It’s a Monday afternoon, a band of nobodies are sweating it out for practically nobody in a small room in South Africa’s Limpopo province. This is Shayamore (which means hit more) rehearsing for their next gig.
As the band plays, I find myself tapping and nodding to the rhythm. It’s hard to believe that a hot and raw talent like this is unknown.
The band is made up of five members, for whom music is their daily bread: Goodman Mndawe, a bassist; Solly Ndlovu, a pianist; Lazarus Silubane, a guitarist; Surance Chimbilini, a pianist, and Thabo Khoza, a drummer. For 18 years, they’ve been working and playing in vain.
“We’ve performed in a lot of places but we’ve never had any exposure or media interviews. This is actually our first interview ever,” says Silubane, co-founder of the band.
Gigs are as scarce as interviews.
“We sometimes go for three months without booking any shows,” says Silubane.
“We have to spend our own money to organize gigs, design posters and distribute it just to get our names out there,” says Khoza.
On Sundays they do jazz sessions in taverns. They charge R3, 000 ($215) for a performance and share it between themselves.
“We end up coming back with R2, 000 ($145) because of expenses like transport and food. And then we have to divide the money by five.  And it happens that we hire dancers as well and have to pay them,” says Khoza.
To them music is life as well as bread.
“Music feeds my soul… I can tell my story through this music,” says Khoza.
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For Khoza, who joined the band in 2014, becoming a musician wasn’t easy.
“After my mother passed away I had to stay with my aunt and she wanted me to become something else. I lost my relationship with my dad. Every time I would run away and go to practises, until she was convinced that I’m really serious about music. Then I started playing music in clubs and local taverns. I had a guitar which was a gift from someone,” he says.
“I had to sell the guitar for R700 ($50) because I was desperate for money and I needed to move out of my father’s place. I couldn’t stay with him when he didn’t believe in me and my music. When I went back to Mpumalanga that’s when I met Lazarus and he introduced to me to the band,” says Khoza.
“Every time we’re behind the instruments we tell ourselves that we are on a big stage, even if there’s no spotlight, and that the universe will one day recognize us.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/life/2017/05/01/die-poor-blame/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">If I Die Poor, Blame Me</a>
They want to release an album, but money is a problem.
“We don’t want to be signed under any record label because we’ll lose our freedom to do music the way we want. Our aim is to be independent,” says Silubane.
“You see this guitar I’m holding, I take it as my lover. And I’ll never stop playing it, only death would stop me,” says Madalwe.
In five years’ time, they want to be like one of the world’s greatest icons, Michael Jackson, and perform in New York and London.
It’s nice to dream, unfortunately the reality says next year this time around they’ll be playing in Limpopo. That’s just the way it is.

Band-054

‘The universe will one day recognize us’

As a young, flamboyant man who toured the world and sold thousands of records all Papa Penny Penny could think about was fame.  Twenty three years later, he thinks young musicians should think about saving their money and life insurance.
Older and wiser, Penny Penny, whose real name is Eric Kobane, talks to us in his home in Nkuri Village, Sifasonke in South Africa’s Limpopo province. He returned to the village, where it all started, in 2003 because he ran out of money.
“We have to understand that death is inevitable, it doesn’t notify you that you’re going to die at a certain time. Therefore people must have insurance for themselves and their families. Even though [musicians] don’t get paid monthly, every little that you get you must save it so that when you die your family will be able to bury you,” says Penny Penny.
“There are so many artists that are being buried by the government. But it’s not obliged to bury us. If I die poor, I would be to blame for not saving.”
Emerging artists should listen. Penny Penny, a veteran of the African music scene and the Shangaan Disco King, as he is referred to, remains relevant today.
He grew up with traditional dance. After years working at a mine, Penny Penny started making demo recordings and sent them to record labels. He was rejected every time.
“My voice was too small, not like this. They kept rejecting me because of my voice. I went to different companies and I remember one producer said I have a voice like a donkey. I was so disappointed but I never stopped,” he says.
His breakthrough came in 1994 when a Tsonga singer and producer, Joe Shirimani, discovered him at the offices of a record label where Penny Penny was working as a cleaner, earning a mere R400 ($29) a month.
“I didn’t have a place to sleep because I had used all my money to make demos. So I was secretly sleeping at the company and at night I’d go into the studio and teach myself how to use the equipment. I got caught. But Joe asked me to sing back-up for another artist. He got the label to record demos with me and from there we did my first album within seven days,” says Penny Penny.
With his first cheque of R150,000 ($10,800) Penny Penny bought a house, in Kempton Park, in Johannesburg’s East Rand.
“Anybody who wants to be a star has to learn to make money and save it. Young musicians go for girls, parties and expensive cars but don’t own a home,” he says.
More than 20 years since Penny Penny released his first album Shaka Bundu, he says it’s harder to find success.
<div id="attachment_31472" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31472" class="wp-image-31472 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Penny-0101-1024x686.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="686" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Penny-0101.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Penny-0101-300x201.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Penny-0101-600x402.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Penny-0101-768x515.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Penny Penny</div>
“This is a very difficult industry. We don’t get money every month; sometimes we get royalties after six months. When it comes you find that we have huge debts that we have to pay back, making it difficult to save.”
According to Penny Penny, South Africans support American artists more than their homegrown musicians.
Penny Penny himself draws bigger crowds away from home. His first performance in Mozambique filled a stadium with 37,000 people.
“We lost six people because of the stampede. I get surprised by the way people treat me; they welcome me in airports just to see if it’s really me,” he says.
It is not only his music that captured the hearts of fans – his flamboyant personality and pineapple phondo are just as popular.
It hasn’t always been good for Penny Penny though. He was accused of beating up his former manager, Lerato Manaka, who claims that he owes her R200,000 for gigs he performed since June 2016.
“My company hired her to be my PR person and to promote my CD with DJ Maphorisa. I didn’t hire her. She promised me a sponsor; I asked to get a contract. She never did, until she faked the contract. She’d organize interviews and then people would demand money from me. How can I owe her if she was the one paying me? Artists get their money from managers after they’ve taken their percentage,” says Penny Penny.
In January 1995, false news of his death circulated. Penny Penny believes the rumours were started by fellow musicians out of jealousy.
“They shot and killed my security guard because they thought it was me,” he says.
Penny Penny has been through a lot of bad publicity and rough times in his career. He rarely gives interviews.
“Media can build and break our careers. Newspapers will put you on the front page and say you did this and that, whereas it’s all lies. Even today, I’m surrounded by lots of propaganda, lies – manga manga business. They’ve been trying to destroy my reputation, I’ve decided not do any interviews again.”
Penny Penny never spent a day in school. For this reason, he is reliant on lawyers for all his business deals.
“In a contract, I only check money. I don’t see a lot of the stuff that is written in there. And I never sign a contract without a lawyer,” he says.
The 57-year-old still works very hard, touring constantly, and he has a reality TV show called Papa Penny Ahee that helps bring in the money. This time it is being used wisely knowing he will never retire.

