stars Descended With Racquets: Federer And Nadal Faced-Off On African Soil For The Mother Of All Tennis Matches

When she woke up to her neighbors’ shouts outside, Lundy’s three-year-old toddler was already choking with the smoke that had seeped into their shack in Imizamo Yethu settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa.



“I just took my baby and ran away,” said Lundy, who declined to give her full name, recalling the 2017 fire &#8211; one of the worst to hit the seaside city, dubbed South Africa’s “fire capital” &#8211; which left her and about 15,000 others homeless.



After taking her child to hospital to treat him for smoke inhalation, Lundy went home to find everything had burned down.



Devastating fires occur with alarming frequency in South Africa’s tightly-packed slums where shacks are built next to unpaved paths too narrow enough for a car, never mind a fire engine, to pass through.



More than 5,000 fires break out in South Africa’s informal settlements each year, according to official data, often caused by people using open flames for cooking, lighting and heat, or by faulty electrical appliances.



Lumkani, a team of South African entrepreneurs, has developed two innovations to save both lives and homes: an alarm to alert residents to danger and insurance to help those who lose their property to get back on their feet.



The value of losses to fires in informal settlements is increasing every year, reaching almost 180 million rand ($13 million) in 2017, according to the Fire Protection Association of Southern Africa.



“The real solution to shack fires is end of shacks,” said Francois Petousis, one of four-year-old Lumkani’s co-founders.



“But ultimately you need these interim solutions,” he added, as fires trap people in “extreme cycles of poverty”.



He described how a colleague was fired from his previous job in a fast-food restaurant for being absent for five days after his home burned down. It took him 18 months to get another job.



“That cycle (of poverty) needs to be broken &#8230; Life is unbearable enough in informal settlements as it is,” he said.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">TERRIFYING</h4>



Unlike ordinary fire detectors, Lumkani’s alarm &#8211; a small blue box attached to the ceiling which uses one battery in about 10 years &#8211; rings not only in the burning shack, but also in neighboring homes within a 60-metre radius.



It detects a rapid rise in temperature instead of smoke or particles in the air, and also alerts the local fire department, while neighbors receive an automatic SMS warning them of the fire’s location.



“Even if you’re at work, you can know there’s a fire in your community,” said Petousis, which gives users the chance to run home or alert friends to come and help.



Communities are often key to fire prevention, he said, describing how neighbors destroyed their own homes in Imizamo Yethu in another 2017 fire to create a fire break, which meant only 10 out of 220 shacks burned down.



“The communities are the first responders and they work really well,” he said, while acknowledging that having to demolish your own home to stop others losing theirs remains “a pretty terrifying reality”.&nbsp;



About 24,000 South Africans have installed the alarm since its launch four years ago, mostly in densely-populated settlements in Johannesburg and Cape Town where fires often spread quickly and gut entire neighborhoods.



Several thousand homes in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, also have the alarms, through a partnership with a local charity.



Lumkani hires agents from the communities who install free alarms in homes, which are either paid for by charities or given to them for free after buying Lumkani’s insurance.



The insurance scheme, costing about $4 a month, targets informal settlement residents and has been bought by about 1,000 people so far.



David, a local hairdresser with a steady stream of clients, decided to pay 60 rand a month for the insurance after he lost his whole salon and equipment in the massive 2017 fire.



“I don’t want to lose everything again,” he said, explaining that he was only able to recover with help from friends and family.



But 60 rand a month is too much for many people in Imizamo Yethu &#8211; like Paula, who lives in a cramped two-room shack with a gas stove perched on her living room floor and makes ends meet by selling roasted chicken feet to locals.



“I can’t find a better job, there’s no work here,” she said. “So everything I earn I spend on food and other essentials.”



But alternatives to deter fires also cost money &#8211; from decorating homes in intumescent paint, which swells up when heated protecting the material underneath, to safer stoves.



For Richard Pithouse of the University of the Witwatersrand, who has written extensively on urban poverty, such innovations fail to address the root causes of the problem &#8211; lack of investment in decent housing.



“The primary issue is that people are living in shacks &#8230; When people are using gas to cook or candles for light in a tiny cramped space, made of highly flammable material, fires are obviously going to happen,” he said.



“The single biggest thing you can do to make a real intervention quickly is to electrify these places. Electricity is vastly safer and that’s a question of political will &#8211; and that political will has largely been absent.”



After the devastation of 2017 and near loss of her son, Lundy works 12 to 14 hours a day at a cafe selling deep fried doughnuts and other snacks, earning around 1,200 rand a month.



She is thinking about buying the insurance.



“I’m worried about another fire. But what can I do?” she said, pointing to nearby shacks which were still scorched black with soot. “I don’t have another place to stay.”



-Inna Lazareva

0000275443

Burning Issue: Can Tech Innovators Save South Africa’s ‘Fire Capital’?

Richard Hardiman is using drones to rid the world’s seas of trash. He faced bankruptcy and depression before the project went from prototype to profit.

Rubbish in the world’s oceans has reached critical levels that threaten not only marine life but also our own future on this planet as we know it, as fragile eco-systems are eroded.
What is already out on the seas, estimated by National Geographic to be growing by almost a million tonnes per year, is lost, but South African entrepreneur Richard Hardiman has developed a drone to catch this waste at source – the harbors and ports of the world – before it hits the ocean.rubbish in the world’s oceans has reached critical levels that threaten not only marine life but also our own future on this planet as we know it, as fragile eco-systems are eroded.
The WasteShark has been in planning and product testing stages since 2015, but is now sold globally as a drone that can clear the water of waste and help halt what is a growing catastrophe on our seas.
It has been a long personal battle for Cape Town-based Hardiman, one that brought him to the edge of despair.
But with the product in the water in a growing number of countries, including South Africa, the United States, India, the United Arab Emirates, Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, his Rotterdam-based company RanMarine Technology is primed to be a leader in this niche field.
“The initial idea was not motivated by trying to solve environmental problems,” Hardiman tells FORBES AFRICA. “I was sitting at the Waterfont in Cape Town watching these guys out in boats with pool nets pulling the plastic from the water.
<blockquote>“It irritated me that there was a lot of trash and they were trying to solve the problem with a little net. In was inefficient and you could see trash being swept out into the open ocean.”</blockquote>
Hardiman, who worked as a radio host for much of his adult life, developed the idea for a drone that could mechanize the process, either controlled from the shore or on its own as a robot in the water.
“I built a prototype, literally in my garage, by sticking some PVC pipes together and did some research on the internet,” he says.
“I taught myself how to code on to my phone and came up with a small drone I put into my pool and started to drive around. It did what it was supposed to do.”
Hardiman had no luck finding early investors in South Africa though.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2015/12/01/diving-ocean-cash/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Diving Into An Ocean Of Cash</a>
“The feedback was quite good, but if I’m honest my pitch was terrible,” he says. “In trying to raise money, the one thing I have learned is that your pitch needs to be perfect. If you cannot be precise with every answer to every conceivable question, it turns investors off.
“Although people love the environment, let’s face it, if they are putting money into it they want to see a return on investment.”
The ingenuity of the idea caught the attention of Accelerator though, a program to help start-ups based in Rotterdam. Hardiman began in the top 1,000 entries from around the world, eventually making it to the final 20 after an arduous series of interviews.
<div id="attachment_37257" style="width: 750px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37257" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-37257 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="494" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" />WasteShark is becoming a feature of a number of ports and harbors.</div>
He was then required to make the journey to the Netherlands for the finals and by this time had sunk so much energy, time and money into the project that the married father-of-three had nothing left to fund the trip.
“I was completely broke, I had no money left. I was taking any job I could get. I was penniless,” he admits.
Hardiman eventually found a local investor who took a punt on the project and lent him the money to get himself to the Accelerator finals.
“He gave me enough money to pay for the trip and to survive for about six months. But when I landed in Rotterdam, his cheque hadn’t cleared yet, my credit card had zero funds in it and I had five Euros in my pocket.
“Each day for a week I would walk from my hotel to the [Accelerator] event, which was about five kilometers away, sometimes in the rain and snow.
“Everybody else was so well-dressed and I would arrive in a soaking wet suit.”
But the response to WasteShark was overwhelming and he made it into the Accelerator program, which meant leaving his Cape Town-based family behind to live in Rotterdam for the next three months.
“After the three months we had done really well and we got a pilot with the Port of Rotterdam, which is the largest port in the world. They put 100,000 Euros into what would be a six-month project.”
But there would be more hurdles for Hardiman to face and the worst was yet to come.
“I fell out with the original engineering firm and brought on another partner that proved to be a disaster. It just wasn’t the right fit. By the end of 2016, I was completely out of money again and we were only halfway through development.
“I came back to South Africa licking my wounds. We had spent a lot of money and it had not really gone anywhere. In terms of investors, I found that the Dutch love innovation, but they hate risk, so nobody wanted to come into the project early.
“I went into a deep spiral of depression. I’d gone from having money to no money again. I had half a product that I needed to make work because I had a family to support.
“But I found I just couldn’t get out of bed, I really felt like I had screwed up and let everybody down.”
A chance meeting at a children’s party led to Hardiman finding a local South African investor who liked the idea of the project and could see the potential. He returned to the Netherlands.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-37258 alignright" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-600x450.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“I just needed enough money to get through to June 2017 because by then we would have finished the product development stage. Then we could start selling.”
A little more than a year on and WasteShark is becoming a feature of a number of ports and harbors, and Hardiman has now moved on to the next stage.
“We sold one, then another, and suddenly it just started taking off,” he says. “We have been inundated with interest from all around the world. It’s a new position for us to be in, from the phase of trying to get a finished product out to going into production.”
Hardiman says that while they could have gotten carried away with technology on the WasteShark, the aim was actually to make the drone as simple as possible.
<blockquote>“I had this vision of a guy on Lake Malawi using our drone and when I sat down with the group of engineers to plan the product, there were many fantastic ideas about what we could do.</blockquote>
“But I was firm in my mind that we need to cater for that guy in Malawi. If a thruster is broken, he can fix it himself. It must be easy for him to operate, be simple and robust.”
Hardiman says they have numerous other versions of the WasteShark in planning and production including one that provides data on the quality of the water and another that can clean up oil in harbors. The next version will be ready September.
He adds he is most often asked what he hopes to do about the critical issue of plastic in the oceans, but the realistic goal for now is to stop the problem getting worse.
“My goal is not to solve the issue that is already out there, because that’s not realistic. It’s to stop the problem getting worse.
“If we can do that in a canal, river, marina or harbor, where most of the trash in the sea comes from, then you are starting to win the battle.”
&#8211; Nick Said

