12 January 2020
Conscience of a Centrist
“Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant and distinctive, it is hard to think of them stilled,” said George W Bush at the funeral of John McCain.
“A man who seldom rested is laid to rest. And his absence is tangible, like the silence after a mighty roar.”
Bush could have easily been describing Morena Richard John Pelwana Maponya, who took his last breath on Monday – just a year shy of his 100th birthday.
Good people die every day. Yet few touch the psyche of a nation and inspire an entire generation of (black) entrepreneurs like the genius of Maponya. The maverick entrepreneur and property developer created a thriving business empire despite apartheid restrictions at the time.
For those like me who grew up in the margins of the South African economy and far away from opportunities, the life and times of Maponya served as the most potent example that black lives matter and we too could be successful in this white-dominated economy.
Born at a time when colonialism still poisoned the lives of black South Africans, Maponya had a steely determination to make a difference for himself and his people.
He was a trained teacher – a noble profession – but life had other plans for him. He started working in the 1950s at a clothing company selling garments to miners and rural people. In the starkly racist language of the day, the company called the department Maponya worked in the “kaffir truck”.
In a classic white privilege arrogance of the time, it is said while Maponya’s entrepreneurial talents were evident early on to his white colleagues, a manager in his department said to him: “You can’t become a general manager because you can’t oversee white people – there’s a glass ceiling over your head.”
Little did the manager know that there will be no stopping Maponya. The true genius of the man is yet to be fully told, but one thing is clear: the crushing racial hatred and bigotry that dominated most of Maponya’s life did little to hinder his rise to the top. He not only survived the hardships of being black during apartheid, he flourished, and by the 1990s he had built an empire short of a miracle story.
His successes are too many to list, but a few are notable. When Coca-Cola disinvested from South Africa, Maponya put together a group of black business people and successfully bid for a bottling plant in East London.
But the undisputed pinnacle of his career was the fulfillment of his multi-decade dream of building the people of his beloved Soweto a living monument in the form of Maponya Mall.
Black excellence in South Africa has never had a more apt ambassador like Morena Maponya.