Penny-0021

If I Die  Poor,  Blame Me

Each year some people have the privilege of doing a political tour of South Africa. From Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma’s home in KwaZulu-Natal, through Johannesburg’s Constitutional Court, Stock Market, Soweto and other attractions to Parliament in the Cape, Hout Bay’s squatter camp and the lovely wine farms.
The tour’s emphasis is on politics and the political people of the country. They meet the players in politics, business, the media, health and education. Fortunately for us, former president Thabo Mbeki agreed to meet us at his Foundation.
Mbeki was in a wonderful mood, sharing his stories, answering our questions, asking a few of his own. Most fascinating for me was his answer when asked to explain why his liberation party moved away from nationalizing mines and banks.
“Well, we went to Cuba in 1986, and you know before our meeting Fidel Castro asked us to bring a copy of the Freedom Charter with us. But he asked it three times, three times!”
“We asked ourselves, we heard you the first time, why ask again?”
“He then told us when we saw him – with the document – that the government Cuban rum is called Cuban Club, and that it is owned by Cuba, it is the best rum, but does not do as well as Bacardi. The owners of Bacardi left Cuba in a hurry but had to leave the vats.”
“Fidel then said, ‘Now you know good rum is made by mixing old rum with new, but Bacardi left in a hurry, taking everything but leaving the old vats. Yet they set up in America and sold a completely new rum. It was not great, it lacked the Bacardi flavor, it was all new and all they had was the name,’ he told us.”
But it was enough.
“‘So,’ said Fidel, ‘we quickly went to France and Europe and registered the names of Cohibas and other cigars, so if those companies also left we would still have their names. ‘Now tell me, ‘ Fidel said, ‘how many mining engineers do you have in the ANC?’”
“We looked at each other and said we did not know if we have any, probably none at that time (1992).”
“Then he said that if we took over Anglo American and nationalized them, we would have to ask them to do the mining, to manage it and run the mines because we could not, and they would then deliberately mine badly, because they would be angry that they had been nationalized. ‘Rather wait a bit,’ Fidel told us, ‘then in 15 years or so you can start taking over as you develop the capacity.’”
“It made sense, so we went back and convinced our people.”
I asked why Mandela, when he first came out of jail, in his first speech in Cape Town, said mines and banks would be nationalized?
“When Mandela was released it was a bad mistake of ours. We had been in talks with government and they had agreed they would give us nine or 10 days’ notice before releasing him, they would call my home with a code name and message, like ‘it is going to rain on Sunday November 1’ and we would have time to prepare.”
“But I was away, with Oliver Tambo in London, so when Zanele (Mbeki’s wife) was called by this strange person with a fairly innocuous message for me she waited a few days and then told the wife of Oliver Tambo to tell me the message. His wife also waited a few days and then said to him ‘Oh, tell Thabo somebody called Zanele to say it is going to rain on Sunday November 1.’”
“I got the message and thought nothing of it. I had forgotten what that meant. Me, I made that mistake… Later I suddenly remembered and realized, it was our code agreed with the South African government, but by then it was the day before his release.”
“We quickly tried to write a speech but failed and those inside South Africa wrote the speech, but they had not yet been told how we had changed our minds on nationalizing the mines and banks despite what it said in the Freedom Charter. So that’s why Mandela said what he said.”
I was aghast. I had written several times to say it was at Davos that the first democratic president had changed policy on nationalization. Mbeki laughed.
“Davos being the place he changed his mind is really just one of many stories&#8230;”

Nationalization Is A  Rum Deal

Speedster Seabelo Senatla is the leading Sevens rugby player in the world but is now taking aim at glory in the 15-man game as he targets a first cap for South Africa’s Springboks this season with one eye on the 2019 World Cup in Japan.
A young Senatla dreamed of being an Olympic sprinter and idolized American 100-meters star Marion Jones, but it is with the oval ball in hand where he has risen to global fame and achieved his aim of appearing at the Olympics.
Athletics was always his first love, with a passion for rugby only coming once he had left school, but it still satisfies his need for speed.
“I loved Jones,” Senatla tells FORBES AFRICA. “After every race of hers I watched, I would go outside and mimic her running, trying to be as fast as I could.”
“I remember later, at nine years old, going out with my dad, who had plastic bags that he would use to simulate the sound of a starter’s pistol, and I would be off, fast as I could.”
“I just love running, still to this day. It was always my dream to run the 100-meters at the Olympics. I feel so free when I’m running; I imagine like a horse must feel when they are in full gallop.”
Senatla is already the leading try-scorer in Springbok Sevens history with 189 and the 24-year-old says that having made the switch to 15s, he will not be lost to that format completely, with the 2018 Commonwealth Games and the next Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 to look forward to.
But, in between those tournaments is the chance for the dreadlocked try-machine to be a part of the Bok squad that competes in the 15-man World Cup in two years’ time having taken up his contract with South Africa’s Cape Town-based Stormers Super Rugby franchise this season.
It has been a momentous few years for the Welkom-born flyer, who admits he never saw rugby as a serious career path until he left the Riebeeckstad High School in the Free State province’s mining city.
“I only played socially at school to be honest. I never took it seriously at all; it was just a chance to play with my mates, enjoy the tours and have some fun.”
“But after I finished school I decided to take a gap year before tertiary education. I was invited to the Harmony Sports Academy [in Virginia in the Free State] and that really opened by eyes.”
“There I was working with people who lived and breathed rugby, and put everything into the game. Everything changed for me. I was in a proper, professional rugby environment for the first time and that grew my passion for the game. I went from loving the social side, to loving playing.”
Oddly for a player of his extreme pace, Senatla says he barely played as a wing in his formative years.
“I was always the smaller type, so I was scrumhalf and then moved around a bit, to center and fullback. I actually never played wing for my school.”
It was while studying at the Central University of Technology in Bloemfontein and playing for his provincial Under-19 and -20 sides that Senatla started leaning towards a career in rugby.
“I could see there was something there. I could see this was something that could feed me and my family. I won a contract to play Sevens and then was called-up to the [2013] Junior Rugby World Cup squad in 15s, and it has gone on from there.”
Sevens has grown in glamour in recent years and is now a sport played at the Olympics. Senatla helped South Africa to the bronze medal in Rio de Janeiro last year, despite being injured for the latter stages of the tournament.
He was undoubtedly the best player on the Sevens circuit in 2016 and was honored as such by being named World Rugby Sevens Player of the Year.
He still has ambitions in that format, like turning Olympic bronze into gold and winning the Sevens World Cup, but for now there is another global prize that has caught his eye.
Having returned to Super Rugby with the Stormers in 2017, he is gunning for a place in Allister Coetzee’s Bok squad this year and was called up for a training camp in March.
“It’s obviously a very different challenge and basically a different game altogether,” he says. “I’m getting back into it slowly, but luckily the team I am at are a great bunch of guys who create a great environment to be in.”
“They play to a system-based structure, which is what I am used to in Sevens, where everybody knows there roles and moves in the same direction. So I am in the right team to develop.”
“There is no doubt my aim is to acquire the Springbok jersey and that is what I am working towards. The next World Cup [in 15s] is the big target. Imagine, I could win the World Cup in 15s and Sevens; that would be really something!”
Senatla says he views his career in phases – the first of which is now complete as he begins the second.
“The first phase was for me to play a lot of Sevens, supplemented with a bit of 15s, to help me develop my skills. Sevens is the best development any rugby player can have because of the skills needed to play the game,” he says.
“The second phase was to move to 15s on a more permanent basis, playing just limited Sevens. I want to remain in 15s for quite a few years, but obviously that depends on my contract situation.”
There is something else that drives him too. His mother, Patricia, was a fine netball player, but was denied the opportunity to compete on the international stage. He believes he gets his athletic ability from her side rather than father Bery, who is a police detective in Welkom.
“My mom was very good at netball, but apartheid took the chance of competing internationally away from her. Now I have the opportunity, it is a chance I want to use to the maximum. I feel very blessed, very lucky and very driven to succeed.”
More success is on the horizon for Senatla and the speedster plans to get there quickly.

