Black Like You

by Mashaba, Herman;

  One hot afternoon, Johan slapped a letter from the BNDC on my desk.

  “Take a look at this. The only way we can get funding from the BNDC is if we buy the property through them, and they then manage our building project,” he said.

  None of the Black Like Me partners was comfortable with this manipulative method of doing business, so we decided not to pursue this funding route. A couple of months later, Walter Dube advised us to buy a property in a small industrial area in the middle of Mabopane, a mere 10km away from our Ga-Rankuwa factory.

  The place was not without its problems, though, and Walter warned us, “There is no infrastructure, the roads are not tarred, and the lights often go out – even in a light rain shower.”

  We were torn between the need for expansion and staying where we were. But the latter would result in stagnation, so we took the decision to build a new facility in Mabopane.

  The property acquisition took almost a year to finalise, but we were still faced with the problem of funding. Yet we couldn’t just sit back and wring our hands, so we employed an architect Walter recommended, who went ahead and drew up plans. And instead of waiting for a loan to be granted, the company used partners’ money to fund the building project. We moved into the new factory in 1989, and had already been occupying it for two months when we received a surprise but redundant notification: funding approval from the BNDC.

  The company’s move to an appropriately sized facility, and the excellent income the company was generating, inspired Connie and me to start looking for a house in a suburb that offered good infrastructure and which was situated away from the township disturbances I had to face daily during working hours. Influx control laws had been done away with in 1986, and petty apartheid was crumbling, despite, or because of, the ongoing political violence. In these difficult and unpredictable times, I wanted my home to be a safe retreat. So in 1987 we started looking around, and we were drawn to Waterkloof in Pretoria. The suburb was populated by embassies and diplomatic houses, which meant that it was a high-security area. I consulted my lawyers, who agreed to be the nominee as the Group Areas Act was still in force and I could not legally buy a property in a white area. The only way a black buyer could own a house was through a white nominee – a loophole that many wealthy blacks took advantage of at the time.

  Connie and I settled for a lovely house that was one of the most expensive homes in the area. But before I could sign the papers, the government closed the nominee loophole which had previously “allowed” black ownership of property in white areas. We could have gone ahead with the purchase, but the threat of forfeiting the house if the purchase were discovered by the authorities deterred us. So we decided that, just as we had built our factory in Mabopane, we would build our dream home in Soshanguve.

  We went all out, feeling that we deserved the rewards of our hard work. Connie and I had taken up tennis and we enjoyed playing with friends and family, so we built a tennis court. We also built a swimming pool, and we enjoyed many parties with our friends in our Soshanguve home. We lived the African dream in that house. Sure, we had issues with the bad roads that turned to sludge during the rainy season, and there was no telephone system. But it was a grand place to live in, with lovely homes and friendly, hard-working people.

  It was during this time in Soshanguve that I visited Ahmed Kathrada, a few days after his release from prison; I went with my friend Goolam, who was related to the Kathrada family. A few months later, on 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. I was at home with my family on that great day, together with visiting business associates from Chicago – we were negotiating to establish Debbie Howard’s cosmetic brand in South Africa. We all watched Mandela’s release on television, a moment I had never imagined I would experience.

  We lived in Soshanguve until the early 1990s. A year after the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of political organisations in 1990, the government scrapped the Group Areas Act. We were free at last to live where we wished, and because we had enjoyed living in a house of our own design, we decided to do so again. It was with much excitement that Connie and I hit the showhouse trail one Sunday, and started looking for land in Pretoria North, where smallholdings could be bought. We explained to the estate agent that we wanted to build our own house, but, sharp agent that he was, he mentioned a house in the area that was on the market, suggesting that we have a look at it.

  We drove along the quiet acacia-lined avenues of Heatherdale, listening to the Piet-my-vrous calling to one another. As soon as the electric gate swung open and we saw the driveway winding up to the house, Connie squeezed my hand; we smiled at each other, signalling that we had found our dream home. The house was set on a two-hectare stand, and it lived up to its driveway promise. At the price, the property seemed to be a bargain, so we made an offer that the owner accepted later the same day. We could not have been happier when the property was eventually registered in our name, and while we waited to move in, we spent many happy evenings planning the furnishings and dreaming of get-togethers with family and friends. But, yet again, our excitement was short-lived. One Sunday morning, our good friend Bra B – Kholekile Biyana – arrived at our home in Soshanguve with the Sunday papers under his arm.

  “You just can’t resist being on the front page, eh, Herman,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Connie retorted, and opened Beeld. She spread the paper on the dining room table and we read about the furore brewing around our home purchase.

  The government’s racist laws had been scrapped, but people’s racist attitudes persisted. It turned out that Mr Bentley, the previous owner of the house we’d purchased, had come to an agreement – prior to the sale – with other right-wingers in Heatherdale. They had agreed that none of them would sell their homes to a black buyer. However, the property market was not exactly booming when I made an offer on the said Mr Bentley’s house, and since money usually has no colour if the price is right, the principled Bentley had apparently said to hell with the agreement he had with the other residents, and accepted my offer. Mr Bentley happened to own a small hotel opposite the property we had bought, and the zealous right-wingers marched to the hotel to protest against the sale of his house to a black family.

