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He is a black business pioneer; a banker and business leader with the heart of a farmer, who agrees with suspended ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema that economic liberation has yet to come. But he believes black South Africans should go out and liberate themselves by becoming job creators instead of waiting around for the government to take the lead.
Recalling his own experiences, he has very recently published a book that he hopes will inspire the current generation of young black South Africans to do more to achieve what they rightfully should.
His name is Dr Sam Motsuenyane, and he has become synonymous with the African Bank and the National African Federated Chambers of Commerce (Nafcoc). He is considered by many to be the father and doyen of black business in this country, and one of South Africa’s most respected business leaders.
But despite all this, his passion – from a very early age – has always been farming. He believes the government is not doing enough to assist emerging farmers and is not utilising the potential of agriculture to create jobs. Putting his money where his mouth is – as always – Dr Motsuenyane himself, despite being a sprightly 84 years old, still oversees the daily farming activities of the Winterveld United Farmers Association.
He started this project some 10 years ago, and today the farmers under his guidance produce 100 tonnes of oranges every year. Most of it is juiced and sold to large retail chains.
Dr Motsuenyane has just published his autobiography, A Testament of Hope, in which he draws on a lifetime’s worth of rich and varied experiences.
“The book is intended for the black business community as well as the youth – especially black youths. I wrote it to try and recapture the spirit of the pioneers, to convey how we struggled to establish organisations in very difficult times. Better times have now come, but more should be done. The attainment of freedom means that we must now dedicate our future to working harder, in order to receive the full benefits of our freedom,” he says. Does this mean Malema has a valid point when he calls for economic liberation?
“I said it many times, long before Malema was born. I was telling the country that, even though we were aspiring and working hard toward political liberation, our ultimate journey was much longer. We also have to achieve economic liberation. This was the top subject at all the meetings of Nafcoc since the 1960s,” he says.
“The new ideas that could emerge after reading this book are intended to stimulate, encourage and inspire our youth, especially our black youth, to stand up and be counted. We need to see more and a spirit of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship emerging from their ranks.”
For Dr Motsuenyane, it all started when he was born on 11 February 1927 on the farm Eignaarsfontein, where his parents worked as sharecroppers on a system called derdedeel. Under this system, which operated in large parts of South Africa in the 1930s, the big landowners – who could not make use of their land – organised black people with a strong work ethic to run these farms and then share the crop. A third of the harvest went to the owner of the farm.
He gives a fascinating insight into his ancestral roots. His family are descended from the Bakwena ba Modimosana tribe, whose ancestral home is Molokwane, situated about 30 kilometres west of the town of Rustenburg.
In the book, the fortunes and tribulations of Dr Motsuenyane’s family are interwoven with the development of South Africa’s history from the 1820s, when his tribe were driven from their ancestral land by the raiding Mzilikazi, and moved to the Free State. It would be many decades later before they would return.
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The Great Depression of the 1930s drove his parents from their farm to Krugersdorp, where his father worked as a labourer and his mother as a domestic worker.
Both parents were deeply religious people, a trait Dr Motsuenyane inherited. He devotes a substantial part of his book to the role religion has played in his life and his involvement in the church and the Boy Scouts movement.
I ask him whether, if given the chance to start all over again, he would have lived his life any differently.“I believe that I would do things very differently for myself,” he responds. “I grew up under very difficult circumstances. I grew up in the countryside, and there were very few education opportunities. We had to walk great distances and also had to divide our time between schooling and working on the farm. I would have liked it if that burden had been a little bit lighter.
“But I am happy that better times have come. Our children have many doors of opportunity open to them that ought to be used,” he says philosophically.
It is from such early hardships that Dr Motsuenyane draws valuable lessons for the young people of today, saying it was exactly that which motivated him to succeed.
“People who succeed in life are often those who started off under difficult circumstances and worked their way up to achieve success through perseverance. Our children these days sometimes have it so easy that they hardly ever have a goal in life. It is the responsibility of the parents or other adults to redirect our children’s vision so that, quite early in their lives, they can have a desire to achieve something. They should live to become achievers.”
He relates how his family moved around and eventually settled on another farm. In the process, they met many whites who were impoverished after the Anglo-Boer War, in which his father had fought.
“A question that I always ask myself is: How did the poor white problem disappear over time? How was it handled and eliminated, ultimately? Today there is much talk about black poverty, but what we need to do is to go back to the drawing board. There has been poverty in the country before,” says Dr Motsuenyane.