The Dreadlocked Flyer Spicing Up Rugby

As soon as I graduated from university there was an invitation from the managing director of a top Nigerian engineering company to join the organization. There I learned the business of construction and after four years of strategic support work I left to start my own building engineering service firm with a partner. It looked easy!
In Nigeria, starting a new enterprise seems like a piece of a cake and it’s very convenient for people to suggest you should “start something on your own”.  Lagos, where I live, has an annual government revenue one of around $1 billion. With this kind of cash seemingly flowing through the streets, it is assumed it is easy to finance one’s start-up.
My partner and I started our business with our tiny fund – around $320 – and within a few months, had invested most of it on marketing. We didn’t have a car to drive around Lagos so we used taxis to get to meetings. We pushed on until we eventually landed a construction site deal. This process taught us how unsupportive financial institutions in our part of the world can be.
The average entrepreneur in Africa finds it difficult to get their idea to market because of ridiculous interest bearing loans. As we began to talk to our banker for financial support, it became clear that the banking sector was not going to be of much help. We did not have a property, in a choice part of the city, to guarantee the loan which in itself attracts over 20% interest.
With time running out, and needing to get our workers and equipment to site, we resorted to a desperate measure. Desperate people do desperate things. In this case it was a ship sinking decision for us. A private investor offered us a short-term loan with a monthly interest of 15%. We assumed all would work out; we had millions to get people and equipment to site, and substantial work could be done to impress our client. Within 30 days, we would be paid and refund our creditor. It was unrealistic.
In an environment where uncertainty is high, relative to other part of the world, such a straight-line strategy requires many back-up plans. Our company defaulted and the loan extended to a third month, with an accumulated interest of 45% on every million naira. We defaulted because our client delayed payment. He couldn’t pay us because his funds were not released. That circle of failure is the undoing of many businesses.
In a society where moneylenders and investors place an emphasis on the reputation of an entrepreneur, one needs to have a plan to protect this. The harshness of the African business environment triggers desperation and keep entrepreneurs focusing on short-term plans. This needs to change; the longer a business’s plans are considered, the better it will be. There are other strategies that work with raising fund. In south-western Nigeria, Yoruba parlance says that “it is from home that treasures are taken out”. The interpretation is that success begins at home.
Many business owners that I have had the opportunity to talk to use their relationship with family and friends to raise funds, equipment and other resources. The benefit of this is that family is more willing to forgive you and this type of loan usually comes without interest. However, this strategy is limited on a continent where around 70% live below the poverty line.
This provides a huge opportunity for capital ventures and angel investors. It provides opportunities to bridge the poverty gap and create wealth on a continent that is thought to be the next global investment destination. To truly realise this opportunity, the purse of an entrepreneur shouldn’t be bullied.

Desperate People Do Desperate Things

As Nigeria continues to grapple with its worst recession, two pressing concerns revolve around its struggle to diversify – the state of the local manufacturing industry and the level of government’s commitment towards industrialization.
Nigeria is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest economy which boggles my mind when I consider the abject decline in the real GDP, income, employment, manufacturing, and retail sales.
The Nigerian economy is chiefly governed by oil and natural gas. While the oil sector provides almost 30% of the GDP and accounts for 90% of the total export capacity, the manufacturing sector provides around just 4%.
The sector is undergoing industrial collapse. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) reported that 272 companies shut down in 2016, 50 of those were manufacturing companies. Other reports claim that more than 1,500 of the 2,500 registered manufacturing companies folded up while millions of employees have lost their jobs.
At the forefront of this decline is Nigeria’s reliance on oil and the failure to make hay while the sun was shining. This focus on oil derailed Nigeria’s progress to becoming an industrialized nation. The government’s recklessness is to blame for the industrial failure, such as power problems, infrastructural deficit, economic mismanagement, taxation discrepancies, policy uncertainty, weak investor confidence, restriction of foreign capital inflows, affixation to irrational importation, and, notably, the low income of consumers.
As commodity prices plummeted, the manufacturing sector has impressively emerged. Despite challenges, the huge demography and being the largest African market makes Nigeria ripe for investment. The United Nations had projected that Nigeria’s population will rise to 240 million by 2050. Also, Renaissance Capital and Frontier Advisory forecast that the country’s economy will grow to $1 trillion by 2025. These are signals of the potential of industrialization.
All that is needed to harness this potential is the willingness of the government to act. A robust manufacturing sector and a willful program for industrialization are equally crucial for the dream to be realized.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that the present government is jumping on the industrial horse to achieve economic reform that will replace the oil and gas with manufacturing and agriculture.
“My engagements with the organized and informal sectors has been mutually affirmative that we should work harder in partnership and disagree less, grow confidence with greater transparency by government, and accelerate actions rather than words, to build our capacities and secure development,” said Nigeria’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enelamah, at the Nigeria &amp; Entrepreneurship Summit &amp; Honors in December.
Since then, however, not much has changed. Private businesses are still hindered by unfavorable laws. To this end, the National Assembly is working on legislative economic reform – with 30 bills, including the Petroleum Industrial Bill, Infrastructure Investment Protection and Regulation Bill, Railway Sector Reform Bill, and Tax and Revenue Law/Bill. If successful, such a revolution would be a shot in the arm for industrialization.
The hopes of entrepreneurs and local manufacturers are also bolstered by the Made in Nigeria campaign, which is receiving encouraging support from top to bottom. President Muhammadu Buhari has reassured Nigerians that his administration is working on enhancing the support of locally made goods as well as improving access to finance for small and medium-sized enterprises across the country.
Despite enduring hardship at the moment, Nigeria can be reassured that greater opportunities lie ahead.

Nigeria Needs Industrialization now

Over the past decade, Kenya has taken considerable steps towards deepening financial inclusion. This is reflected in the 2016 FinAccess Household Survey which shows that slightly more than three-quarters of Kenyans are now formally included by the financial system, which is a 50% increase over the past 10 years.
According to the report, the percentage of Kenyans relying on informal services providers decreased from 32.11% in 2006 to 7.2% in 2015. Thanks to technology, 18% of Kenyans now use new mobile banking services such as M-Shwari and M-Pesa, a scenario that has pushed the proportion of bank account users to 38%, up 10% from 2013, while traditional bank accounts have decreased.
Despite the significant progress seen towards enhancing financial inclusion, there is much less success in the use of investment products, such as shares, mutual funds and treasuries. The study showed that the use of investment products decreased to 10.6% in 2016 compared to 11.6% in 2013. Findings by the same survey also revealed that the number of Kenyans familiar with the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) stood at only 38%. It seems that a lack of awareness could be why less than 30% of daily market transactions at the NSE are attributed to local individual investors.
But there is hope. Mobile phone platforms are being used to increase awareness and participation. Data shows that 26% of Kenya’s adult population own a smartphone or other smart devices. The uptake of mobile banking services has led to an increase in the banks’ penetration in the past 10 years, from 14% in 2006 to 38.4% in 2015. Investment managers, stockbrokers and insurance companies will also be buoyed by market studies that show that 71% of the population uses financial services provided by mobile financial service providers. This is a clear sign that mobile phones are the best way to encourage investments.
In light of this, the Kenyan government is launching the mobile-traded government security, M-Akiba. Kenyans with as little as $30 will be able to bid for the upcoming five-year income tax-free bond using their M-Pesa accounts. Investors will rejoice; M-Akiba returns are expected to be better than the current fixed deposit rates and most money market accounts. Stockbrokers have not been left behind either – at least three of them have recently launched mobile apps aimed at retail investors looking to buy shares, monitor their portfolio holdings and check account balances via their mobile phones.
But, the road ahead is not without obstacles. One is the low incomes among Kenyans. According to household survey, 75% of adults earn less than $150 per month. This may hinder most Kenyans from taking up financial products. A lack of trust among women towards formal financial institution is another major challenge. According to the latest quarterly report by the Capital Markets Authority (CMA), women account for merely a third of the total number of investors. Low levels of education in the country are also an issue, with 60% of the population not completing a secondary level of education. With this in mind, it could be daunting when it comes to selling sophisticated financial products, such as derivatives and exchanged traded funds. Even among the educated, stakeholders will have to fight to shake off the persistent fascination with real estate.
At least Kenya is showing resolve to deal with the challenges. There is a big chance to make real changes to how people invest; all that is needed is a phone.