IMA_37811Acontrastsrgb

The Man Who Sunk His Finances To Clean The Ocean

The gentle sea breeze, the glint of classic cars, swaying sugarcane plantations, and horses trotting around – while this might seem like the description of a picture postcard, this is the everyday life of Viju Gowreesunkur, an entrepreneur in the island nation of Mauritius.
This sugarcane planter, who has a vintage car collection that is the pride of the island, also knows a thing or two about horses. He grew up with them, and today, even owns a few.
Mauritius occupies a significant place in Africa’s horse industry. The country boasts an average racing population of 450 horses, and has an important equestrian link with South Africa. All of the nation’s racehorse imports – 150 every year – come from South Africa.
“A lot of South African jockeys ride in Mauritius. The traveling time to Mauritius is only three hours by air. The horses adapt well with our climate. A lot of South Africans are immigrating to Mauritius, and horse racing can be a main social activity for the expatriates,” sums up Gowreesunkur.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sport/2013/08/01/racing-into-history/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Racing Into History</a>
In South Africa, the horseracing industry contributes R2.71 billion ($226 million) annually to its GDP. Efforts are on to ramp up those numbers.
And as with the expatriates taking to horse racing in Mauritius, here too, it’s no longer the pastime of only the privileged few.
“These days, horse racing is no longer the domain of royalty, and with this shift came the glorious possibility that anything is possible and that the richest races could be won just as easily by a working man as by a multi-millionaire,” says Adrian Todd, Managing Director of SA Equine Health and Protocols NPC, in South Africa.
Mick Goss, the CEO of Summerhill Stud in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, says while owning racehorses can be an aspirational endeavor, it can also arise from a deep-seated connectivity with animals in general, or horses in particular.
“The result is that racehorses are owned by people from across the social and economic spectra, from the wealthy to the determined,” says Goss. In its 40th year, Summerhill Stud is one of the country’s top horse breeders, and it has produced several champion racehorses.
<div id="attachment_35865" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35865" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-35865 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AHS-114-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="681" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AHS-114-1024x681.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AHS-114-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AHS-114-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AHS-114-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AHS-114.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Approximate annual cost to maintain a horse on a styud farm in South Africa: $5,000. Photo supplied.</div>
Goss had humble beginnings starting the stud farm. He came from a family of generations of horsemen and was previously a lawyer, when after 17 years, he gave up law to start out with nothing in the horse business but “a deep-seated will to make it work”.
“I inherited the horse ‘disease’, for which there is no known vaccine,” he jests.
Today, his farm runs a school of management excellence in equine studies, the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere, he says, and the results have been “extraordinary”.
Goss says South Africa is set for a record year.
“2018 will be a game-changing year,” he says, with respect to the efforts now being made to rejig the racing and breeding industries “with substantial investments towards the normalization of export protocols with international trading partners”.
There is significant demand for South Africa-based horses in the international market for their quality and affordability. A case in point being that in the past, at the $10 million Dubai World Cup, the richest day in international thoroughbred racing held in March every year, South African-trained horses have won at many levels.
“We have produced winners at the highest level in almost all of the major racing jurisdictions of the world. It is little surprise that our horses are as sought -after as they are internationally, more so as they cost a fraction of their counterparts from other major racehorse-producing countries,” says Goss.
But there are challenges, including strict export restrictions, quarantine controls and prevalence of the African Horse Sickness (AHS).
“The current onerous export restrictions make it difficult for the racing and breeding industry to expand and very hard for our horses to travel and compete internationally,” says Todd.
The country has been severely curtailed in its ability to export horses due to AHS.
South African horses have to endure a quarantine of up to six months before they reach their country of destination.
“Compare this with the delivery of 30 days of horses acquired in countries like Australia and New Zealand, destined for South Africa,” says Goss. “From this, you can deduce the obstacles South African horse people face in the export of their products.”
AHS is a vector-borne viral disease, and has affected South African horse exports since the 1960s.
Goss says he has only suffered one loss to AHS in 40 years on his farm, but says, if properly managed, the losses can be avoided.
“Proliferation of game farms around the country has meant concentrations of zebra in close proximity to horse farms, which has exacerbated the problem,” says Goss.
“The reason is many zebras are carriers of the virus, though they have an inbuilt immunity against it, and while the disease itself is not contagious, it can be carried from one animal to another by a vector.”
Thankfully, there have been breakthroughs in its detection.
“The latest technologies mean that we are able to detect AHS within a matter of hours nowadays and with the quarantine protocols we now have in place, we can guarantee we are unlikely ever to export infected horses,” says Goss.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2013/11/01/love-mountain-hate-horse/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ: Love The Mountain Hate The Horse</a>
“With new scientific developments and a new Polymerase Chain Reaction test to detect AHS within hours, South Africa is busy working towards a much shorter period of quarantine of possibly 16 days. This will obviously open the door to the world market and allow the entire horse industry to grow to its full potential,” says Todd.
This test has been developed by Professor Alan Guthrie and colleagues at the Faculty of Veterinary Science’s Equine Research Centre in the University of Pretoria, which has improved the lab diagnosis of AHS by increasing the sensitivity of detection and shortening the time required for the diagnosis.
Equine experts like Todd are optimistic the strides taken by the industry will make this year more successful for the horse industry.
Currently, horses are exported from Cape Town’s Kenilworth Racecourse, which serves as a quarantine, transit and export station. The horses are required to serve a three-month quarantine period in Mauritius on top of the three weeks already spent in quarantine in Cape Town, before going on to their final destination.
“The opening of export protocols will allow the industry to unlock a potential billion rand market. This in turn will lead to an expansion of the industry and a significant increase in rural employment…,” says Todd.
The platforms and opportunities are plenty.
In December, FORBES AFRICA visited the Turffontein Racecourse in the southern suburbs of Johannesburg for the glitzy Gauteng Sansui Summer Cup. Dating back 128 years, and along with the Durban July and the Sun Met in Cape Town, it’s one of the big three races on the South African horse racing calendar, with a prize money of R1.25 million ($104,373) up for grabs.
In South Africa, horse-lovers come from all walks of life.
“From rural communities who use horses for transport, to families who buy ponies for their children to ride for fun, to show jumpers and wealthy [South African] businessmen like Dr Richard Maponya who loves horseracing,” elaborates Peter Gibson, the CEO of Racing South Africa.
Prices range greatly depending on the breed and what it will be used for, but buying a thoroughbred racehorse could set you back by an average of over R300,000 ($25,000).
Furthermore, it takes R50,000 ($4,000) to R60,000 ($5,000) a year to maintain a horse on a stud farm.
“Thoroughbred studs are cash guzzlers, and you need to surround yourself with people that are capable of contributing towards the capital needs of the business by way of their support as clients, as well as developing strong relationships with the financial institutions that support you,” says Goss.
“The horse breeding and racing industries by their very nature are among the most labor-intensive activities in South Africa, and according to a recent audit of the industry by Grant Thornton, it employs in excess of 100,000 people, either directly or in those businesses that provide services to racing and breeding.”
Hopefully, in the years to come, the “cash guzzlers” will repay the favor, in leaps and bounds.