“For instance, we can look at how the Afrikaners rose from the depths of poverty in the 1930s to become a group of prominent, well-organised businesspeople. We can look back to the 1910s when organisations like Volkskas and Sanlam were formed – how they were started and why.
“All of that inspired us very much to initiate the African Bank much later. We looked at prominent Afrikaner pioneers of that time, such as Willie Hofmeyr, and we believed that if the Afrikaners – who were financially and economically very subservient after the Boer War – could rise to become rulers and leaders of our country, we could aspire to reach similar heights,” he explains.
“And here we are, many years later, with a black government. However, that is not enough. If we want to increase our influence in the affairs of our country, we will have to extend our influence in the economic sphere.”
Although his education was interrupted at times due to a lack of funds, Dr Motsuenyane was the only member of his family to advance beyond Standard Six, eventually going to the United States on an exchange programme, where he obtained a BSc degree in Agriculture from North Carolina
State University.
After obtaining his Junior Certificate in 1946, he left home in search of work in Johannesburg. There, he worked alternately as an office boy, messenger, factory labourer and cleaner. It was also there that he had his first taste of the infamous pass laws.
After finishing his Matric through correspondence, Dr Motsuenyane trained as a social worker and was sent to Cofimvaba District in the Transkei, to work on a project that operated in rural communities.
In 1953, while living in Johannesburg’s Alexandria township, he met his wife, Jocelyn.
Dr Motsuenyane says he cannot single out any particular part of his life as being the most important. “I think all the different areas in which I was involved over the years were all very important for our country.”
He became active in establishing a national soil conservation movement in the 1950s, and worked in rural development and agriculture. He later served as national organiser of the African National Soil Conservation Association.
In 1959, he was selected for the US/SA leadership exchange tour to study the methods and programmes of the US Department of Agriculture in the northeastern states.
When Dr Motsuenyane returned from the US, a shiny degree in hand, Nafcoc was being formed and he was almost press-ganged into it. He says he was “hijacked” by Nafcoc, as he was unwilling to leave the agricultural sphere at the time.
“But the businesspeople said, ‘We need your knowledge of agriculture as a business. You must come here (Nafcoc) and join us.’ So I did; and for the next 24 years, I was president of Nafcoc – and they never wanted to let me go,” he recalls.
“And there we had the opportunity to pioneer black institutions for development: African Bank, Black Chain, the African Development and Construction Company, and many others. We established a scholarship fund, in which I played quite a prominent part. And, so, I cannot look back at that chapter and say we did nothing.”
African Bank
In his book, Dr Motsuenyane looks back on how the African Bank was established: from the overly ambitious enthusiasm of well-known Soweto entrepreneur Richard Maponya, who suggested collecting some R18 million in start-up cash in one year, through donations of R1 each from ordinary black South Africans; to the reality of collecting only R1m in start-up funds over 10 years.
He relates how the government of the day put obstacles in their way and forced them first to establish the bank in the various Bantustan homelands, before allowing it to operate in the “white” cities.
The bank remained weak on the equity side, and fell foul of the South African Reserve Bank’s required deposits-to-equity ratio. As a result, the bank had to be bailed out by other groups, and black control was lost – something that clearly does not sit well with Dr Motsuenyane. He states in the book that he would like black people to buy shares and take back control of the bank they created.
He lists among his early role models and mentors people such as SJJ Lesolang and his brothers, who were pioneering black entrepreneurs; the Afrikaner Willie Hofmeyr; the erstwhile chairperson of the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce, Cyril Pearce; the Afrikaner businessman Anton Rupert; RV Selope Thema, a veteran black politician and early ANC leader; Richard Maponya, a Soweto entrepreneur; JJ Makgetha, another Soweto businessman; and others.
Dr Motsuenyane capped it all with a stint in politics. Although he had joined the ANC at an early age, he preferred a back-room political role. In 1989, Nelson Mandela invited him to Victor Verster Prison for talks prior to his release, and in 1994 he was elected leader of the Senate (now the Council of Provinces). In 1996, he was appointed South African ambassador to the Gulf countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and Yemen.
Finally, Madiba allowed him to retire – but that is not what Dr Motsuenyane did. “For me, there will be no real retirement: there is so much more still to be done. As a late friend of mine always said: ‘We are so far behind that we are not even allowed to sleep’.”
Stef Terblanche