More Phones more finance

African literature cannot be completely told without a mention of one Can Themba. This was the kind of journalist he was. In defiance of racist laws, Themba attended white church services; he was yanked out of church, beaten and arrested for trespassing.
Canodoise ‘Can’ Themba was born in 1924 in Marabastad, a township outside Pretoria, the capital city of South Africa. Themba wrote for the South African black magazine called Drum, in Johannesburg, in the 50s, a publication that spawned a generation of talented young black journalists. Because of his man-about-town manner Themba was popular among thugs and educated alike in Sophiatown, the now defunct suburb where both black and white lived. Themba called his abode, at 111 Ray Street, the House of Truth where his friends gathered to carouse and debate. They called him the ‘shebeen intellectual’.
Essop Patel, the late South African judge and poet, wrote about Themba’s house of truth and drink in a book he edited, The World of Nat Nakasa. Nakasa, a Harvard graduate who later died in exile in America, was Themba’s colleague from Durban; Themba welcomed him to Johannesburg.
“For those with the Karamazovian lifestyle led by Can Themba and his ‘pards’ in a room called the ‘House of Truth’ in Sophiatown, Nat’s initiation must have looked like leading a lamb to the slaughter-block. The curious and interesting thing is that while Nat conducted himself as something of a dilettante from the word go, there was plainly nothing bogus about him. He cheerfully sank into the Bohemian life with Can Themba and his crew in Sophiatown and later drifted into the twilight world of ‘mixed gatherings’ and ‘mixed parties’ in Hillbrow,” writes Patel.
Siphiwo Mahala, who has never touched a drink, is a scholar of Themba’s work and African literature. He wrote a new play about Themba, along with veteran actor Sello Maake kaNcube. He of all people knows that Themba would have chuckled at the thought of a teetotaller writing play about his life half a century after his death.
Last winter, Mahala premiered the bio-play The House of Truth at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Maake kaNcube depicts the little known story of talks Themba had with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu while they were students at the University of Fort Hare – a cauldron of African nationalism, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. The politicians asked him to rally his journalism colleagues behind their movement, the African National Congress, but Themba made it clear he would choose alcohol over politics.
“I am a student of African literature. I remember distinctly when I first encountered Can Themba it was obviously his most popular short story – The Suit. I read it from an anthology by different South Africans called To Kill A Man’s Pride. What struck me about the book, until that moment I had not read a book that depicts a township life like I know it. In the same book I read The Music of the Violin by Njabulo Ndebele. I was probably in standard eight or thereabout, around about 1992. Ultimately, when I finished school I wanted to study literature, because when we grew up most of these writers’ work wasn’t available in our school syllabus,” says Mahala.
Mahala’s interest and devotion to the work of Themba was by chance when he was a master’s student in creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 2002.
“I presented my short story called Mpumi’s Assignment in the creative writing course. During feedback people kept on saying it reminded them of Can Themba’s The Suit. At that point, I wasn’t sure whether to take it as an offense or take credit. Somewhere it felt like they thought I have plagiarized. There’s a scene there where a woman finds an earring that is not hers in their bedroom. So, she asked her husband whose earring this is, he says it’s his and he is trying to be hip. So, she says okay put it on. And this guy happens to be a teacher and is forced to wear the earring to school. So, they took that and associated it with The Suit.”
Mahala reread The Suit to examine the similarities. In the process of reading, he thought the story needed a conclusion.
“We last heard of the adulterous man when he ran away clad only in underwear. That’s where I thought of writing The Suit Continued, which was published in 2002,” says Mahala.
The Suit Continued didn’t only become the introduction of the introverted Mahala in Johannesburg’s literary scene, he made it his academic project, uncovering Can Themba’s oeuvre. It bothered Mahala that the story of Themba was largely told from the time he worked for Drum.
“Now we have established this connection between Siphiwo Mahala and Can Themba. There are so many academic papers and reviews linking us. So, I felt obliged to know better about Can Themba, the person. I spent a lot time with ‘Bra Willie’ Kgositsile who used to regale me with stories of his own upbringing and life in Sophiatown and encounters with Can Themba,” he says.
Mahala, the author of a novel When A Man Cries (2007) and a collection of short stories African Delights (2011), said the late professor and vice chancellor at the University of Fort Hare, Mbulelo Mzamane, challenged him to immerse himself in Themba’s work.
<div id="attachment_31488" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31488" class="wp-image-31488 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="681" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-768x511.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Above: Siphiwo Mahala with actor, Sello Maake kaNcube</div>
“He had been pushing me to go back to school to study towards a PhD on Can Themba. In 2013, he said to me: ‘You already know so much about Can Themba, and chances are, your supervisors wouldn’t know as much you know about Can Themba’,” he recalls.
In 2014, Mahala enrolled for a PhD at the University of South Africa. His research sent him back to where it all started, at the University of Fort Hare, and Grahamstown, where he was born, in the Eastern Cape. From the university Mahala retrieved Themba’s correspondence with the Transvaal Department of Education. Themba, who studied English but wanted to teach, had a long and miserable run-in with the education department. He was refused promotion because he lacked a teacher’s qualification. There’s a rich archive on Themba’s life at The National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, lying just 20 kilometers from Mahala’s home in Joza township.
“Fortunately, I didn’t struggle so much. Now I am depicting a real character as opposed to crafting a fictional character. I had to reflect on Can Themba’s life as much as possible, this including the kind of music he listened to, his behavior in general. The play goes beyond the carbon character that has been created about Sophiatown. You see Can Themba in love, you see Can Themba as a family man, you see Can Themba frustrated. The issues of his troubles with the education department were never written about. I didn’t have to be creative that much, the creativity was demanded mostly in packaging the story,” says Mahala.
The idea to have the story of Themba in film was hatched in those interactions with the poet and professor of English, Kgositsile. The film A Teacher in the Newsroom features the scholars and writers; Kgositsile, Pitika Ntuli, Don Mattera, Nadine Gordimer, Joe Thloloe, Muxe Nkondo, wife Anne and daughters Morongwa and Yvonne Themba.
Mahala thought it would be unfair to compare Themba to his privileged contemporaries like the prolific Nadine Gordimer, a friend of Themba.
“Nadine in many was ways was privileged as a white person despite identifying herself with the struggles of the black people. The major distinction here is that fact she lived until her nineties, Can Themba died at 43, she had over 30 years to write after Can Themba had died. She could establish herself even further. I think for a man of his talent, his capabilities, his potential wasn’t fully explored.”
The Suit was published in 1963 in the inaugural issue of The Classic, a literary journal founded by Nakasa and Gordimer. Three years later the politically-charged story was banned after the apartheid government declared he was a “statutory communist”.
The following year, Themba died in exile in Swaziland without a book to his name. Thanks to his friendship with Italian catholic priest, Angelo Ciccone, Themba was the first non-priest to be buried at St Joseph’s cemetery in Swaziland.
Playwrights Barney Simon and Mothobi Mutloatse adapted The Suit to theater production which Maake kaNcube performed at Johannesburg Market Theatre at the dawn of democracy. A French adaptation followed in 1999, and the play toured the world between 1999 and 2014. Former President Thabo Mbeki posthumously bestowed Can Themba with the Order of Ikhamanga, in 2006.
The 50th anniversary of Themba’s death will be celebrated with his stage work The Suit, Crepuscule, and The House of Truth, around South Africa.
“I think from 1993, during the South African transitional period, more and more people started knowing about Can Themba. During that period, many of the exile people were coming back and many of them knew Can Themba,” says Mahala.
Mahala had merely expected Maake kaNcube to lend his theater expertise.
“But the wonderful surprise was that he didn’t only like the play but wanted to perform it. So, the full-cast play had to be changed to one-man play per his advice.
“So, when I wrote this, I knew Sello is the real person that feels and knows Can Themba. I have dealt with so many academics and people who are related to Can Themba, but they don’t feel him as much as Sello does,” says Mahala.
“Can Themba, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be the actor I am now,” says Maake kaNcube.
You can be sure the man himself is raising a glass to Mahala and sees the irony in the playwright teetotal chronicler – wherever he is.