Brave-Tin-Soldier-retouched-cover-pic-online

The South African Horse Industry: A Potential Billion Rand Market

John Rabie is the entrepreneur who transformed the way South Africans build houses. With humble beginnings, he is now known as the man who took 1.25 million square meters of marshy wasteland on the outskirts of Cape Town and turned it into the $1.95-billion Century City.
It’s hard to believe that this co-founder of the Rabie Property Group is the same humble man who was painting buildings in Sea Point 40 years ago, along with his longtime business partner, Leon Cohen.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2016/02/01/inside-house-future/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Inside The House Of The Future</a>
&#8220;I started as painter with Leon. We formed a painting business. We said to ourselves, ‘hang on a second, let&#8217;s start building’. In those days, there was plenty of land in the southern suburbs in Constantia,” says Rabie.
From his office in Cape Town’s foreshore, filled with memorabilia of his property developments and school photographs, you can see why Rabie has stood at the test of time.
“It took me 40 years. There is no instant gratification to wealth. Property development is not a one-day game, it’s a five-day game,” says Rabie, using cricket analogy. “It’s taking a view for the future. Because we build buildings not for five years but because we want to live in them for 10 or 20 years.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2014/05/01/selling-beer-rubbing-shoulders-richard-branson/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: From Selling Beer To Rubbing Shoulders With Richard Branson</a>
Along with Century City, Rabie has been involved in other developments around Cape Town, including Marconi Beam, Westlake Estate, Royal Ascot and Big Bay.
Rabie is also responsible for cluster house developments. This started when Rabie didn&#8217;t have the capital to build the houses from scratch. Instead he came up with the idea of plot and plan, which allowed house hunters to pay a deposit on a plot of land for cheap and wait for Rabie to build it.
&#8220;In those days people bought their own little plots and then they built their houses. So we said ‘ok, we can build these houses on your plot for cheaper’. Then we said ‘hang on a minute, let’s take it to the next level’. We acquired five plots on Constantia, I think we paid R10,000 ($850) for a stand at the time – can you believe that, in Constantia of all places? We said ‘let&#8217;s build a house, finish it and furnish it and landscape it’.&#8221;
The idea took off in the 1980s and Rabie&#8217;s team was building five houses a month.  Soon it was building villages, over vast areas of Cape Town&#8217;s southern suburbs. It then moved on to show houses, giving buyers an idea of what the house would look like, right down to the kitchen sink.
&#8220;You know, what people struggle with is the design. How the house is going to look when the building is done, the vision. We had a beautiful brochure with eight or 10 designs, because the individual owned the plot we could sign a building contract and build that house that they chose.&#8221;
Back in his office, Rabie admits to being a hoarder. He has dozens of books with newspaper clippings and advertisements. It is a personal archive of 40 years of developing property. His proudest moment came in 2004, when he bought into a project that wanted to turn a marshy wasteland of 1.25 million square meters into a mini city.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2013/12/01/property-industry-shows-green-shoots/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Property industry shows some green shoots</a>
&#8220;The biggest boom to hit this country was in 2001 to 2007 – the world exploded. That was the biggest property boom we&#8217;d ever seen,&#8221; he says.
&#8220;It changed Rabie Property Group, because we now had a city.&#8221;
Fourteen years and an investment of more than $1.95 billion later, Century City has taken shape. These days it is a city-within-a-city; a place where one can work, live, shop and relax. The precinct hosts more than 500 businesses, 4,000 residential homes and is known for its clean and safe environment.
<div id="attachment_35845" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35845" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-35845 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Century-City-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Century-City-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Century-City-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Century-City-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Century-City-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Century-City.jpg 1154w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />The Apex forms the focal point of the new Century City Square in Cape Town. Photo supplied</div>
&#8220;The great thing about Century City is it&#8217;s like a jigsaw puzzle, as the markets change you can change it to have a bit more commercial, a bit more residential areas. When I go inside the conference center or along the canals, I have to pinch myself,&#8221; says Rabie.
One of the latest developments in Century City has been the introduction of a Marriott hotel, the signature brand of the world’s largest hotel group, Marriott International. This brand was ushered in through the recent conversion of the African Pride Crystal Towers Hotel to the Cape Town Marriott Hotel Crystal Towers.
“It’s extremely positive for Century City to showcase a global giant like Marriott. The credibility of the brand internationally adds gravitas to our tenant directory, and we will no doubt see many more visitors from around the world coming to Century City because of the presence of a hotel under this brand,” says Cohen.
By 2010, Rabie had thought he had done all he could do in property. He was traveling abroad when he noticed a trend of inner-city revival. He saw major cities, like Sydney, were rejuvenating derelict buildings in city centers and repurposing them for residential living.
He immediately thought Cape Town could do the same. So, he embarked on co-founding Signatura, the private label property company, to do just that.
&#8220;No one was thinking of inner-city revival at that time. It was going to be very important for Cape Town to have hospitality linked to residential – in other words, intertwined. Our first project was the Radisson. We converted the office into the hotel and put 175 apartments on top, but the apartments have the use of the hotel facilities, the gym etc. That was hugely successful,&#8221; says Rabie.
<div id="attachment_35846" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35846" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-35846" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Radisson-Final-300x212.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="212" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Radisson-Final-300x212.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Radisson-Final-600x424.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Radisson-Final-768x543.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Radisson-Final-1024x724.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Radisson-Final.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Rabies ambitious Radisson development in Cape Town. Photo supplied.</div>
Signatura recently completed the upscaling of central city landmark, the Safmarine building. It was transformed into an ambitious $100-million residential and hotel development known as The Radisson Blu Hotel and Residence.
It caters to South Africa&#8217;s growing upper middle class who are eager for luxury living close to the city and the ocean. What stands out for Rabie is the way in which social media has changed the way people buy property.
&#8220;We used to have to put flags up on Sunday at 10 o&#8217;clock. We&#8217;d get dressed up in our work clothes. That’s how we did it. If you didn’t get people into show houses on a Sunday, you didn’t sell. With social media, it changed dramatically. You hardly see us advertising in the press anymore because social media is so incredibly strong. We get 10 to 15 leads every day from people on the internet wanting to know about our developments.&#8221;
In five years, Signatura has rejuvenated more than 20 buildings in and around Cape Town – achieving over $500 million in sales.
It seems Rabie made the right decision to give up painting houses to build them instead.

