In a dusty, forgotten corner of the country, an innovative goatskin business is providing an impoverished community with an alternative to mining.
The ubiquitous goat wanders throughout rural Africa. It is slaughtered for food and rituals, and its skin serves as a carpet on dusty floors across the continent. It is regarded as a scourge of the landscape, but goats provide poor people with food and a livelihood. In South Africa’s platinum province, a community is using goats to build a thriving enterprise.
There is money to be made from discarded skins – as hundreds of women in rural South Africa have discovered to their great surprise. Until recently, most curios made of goatskin that were sold in South Africa were in fact imported from Zimbabwe. Goatskin bags, belts, purses and other products were carried across the border by Zimbabwean women and sold in street markets and curio shops.
The South African Department of Trade and Industry’s Community Public Private Partnerships (CPPP) programme discovered this when it researched indigenous agricultural resources in the country.
The programme decided to set up the Mokqalwana Indigenous Goats Project in the North West province, one of South Africa’s most impoverished provinces. When the CPPP approached the Bakgathla ba Kgafela tribe with the idea, one person was appointed to help the community set up the project. Grace Masuku, a retired school teacher, had already been involved in several job creation projects among her people.
Masuku is passionate about helping her people. “I have always believed that if you are fortunate enough to get an education, you have a responsibility to people less fortunate,” she says. “You can’t just sit at home and watch the poverty around you.” Since she retired, Masuku has continued teaching sex education and indigenous knowledge at schools throughout North West province. Among many other job-creation projects Masuku has established are herb gardens where women grow plants to sell to traditional healers.
The CPPP did research into indigenous agricultural resources and the goat project grew out of it. “We saw the potential of using people’s indigenous resources, rather than getting them to grow maize or something else,” says Ellen Mahlase of the CPPP.
“We did market research to make sure the business will be sustainable. We wanted to ensure that the community got maximum benefit. What we set up is a way for goat owners in the Bakgathla ba Kgafela tribe to supply live goats to a private company. About 50 goat owners set themselves up as a co-operative.”
The project is now registered as a private company – Podi-Boswa (Pty) Ltd, which means “goat, our inheritance”. It employs 20 people in the town of Brits. After the goats are slaughtered, the skins are treated. Then the private company makes bags, shoes and keyrings. Curio shop owners buy the products, which are sold across the country. “We have contracts with curio shop owners for a regular supply of products,” says Mahlase.
The enterprise is now looking into exporting the goatskins. The United States wants thousands of goatskins annually and Saudi Arabia has expressed an interest. There are also plans to set up a similar project in the Eastern Cape. The Bakgathla ba Kgafela are a poor second cousin to the Bafokeng, whose land borders theirs and is rich in platinum that earns the tribe millions of rands a month. The Bakgathla ba Kgafela have land, but it is not fertile enough for large-scale agriculture. Their young men leave the area after finishing school to work on the nearby mines. They are hoping to make some money from their land, though – they have lodged a land claim that may see them developing Sun City and the Pilanesberg National Park.
When the CPPP arrived with the idea of the goat project, Masuku got into her car and headed off to small villages to conduct a poll of how many goats there were and how many owners would be interested in the project. She did all of the work and continues to supervise it at her own expense.
“When Mrs Masuku arrived in our village, I couldn’t be rude to her because she is a cousin. But I thought she was mad and couldn’t understand why she was asking questions about our goats,” says Masekwape Matlala, chairperson of the goat cooperative at Mokgalwana village.
“She asked if we are satisfied with the way we are living, growing enough just to feed ourselves and having no money in our pockets. She asked me to make a list of all the people who have goats and to count how many goats there were. Then she came back and we had a lot of meetings, and we realised she was going to make us all Oppenheimers. Now we don’t think she is mad, we think she came to save us.”
Today, 174 goat owners in and around Mokgalwana village are involved in the project. Matlala bought her first goat last year, which recently gave birth to the first kid. Matlala is hoping to be one of the biggest goat owners in the village in a few years’ time.
The biggest at present is Kganetso Diole, proud owner of more than 200 goats. She only keeps a few in her kraal at home, the rest are grazing at a communal farm nearby. She slaughters 20 a month for the goat project. She has eight children, and every cent she earns from the project will be spent on their education. “I am so proud of what I am doing. I can’t find the words to describe how happy I am. I never thought a goat could contribute so much to my life,” Diole says.
Masuku says when she conducted the research for the CPPP, she realised that almost every household in the province owns goats, with 50 being the average in each family. The goats are low-maintenance livestock and therefore popular in poorer communities. “We provide about 100 goats a week for slaughtering. We slaughter almost daily for our own purposes. These goatskins are just lying around in our houses. Most people use them for mats. So we are collecting skins as well as live goats from households,” says Masuku.
“We have centred this project around our youth. We have more than 1 000 young people involved already. We are trying to get them to fend for themselves. We don’t have technical expertise, we have a workforce that can be groomed and trained. At present we are teaching the youth to make handbags, belts and purses from the leather.” A percentage of the profits is kept in a trust fund to develop the business. The women at Mokgalwana village are saving to build a feed lot, holding pens, an abattoir and a tannery.
“Come back in a few years’ time. There’ll be a few millionaires here, I promise,” says Matlala.