The Literary Bon Viveur  Who Drank,  Fought  and  Wrote  Furiously

Luis von Ahn looks like a tech-guru who has made millions – casually-dressed, subtle and polite.
I meet the inventor and CEO of the world’s largest language app, Duolingo, the day before the launch of the app’s first African language, Swahili.
For Von Ahn, the road to introducing Swahili to the 150 million users of his educational language app has been long, and has taken him around the world since leaving his homeland Guatemala.
A son of two medical doctors, graduating from Guatemala City’s international school, Von Ahn had to look outside the Central American country to find education – a university that offered math degrees – perhaps inspiring him to create a universal educational tool later in life.
During the first year of his PhD studies at the prestigious Duke University in the United States, a particular talk would influence and shape his life.
“The chief scientist of Yahoo came to give a talk about 10 things they needed solutions for. They struggled with people creating Yahoo email accounts to send spam. That led me to do a test recognizing humans: CAPTCHA. We were online within six months,” says Von Ahn.
This stroke of genius did not make Von Ahn a dime, he says.
“I don´t regret it, because everyone started using it; all kinds of people started approaching me.”
As tech giants lined up to court the CAPTCHA inventor, then 29-year-old Von Ahn was thinking about his next step.
“Two hundred million CAPTCHAs were typed a day, it takes about 10 seconds, that’s 500,000 hours of typing every day, how could I use that?” he asks, revealing how he turned the thousands of hours into an efficient digitalization tool.
Digitalizing books were trending, but no one had cracked the code on how to efficiently publish them yet.
“Google was trying to do this,” says Von Ahn.
“A computer scans a page that needs deciphering, which computers could not do at that time.”
Pictures of words from books are put online as CAPTCHAs, humans then decipher it, and the computer then saves it.
“Today, we call this crowdsourcing,” Von Ahn says, smiling.
“It worked. We were probably doing a year of the New York Times in a week. Then Google bought it, and today CAPTCHA digitalizes 100 million words a day, which is two million books a year,” says Von Ahn, explaining how, if you have filled in a CAPTCHA since 2007, you are probably among the billion people who have helped.
The sale of the CAPTCHA business has never been disclosed, but Von Ahn admits that it did make him millions. After that adventure, 37-year-old Von Ahn wanted to focus on education.
“I wanted to work on something passion-driven, and we decided on languages because there are 1.2 billion people learning languages, and language has impact: learn English, and you can immediately make more money.”
Eyeing a massive hole in the market, Von Ahn threw himself into making Duolingo.
Alongside Swiss PhD student Severin Hacker (that is his real name), Von Ahn started creating a website.
“That’s what people did,” he says.
The app market was only just launching in 2011, but that was all about to change.
“We raised $3 million of funding and launched in 2012. A few months later we launched apps, and now there are more than 150 million using it,” Von Ahn says proudly.
The main income generator is the app’s online language tests, an alternative to the traditional TOEFL tests that measure your ability to use and understand English.
“The TOEFL tests are expensive, slow and have to be done manually at centers. This is much cheaper,” says Von Ahn, offering tests at $50, whereas a TOEFL is about $250.
“We have already got about 30 universities on board,” he says.
Targeting Africa seems like a good idea, as the number of smartphone connections has almost doubled since 2014, and the cost of buying a smartphone has dropped by more than 25% since 2012. According to reports, more than 500 million on the continent currently subscribe to mobile services, with mobile operators expecting numbers to reach 725 million in 2020.
“The lack of smartphones is the main challenge, but everyone is trying to grow here, like Facebook, so that will change,” says Von Ahn.
Founder of numerous African tech start-ups, Ndubuisi Ekekwe, has stayed clear of any app-based business.
“Most smartphones sold in Africa fail to download and install apps from apps stores,” he says, explaining how in Africa, phones are used for a longer period of time before being replaced, making the phones unable to handle many apps.
“Americans can upgrade their phones annually and that is in line with most app upgrades. But in Africa, people use their phones for more than three years,” says Ekekwe. “We do not see a roadmap for how that can be closed, and that is why I do not see a market for apps in Africa for a long time.”
Von Ahn is not too worried though.
“I recognize that in six years apps might not even exist, but right now I think we’re okay,” he says, convinced of his, and Duolingo’s, ability to adapt.
The app’s current mission is to introduce Swahili to its 150 million users. Judging by the waiting list of 45,000 users, he is probably right.

The Tech Wizard Who Wants The World To Learn Swahili

It’s a big claim and these two entrepreneurs are sticking to it. Fernando Pinheiro and Michael Muller started an online shop to sell your secondhand car – that they say will take you 30 minutes – after they got screwed over trying to sell their own.
“Mike and I both had really really bad experiences and that’s why we wanted to start this business,” says Pinheiro.
Hence CarZar was born. Their business model is simple; fill an online form which uses national data and CarZar’s very own algorithm to find a price. If you accept the price, CarZar sends over an inspector and 30 minutes later, you have cash in hand.
It all came the hard way.
“I was moving from Cape Town to Johannesburg on a new job. I tried to sell my car privately online to get a higher price,” says Muller.
“It was a BMW 3 series, a 1996 model – I called it White Lightning. It had at some point overheated badly, and according to my mechanic it had put strain on the whole cooling system. So every month or two one of those parts would break,” says Muller.
It took weeks of wheeling and dealing online until Muller was willing to meet a buyer for R25,000 ($1,800).
“We met outside in some car park in Milnerton, with a dicey pub and an internet café. When we got there, he offered me R5,000 ($360) less, which was 20% of the car value. I rejected the offer.”
At this point Muller was in a fix. He was leaving for Johannesburg the next day.
“I didn’t have more time to go and find more people. He was an ugly guy. He was rude to me and then he had offered to pay less than what we had agreed upon. I really didnt want to sell him my car. As I stood on the pavement watching this guy pull off, I flagged him down and said fine.”
“We walked into the cafe where we made the transfer. I watched him do it, and at the time I hoped he was doing it. You still never know. I had to take the risk. It was really ugly. But the transfer went through. It was the biggest transaction I had made in my life and it had been a complete failure.”
Pinheiro too had trouble getting anyone to buy his car. Having moved to South Africa from Brazil, he bought a secondhand Chevrolet from a dealer when he worked as an engineer consulting for firms Engevix and Passarelli.
“I remember the smile of the dealer who I bought the Chev from. His face lit up. Once I bought it I remember looking at it covered in dust and thinking I had paid a good price for it. But, when I tried to sell it, I visited eight dealerships and none of them wanted to touch it. One would maybe accept it as trade-in. I’m still driving it to this day,” says Pinheiro.
With their bad experiences fresh on their minds the two teamed up to look for ways around it online. Pinheiro looked back to Brazil.
“I saw the same business model being implemented in my country, Brazil. I knew one of the founders and it seemed to me like a very good idea,” says Pinheiro.
Muller, who had quit his corporate chartered accountant job at McKinsey &amp; Company, in Johannesburg, and returned to Cape Town, was now designing a hotel app in the same building as Pinheiro. Pinheiro convinced Muller that cars and online sales were the better option.
“We did some basic market research. We noticed a huge space for innovation and space for improvement in trade in the auto trade industry. I needed a bigger pool of qualification which is where Michael came in,” says Pinheiro.
“South Africans are getting more used to online internet services to buy stuff. In our specific case, we noticed most of our traffic is coming the age between 18 and 35 years, which is quite expected. What we also want to achieve is those ages between 35 and 65 years old, normally unused to selling cars in different ways, those that don’t use the internet or don’t care.”
With a R3-million ($220,000) investment from Silvertree Internet Holdings, a tech startup company based in Cape Town, CarZar launched in April. It saw 6,000 inspections in just eight months.
“You need to sell the cars quickly so you don’t need such large amounts of capital. If you can turn over that car in three days then you can turn over the capital quicker,” says Muller.
“There is one group of customers who think this is a great product. Then there is another group that aren’t satisfied with the price. What people often forget, the dealer needs to recondition the car. Fix it up. In a private sale you don’t need that. Then the dealer needs to house this car on their floor and get someone to come and buy it.”
Their first hurdle was dealing with the dealers.
“When we started out we struggled to sell the cars. Car dealers are particularly nervous guys; it took a while to gain their confidence. When we first did the market research they tell you they are desperately short of cars. But then you take them a car and they look at it and say it’s not so great,” says Muller.
Their first experience selling a car was also a learning curve.
“We thought it looked nice, we had no idea what we were doing. It was a 2009 white Polo. The guy didn’t want to give us the documents of the car. Once we tried to sell the car to the dealers, we had a horrible surprise. We were actually trying to sell ‘lemons’ to the dealers. The car was totally f***ed,” says Pinheiro.
They call them lemons in the car industry – cars so bad they leave a sour taste in the mouth.
“After the dealers pointed it out to us it was clear. You can get a car that looks really neat and if there is structural damage it’s worthless,” says Muller.
“You can pay top-dollar price for a car that’s worth half of it,” says Pinheiro.
Other than cars that leave a sour taste, the two entrepreneurs also have the challenges of building an online business. They complain there aren’t enough qualified programmers.
“We’ve had job recruitment agencies looking for a year and we just can’t find guys. It’s been a real strain. We need web developers. It’s a huge gap. This will be a trend for the future and it could make South Africa a really power internet space if you get to the source and solve the lack of developers. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who want to do a lot of stuff, they even have access to capital but they can’t find the helpers,” says Muller.
“In the past when I was a kid normally would go to specialized English schools, after school. What’s happening in Brazil now is parents are sending their kids to learn how to code. These kids are 10 years old and it’s the future. Learning how to code is just as important as learning how to speak English,” says Pinheiro.
Experience talks. Tyre kickers and time wasters walk.