John-Rabie-online

From Painting Houses To Building A $1.95-Billion Development

It was a gamble that paid off, 8,500 kilometers away from their comfort zone.
Two 21-year-old fashion students, Inés Mille and Marc Collines, left the hallowed hallways of fashion in Barcelona and with just $9,000 in their pockets, traveled all the way to East Africa to set up shop in little-known Kigali in Rwanda, which at the time was building itself – a fully-fledged fashion industry was not yet on its radar.
&#8220;Rwanda. It’s where our heart is. It’s where the soul of this company is. It’s where we were born and where everything happened,&#8221; says Mille.
Eight years on, Mille Collines, the brand she built with Collines from Kigali, is a million-dollar fashion line that can spotted on the runways of Lagos and Cape Town. Now 32, Mille looks back at the memory with a smile.
&#8220;The obliviousness, the ignorance. We were mad and we were so young and we were so crazy. So we said we can do this.&#8221;
Mille sits in her home in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town, among inspiring pictures of fashion models on runways, African sculptures from her travels and intricate bookshelves. Naturally, it is the epitome of one conscious of subtle African style – much like her work.
Her story goes back to a time when she was young and fresh in fashion school in Barcelona. It was 2005 and Mille was traveling in Rwanda with her mother&#8217;s NGO looking for outreach programs to sponsor. Here, she met a seamstress named Antoinette, who trained women and kids to sew.
&#8220;She said ‘you are a fashion designer. You have no idea of the handcraft skills we have here, if only you can put your brain in design and their handcraft skills together, it would be incredible’,&#8221; says Mille.
The idea hit home. A year later, and in her final year of design, Mille thought it would make the perfect thesis. She decided to travel to Kigali and pursue Antoinette&#8217;s suggestion. Along with her came Collines, who at the time was at another school and also looking for a project.
&#8220;The funny story is when I went [to Kigali], there was huge resistance from my tutors and the board of teachers at my college. They said ‘there was absolutely no ways you are going to Africa to do a collection where there is no infrastructure. How are you going to make garments in Africa, they don&#8217;t even dress in clothes’&#8230; I was at a progressive design school in Barcelona. They were afraid that just because I went there and worked with poor people, I would come back with a sh***y collection. That was the spark,&#8221; says Mille.
A 50% mark prompted Mille to move to the heart of Africa. They took with them $9,000 in savings and set up shop in Kigali where they developed their first collection, in partnership with Antoinette. At the time, Mille recalls there was no infrastructure for fashion in Rwanda whatsoever. They had to start from the ground up looking for people to work with.
&#8220;Many people thought, &#8216;where are they going? Are they going to be able to do anything in Kigali? Is there even fashion there?'&#8221;
<div id="attachment_34613" style="width: 273px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34613" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-34613" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Mille-Collines_JC-5-263x300.jpg" alt="" width="263" height="300" />Mille&#8217;s first designer diary. (Photo by Jay Caboz)</div>
One of her prized possessions from this time lies on the stone table in front of her – their first designer diary. Kigali springs to life and Mille&#8217;s eyes light up as she fingers the pages recalling drawing African masks and collecting slivers of material from the markets.
&#8220;There were informal collectives of women around the country, which were amazing and very well organized, they&#8217;d been doing handcraftsmanship for a long time&#8230; Initially, we tried to think everything is going to be coming from Rwanda. If it was textiles, it was found in the markets with a few wholesalers here and there. Obviously, it was challenging.
&#8220;I remember some women were doing baskets and I said ‘do just flat disks’. They said what for? I said we&#8217;re going to do necklaces. They went crazy over the idea. They then started doing their own earrings and selling them in the market. They were everywhere from corporate to home. It was the thing to have in Rwanda,&#8221; says Mille.
Their ticket to success was blending the creativity, strength and culture of the African spirit with ever-evolving global trends.
&#8220;There was a lot of intrigue. Nobody was doing this in Rwanda. No other brand existed that had taken handcrafted skills, redone it and made a contemporary product. We were some of the first ones to do it. It sparked a number of other brands to follow,&#8221; says Mille.
The team moved in to Kenya, casting their net in Nairobi. The demand was high and four more stores followed. It wasn&#8217;t always easy – a store on the coast of Kenya and a store in South Africa failed because they didn&#8217;t catch the right market.
&#8220;We were opening the door to the African clothing market&#8230; We thought if we sell abroad with all our challenges we already have, in terms of logistics, in terms of quality, we needed to align our market. We are producing in Africa; it makes sense to sell in Africa and make this product African.&#8221;
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/10/06/fashion-operation-theater/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Fashion in The Operation Theater?</a>
Along with the birth of Mille Collines grew the fully-fledged fashion atelier, which is owned and operated by the Kigali team that helped build Mille Collines.
&#8220;It was the hardest moment in the company. We needed to hand over the workshop to the team in Rwanda. They were prepared. We needed to transfer it and move away from production and focus on distribution and design. Otherwise we couldn&#8217;t grow further. It took one-and-a-half years. We sold it to the Kigali team for $1. The employees all have a stake. Rwanda is not in our core business, it&#8217;s became an actual supplier.&#8221;
<div id="attachment_34612" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34612" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-34612" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Mille-Collines_KatGrudko_Shot01-433-e1512375288376-300x200.jpg" alt="Mille Collines" width="500" height="333" />Mille Collines on the catwalk. (Photo by KatGrudko)</div>
Now their journey has taken them to Cape Town and the house we sit in. Their team is here to begin the next step of their journey.
Mille wants to see their clothes hang in major retail stores across the continent and hopefully take an even larger chunk of Africa’s dynamic fashion industry.
&#8220;I was the first one to land in Cape Town in 2015. We had to start from ground zero. We had participated in fashion weeks, so people kind of knew us. Our main market it still Kenya. But we&#8217;ve been building relationships with suppliers in Cape Town.&#8221;
As the company expands, Mille has shifted to purchasing textiles because it&#8217;s cheaper. They are also looking to the likes of Mauritius and Madagascar for textiles once their orders get larger.
&#8220;You need to find who is better for what. When we left Rwanda, that&#8217;s what happened, we became more pan-African. We only produce in Africa.&#8221;
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2017/09/14/from-pizzas-to-pizzaz/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: From Pizzas To Pizzaz</a>
The company has even expanded in ways they didn&#8217;t expect. Without owning a store or being on the shelves of retail outlets, Mille says South Africa is their second largest customer. This is because of online sales and a strong presence on Instagram.
&#8220;Instagram is the strongest source for us. We make sales on it. I think it’s because it’s a visual platform. Instagram is my baby. It&#8217;s difficult to delegate. How can I explain to someone that an image is not Mille Collines? It&#8217;s very tangible, either you feel it or you don&#8217;t. We go a lot with how people react when we put images up.&#8221;
The brand’s attention to detail and passion for telling beautiful stories continues.
Mille&#8217;s clothes have been worn, she says, by the likes of Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, Hollywood actress Lupita Nyong&#8217;o and journalist Mélanie Gouby.
<div id="attachment_34614" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34614" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-34614" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Mille-Collines_JC-3-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="450" />Inés Mille in her Mille Collines studio in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by Jay Caboz)</div>
It&#8217;s a brand for the African woman.
&#8220;She is a mother, an entrepreneur, an individual. She is alive with bursts of color and print and grounded in muted tones of Africa&#8217;s landscape.
“In a world where differences are increasingly emphasized and where people are divided and separated, it seemed fitting to celebrate the rich beauty that comes from combining many different influences. We wanted to celebrate the fact that, despite parochial thinking in some quarters, the world is becoming more of a mélange every day,” says Mille.
&#8220;I never dreamed I&#8217;d open a business in Africa. Not a business in fashion, never. My father was a businessman and my mother was passionate about Africa. I said I was going to be a vet. I loved the fact that [fashion] is a business and art. It&#8217;s a space where it meets in the middle. It&#8217;s very commercial and it’s very challenging and very interesting.&#8221;
For Mille, Africa is the muse that keeps on giving.

