Retail Renegade: Richard Maponya

Sitting in his majestic home in northern Johannesburg, Richard Maponya tells a story. After building up a retail empire in the 1960s and 1970s, South Africa’s first black tycoon fought for six years to become a racehorse owner when the Jockey Club of Southern Africa (now known as the National Horseracing Authority) was a white-only bastion. But once he was admitted (after a lengthy legal battle), he couldn’t resist the temptation to needle his adversaries. “I called my first horse Another Color,” the 80-year-old Maponya recalls. “On his third time out, Another Color came scorching home. At 400 m out, he hit the front, and the commentator was screaming: ‘Another Color is coming up! Another Color is taking the lead! Another Color can’t be caught! Another Color is winning!’ To hear those words, to see what was happening — the black people in the crowd almost tore up the track. It was a riot. It was one of the most exciting days in my life.”

As a rich black entrepreneur at a time when apartheid was meant to make such a thing impossible, Richard Maponya made his name, and his fortune, subverting the established narrative. Later this month, he will buck convention once again when, opposite the wooden shack used by Dark and Lovely Barbers on Old Potchefstroom Road and an abandoned shipping container that is the workshop for P. Maone Auto Electrical Repairs, he opens a $70 million, 700,000-sq.-ft. (65,000 sq m) steel-and-glass shopping mall in Soweto.

As with much of Maponya’s life, the decision is as much political as financial. Soweto was created by the apartheid regime as a vast dormitory just over 19 miles (30 km) from Johannesburg city center (Soweto is short for South Western Township), where blacks would return each night to eat and sleep after another day of carefully controlled, low-paid work in the city. In the 1970s, this vast shanty town became a locus of revolution. After the end of apartheid, its tin shacks and dusty back alleys retained a reputation for poverty, unrest and crime. Maponya is undeterred. Poverty and violence are part of Soweto, he admits. But today so are smart bungalows (including one still owned by Maponya himself), private schools and hip restaurants. “I believe Soweto is the strongest suburb in the country,” he says. “With an estimated 5 million people, it’s one of the biggest cities in South Africa. And yet if people want to buy good clothes or furniture or electrical appliances, they have to get a taxi or train into Johannesburg.” Those who fail to spot Soweto’s nascent transformation from ghetto to the cradle of a new black middle class, says Maponya, are guilty of the same black-or-white short-sightedness that once held that “a black man was not capable of running a business.”

The rise and rise of Richard Maponya is a lesson in how there is more than one way to fight a revolution. While the African National Congress (ANC) of Nelson Mandela and others confronted apartheid head on, Maponya undermined it from the inside. A 22-year-old teacher when apartheid first took hold in 1948, Maponya was offered a job as a stock taker in a clothes maker. He quickly proved a talented operator, winning a promotion for himself and the white manager, a Mr. Bolton, who took him on. A grateful Bolton began to sell offcuts and soiled cloth to Maponya, who set up his own tailor and sold clothing on credit. The authorities closed that business — despite the best efforts of South Africa’s first black law firm, established by Mandela and Oliver Tambo — but not before Maponya had built enough capital to set up a dairy in Soweto.

Since there was no electricity or refrigerators to keep perishables fresh, Maponya opened a distribution system with 100 bicycle delivery boys, who hauled milk to the families of Soweto exactly when they needed it. The dairy grew to a general provisions shop and, despite police raids and a constant battle to win licenses — for example, he needed a special license to sell soap on Sundays — a small conglomerate bloomed. By the mid-1970s, Maponya’s businesses included a chain of general stores, a butcher shop, a restaurant, a Coca-Cola plant, filling stations and a GM and BMW car dealership. “Richard Maponya is the real deal,” says Michael Spicer, ceo of South Africa’s Business Leadership forum, which advises government and big business on policy. “He cut his teeth at a time when it was exceptionally difficult for black Africans, and he did not do it in any facilitated way. Richard was black and rich and proud — and he did it himself. That made him one of the first black icons, a role model when there were practically none.” The Little Black Book, an annual rundown of South African business leaders, calls him “the father of black retail.”

Through it all, Maponya was always careful to stay on the right side of the law, even if it meant fudging the truth. Arrested on suspicion of funding ANC student fighters, a charge of which he now admits he was guilty, he escaped a sentence by claiming he made payments under duress. But Maponya developed a taste for provocation and pushing the system to its limits. He bought a home in an affluent Johannesburg suburb when he was meant to be confined to the townships. At the Jockey Club, he dressed his (white) jockeys in black, gold and green — the colors of the ANC.

Maponya’s relationship with the ANC was not always smooth, however. One of Maponya’s few fellow black entrepreneurs was Ntatho Motlana, a doctor who began South Africa’s first private black hospitals before branching into telecommunications and media. Motlana says that all through the apartheid years, the ANC was split on whether being involved in business supported apartheid and was a betrayal. “Some thought being involved in business meant not being involved in the struggle,” adds Motlana, 82. “We were saying that if we were independent, if we made money for ourselves, that was part of the movement. And today you can see the effect of people like Richard was powerful. It set off a whole chain of events that said to people: ‘You are going to pull yourself out of poverty.'”

Maponya himself says that, while others fought the system, he simply worked it — to make it work for him, and Soweto. “Nelson and the others, they sacrificed themselves, their jobs and their lives for our freedom. My contribution was small. I wasn’t locked up. But I was undermining the regime. I was exposing them. I was making the statement that, given a chance, a black man could become as successful as a white man.”

That mission — upsetting the status quo — continues. “The new mall is about saying that a mall in Soweto can be as 21st century as anywhere in the world.” As does his enthusiasm for getting up people’s noses. After his win with Another Color, Maponya went on to become a breeder, at one time owning the biggest stable in South Africa. And the name of his stud? Maponya laughs. “Black Charger.”