Hey, black spender

The term ‘black diamonds’ was coined by marketers to describe well-educated, salaried African folk. Kwanele Sosibo speaks to six South Africans who fit the profile but eschew the label

The term ‘black diamond”, at least in the geological sense, describes a stone of dubious origin, known more for its porosity than any endearing quality. It figures then that almost all the people interviewed unanimously rejected the term, even though it was ostensibly dreamt up to toast their arrival into middle-class society.

As far as marketing buzzwords go ‘black diamond”, an umbrella term meant to refer to ‘well-educated, salaried, credit-worthy and suburb-bound” black-folk, must go down as the most contentious.

Debates have raged about its merits — whether it sheds any new light on black people about themselves or whether it is just for the benefit of marketers looking to corner an ’emerging market”.

The figures quoted below were gleaned from a survey of 4 500 people in seven metropolitan areas and were released by the University of Cape Town Unilever Institute and TNS Research Surveys earlier this year. According to the study, there are 2,6-million black people in this country who qualify as ‘black diamonds”. That figure grew 30% in just more than a year. The group’s collective spending power rose from R130-billion to R180-billion in that time, accounting for 28% of the total South African spend.

‘Darkies are consumers,” says Lerato Motsoeneng, a young executive at Vodacom. ‘A dude might have R3 000 shoes from Spitz, but he’s still trapping [walking] it — Even Tito when he’s increasing interest rates, indirectly, he’s saying: ‘Darkies stop spending.’ A lot of people have been given the opportunity to earn a proper income. With luck the next generation will become what I call owners of immovable capital. Right now we’re still reliant on banks to finance our homes.”

Although most black people can regale you with examples of the typical black overspender, it is always one person removed from themselves. As a people Africans tend to be overly sensitive to being classified by race, especially if the connotations are less than flattering, hence the aversion to the term black diamond.

‘I don’t feel comfortable with the term at all,” says Motsoeneng. ‘All of a sudden we’re all lumped into that. Middle class? Probably fine, but then again, that depends on where you’re coming from. Is that because I have a job, I live in the ‘burbs and I have my own car? What if I don’t have any cash at the end of the day and I’m living off credit? Does that make me middle class?

‘What you see in the media — these people living in townhouses, with cars and chilling at News Café — that’s not me. We need to look beyond the notion that all we’re interested in is material items, because that’s how they see us.”

The people interviewed have a few things in common: the cars, the fancy houses in suburbia, degrees from illustrious institutions and excellence in their professions.

More importantly, they do not confuse affluence for whiteness, as was suggested by the research’s gatekeepers. They are not religious zealots, like many of their predecessors, and all hope to run their own businesses one day. These are their stories.

Lerato and Lorato Motsoeneng

Lerato Motsoeneng (30) has taken the afternoon off to play golf with some of his mates. ‘What I like about this game is that it humbles you,” he says, unprompted, after misfiring from a less-than-perfect swing. ‘You could be flying high, doing your thing in the boardroom and then come here.”

He has played for about a year and a half, but not as often as he would like. ‘I haven’t really had the time with my daughter being so young,” he says.

Although the Leeuwkop golf course is about five minutes from his three-bedroom townhouse in Sunninghill, he hasn’t been here for at least seven months.

‘Golf allows you to spend four hours with your mates on the course,” he says. ‘You walk and talk, you know. It’s focus time. In business, especially, there is no better place to be with your client than on a golf course.”

For Lerato, the game allows him to reflect on his achievements and goals. ‘It gets you back on track,” he says. ‘It’s like doing anything and you start thinking you’re the best and you forget to take stock of the basics. You can have a brilliant shot and think: ‘Now I’ve waxed it’ and the next shot it’s like you never played before.”

Lerato’s golf set was a gift from his wife, Lorato, a woman he describes as a grounding force in his life. ‘A lot of my success comes from the relationship I have with my wife. I have someone who supports me, understands me and, most of all, corrects me.”