  Koos van der Merwe, who is currently a member of the Inkatha Freedom Party, was one of those right-wing demonstrators, and in the same Beeld article he vowed that no black family would stay in Heatherdale for long, as he would make their lives miserable. In the same article, I learnt that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pik Botha, was to be my new neighbour – he lived in the house behind mine.

  Connie was extremely concerned about all this. She pointed to the article and said, “Herman, we can’t move to Heatherdale.” With urgency in her voice, she reminded me, “Look how the police treated us in Hammanskraal. What will happen if these people threaten us when we move in? How can we rely on the police to protect us here; they don’t want us here either.”

  I understood her fears and tried to placate her. “Connie, we have taken transfer of the property and we have to move in.”

  She started having nightmares about the right-wingers breaking into the house and killing us, and so I contacted a company to build a high security fence around the entire property. But I knew that this was not enough to protect us. There were other problems too – among them the planned upgrade on Connie’s BMW.

  I held out the BMW brochure she’d been looking at. “Connie, there’s no way you can get a new BMW now; if you pull into the Heatherdale house in a shiny new luxury car, it will draw attention to us.”

  Connie was furious. She had worked hard and deserved to reward herself in any way she saw fit, but I wanted to minimise the impact of our moving into the neighbourhood. So we compromised by agreeing to purchase a black Jetta. Unfortunately, none of the dealerships I approached could source a black one, so I bought Connie a green Jetta instead. When the car arrived, she s
tood in the parking lot and stared at it, and I could tell from the thrust of her hip and the jut of her jaw that she wasn’t happy. She fumed quietly for a few minutes, then she looked at me and said, “Okay, it is a new car. And many people don’t have cars. It’s fine.”

  I was relieved, but I was also grateful – as I had been countless times before – for Connie’s positive attitude.

  Life has a way of challenging our perceptions. Though we expected the worst from the militantly vocal right-wingers in Heatherdale, on the day we moved in things turned out rather differently. A prominent local Afrikaans businessman, his wife, and some of the other neighbours arrived to welcome us. And a few days later, while I was working in my office in Mabopane, my secretary buzzed me with the news, “Mr Mashaba, you have a phone call from Minister Pik Botha’s office.”

  The phone call was an invitation to attend a “Welcome to the Neighbourhood” cocktail party. Of course we accepted the invitation, and local residents and the media were in attendance; both national and international newspapers covered the event, and the following day one headline read “Pik Welcomes Black Neighbours”. Connie and I realised that the rest of the community had protected us from the minority group of right-wingers among them, and we were never bothered by anyone – right-wing or otherwise – in our comfortable new house.

  Most of our neighbours were wonderful people; friendships we made in Heatherdale, for example with the Hough family, endure until today. And it was while living in Heatherdale that I voted in an election for the first time.

  Although Black Like Me was a rising star in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the partners were all making money, some of them wanted to branch out into other areas. In 1989, Joseph decided to sell his share in the business. When we’d started the company, we were totally inexperienced in business hierarchies, and as a result we didn’t appoint a CEO – Johan attended to production, and Joseph and I managed the sales and marketing as equal partners. When we’d appointed Nisar Dawood as financial director, Joseph wasn’t pleased. But Johan and I had managed to convince him that Connie needed the assistance of a financial expert if the company was to manage its money efficiently. Joseph had eventually agreed, but in the meantime he looked for other business interests. These business pursuits weren’t of any real interest to me, but what did concern me were the weaknesses in our sales management. Because Joseph and I were equal dealmakers and rule-setters, a few wily customers took advantage of the situation. For example, I would get a phone call from a customer along the lines of, “Hi, Herman, can you let us have the hair relaxer at the same price we paid on the last order?” I would then call up their last order, and when I noticed that it was at the previous year’s price, I would turn down the request. Unperturbed, the customer would simply phone Joseph and make the same request. Invariably, Joseph would approve the purchase, unaware that I had already turned them down. This kind of thing was losing us money, and I decided to call a special board meeting to discuss this weakness in our structure.

  “Guys, I suggest that we split the sales and marketing responsibilities, so that we don’t have two rule-makers,” I said.

  Joseph wasn’t at all satisfied with the suggestion. “I don’t see any reason to change our current system,” he said.

  It occurred to me that I had over-estimated Joseph’s capacity to take on responsibility, and in my eagerness to foist a division on him, I had not properly evaluated his capabilities.

  Instead of even giving my suggestion a chance, Joseph broke the news that he would be leaving the company. He’d given Black Like Me five years of good service, and it was a blow to me to hear him say this. I’d been with him from day one, and had always admired his drive. Eventually, we were forced to buy him out, and it was difficult to negotiate with a bitter person who took the position that we had pushed him out.