From Mille To A Million

If you have just moved into the cities of Cape Town, Maputo, Lusaka or Windhoek, you have become part of the problem. A big driver of climate change is urbanization and scientists say these four African cities are at the top of the list.
That was one reason why 2016 ranked as the hottest year on record, according to data analyzed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations’ authoritative voice on weather, climate and water.
One of the leading causes of this is carbon dioxide and methane concentrations from burning fossil fuels, which surged to new records, claims the WMO. This based on evidence from the likes of NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, UK-based Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
The world’s cities are responsible for 60% of all carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases while occupying just 2% of Earth’s surface, according to the United Nations Human Settlement Programme.
It means, unless humans find ways of reducing their carbon emissions, worse is yet to come.
Climate change, according to the South African Weather Service, is the natural cycle which the earth and its atmosphere experience from energy received from the sun. The climate goes through warm and cold periods, taking hundreds of years to complete one cycle. The changes also influence rainfall, but the biosphere is able to adapt to a changing climate if these changes take place over centuries.
As many as 100 million people could slide into extreme poverty because of rising temperatures, which are caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the World Bank reports.  It also says climate change has led to crop failures, natural disasters, higher food prices and the spread of waterborne diseases, creating poverty and pushing people at risk into destitution.
In 2015, the UN, in its report on climate change, noted that it is expected to cause shorter growing seasons and force large tracts of peripheral agriculture out of production. Without action, climate change would likely spark higher agricultural prices and could threaten food security in poorer regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Climate variability is also at play.
This year has been aggravated by El Nino, a Pacific Ocean weather pattern which decreases moisture in the sub-Saharan region and causes other extreme weather patterns.
Examples of climate variability could be seen in Cape Town in March; a disaster was declared by authorities as dam levels dropped to 31.5%. At the time of going to print, the city estimated that it had 105 days of useable water left. Meanwhile, in Mozambique and Madagascar, countries lying just north and east of South Africa, the category four tropical cyclone Enawo hit. The cyclone, which ravaged their coastlines with winds of 190 kilometers per hour, was dubbed the most destructive storm in years.
The next problem is how people deal with it.
A large group of people within the FRACTAL project, led by the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), is trying to tackle the problems associated with climate change in cities through novel approaches.
“We need to move away from the ‘sausage machine’ type of model whereby climate data is produced on one end by scientists, then follows a path to be spat out at the end to decision makers who are expected to use the data. Decision makers need to be engaged in the process of producing relevant climate knowledge from the beginning.”
So says Alice McClure, the coordinator of the Future Resilience for African CiTies and Lands (FRACTAL), a four-year project that aims to build relationships between scientists, practitioners, and the people whose elected representatives decide what’s best for the city.
“In this process, science should not be king. We argue that the knowledge that decision makers in the cities have is more relevant than the information the scientist is going to produce. For the purpose of decision making, scientists can produce as much rigorous climate data as they want, but the uptake of climate information and eventual impact that it might have, is undermined without considerations of context,” says McClure.
Started in 2015, FRACTAL is working in nine cities: Blantyre, Gaborone, Harare, Lusaka, Maputo and Windhoek. Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa have joined the program as self-funded cities.
FRACTAL is part of an initiative called Future Climate Change for Africa, which runs five projects to understand Africa better during climate change and integrates this into decision making.
FRACTAL’s approach enables particular issues, focused on water and energy, to be identified in each of the cities in which it is working, for which relevant and significant climate knowledge can be produced by scientists and decision makers.
What is becoming evident through the initial engagements is that each city has its own problems. For example, in Maputo issues associated with potable water, drainage and sanitation have surfaced, while in Lusaka groundwater recharge, drinking water, flooding and solid waste in peri-urban areas surfaced as pertinent issues.
“We need to understand the region within which the city is located, and how this might affect resources in the city, such as energy and water. For example, Lusaka is located within the Kafue river basin. So we need to understand how changes in the broader surface water system &#8211; as a result of climate or other non-climate drivers &#8211; might affect water supply in Lusaka. City-regions are very integrated, complex systems with multiple actors, stressors and scales. We need to have a deep understanding of the city-region context to understand what climate information might be relevant and significant.”
As part of the project, FRACTAL has embedded researchers into offices in the cities to gain a better understanding of how governments work. The idea is that the work undertaken by these researchers is mutually beneficial for the city officials and the researchers working on the project.
“The scientists are learning about the city-region and the decision makers are learning about climate variability and change. Together, we would like to build an understanding of what climate change might look like in the future in each city.”
It means cities need to come up with tangible solutions that can adapt to the next 40 years of increasing droughts and stronger typhoons in the face of growing cities.

Africa Is Heating Up  And Not In A Good Way

It doesn&#8217;t look like much but it&#8217;s the first of its kind on African soil that could turn a stinking problem into a profit. This $400-million plant takes the black rubbish bags of Cape Town, with their rotting food and heaven knows what else, and converts it into gas – methane and carbon dioxide – for sale.
The plant, owned by New Horizons Energy, a subsidiary of Clean Energy Africa, is the fruit of five years of planning with family-owned Waste-Mart, one of the largest waste collectors in the city. It was also backed by African Oxygen (Afrox) and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
This machine was born of a shortage of holes in which to put rubbish in Cape Town.
&#8220;WasteMart brings in 500 tons of waste a day. Cape Town produces 2 million tons a year. It goes to landfills sites and sits useless. We plan to convert 10 percent of Cape Town&#8217;s waste into something. The city of Cape Town, in effect, has become our mine,&#8221; says New Horizons Energy CEO, Egmont Ottermann.
<div id="attachment_4621" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4621" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-4621" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/biowaste-plant_JC-2-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Preparation of apricot juice for the plant.</div>
It is a 15-year dream Ottermann has realized. He says he first came up with the idea when looking at how to make gas that is produced in the cement industry.
At the heart of this are millions upon millions of bugs that live inside the huge vats and eat the rubbish to produce the methane. In their teething days they were fed nothing but cow manure before moving on to 50 tons of apricot juice. The bugs will mature in May and be strong enough to chomp their way through waste, turning it into valuable gas.
“We’re very excited about the plant. It can help to replace imported fuels by taking the waste and making gas out of the resource. Most importantly, it’s creating jobs. We also believe that there is massive opportunity for replication throughout South Africa and Africa,” says Raoul Goosen, the IDC’s Green Industry Specialist, who played a vital part in securing a 60% finance backing for the project.
The plant will release 20 tons of carbon dioxide and 540 gigajoules of biomethane, which Afrox will buy.
“For Afrox it&#8217;s a sustainable green offering that our customers are looking for. It&#8217;s a good news story from birth to graveyard in terms of managing a waste stream,” says Silvia Schollenberger, Afrox Head of Commercial and Projects.
&#8220;We found there was more value to the industries of biogas, rather than energy. Cape Town has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. Afrox has seen shortages of carbon dioxide and methane, especially in summer, so this is a good idea on various levels,” says Ottermann.
Ottermann believes there’s more rubbish than time.
&#8220;It&#8217;s not the silver bullet solution, but it&#8217;s a start. The idea is to use 100 percent of the landfill. We’re enhancing the recycling economy. There’s great potential in the future to make products such as plastic bricks and roof tiles. Over the lifetime of this plant, we expect many more little industries to be established close to the plant, so that we can drive zero waste to landfill.”
Where there&#8217;s muck there&#8217;s brass – there is also gas.

Rubbish. Bugs.  Profit.