We’ll Buy Your Car  In 30 Minutes

They call themselves Geeks on a Plane and they landed in Africa with hope and money in the middle of uncertainty. Many of these investors and entrepreneurs are based in Silicon Valley, one of the biggest US business hubs, known for its start-up ecosystem, high-tech innovations and scientific developments. They have been touring Africa looking for investments.
“Successes are infrequent, maybe 20 to 30 percent of our investments will probably return some capital but the majority of the significant outcomes will be less than 10 percent of our portfolio and the really big outcomes will be under one and two percent,” says Dave McClure, the founding partner of 500 Startups, the venture capital and seed fund accelerator that organized Geeks on a Plane.
The company was launched seven years ago. It has created business opportunities for about 18,000 companies, making around 500 investments a year, says McClure.
“This is our eighteenth trip around the world. We usually take between 20 and 40 people to the different markets in the world and try to expose them to what is happening. We learn about the local market, we meet entrepreneurs and investors, and we tell them what is happening back in Silicon Valley. It’s a great way to get to new markets and meet new people.”
It has been four years since the first investment in Africa. Since then there have been at least 10 investments in sub-Saharan Africa, in payment infrastructure, mobile technology and services. The investment, per company, ranges from $25,000 to $100,000. McClure says some of their investments have failed, but they encourage companies to work hard to break even, as soon as possible, to attract other investors.
<div id="attachment_31484" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31484" class="wp-image-31484 size-medium" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/3W0A0759-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/3W0A0759-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/3W0A0759-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/3W0A0759-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/3W0A0759.jpg 683w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />Dave McClure</div>
“To create the right risk appetite [is all] about hope and trust. When you think about trust, it’s when you sort of build a network of investors together… We have investors coming in and spending three weeks with us and we showcase some of our start-ups and what we have seen is that those people that are meeting for the first time are creative, so of a similar interest. One of the companies didn’t raise the money before, but with the class they raised $500,000,” says Bedy Yang, the Managing Partner at 500 Startups.
“You often see that intersection with a local founder and a local investor, it is not only among people on the same trip and same small circle, but the idea we open those circles. The reason we come to Geeks on the Plane is we want to map up those circles and narrow the trust quickly and say ‘I want to do something people believe in and write the cheques’.”
Monique Woodard, one of the first black female venture capital partners in the United States, says the best women in business are African women. Despite this, they are often rejected by banks and investors.
“I would say they need to start [considering women entrepreneurs] because I am coming to take those deals… The position of women in business in Africa is quite good when you look at large corporations or family run businesses. When you look at start-ups, we are still at the very beginning of seeing women entering,” she says.
Woodard says in a developing market they first look at telecoms, transportation, broadband, financial services, e-commerce and media.
“The sub-Saharan ecosystem is still emerging and developing market. There’s a playbook of how the developing markets of sub-Saharan Africa can grow and we have done it in other areas as well. I expected it to be different but not impossible,” says Woodard.
Woodard acknowledges fewer girls are taking science and mathematics at school but says she’s hopeful that will change. They have partnered with companies, like Andela in Kenya, to train and place women in the software development industry.
“That’s not something unique to Africa, that’s very much across the board. So, there are things we should be doing, figuring out how to encourage girls to continue with computers science degrees and then continue to be in the tech industry and start their own companies. When it comes to education, we play are role in investing in companies that provide education outside the public school system,” she says.
The company has helped many in Africa, including Hanan Abdel Meguid, an Egyptian businesswoman. In the early 1990s, Meguid, then a student at the American University in Cairo, took a leap of faith when she enrolled for a computer science degree despite not being familiar with computers. She discovered the field was male-dominated, but she stayed in the course.
“I started my first company with friends, right after university, because our dreams and our capabilities were much bigger than the opportunities in the market. A similar experience is happening for Arab youth this day. IT has become a catalyst for change,” says Meguid, who’s now based in Silicon Valley and mentoring in advisory and seed investment programs.
500 Startups has an appetite for risk – amid the turmoil of the week they landed in South Africa, it was just as well.

Risk? So What?