  “Joseph, don’t sell out,” we urged.

  “Leave your shareholding and enjoy the dividends,” we said to him.

  But he wouldn’t be swayed. “No, I want the cash,” he said.

  We had his shareholding evaluated, and I made him an offer I considered to be generous and fair. But he shook his head and replied, “No, that’s not going to work for me.”

  He appointed lawyers to deal with his payout, and the deal the lawyers eventually agreed upon was substantially less than my original offer. I bought Joseph’s shares and in time, as other partners also left, I bought their shares too.

  Three years later, in 1992, Johan Kriel was the second partner to leave. He was an entrepreneur and a deeply committed family man. Black Like Me had given him the means to pursue other interests, and he had decided to sell his shares in the company.

  “I’m going farming,” he explained when he told me he wanted to sell his shares. Not long afterwards, he bought a beautiful farm near Emalahleni in Mpumalanga. Often, he’d phone me and say, “Herman, why don’t you and Connie come out here and spend the weekend on the farm with us?”

  Connie and I loved those farm weekends with Johan and Christine and their family. “It’s such a relief to get out of the city,” Connie would say, reclining in the passenger seat as we drove away from the week’s stresses.

  Chapter 13

  By 1993, Black Like Me was one of the leading black haircare brands in South Africa, drawing a lot of attention as the maverick company that had thumbed its nose at apartheid regulations. It came as no real surprise, then, when the company was offered R65 million by a multinational competitor.

  “That sounds like an offer we can’t refuse, Herman. You really should give it serious consideration,” was Connie’s response. We mulled it over, looking at the offer from all angles, but I eventually decided to turn it down.

  “No, I don’t want to sell,” I finally told Connie – and the potential buyer too.

  Instead of selling Black Like Me, I entered into a marketing deal with African Bank to train hairdressers, salon owners and distributors on the business aspects of the haircare industry. In addition, we ran a R500 000 competition for hairdressers every eighteen months, which focused on professional development within the industry. By this time, I had established Black Like Me regional offices in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth, and I’d employed Lucas Sebobe as the head of sales.

  The only thing still lacking in our lives was children. This was not for lack of trying – indeed, soon after we’d got married, friends and family had already begun to ask the inevitable question: “When are you going to have children?” Though both our lives were busy and interesting while I was still a rep for SuperKurl, Connie looked at me one day with a serious expression in her eyes. She said to me, “Herman, I want us to start a family.”

  Connie and I had travelled a long and difficult road together in our quest to become parents. During her first pregnancy Connie doubled over in pain and was rushed to hospital. She had an ectopic pregnancy and had to undergo surgery. It took her a couple of months to recover from the loss of our unborn baby, and although we didn’t manage to conceive over the next three years, she was still positive that we would have children of our own. In 1984, a year after our wedding, we had felt blessed when Connie fell pregnant. Everyone had congratulated us, but our optimism was guarded because of our experience with the ectopic pregnancy.

  “Don’t be so anxious,” the doctor reassured us. “Your worries are to be expected, but Connie’s a healthy woman who takes excellent care of herself, and there’s no reason not to expect a healthy pregnancy and a beautiful baby at the end of it.” With the doctor’s reassurance, we again began to look forward to the day that we would be parents.

  But our expectations were crushed when Connie went into labour at six months.

  “Herman, don’t let anything bad happen to this baby; I couldn’t go through another loss,” Connie cried.

  The doctor called me aside and told me, “Mr Mashaba, there’s little hope of survival at this
stage in the baby’s development. You see, the lungs haven’t developed sufficiently. And even though there’s a very small chance that she’ll make it, she may have many health problems.” This was devastating news. The doctor proved to be right; our little girl didn’t make it. After only sixteen hours of fighting, she gave up the struggle. Connie was heartbroken. I cannot even articulate how Connie’s pain affected me; I have loved her since the day I first saw her, and seeing her suffer is one of the most shattering experiences for me.

  Connie struggled to conceive again, and one day her mother said to her in desperation, “My child, what can you do to have a healthy pregnancy?” My mother, who was present at the time, tried to reduce the pressure on Connie by saying, “Herman didn’t marry Connie for kids, he married her because they love each other.”

  Those words meant a lot to us – to me, because they showed that my mother knew how much I loved Connie, and to Connie, because she needed to believe that a child wasn’t the cement in our marriage: what held us together was the love we had for each other.

  After the loss of our daughter, Connie was referred to a doctor in Kempton Park and soon afterwards she underwent in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

  “I’m not giving up so easily, Herman; I am going to be a mother,” Connie said, gritting her teeth and resolving to do whatever it took to hold our child in her arms. We were then referred to Dr Rodriguez at the Sandton Clinic, where Connie had fourteen more IVFs – but, again, none of them was successful. Our friends and family were very supportive throughout, and one day Louis Mkhetoni’s wife, Sally, made an offer of real friendship.