Similarly, Lorato says she feels quite fulfilled: ‘I can’t imagine where I’d be now if I was single — just from the things I have heard from my friends who are single and still dating, being disappointed by people. For me all the milestones I needed to achieve in my life have just seemed to fall into place.”

The couple met in 1996 at Rhodes University, while Lerato was doing his BA and Lorato was doing a BComm. She was initially uninterested, but the guy was persistent. A project manager at e-Bucks, Lorato is in charge of rolling out IT projects and coordinating research on projects. ‘Before getting married four years ago, we were quite social and outgoing,” she says.

‘We would take weekends away and go to overseas destinations once or twice a year and do movies, which we haven’t done since Kananelo was born in July.” Now, she says, they are quite happy to entertain friends at home.

‘I fully support the idea of working flexible hours. In the afternoons I leave work and work from home on my laptop … or sometimes in the mornings I can just check my emails from home and get into work later.”

On the other hand, she says, Lerato seems to work even harder since their daughter was born. ‘That’s what his job requires,” she says. ‘Now and again he has to entertain clients in the evenings, but he spends enough time at home on weekends.”

As hard as he works at his job, Lerato is nonchalant about his chosen profession. He has a deferred dream. ‘One of the things that I wanted to do, and I’m still passionate about, is music. But you can’t tell the o’lady [my mother] that you want to do music, ntanga [broer]. There is still my brother and two other siblings [to support],” he says.

That’s why he is unsure about describing his upbringing as middle class. ‘For the longest time my parents didn’t have a car,” he says. ‘My mom was a PA and my old man sold insurance. He didn’t even go to school to sell insurance. So are we middle class?”

What is certain is that he has received a decent education. He did a stint of boarding school at St Gregory in Estcourt before matriculating at Wendywood High School in Johannesburg.

Lorato’s parents, on the other hand, owned a liquor business in Mafikeng, which she credits as having helped carve her path to success quite early in life. ‘I learned the value of hard work.” Her parents would make the trek to Grahamstown to be with their daughter even on short school breaks while she attended Kingswood High School.

Lorato, like her husband, sees her job merely as a means to a living. ‘I am busy exploring options of running my own thing,” she says. ‘I don’t want to work for somebody else all my life.”

Lorato and husband run a domestic service on a part-time basis, which they hope to expand into a full-time business soon.

Tebello Chabana and Mxolisi Kobus

‘I work for a mining company and [gem quality] diamonds are functionally useless. So to be called a black diamond — [his voice trails off ponderously]. You know what I mean?”

That’s not exactly how Tebello Chabana, head of public affairs at Kumba Iron Ore, introduced himself to me, but that statement, uttered about 15 minutes into our conversation, was poignant. We are seated at Tribe, an upmarket meat emporium at the Design Quarter in Fourways. The venue is Chabana’s suggestion, recommended to him by a colleague.

‘What I don’t like is the element of it being consumption-driven, those are the connotations attached to the black diamonds: very materialistic, consumption-driven.”

Mxolisi Kobus, a friend of Chabana’s since junior school (in St Peters Preparatory School), is a tad less cynical. ‘It’s not that straightforward,” he suggests. ‘Black people were dispossessed. We couldn’t own property. We couldn’t own things. Financially, we were illiterate.”

Although Chabana and Kobus are pretty much the same age, 35 and 36 respectively, socially they lead different lives.

‘Financial independence for me is to be able to say to my employer: ‘Look I don’t need you anymore,’” explains Chabana. ‘Whether you give me a salary or not this month, I don’t care. I am trying to wean myself off of that through investments and acquiring property, but I haven’t made that ultimate leap, which MK and I often talk about: establishing your own business.”