Walk around any major city in Africa and you’ll see billboards. They’re hard to miss. Apparently, they also make the perfect outdoor sleeping bags.
“The wind can blow as much as it wants, and it can rain, it’s no problem. I can sleep at night, and in the day I can work,” 31-year-old Zota Atiwa, or ‘Alvis’ as he calls himself, says to FORBES AFRICA in the city center of Cape Town, South Africa.
The man behind the idea of making sleeping bags from billboards is 32-year-old Capetonian Oliver Brain. Today, he is handing out bags, exactly as when he started the company, Street Sleeper, two years ago.
After five years abroad, Brain brought back an engineering degree from Oxford University, experience in strategy consulting, and a determination to find a sustainable business model for a social business.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4448" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Oliver_Helga_1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Today, Street Sleeper has distributed more than 6,000 sleeping bags, made from billboards, to homeless people in the city, says Suzette Little, Councillor and Mayoral Committee Member in Cape Town.
Street Sleeper is not a charity, it is a social business, says Brain.
“We don´t rely on donations. We provide a product, and that enables us to do what we do.”
According to Rachida Justo, Professor of Entrepreneurship Management at IE Business School in Madrid, Street Sleeper is part of a global trend of upcycling, or turning a used product into a different product.
“Everything related to upcycling is something that fits fantastically to our time, given the issues that we have with garbage, plastic and environmental issues. The upcycling is becoming a trend,” she says.
A bag costs R150 ($11), which funds the production and distribution in Cape Town.
“If you want to gift to another place, you pay for the shipment,” says Brain.
Earlier this year, Street Sleeper received some unusual help.
“We got an advertising grant from Google in the amount of $10,000 a month, which is great for connecting to an international audience,” says Brain.
The international connection is going well. Right now, an international shipment of bags is on its way to New York.
“Just in time for the cold east-coast winter in America,” says Brain.
The billboards have all the characteristics perfect for outdoor sleeping bags.
“They are made of PVC, polyvinyl chloride, a sort of plastic. It’s perfect because it is water and windproof, thin enough to act like a fabric, and highly wear resistant, and you can sew it,” says Brain.
So far, Street Sleeper has used approximately 24,000 square meters, or 12 tons, of material that was destined for a landfill.
While Brain started out sewing the bags himself, he now leaves that to the head of production, Oled Borris, a Burundian refugee. Borris learned to sew in Burundi at the age of 12, but after quitting a government job which led to incarceration, he had to flee the country.
“I can relate to the people we give the bags to, because in a way I am homeless too,” he says.
The company is growing and moving to a bigger location. In addition to Borris, Street Sleeper has so far employed eight disadvantaged people.
Down the road from the current workshop, we meet 39-year old Helga, one of only 21% of female homeless people in Cape Town.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4450" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Oled_Oliver_Sewing-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Helga is distressed; her bag was stolen while she was asleep.
“Now sometimes I get wet,” she says.
Brain presents her with a new bag and her eyes water.
“I am going to cut this up on the one side, so it can be used as a blanket for me and my husband,” she says.
As Street Sleeper has supplied most of Cape Town’s homeless with sleeping bags, the company is now branching out.
“We’ve been sending bags all over the country,” says Brain. “We’ve realized that in all major cities, Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria, and even New York, there are a lot of likeminded people, so we want to help them get started.”
New York is not a one-off; in Stockholm, Edinburgh and Dublin, people have received Street Sleeper bags.
“We’re not afraid of letting go of control,” says Brain.
That seems to work, 90% of the bags are picked up by buyers and distributed autonomously, freeing up time for Brain to develop new products.
“We want to branch out and use the same material to make everyday stuff, like beach bags and raincoats,” says Brain.
A smart move, according to Justo, who says that being a social business is not enough to lure customers.
“We’re not there yet, where upcycled products are prioritized. There are still necessary conditions that need to be fulfilled, you need design, convenience and price,” she says.
“You need to take a very honest look at what you do, whether it’s functional or not. We’re very proud of the fact that we’re profitable,” says Brain.
The young entrepreneur has plenty of goals with his business, stretching far beyond the borders of South Africa.
”Every city has these problems, and every city has advertising billboards, so there is a market and supply everywhere.”

No More Pain From Wind And Rain

It is the faint whiff of tobacco that turns your head as you walk through Cape Town&#8217;s cobbled Greenmarket Square. All around are tourists with coffee in hand and people talking business in sidewalk bars. Everything you can see is like modern cosmopolitan to the cries of hawkers selling African art under canvas.
Here among the new, you will find – amid clouds of smoke – the ancient, in terms of African shops.
Sturk&#8217;s Tobacconists opened its doors in Greenmarket Square on August 1, 1793, and hasn&#8217;t closed them. The business seems durable to say the least. In recent times #FeesMustFall students fought pitched battles near the doorstep of Sturk&#8217;s – even then it did not close its doors.
This 223-year-old store, which is older than the Louvre in Paris by nine days, is now owned by Alan Phillips, a former customer and bartender from Benoni in Johannesburg.
&#8220;Smoking a pipe isn&#8217;t something you just pick up and smoke and enjoy. There is a process. It&#8217;s not for everybody. The pipe bug hit and then I became a client of Sturk&#8217;s,&#8221; says Phillips, leaning on the store’s hardwood counter.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5479" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Alan-Phllips_Sturks_JC-7-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Phillips is not just the owner, he is also a student of the history of the store. The likes of Cape governors and even at one time Winston Churchill visited it.
&#8220;Originally the entire building was [Hendrick] Sturk&#8217;s. He was a general dealer. At that stage the Cape governor&#8217;s house is where the South African Museum in Company&#8217;s Garden is. This was the CBD, it&#8217;s where everything happened. This square is where you bought your vegetables.&#8221;
Inside are relics that tell the passage of time. Phillips weighs his blended pipe tobacco on the company&#8217;s 200-year-old scale. Around him are ceramic pots that have also survived a couple of wars. Sitting next to them are vials of tobacco flavorant gathering dust in the rafters. Even World War II posters, found in a bunker in France, were brought here to add to the flavor of another time.
&#8220;Look, we&#8217;re a specialty shop. You can buy cigarettes pretty much anywhere, the street vendor the grocer, wherever.  Tobacco is our bread and butter. We blend it ourselves. When I talk about a niche business, you cannot buy a blend we produce anywhere other than where we are sitting now. We do cigarette shag and pipe tobacco blended to our own specifications, through age-old recipes.&#8221;
The sweet scent of tobacco may have layered onto these walls over two centuries, but in the uncertain 21st century the store is suffering hard times.
&#8220;It&#8217;s hard to pinpoint the exact cause. 2015 and 2016 have not been good years. The three main factors are new smoking laws, global economics and South Africa visa laws which affected us severely.&#8221;
Ten years ago, Sturk&#8217;s would sell an average of at least 80 kilograms of tobacco blend a month. By 2011, it was 70 kilograms. These days, Phillips sells 50 kilograms.
The tobacco industry has taken a huge knock globally as tighter health restrictions have been imposed. In 2013, Phillips says the South African Department of Health cracked down on smoking laws. These included store owners using designated smoking shelf zones, restrictions on advertising, and higher taxes.
Phillips&#8217; main worry is a pending amendment which, if enforced, could reduce his shelf space to a mere four square meters.
&#8220;This business sells tobacco related items only. Four square meters is going to be a problem. I cannot fit a thousand stock units in four square meters, it&#8217;s absolutely impossible.&#8221;
&#8220;I can understand the Department of Health&#8217;s point of view, it&#8217;s for health reasons. But the revenue generated through tobacco tax is huge,&#8221; he says.
Coupled with tighter laws is a decrease in tourists and a grinding South African economy.
&#8220;Although, the business can&#8217;t count on the tourism factor, as we recently found out with the visa debacle that was happening with the unabridged birth certificates, it knocked down tourism figures significantly, and our business.&#8221;
On this morning, a number of curious customers trickle in. Phillips gets up to weigh out a 50-gram pack of his tobacco blend which sells for R55 ($4) to a pipe smoker. Another customer gets his lighter filled at no charge.
&#8220;I generally buy loose tobacco in five-kilogram bundles which we then blend and repack. I try to keep cigarette turnover under 20% of total. The margins on cigarettes are very low,&#8221; he says.
Opposite the counter is Phillips’ pride and joy, an assortment of smoking pipes, hanging in fluorescent light for all to see.
&#8220;What you see here, hasn&#8217;t been purchased quickly to give a look to the shop. This is the way the shop has always looked. I&#8217;m sitting on around 150, I haven&#8217;t bothered to count in the last year or two,&#8221; he says.
Some of the pieces in Phillips&#8217; collection can cost as much as R3,000 ($225). The collection may not be up for sale, but Phillips does sell high-end pipes on the rare occasion. His biggest sale was an order for a Dunhill Christmas pipe for R9,000 ($670).
&#8220;[Pipe smoking is] exclusive, you don&#8217;t see many men with pipes, you hardly see any women with pipes. The options of the tobacco are almost endless. There is a difference in aromas, in flavors and one can blend to ones heart&#8217;s content to make something bespoke for you.&#8221;
Phillips holds a favorite from his collection. The South African-made pipe has a long stem – called a lovat – that has been rusticated in a well-known Italian Castello style.
&#8220;New, this guy would retail at R3,000. Which one would think is rather a lot of money, but considering the cost of the material and the time required to produce a pipe like this, it means the pipe maker is only earning about R100 an hour. Which is not fair on the pipe maker, but it is what it is.&#8221;
As it becomes more difficult to sell his wares, Phillips is doing the best he can to swim with his head above water.
&#8220;Talking about adaptation though, we&#8217;ve supplemented the decline in volume with newer smokeless products like snus and vaping.&#8221;
As the discussion finishes he gets up from the counter and adds: &#8220;Survival is about adaption, you see.&#8221;
Survival is going to be as tough as being a smoker in urban Africa.

