THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
PICTURE this as the new corporate logo for South African Airways: a humongous image of Desmond Tutu’s beaming face emblazoned on the tail of the national carrier, with the words “gravy plane” running alongside.
This was just one of the numerous items of “hate mail” Peter Vundla says his advertising agency, Herdbouys, received when it invited people to submit ideas to replace the Springbok as SAA’s symbol. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of the 33 000 suggestions received favoured a design around the country’s new flag.
Vundla says he received much more racist hate mail (the K-word and N-words featured prominently in the text), but he refused to give me details, claiming it was against his nation-building role.
We had arranged to meet in his office, a brightly coloured modern carbuncle on an industrial estate between Sandton City and Alexandra Township. Officially Vundla was on holiday, but he had already had an early morning breakfast meeting – it must have been pretty stressful, judging by his sweat-soaked shirt.
He explained that he was trying to tidy up some loose ends before jetting off to Kenya for a 13-day holiday, his first for more than three years. That is the price one must pay to build up the country’s first black-owned advertising agency and watch it grow in six years from a modest house in Soweto to a multi-million-rand business.
I suggest Vundla and his three partners (there were four initially but one dropped out) were aided greatly by the black empowerment virus spreading across South Africa during this period. “Not so,” he says. “We are in a unique position where no one has made things easy for us because we are black. In fact, we have empowered white corporations by giving them access to black markets. But there is still a lot of tokenism and cosmetic changes in this business. It is still a closed shop where black people are concerned.”
What about the many talented black people now involved in the public relations and marketing worlds? “Many agencies have not trained any black people … they just want black names and faces, especially at boardroom level, where they are merely window-dressing.
“Racism is still a big problem. My agency is the most integrated in the country, but because we are black-owned we are still labelled a black agency.”
Herdbouys has made important inroads into this white-controlled industry, but it still gets clients wanting information about the black market, as if it was something on the fringes. “They just want us to do the black end of a promotion, while the larger share of the contract will go to a white agency. We tell them to f- off, otherwise we are buying into their stereotype.”
Occasionally, as with the SAA contract, the agency is forced to link up with a white company in order to win a deal. The big difference in the case of SAA was that all the local agencies in the bid were required to have an international partner with experience in airline promotion. Herdbouys joined with New York- based Diefenbach Elkins for the project and found itself being criticised publicly by one white agency for doing so. “Sour grapes,” snorts Vundla.
He believes white people still do not trust black business competence: “They think anything black people do is sub-standard and that we won’t deliver on time … We have to fight for every bit of our business and prove our ability 10 times more.”
Vundla, the eighth in a family of 11 (he has five brothers), comes from South Africa’s second-division political elite. His father, known as PQ Vundla, “a helluva guy”, was secretary general in the 1950s of the African National Congress’s Transvaal branch and was involved in civic politics for many years after working as a journalist for Bantu World.
“I built on the name he established and patterned my life on his,” says a candid Vundla. “My dad was a courageous man who always spoke his mind. He was forthright … cared for people and the future of this country … was good at networking and bringing people together. He was also one of the best-dressed men in the country.”
Vundla is certainly looking dapper in his navy blue suit, and that shirt sure looks expensive. This plus his considerable charm might explain why he is regarded as a bit of a ladies’ man. “My father always said: `Even if you are poor, you don’t have to look it.’ I like power-dressing and dressing for success.”
The family grew up in the Western Native Township, where Vundla was born 49 years ago. In the late 1950s, during the forced- removal programme, they moved into the newly built Soweto.
“My first memory of Nelson Mandela was around five years old, when this elegantly dressed man in flannel trousers and navy blazer came to our house to speak with my father.” Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo were also important visitors.
With such a heritage it was not surprising that Vundla and his older brother, Mfundi Vundla (a writer for the television series Generation), share the distinction of having been expelled from both high school and university after agitating for better food and living conditions for students.
After primary school in Soweto, the brothers were shipped off to boarding school in Healdtown, in the Eastern Cape. After three years they were expelled as trouble-makers. “We campaigned for better conditions and food.” The school authorities were not impressed and refused to let them matriculate.
They went back to Soweto and matriculated there. Then it was off to the University of Fort Hare, where it only took two years for their expulsion as part of a group of students who led a strike at the university. Among the 21 people kicked out were Barney Pityana, now chairman of the Human Rights Commission. They were refused access to any other educational facility.
But Papa Vundla, who was president of the Association for the Cultural and Educational Advancement of Africans, managed to persuade the education department to let his sons finish their degrees through correspondence with the University of South Africa.
Vundla completed a BA in political science and history, and was working with Market Research South Africa when in 1971 he won a scholarship to do an MBA at Columbia University in the United States. He spent more than four years in New York, then returned home because his father had died and two brothers were in exile (one in Kenya and the other in the US).
Someone had to help look after his mother and younger siblings. He started working in retailing in Soweto, then opened one of the township’s first coin-operated laundries with three partners. They just broke even.
So Vundla left entrepreneurship behind and went back into marketing, working for Van Zyl and Schultze, subsequently bought by Ogilvy and Mather. As with most things in life, it was to prove both frustrating and rewarding.
“They wanted to make me a black expert and I was advised by my mentor, Dr Ivan May [now at Nedcor], that I needed to be a complete advertising person. I said I had no mandate to speak for what was then 30- million black people.”‘
This is the kind of pigeon-holing that still happens. “I call it race prejudice,” he says. “The problem with white people in this country is that they – especially in this industry, which is still dominated by those who are male and pale – see themselves as custodians of creativity. They love control and won’t let go of it easily. My father always taught me that no one gives up power … you have to take it.”
Among Herdbouys’s first clients were the National Peace Accord and National Sorghum. Its client list now glows with such illustrious names as Cola-Cola SA (Sprite and Krest), Eskom, the SABC, Kenyan Airways, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Sowetan.
Herdbouys (a play on herding clients and consumers towards each other) sees itself redefining the way blacks are portrayed in advertising . “There are too many subservient images,” says Vundla. “Ads are supposed to be aspirational and show things as they should be or could be, not just a window of the world we live in.”