Up from apartheid, Soweto millionaire becomes role model

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- When Richard Maponya did well as a clothes salesman, his white boss could not promote him under the rules of apartheid.

So the boss offered instead to sell Maponya damaged clothes for cheap. Maponya resold the clothes after work and on weekends, and earned enough to go into business himself.

Today, the 81-year-old owns supermarkets and car dealerships, as well as the biggest mall in Soweto.

Maponya is the most prominent in a small club of early black businesspeople who have proved what an important role black entrepreneurship can play in building South Africa. Yet his success also stands out for how rare it is in a country where a quarter of the work force, most of it black, is unemployed, and most blacks still struggle in poverty 14 years after white rule ended.

"The role models coming to the fore is important, the success stories coming to the fore is important," said Neren Rau, chief executive officer of the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "But we're still not getting to the point of the gap closing" between rich and poor.

Maponya showed early signs of entrepreneurial instincts. As a boy, he dammed a stream in the northern South African hills where his family raised dairy cattle, drew water from his pool for a vegetable plot, then sold the cabbages and tomatoes to earn extra money.

Now his house sits in what was once a whites-only Johannesburg neighborhood that is a short drive -- and a lifetime away -- from Soweto, which was envisioned by apartheid's architects as little more than a vast dormitory for black workers.

Maponya describes himself as "just a stubborn young man who never used to take no for an answer."

For pioneers like Maponya, the desire "to prove whites wrong" may have been what kept them going, said Mthuli Ncube, who heads the new Centre for Entrepreneurship at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand. He tells his students they need passion, as well as to learn the basics of reading balance sheets and drafting business plans.

"Maybe one needs to be angry, but you have to channel it in a positive way," Ncube said.

Maponya acknowledged there were times when anger drove him.

"I've never failed in whatever I've tried to do. It wasn't my failure I was being denied the opportunity. I kept fighting," he said.

His Maponya Mall is a case in point. He bought land with plans to build a mall, but it took 28 years before he could find banks and partners willing to take what they saw as the risk of building in Soweto.

The deal finally closed in 2001-2002.

Maponya is a celebrated and revered figure among South Africans, as awards like a recent honorary doctorate from a Pretoria university show. Angie Makwetla, another Soweto entrepreneur who at 61 is a generation younger than Maponya, has been inspired not just by what he has accomplished, but by what he will leave behind.

"One looks around in South Africa, one can actually count the old, black-owned family businesses on one hand," Makwetla said. "We need to start a legacy."

Maponya says that while politicians fought for the liberation of our country, "I was fighting for the liberation of our economy."

That day has not yet come, he said. Blacks no longer have to break the law to own businesses, but the legacy of second-class black schools persists. Ncube's center just offered its first short course for unemployed but educated blacks interested in starting their own businesses, and most of the class of 34 had never used a computer.

Most blacks have not grown up in professional homes, so don't have the chance whites might have had to learn in a family firm, intern at the offices of a family friend, or gain "some history or experience that persuades you ... that business is a good life for you," said Rau, of the chamber of commerce.

The climate is tough for any new business, black or white, amid global hard times and South Africa's reputation as strike-prone and crime-ridden.

Long denied property, black entrepreneurs don't have the capital to persuade private lenders to back their ideas and get credit.

For years, much of the focus of the government's "black economic empowerment" programs was encouraging established white businesses to share their wealth through stock transfers to black employees, for example. Maponya said the government should have concentrated on creating institutions to lend or grant capital to young entrepreneurs.

Earlier this year, the government-owned Industrial Development Corporation created a special 1 billion rand fund to finance entrepreneurs from "South Africa's marginalized groups." Shakeel Meer, an Industrial Development Corporation executive, said he looks to the next generation of entrepreneurs to create jobs.

As for Maponya's generation?

"The lesson that people can take from them," Meer said, "is that if it was possible under those conditions, there's no reason why it can't be possible now."