‘Well, I am going the other way,” reveals Kobus. ‘He’s sort of grown in a corporate environment and most of my life I’ve been an entrepreneur, but I’ve joined a corporate.” Kobus, a veteran of the grind, has dabbled in property development with some success. He recently joined Barloworld as a transformation manager in a deal involving his consortium. It is an experience he describes as ‘surprisingly smooth”.

The more he goes into detail, however, the more I feel he has run into his fair share of glitches. He describes his title as having the ability to ‘put the fear of God” into a lot of people. ‘People thought I was going to be this radical who would start firing all the white guys,” he says. ‘But it’s basically about improving the competitiveness of the company, which involves enforcing BEE codes of good practice.”

While Kobus and Chabana do not see themselves as black diamonds, they concede that the Unilever study has some value.

‘I think it’s important to start dialogue on things. You need to start somewhere,” proffers Kobus. ‘You have to be brave enough to come up with certain hypotheses and from there you can debate it, come up with further research, but it’s a valuable tool and it’s overdue. I think people become too sensitive about labels. I mean if they call you a ‘black diamond’, how does it affect your life? It doesn’t make you any worse or better off.”

Chabana agrees. ‘It has some merit, even to the individual, in that if you see yourself as part of that grouping, it’s always good to know, what is it that we are doing that people say we are doing and what do they think about it? For instance, guys living beyond their means. Let’s be honest, we do see that, and we see that a lot. I remember when I started working, I was also blowing my credit card. Spend, spend spend, using the budget facility — and I remember it took me like two years to recover from that debt.”

Tebello and Renee CHabana

‘I had a private school education and I would like my boy to go to a private school,” says Tebello Chabana of his plans for his one-month-old son, Jayden.

‘I went to Michaelhouse, so I would like my boy to go there and be away from home. I think it allows kids to flourish. Day scholars did what they wanted with no sense of being part of a team. Boarding school instils different values in a kid.”

Back then, Chabana says, his father’s decision was a matter of survival. ‘My late brother, Thabo, turned out very different [because of his environment],” he says. ‘He attended township schools in the Eighties and Nineties. Consider Thokoza then, [while] I was in KwaZulu-Natal, deposited, away from everything.”

In 1993 his brother was fatally shot by the police. ‘I’d like to say it was for a noble reason, but he was caught up le magintsa [with car thieves]. But I don’t think we were different. It was a matter of I had the opportunity and he didn’t. But now things are different … A kid might go to a local school. But private schools can look after a kid who would not have survived in another school.”

Perhaps even more importantly for Chabana, the entrenched networks that exist among the ‘old boys” of these schools bode well for the future of his son. ‘A lot of the parents are wealthy and they own companies and their kids are born into that,” he says. ‘Middle-class kids born into middle-class families lead middle-class lives.” And, as an employer, it’s like: ‘Oh you went to Michaelhouse, good school.’ People know what kind of breed comes from that school.”

Renee, Chabana’s wife, who is a tax lawyer for the South African Revenue Service (Sars), is indifferent to where their children Adina and Jayden will get their schooling: ‘I never really saw the importance of boarding school.”

Renee grew up in working-class Parkside, a coloured neighbourhood in Port Elizabeth. She attended nearby Bethelsdorp High School, which she feels was a good enough education for her. The two met at the University of Cape Town in 1994 and have been married for five years. They now live in a spacious house in boom-gated Gallo Manor, which they are renovating in light of their growing family.

On the morning we arrived for an interview the couple were preparing for their daughter’s performance at an end-of-year event at Peter Wabbit, a day-care centre in the vicinity. Three vehicles, including a BMW X3 and a C Class Mercedes Benz, were being washed as Chabana related a story of how they were almost burgled the night before. Despite the violation, Chabana was far from fazed, likening the event to the work of a lone loony on a burglary spree in the neighbourhood. He remains averse to electric fences and high walls, saying it breeds paranoia.

Since having children, the Chabanas’ routine has become rather tame. Renee changed jobs from working at a law firm to Sars so she could be home earlier and the pair travel a lot less for holidays, despite having a live-in domestic worker.

