The mielie-seller
The mielie-seller is perhaps the most quintessential South African image. Resident of both urban and rural worlds, she is also symbolic of a growing informal economy.
Thabi Chauke wakes up at 4.30am. Her day is simple: she dispatches her 14-year-old daughter into a packed minibus. These ferry the children of the newly enfranchised to the privileged suburban schools where the gates of learning have been thrown open.
Then Chauke coaxes her 22-year-old son to go job-hunting again before climbing into a lorry that will take her to Randfontein, where she buys her weekly supply of mielies. By early afternoon, she’s sitting in front of her brazier roasting mielies that she sells for R1,50 each.
It’s a hard day’s work. She has to fire up the brazier, then wait for an hour and a half while it heats up. With the help of a fellow hawker, she gingerly lifts the blazing tin can in its cardboard box to start her 10-block trek to downtown Johannesburg where she has carved a bit of pavement as her turf. She averages a daily turnover of R30.
Chauke’s lot in life is far from perfect, but for her there has been a thousandfold improvement from what it used to be.
“Things are much better now,” she says shyly. In the past the Boers used to arrest us and destroy our goods, but now at least I know that my children will have something in their stomachs when they go to bed at night.”
Her life is not charmed, but it’s adequate. She is unlikely to take to the streets to protest against her plight. She wishes, however, that her son would get a job. She says he’s done his best. After all, he passed his matric and she thought that would be an “open sesame” for him.
He is one among the annual 300 000 matriculants who stand little chance of getting a job in the formal economy where jobs are haemorrhaging. “But what can I do?” she sighs.
The yuppie
Ken Gillat, the young manager of a seafood restaurant, says his life hasn’t changed much in the past five years.
“The only difference is that in the past at home we used to have an open garden; now we have had to build a security wall.”
It’s just after 9pm at Sandton City and Gillat is getting ready to shut up shop. Outside in the garrison community of Sandton, residents have invested in booms and gates across public roads, and passage is controlled by security guards. The gardens are still as pristinely manicured as always.
Gillat chose not to study but to plan a business career instead. Despite many white fears of affirmative action, Gillat’s career is going places fast. He started off with a six-month stint as a waiter, later graduating to a sales assistant at a sports shop, and now he works as a manager. He is not speed-dialling any of the radio talk shows – the soapbox of those who feel recently disenfranchised – nor is he packing for Perth. Instead he’s just matter of fact about the interregnum in South Africa: “Any country that goes through changes will have such a high degree of crime.”
He is hopeful about the future, calling South Africa a “beautiful country, as long as we sort out our problems”. For Gillat these problems will sort themselves out because, he says, “the people with the differences are going to die and the youth will start afresh”.
How does he see his future? In essence: he might not have to wear shades, but it’s still bright.
The newly advantaged buppie
Joe Tsotetsi is frank about two things: his company would not have been possible without the new order in South Africa; and his hero is white. He models himself on Bill Gates, although his Afro-chic shirt and steel-framed spectacles are anything but computer nerd. Although he’s not a billionaire like Gates, Tsotetsi’s company has grown in value to more than R100-million in three years.
While working in the United States in 1986 (he was exiled in the Seventies), Tsotetsi saw a story on Gates, who had started his own company. “It was an epiphany for me. I decided to start my own company as well.”
The dream was deferred until 1996 when Motswedi Technology was started from scratch by Tsotetsi, who returned to South Africa in 1990, and his partner, Tebogo Matsoso.
The company has won rave reviews because it was started with their own capital, the owners are involved at an operational level and they have influential partners like Siemens and Microsoft. They plan, design and implement computer systems for the government and parastatals.
Motswedi has grown on the back of a change in government procurement policies. The state has used its financial might to encourage black business empowerment by introducing affirmative action requirements into its tenders for everything from computer systems to road construction and even the stationery outlets it buys from. Although this is bridging the gap between the haves and the have-nots, there is still a huge underclass of need.
Motswedi is doing its bit to ensure the empowerment it has benefited from has a ripple effect. Twice a week Tsotetsi teaches computer skills to aspirant Gateses in the Katorus area on the East Rand. Motswedi’s Katorus project boasts 1 000 graduates who have learned skills like programming, computer maintenance and some design work. “I feel a responsibility to entrench democracy,” says Tsotetsi, adding that “you get economic freedom from political freedom”.