One of the last survivors of the rebels who faced death with Nelson Mandela was a genial soul with a resolve of iron.
Ahmed Kathrada was one of the great worker bees of the struggle against apartheid in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the shadows of Liliesleaf, a smallholding in the middle-class northern Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, used as a hideout by underground activists, Kathrada, wrote, worked and photocopied pamphlets tirelessly. When the struggle called upon him to pose as a white man – he dyed his hair, put on make-up and a moustache to pretend to be a Portuguese man called Pedro. It was a disguise that fooled people; despite this, he never felt comfortable going into restaurants where people of color were not allowed.
Discomfort in the heat of an armed struggle, against a brutal regime, shows the gentle soul that was Kathrada. He may have been strident when it came to principle, but never fell for bravado; humility was his middle name. He admitted to me once, in an interview for CNBC Africa, that he feared he could have broken if he had been tortured by special branch after his arrest half a century before. His heart was always tender and 26 rough brutal years in prison left few callouses. Once, on national radio, I heard Kathrada break down when a caller reminded him of a comrade who had been tortured to death more than 50 years before.
<div id="attachment_5630" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5630" class="wp-image-5630 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/funeral-076-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />Kathrada’s widow Barbara Hogan and nephew Nazir</div>
If the scars were deep, Kathrada’s spirit kept a salving sense of humour. With a laugh, he told me how Govan Mbeki – the father of South Africa’s former president Thabo – used to sell eggs he coaxed from the Liliesleaf chickens to his fellow activists, despite their protestations. He also told me how the underground activists of Liliesleaf used to sell vegetables.
“Our best customer was the Rivonia Police!” he chuckled. It was the police of Rivonia who raided Liliesleaf with dogs, in July 1963, putting Kathrada behind bars on his way to trial for sabotage that carried the death penalty.
Even in the shadow of death Kathrada, in the so-called Rivonia trial in Pretoria, never lost his sense of humour. Prosecutor Percy Yutar quizzed him, on the stand, about a person who went by the initial K, referred to in Nelson Mandela’s diary. Yutar pressed in an attempt to humiliate: did Kathrada know anyone with the initial K?
“Yes,” replied Kathrada, “Mr Khrushchev.”
Even the judge laughed. The court spared Kathrada and his comrades the rope at the end of the trial in 1964.
“We subsequently found out that life was to mean life,” he said with gentle irony through his trademark smile.
When Kathrada emerged from prison, in 1989, apartheid had taken a lot more than his youth; it also took his birthplace. The place he grew up in, Schweizer-Reneke, in South Africa’s North West province, was bulldozed by the authorities in the cause of keeping the races apart.
Incarceration took even more. Computers, hotel room cards instead of keys and the paraphenalia of the modern world were a mystery. He tried driving on motorways that he had never seen, once, but found it too stressful. Even a harmless ATM spelled confusion as Kathrada found out one Sunday morning when he went to draw money with fellow Robben Island prisoner Laloo Chiba.
“He put in his card and it was swallowed, then I put my card in and pressed a few buttons and it was also swallowed. We had to phone the bank and they came to open up the ATM and get our cards out. Now Barbara gets my money for me,” he told me.
Former minister Barbara Hogan was Kathrada’s loving partner and they appeared kindred spirits. Kathrada would have loved to raise a family – a big gap in his life. The prison guards, on Robben Island, used to keep children cruelly out of sight of prisoners; Kathrada told me of the pain of more than two decades without that most natural sound; the carefree laughter of a child. Hogan was his family.
“When I phone home from overseas my first question is: ‘What happened in Isidingo (A TV soap opera), my second question is about whether the country has been overthrown!” says Kathrada drily.
One or two people in the African National Congress would whisper to you that Kathrada could be a bit star struck when it came to big names and would occasionally drop everything to be with them. It was Kathrada who accompanied the then United States senator Barack Obama to Robben Island.
When it came to integrity, there was never a waver, nor whiff, of scandal around Kathrada. I shall remember him for six words he shot back to me in the studio in 2010. I ventured that there was a rising generation of young people who chose not to know, nor care, about the causes and sacrifices of the struggle.
<div id="attachment_5632" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5632" class="wp-image-5632 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/funeral-041-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Julius Malema at the funeral in Johannesburg, South Africa</div>
“That is what we fought for.”
The principled and upstanding way of Ahmed Kathrada that South Africa is poorer for losing; sadly, many of those principles he fought for have been abandoned by a generation old enough to know better.

Farewell To A Gentle Soul

On April 3, the rating agency Standard &amp; Poor’s Global (S&amp;P) downgraded South Africa to junk status following the reshuffling of several cabinet ministers, including finance minister Pravin Gordhan and his deputy Mcebisi Jonas. President Jacob Zuma’s reshuffling received mixed reaction from the people, but even worse, the downgrade that followed rocked the country’s markets. And more was to come; four days later, Fitch Ratings announced the second downgrade.
Azar Jammine, Chief Economist at Econometrix, says the downgrades can hurt the economy in three ways.
<div id="attachment_5619" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5619" class="wp-image-5619 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/march-047-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />Zuma must fall protest</div>
“When business confidence is low, businesses don’t invest in capital formation. If you reflect on what happened in 2016, the economic growth rate was just 0.3% but when you look at the breakdown thereof you see that consumer spending grew by nearly 1%, government spending grew by nearly 2%, exports exceeded imports, so why was growth why so low? The answer is because capital investment fell by 4%, and one fears that we are going to see more of this going forward,” he says.
“People are focusing a lot on the impact on the rand, but in fact that’s neither here nor there. All that happened thus far the rand has retraced some of the gains that it made in January and February. At this current exchange rate, the impact in boosting inflation and interest rates will not be too severe. What is has done is to get rid of any hope of a cut in interest rates, and to that extent has dampened the business confidence.”
“The third way in which downgrades are likely to impact negatively is through the increase in the long-term interest rate which is going to raise government’s cost of servicing its debt. Government and parastatals have to borrow R260 billion ($19 billion) or about 5.5% of GDP in the coming year. Now, already, long term interest rates have risen by 50 basis points and the impact on cost of servicing debt in the longer term will be substantial, around R15 billion ($1.1 billion) to R20 billion ($1.45 billion), which will be taken away from the ability of government to spend on all sorts of vital areas of infrastructure and social requirements.”
Jammine isn’t writing off any possibility of a third downgrade from  credit rating agency Moody’s. He doesn’t expect to see improvement under the new Minister of Finance, Malusi Gigaba, who has little experience in finance.
“If the new minister carries on the way he has about the radical economic transformation, then that dashes the hopes of credit agencies regarding adherence to fiscal discipline. The moment you have that, the ratings agencies are going to downgrade you, and that’s a big concern. If S&amp;P and Moody’s local currency debt decline to junk status, then South African government bonds will fall out of the Citigroup World Government Bond Index.”
Iraj Abedian, an economist and CEO at Pan African Investments and Research Services, also has doubts about Gigaba.
<div id="attachment_5618" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5618" class="wp-image-5618 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/march-17-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />Zuma must fall protest</div>
“He’s been a weak leader in the ministries he led before and his current comments on the downgrades have been contradictory. It seems he doesn’t understand the gravity of the problem, he has little time to allow himself to learn basic economics, but we can hope he transforms himself for the benefit of the country and the people,” he says.
Abedian says South Africa can return to normality within five years only if Gigaba doesn’t listen to clueless politicians and rather pays attention to the markets’ demands.
Jammine, however, says we haven’t seen the worst yet. There’s a huge burden on Gigaba to try and convince the markets that he’s not going to go crazy with government spending. He fears the new minister doesn’t understand the implications.
“First, he said you don’t go and downgrade a country just because of the change of one person, and then after that he said he knew about the downgrade, so the statements were totally contradictory. In the same way, he says we are going to be committed to radical economic transformation and then argues that we are committed to fiscal discipline, this also tends to be contradictory.”
If the minister cannot heed to the advice of economists, there’s a risk of a long spell of recession and social upheaval as the living standards of ordinary people in South Africa deteriorates, says Jammine.
Ordinary South Africans are aware of the damage that Zuma’s reshuffle has done. More than 100,000 marched on the streets to show the president their displeasure.
“It’s bad news as the people started to ask whether South Africa is going the route of Zimbabwe or Venezuela, for example,” says Jammine.
“What you have right now is a huge divide between what the president himself has termed ‘clever blacks’ and white monopoly capital, who are seen to do all this to benefit themselves. They are being accused of making a big brouhaha about the ratings downgrades in order to persuade people the impact would be bad for the poor. The reality is that it would be worse for the poor than the middle [and] upper income groups because a fall in the value of the rand tends to push up the share prices of the companies listed on the stock exchange that have huge investments overseas. Secondly, higher interest rates improve the returns on pensions people hold. So pensioners and those who have a lot of shares will do well out of this.”
The South African Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago lambasted politicians who questioned the credibility of rating agencies when they should be taking the people into their confidence.
“We are going to engage the credit ratings on their own terms. When you lose your investment grade ratings, your government is going to pay more to raise debt and when your government does that, your banks are going to pay more to raise debt and they will pass those costs to businesses and household and then it doesn’t become nice. It is going to affect the poor and the middle class who rely on credit,” says Kganyago at the monetary policy forum.
Jammine agrees the poor will suffer from this as there will be job losses and rises in inflation. So, what can the government do?
“The best thing the government could do is reinstate Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas, or to put someone in Gigaba’s place. Gigaba has a very poor reputation in the way he managed the ministries of public enterprise and home affairs previously.”
“You may shout about the credibility of the agencies until the cows come home, the fact is the international investors do pay attention to these credit rating agencies… you can try and pretend they don’t count, but they will cost you a lot of money.”
Despite the upheaval seen on the streets, it is not the first time South Africa has faced economic meltdown and certainly won’t be the last. In 1994, the new government inherited a treasury with huge amount of debt that rose sharply as a result of a massive increase in defence spending.
<div id="attachment_5624" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5624" class="wp-image-5624 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/AnitZumaMarch_JC-3-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Zuma must fall protest</div>
“Nelson Mandela and his minister of finance that he appointed in 1996, Trevor Manuel, realized that the only way to get back on course was to actually cut back on government spending rather than increasing on populist needs. That restored a lot of confidence in the South African economy but it took a long while. But it was only after the 2001 crisis that South Africa’s economy started picking up, but we did see credit ratings gradually improving and Standard &amp; Poor’s actually put us on investment credit rating for the first time,” says Jammine.
It is said that one of the reasons the Gordhan was fired was that he defied Zuma’s wish to commission Russia to build a $70-billion nuclear plant in South Africa.
“That is also why people are concerned the President appointed Gigaba instead of Pravin – in order to sign a nuclear deal. The fear with the nuclear deal is that it will cost R1 trillion, that it will be unaffordable. Our total public debt is R2 trillion and it will increase our debt in one fell swoop 40% to 50%, something that will stifle the ability to spend on everything else. What is particularly worrisome to people is why there is this dramatic desire to embark upon a nuclear deal? There are strong suspicions, as has been the case with other smaller projects that the president is personally involved with, that the Russians are paying him to get this deal through,” says Jammine.
This time, the president may have overplayed his hand. South Africans of all colors and creeds united to defy him.
President Zuma Bites Back
<div id="attachment_5617" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5617" class="wp-image-5617 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-667743392-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="400" />Presidents Jacob Zuma&#8217;s Birthday Celebration</div>
While tens of thousands protested outside at the gates of the Union Buildings in frustrationon april 12, President Jacob Zuma ate cake – after all, it was his 75th birthday.
Eighty kilometers away from the crowds chanting down his name, Zuma celebrated in Kliptown, Soweto – the place where the Congress of the People drew up the guiding Freedom Charter in 1955 – with dancing, singing and speeches.
&#8220;Do not be fazed by people who are saying we are marching, we are marching, today was declared a national day of action. What is it? Zuma must go. What has he done? He is not running the country properly, he must go. You can&#8217;t even pick up the essence for the protest, it&#8217;s complicated to be the opposition. I am trying to put you at ease because if they don&#8217;t protest they wouldn&#8217;t be the opposition,&#8221; says Zuma in Zulu, his mother tongue.
&#8220;Don&#8217;t let the opposition make decisions on your behalf; you would have lost your way, because regardless of who the next leader is they will never be satisfied.&#8221;
Sitting next to him in a lavish armchair were some of his closest allies – Deputy Secretary General of the ANC Jessie Duarte, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane and Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini.
Zuma seemed unconcerned that key figures of the ANC were absent, among them the likes of  Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, Secretary General  Gwede Mantashe, and Treasurer General Zweli Mkhize.
The president chose to send a clear message to those who have been calling for him to step down. He said he would be willing to do so if called upon by the ANC.
&#8220;Even if you said tomorrow I should step down from my duties, I will gladly do that with a pure heart, but what I want to tell you my leaders is that I will be ANC until the day I die.&#8221;
It is not the only event in which Zuma has shrugged off opposition. Two days before, at the Chris Hani wreath laying ceremony in Thomas Nkobi Memorial Park, east of Johannesburg, he criticized the 60,000-strong national march on April 7.
&#8220;There is a resurgence of racism in our country… Many placards and posters displayed beliefs that we thought had been buried in 1994, with some posters depicting black people as baboons. It is clear that some of our white compatriots regard black people as being lesser human beings or sub-human,&#8221; he said.