‘The two of us loved travelling,” says Chabana. ‘It’s difficult to do international travel with the little one. The last time we tried London and Italy and you feel it. You can’t go out at night and you have to choose which restaurants to take your kids.”

Daniel Ngwepe

‘My purpose for coming here is to meet new colleagues, to check the temperature, so that when I speak of the company, I speak from an informed perspective,” says Anglo American’s public affairs manager Daniel Ngwepe as he ushers us to our table at the company’s expansive cafeteria in the heart of its pristine Marshall Street premises. ‘From the security guards to the CEOs to the middle managers, I know everybody,” he says, between greeting by name every second person we pass.

The cafeteria is abuzz with lunchtime traffic and the relaxed atmosphere of an approaching weekend. ‘It’s important to build relations with government people, the media and investors, but it’s even more important to build relations with our ambassadors, the people who work here, who built this company.”

Although Ngwepe has been with the company for only two years, after 12 years with the South African Foreign Services, he has an easy rapport with all his colleagues and carries himself with the distinguished air of an elder statesman. He has a knack for distilling the bigger picture into disarming anecdotes which, besides the free lunch and the tour of the campus, is why a colleague and I are here: to hear him speak of his younger co-workers.

‘We attract qualified and ambitious people who want to get somewhere with their careers and, given the opportunity, they’ll use it,” says Ngwepe in defence of the proverbial ‘black diamonds”, who are perceived to be ungrateful job hoppers. ‘They are restless,” he concedes. ‘They want to be better tomorrow than [they were] yesterday. For Anglo to retain the best, it has to have a good rewards scheme, which includes a growth path that people can see and aim for.

‘Graduates these days want a townhouse, a Golf 5 and a good salary,” he states. ‘Don’t send them off to [far-flung] Chikurundi [like in the olden days]. Just leave them be. It’s not all about money. They want to live in a nice suburb, with a nice bookstore and read while they drink coffee. They want all those things. They want to go to Ellis Park — When they come here, on their faces it’s written: ‘I’m well qualified, I aim to be here as long as I want to. It’s your job to keep me here.’”

Having said all that, though, Ngwepe still has reservations with the term ‘black diamonds” and the connotations it carries. ‘For me it waters down the fact that black folk come from economic and political exile and have just entered the mainstream,” he says. ‘For many years black folk were excluded and when they take their rightful place in society and are compensated fairly, somehow they belong to a group called the ‘black diamonds’. I think there is an issue of novelty here. Going into the future for a black person to have a million bucks is not going to be an issue. For me the thing is we have a cake with a few pieces here, but the challenge is: Hwow do we grow that cake?”

Ngwepe, a father of two girls aged eight and 12, insists he wants the best for his children, but he doesn’t want to go overboard. ‘Our children go to good public schools, ‘ he says. ‘We want to expose them to the feeling of [being part of the larger society]. We don’t want them to feel exclusive. We want them to be exposed to a normal, regular life. In the way that we live, we value family traditions. Nothing is more important than a warm, home-cooked meal.”

Ngwepe becomes modest when describing his material possessions, which include an XC90 Volvo. ‘I live in a rambler,” he says of his four-bedroom house in the posh Pretoria suburb of Waterkloofridge. ‘It’s just a long house, like a classroom. I bought it while working for the government. There are no limestone tiles, no huge guest wing and no crystal chandeliers. It is not luxurious, it just has the bare essentials. When it rains, the kids are in a comfortable, safe home.”

As for his children’s future, Ngwepe reckons he will be happy knowing that he has given them the ‘combination to the lock of life”.

‘They must treat others as they would want to be treated and they must know that no one has a right to trample on their rights,” he says. ‘At some point they are going to have to be self-reliant and independent because, maybe then, there will be a sunset to affirmative action. Then they will run out of excuses.”

Daniel Ngwepe has subsequently left Anglo American to start his own business