The 200-Year-Old  Business That Could  Go Up In Smoke

Cape Town’s townships were once referred to as “apartheid’s dumping ground”. Today, 22 years into democracy, the stories usually told of these spaces speak of poverty, rampant crime and socioeconomic marginalization.
But Tony Elvin, the charismatic founder of Ikhaya Le Langa, has a very different view. “When I first discovered Langa, not only was it not what I was told in terms of supposedly being a sad and fearful place,” he says, “It was the place where I found a community still intact. There’s an energy and a spirit that is in Langa, and if we can capture that, it’s like gold.”
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5041" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Langa_Tony_JC-2-of-10-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Seated in the café at his headquarters in a repurposed Langa primary school, Elvin uses a detailed and dog-eared map of Cape Town to introduce what his NGO is trying to achieve in Cape Town’s oldest black township.
What the map reveals is surprising and powerful: Langa does not sit on the isolated peripheries of the metropolis where common lore has long positioned it, but right at its pulsing heart.
As a black Londoner living in Langa, Elvin admits that he’s used to surprising people. Before he moved here permanently in 2010, the long-neglected Langa community’s interaction with the rest of the world had been limited to occasional groups of white tourists passing through on a quick “poverty safari”, as Tony disdainfully calls the archetypal township tour, before heading back to their cushy city hotels.
Through the ongoing development of the so-called Langa Quarter, Elvin hopes to emphatically change that trend.
“The aim is to create an aspirational cool place, not just for tourists, to create a new place in Cape Town where Capetonians can also go, not only for a history lesson, but to listen to some great jazz, see some great art, chill out and have a great time. I want the Langa Quarter to be to Cape Town what the French Quarter is to New Orleans,” says Elvin.
The Langa Quarter is the pilot model of a concept that Elvin has dubbed the “Social Enterprise Precinct”. The idea, he says, is to overlay the social enterprise principles of “people, planet and profit” onto particular neighborhoods, and to thereby create “viable, sustainable spaces where investment will flourish, and the poverty will then take care of itself.”
Elvin has considerable experience doing this in Cape Town, having first come here as a social enterprise consultant for celebrity chef Jamie Oliver in 2004. Elvin soon fell in love with the city and went on to set up his own social enterprise consultancy firm in the center of Cape Town, where he came into contact with a number of young township-based social entrepreneurs.
“I became aware that there was a lot more I wanted to do in Cape Town, and particularly in the townships,” says Elvin.
He concedes that he still “wasn’t quite sure” what he was setting out to achieve when he moved from his luxurious Hout Bay residence into the township to start Ikhaya Le Langa.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5039" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Langa_Tony_JC-7-of-10-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
“Even today, I sometimes describe it all as being at sea, in the middle of a storm, in a boat that I’m still building, without knowing what shape it will take, and I’m not sure what direction I’m headed in either. It’s still new, this approach.”
But Elvin can already boast a number of successes, including the Langa Quarter Homestay Hotel, where visitors are fed and accommodated in the home of a Langa resident. Since its inception a little over a year ago, this initiative has contributed more than R100,000 (roughly $6,400) to the 15 households currently involved – a considerable amount of money in an area where the majority earn less than R4,000 (roughly $250) a month.
Then there’s the annual, and increasingly well-attended, Uplifting Langa Through Reachable Art (ULTRA) street art event, which this year drew talented artists from across the Langa community and far beyond; world-renowned French street artist Jace stayed in Langa for a week as the event’s artist in residence.
Other fledgling ventures – including a media, graphics and advertising studio, an online shop for local artisans and designers, and a new restaurant – have drawn support from multinational companies, including Amazon and Ikea.
But take a walk with Elvin through the intricate crisscrossing streets of the quarter and it’s evident that he’s not resting on his laurels. He talks incessantly, throwing out countless ideas and plans for improving everything that he passes.
The effusive greetings he receives from the local residents along the way pay testament to the time he has invested in gaining their trust, and ensuring that they will be a central part of every step of this process.
“Above all, I’m focused on how the wonderful, cool transformation of Langa can positively influence the community and what is the opportunity to drive change. Langa deserves to be shown some love.”
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5040" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Langa_Tony_JC-9-of-10-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
It’s also clear that Elvin feels more than just a philanthropic affinity for Langa.
“I love living in Langa. I’ve got friends here, I love the noise of Langa, I like the people that you walk around and see every day – it’s really very charming. After six years, Langa’s my home.”
With so much still in the pipeline, Elvin is not looking to uproot himself anytime soon.
“The Langa Quarter is far from a finished product, but we are at a stage where we can invite people in and, critically, they can stay,” he says. “So that’s a stake in the ground and we will grow from that, and more and more people will benefit from that. Essentially what we’ve done already is create hope.”

The Londoner Capturing African Spirit And Spinning It Into Gold

It is a peaceful 200-yard walk from the Cape Town city streets to the gates of Parliament, but inside it was loaded like a gun; anger blazed in the eyes of many for Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa for nearly seven years and head of the African National Congress (ANC).
A small group outside Parliament held up placards reading ‘ANC Betraying South Africa’. The leader, in a navy suit, who wishes to be known only as Michael, said they had taken their lunchbreak to voice their disgust.
“The ANC members here today must do the honorable thing and fire this president who flaunts our wealth.”
A man dressed in the darkness of death contrasted against Parliament’s bright white walls. He held a cardboard match to a cardboard Constitution as MPs floated past in their luxury vehicles.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4842" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Parliament-_JC-5-of-14-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Curious students across the way ran to see what the fuss is all about. One claimed Zuma is running the economy into the ground, another countered that he is too powerful to be ousted.
The street vendor, a few blocks down, didn’t care. He sold sweets and cigarettes to anyone who had money, be it Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) red or ANC green and gold, as they shuffled toward Parliament. No one wanted to miss this one.
Inside, the debate raged like a fire on Table Mountain. The gallery was packed as leaders of the opposition parties tore into the ruling ANC. Mmusi Maimane, the first black leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), likened the ills of his opponents to a disease.
“Corruption has infected the entire party like a cancer. While our attention today focuses on a large and malignant tumour, we know that under the surface, the disease has replicated itself in every cell,” said Maimane.
“Today, it will be recorded that ANC members of Parliament chose to defend a crooked, broken president instead of the constitution and the rule of law. Today will signal once and for all that the ANC has lost its way and there’s absolutely no way back.”
Nhlanhla Khubisa, National Freedom Party secretary-general, called for the president to be elected by the citizens, and not by the party.
Pieter Mulder, Freedom Front Plus leader, reminded the ANC of the fate of their predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, who was recalled in 2008.
“His mistakes were 10 times less serious than Zuma&#8230; Sir, if ANC members once again ignore the facts of the last week… take my word for it, history will in a couple of years from now judge them very harshly and negatively,” said Mulder.
ANC MP and Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, John Jeffery, bit back.
“The DA claims the president seriously violated the Constitution, but here is the issue: the court did not find a serious violation of the Constitution as Section 89 (1) requires&#8230; The court did not declare Zuma violated his oath of office as the EFF had wanted.”
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4843" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Pieter-Mulder_JC-1-of-1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
A statement was read out:
The Presidency wishes to correct media reports wrongly stating that the judgement by the Constitutional Court found that President Jacob Zuma had broken his oath of office. The Constitutional Court did not make such a declaratory order.
The Constitutional Court instead ruled that “The failure by the President to comply with the remedial action taken against him, by the Public Protector in her report of 19 March 2014, is inconsistent with section 83(b) of the Constitution read with sections 181(3) and 182(1)(c) of the Constitution and is invalid.
Votes were cast, results read, the dust settled and the opposition walked out – oh, by the way, Zuma won: 233 votes to 143.
<h1>How Did We Get Here?</h1>
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4846" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Ahmed-Kathrada-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Even if President Jacob Zuma does survive, this fragile democracy will face an acid test on August 3. Millions of South Africans will go to the polls for municipal elections in which the ruling ANC is expected to lose ground.
How did we get here? Well, the tension has built since 2009, when the story of Nkandla broke. Seven years later, South Africa&#8217;s Constitutional Court – the highest in the land – found Zuma to have unduly benefited from $15 million worth of upgrades to his personal home in KwaZulu-Natal. The court stated Zuma failed to uphold, defend and respect the constitution as the supreme law of the land.
A humbled Zuma apologized publicly to the country on television. The ANC backed him.
&#8220;I wish to reiterate that any action that has been found not to be in keeping with the constitution happened because of a different approach and different legal advice&#8230; I never knowingly or deliberately set out to violate the constitution&#8230; It was never my intention not to comply with the remedial action taken against me by the Public Protector [Thuli Madonzela] or to disregard her office.&#8221;
Other loyalists called for more than an apology. Trevor Manuel, South Africa&#8217;s former finance minister, wanted resignation. Even Ahmed Kathrada, who faced death with Nelson Mandela in the 1960s, wrote a letter calling for Zuma to go.
&#8220;I know that if I were in the President’s shoes‚ I would step down with immediate effect,&#8221; wrote Kathrada.