One Decision, Many Repercussions, Millions Angry

It’s a busy Thursday morning in South Africa’s famous Vilakazi Street, in Orlando West, in Soweto with tourists roaming about. This street was not only home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but also legendary musician Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse.
On this day, at a wine bar, Mabuse leans on the table to make his point. He feels up-and-coming musicians should be wary of exploitation.
“If one is not stable then you lose your mind and values. When you’re young, starry-eyed and ignorant you get so exploited by promoters, record companies; everyone takes advantage of your naiveties. If you don’t have resilience you end up an alcoholic or a drug addict just to numb the pain of what the industry can inflict,” he says.
Mabuse started playing the drums at the age of eight, an instrument that he would master so well that a fellow band member, Condry Ziqubu, gave him the nickname ‘Hotstix’.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-5606 alignright" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Hotstix-020-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />
His journey began 50 years ago, when he formed a band, The Beaters, at high school in Soweto.
“We were adored by the media and everyone. The Beaters became popular among the students in universities and high schools. We toured to neighboring countries like Botswana, Lesotho and Namibia.”
In the 1970s, they visited Zimbabwe as an Afro-funk group and named themselves in honor of the future name of the capital city.
“Zimbabwe was known as Rhodesia back then; we were influenced by the grounds of black consciousness. We were conscious of our surroundings and interacting with the struggle itself. It was imperative for us to change the name to Harari.”
In 1982, the band split. A devastating moment for Mabuse. He likened the split to a beautiful marriage that suddenly crumbles.
“I had put so much energy, love and commitment in the band. I felt like all my efforts were in vain.”
Mabuse launched his solo career and produced the hits Jive Soweto, Rise and Set Me Free. His funky township disco-jive jam, Burnout sold 500,000 records.
“A band member passed away while we were in Harare. Before his death, I made a promise to him that because he made fire when the cold wind was blowing I’ll keep the fire burning. One of the things I did was to go to studio and record a song Set Me Free. I don’t know if it was somewhat a paradox that was I refereeing to the split itself or allowing myself to go solo,” he says.
Staying on top is hard.
“To stay relevant, one has to be inventive. My music evolves with my age. I performed at some event recently and I was amazed at the response. When I started playing, the response was just overwhelming. I get goosebumps because I didn’t imagine that people would still remember the music I did 40 years ago. After I performed they kept asking for more,” says Mabuse.
“Music has provided me with things that I never imagined I could have. I managed to build homes, raise my children, and travel the world. If it wasn’t for music I wouldn’t have had the privilege of meeting the late Nelson Mandela or Bill Clinton.”
All of this didn’t come easy. For black musicians under apartheid, performing was a struggle.
“It was difficult to make music freely. I remember we were performing with Percy Sledge, an American artist. Black musicians were curtain-raisers and we couldn’t play in certain white venues so that white people could not see us. If we were found in town after 12AM, we had to state why we were there. If we say we’re a band, they’d ask what is a band? For them, black musicians were nothing but vagrants.”
With fluctuating royalties, Mabuse says it’s difficult to save money.
“The music industry is fickle. We don’t get jobs that continuously pay us. It’s important for us when we get money to plan around it but we cannot have a saving plan. Sometimes musicians stay for two to three years without getting royalties.”
According to the 66-year-old Mabuse, a retirement annuity is a must.
“People don’t understand how important it is. If I knew what I know now about money 40 years ago, I probably would have been a billionaire.”
Mabuse and his band members dropped out of school in Grade 11, for music. He says fame made them lose focus.
“In high school we dropped out without realizing it. The pressure was too much, so was the music, the money and women,” he says.
In 2012, at the age of 60, Mabuse joined an adult basic education training program at a school in Klipspruit, Soweto, to get his matric.
“Now that I’m older and wiser I know that education is powerful. I am grateful that I was able to get education, otherwise I would not be getting royalties because I wouldn’t have the knowledge of what music means in terms of financial and economic gains. I still get royalties for all the music I released,” he says.
He recently produced a documentary about his song Jive Soweto for the BBC. He also plans to study anthropology at a university away from home.
For musicians, maybe it’s better to remember his parting words rather than his songs.
“If they do not have expertise, it’s better to invest with those that have expertise. First of all, find a good lawyer, manager and pay them. If you don’t have money, get them into some kind of a deal because then you will be protecting yourself for a lifetime. Stay focused and don’t believe the hype.”
Maybe young musicians should print out these words and put them on the wall.

Tag: may 2017

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