I grew up in an area which had no high school, so my fellow pupils and I had to take the bus from our small village in Hammanskraal to township schools nearby. My journey was an hour-and-a-half trek, every weekday morning and afternoon, from Hammanskraal, through Winterveldt, to Mabopane. This was in the 1980s.
That’s when I first heard about Sam Motsuenyane, reading about him in the Sowetan newspaper we would share on the long trip back home from school. His name and face would often pop up in the newspaper. The editor, Aggrey Klaaste, would tell us that if you wanted something done, and done brilliantly and with dedication, then you should set Motsuenyane to do it.
By then Motsuenyane was a legend. At school, one of the teachers would regale us with stories about how Motsuenyane and other black business leaders had put together a small kitty and started a bank. The founding of African Bank is a story that makes you shiver as you contemplate how, back in the dark, closed, oppressive atmosphere of that period, these men and women achieved what they did.
In 1964 the ANC had been banned, Nelson Mandela and many others had been jailed, and black leaders were on the run, in exile, or in jail. Many black professionals — from journalists to lecturers to doctors — fled to other parts of Africa, to Europe and elsewhere. South Africa was not a place of hope.
Yet in 1964 Motsuenyane and others called a large meeting of black business and formed the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce & Industry. It aimed to be “the leading voice of business in South Africa”. At this meeting the delegates bemoaned the difficulties they faced to raise loans from mainstream banks. They vowed to start their own bank.
In 1975, having collected the princely sum of R70, they launched African Bank, vowing that it would be an institution “for the people, by the people, serving the people”.
Ask most black entrepreneurs of the 1960s through to the 1990s who they were inspired by, and you will hear stories of Motsuenyane and his generosity, kindness, single-mindedness, smarts, verve, wit and business nous. He was responsible for the success of many of the industrial parks set up in places such as the former Bophuthatswana, for example, where the likes of millionaire Herman Mashaba got their first breaks and significant loans and business properties.
The story is typical Motsuenyane. He did not wait to be invited. He did not just complain. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and started working
Motsuenyane’s greatest achievement, the thing that I will always carry with me, was how inspirational he was to us as young people in that bus travelling the dusty roads from village to township. The late 1980s in South Africa seemed hopeless. The country was imploding as apartheid refused to die.
At this time Motsuenyane would slam the apartheid system (it just didn’t make economic sense) but also set out a vision for a South Africa where people like me could start businesses, run them, make them succeed, employ people and contribute to a better country and a better world. He was always supremely confident, cool and calm in his utterances, but with his iron will always apparent.
He didn’t just inspire me when I was a teenager, but when I was an adult too. In the late 1990s a major citrus project in Winterveldt, right by the road that I had used to travel to school, lay fallow. I would drive past that farm and rave and rant about why it had been abandoned. Unfortunately, that was where the inspiration ended, for me.
And that’s where you see the difference between people who just talk, and people like Motsuenyane, who act. In 2002 Motsuenyane, the late Philip Kgosana and others set up the Winterveldt Citrus Project. By 2009 they had planted more than 55,000 Valencia trees to supply fruit to major retailers and for juicing.
The story is typical Motsuenyane. He did not wait to be invited. He did not just complain. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and started working.
Sometimes, when I despair for this fair land, I wonder why we don’t sing the praises of people like Motsuenyane more often and far more loudly. I wonder why we don’t use them as examples of what our country really looks like.
This man, who passed away this week aged 97, was true leadership. This man was integrity. This man was entrepreneurship and service to country. This man was us at our best. Rest in peace, Sam Motsuenyane.
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