Go Now, Mr President!

On any given day, you can find Mike Lawrie sitting on the patio with a cup of tea in his hand or watering his plants. His wife, Christine, plays scrabble on Fridays. He prefers to dress in khaki shorts and a cotton shirt in the summer heat. This is the 75-year-old who brought the internet to Africa, making it possible for kids, and their parents, to watch movies, play games and surf the World Wide Web from their homes.
His vigour as the father of the internet in South Africa is reflected in his twilight years. He also brought the internet to this retirement village in Pretoria where he is teaching his neighbors how to use their cell phones.
“We’re having a whale of a time doing it. It’s keeping me busy. But today for the first time, one of the old ducks came with a Samsung S4. She’s got a grandchild who lives here with us, and he knew exactly how to use this phone. This kid can’t be 10 years old. It’s fantastic. If I told this kid, 10 years before you were born, there was no internet, he would look at me and say ‘what the hell are you talking about?’”
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4495" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0084-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
When the sun was high on this summer day, the friendly and polite Lawrie offers a glass of iced water and biscuits on his shady patio, ringed with dozens of succulents in pots.
Lawrie’s journey begins in Cape Town where he grew up with a flair for mathematics and science. He struggled to find a job, until he turned to punched card machines, the primitive form of computer programming.
“It was the early computer stuff. Ever wondered why there are 80 columns on a screen? It’s from the punch card system,” says Lawrie.
Along came 1962. Computers were into their second generation and were a little smaller; they could now fit into a lounge, recalls Lawrie. He was one of the few people in South Africa who could work on them.
A purchase made by Rhodes University of an ICT 1301, in 1965, changed everything for Lawrie. The computer had to have a technician. It meant 25-year-old Lawrie moved to Grahamstown, from Cape Town, with his wife, on her 21st birthday, to babysit the ICT 1301 at the university’s computer lab.
“You had to rattle electronic circuits to check for faults. You hit it with a hammer… tap, tap, tap… if the computer still runs it means there is nothing wrong and you move onto the next one. They made them to last. It was a great machine to work on. It taught me computing through and through. These days techies haven’t got a clue about how a machine works.”
The backwater could’ve been the last place you would expect a computer techie to thrive, but Lawrie did.
“Grahamstown has no great industries. It has no electrical noise. Electrically it’s a quiet town. We arrived in November and came back to Cape Town in December, and told people about this pokey little town. The next year we went home, to Cape Town, the same streets you have lived in all your life now looked narrow.”
To say Lawrie is a mere techie is an understatement: he brought the net to Africa, as an experiment, in his own time.
“The doing of it was pure technical. It was fun, it wasn’t a project. It wasn’t our job at the university to specifically do it. It was never part of the reports for the university. The main thing was to run a computer service in the university. Low and behold we tweaked the system and got it working.”
Lawrie took the first step in  linking the world in Grahamstown. With 100 meters of copper wire he set up a primitive computer network that connected the physics department to the university mainframe. He then tried to connect something a bit farther, his house, two kilometers away.
“We found out that if you take two wires from Telkom, then the South African Postal Service, you can put five volts in this side you get five volts on the other end. If you jumper it, [the computer] thinks a modem is connected to the other end.”
By 1985, Lawrie developed an internal email system. Academics could now speak to each other on campus through their computer. Its commonplace now, science fiction then.
The next phase took three years, Lawrie wanted to connect to other universities. The issue was some used IBM computers; the university used a VAX operated computer.
“Low and behold we got the thing to work, using IS protocols. This was magic, connecting two independently controlled computer systems. By 1988, we could take a VAX computer, take an email, put it into our homegrown system, pull it out again, pull it through a sausage machine and then make it an IBM mail and send it off to Potchefstroom,” he says.
It dawned on Lawrie that the system had the potential to send an email around the world.
Lawrie contacted a network called Bitnet that agreed to let South Africa join their network. But, he first needed to get approval from Uninet, run by the CSIR, the government research facility that spearheaded network projects in South Africa.
“I took this proposal to the board, and the board laughed me off. They said I was out of my mind, because Bitnet is run by countries that have a stance against apartheid and would be shut down.”
“I was cheesed off and I don’t get cross that easily. I decided the best thing to do was never to go to a committee again. It’s so easy for a group of people to say it can’t be done.”
Lawrie found an alternative solution in FidoNet, a TCP/IP freebee package designed by Randy Bush in Oregon, in the United States (US), which was smuggled into South Africa on a floppy disk by a friend named Pat Terry.
“This was luck beyond belief,” says Lawrie.
With floppy disk in hand, Lawrie also needed to negotiate an account with the University of Delaware to give him access to the internet. From his computer in Rhodes, Lawrie was able to send mail to Delaware, to Bush in Oregon, to a Unix system, and then over FidoNet.
“The point about the FidoNet was in the testing phase of getting ‘some’ form of international email to work prior to releasing the email service for general use to Rhodes staff and students. This testing was in 1988, the service to Rhodes folk was operational early in 1989.”
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4496" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0121-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
“We are now at the point where I can sit at home and I can log into our mainframe, create mail and send it to someone in the US. You would sit at eight o’clock at night and type an email out to this guy, he doesn’t know when it’s written, and writes back. In his email he invites me to come to this conference saying he wants me to come and talk about what we are doing. I then reply back and say great. He then writes back, how did that mail get here so quickly? How could the interchange of email to Africa be so quick? It was like instant. This guy was expecting to get a response from me in three weeks and he got it in about two minutes. This opened eyes all over the place.”
On November 12, 1991, at 10.44AM, Lawrie set up the first permanent link to send mail, via file transfer protocol (FTP), it was a long walk to the internet for Africa.
“He’s quite an anomaly. Even at that time he was a visionary,” says Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In 2003, Balliah came across Lawrie when reading archives for her master’s degree.
“I found on the internet a bunch of usenet groups, which were archived, by whichever browser was there back then. They were literally archives of text messages sent by individuals over the internet.  One of them related to South Africa. It related to the original internet work that existed in South Africa at that. I became interested in following this trail, it became a forensic trail. I picked up people’s names and eventually it led me to Rhodes University where the network was started.”
All roads lead to Rhodes. At the end was a meeting with Lawrie and two days of lessons in internet history. It prompted Balliah to write a book on the history of the internet in South Africa.
“I’ll never forget he told me once ‘Everyone at a university complains about how students are only downloading porn, and I look at them and say at least they reading something’. It’s always been his approach. He will complain about how much students consume data, but his approach is let them just play,” she says.
Back in the retirement village, Lawrie is as happy as an email on a server. He presides over the most internet savvy retirement homes in the country.
“What was I driven by? I don’t know. It wasn’t a pioneering nature. It definitely wasn’t the politics of it that motivated it. What’s this concept of emails and why would one want to sit at a computer, type something in and see it somewhere else. How do you go about selling something in a world that doesn’t use email? So I didn’t set about selling it. I set about making it work,” says Lawrie.
You can take the technician out the computer lab but you can’t stop him from joining the dots.

Tag: Cape Town

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA