Soweto millionaire a role model for black business people
(5 Oct 2008)
AP Television
Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 September 2008
1. Wide set up Richard Maponya, South African businessman, standing in garden with his family
2. Various of Maponya talking to his daughter
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Richard Maponya, South African businessman:
“I got an offer from an industrialist who wanted an educated black man to look after a departmental store, the stocks of a departmental store, and I went for an interview and I found that they are actually paying me four times if not more, more than what teaching was paying me.”
4. Various of Maponya looking at a painting
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Richard Maponya, South African businessman:
“I thought a was I going to start the first retail clothing store in Soweto, but when I made an application the powers that be, they said to me ‘you are dreaming, there is no black man who is supposed to be in business here, you are all here to serve industry.’ And I then went to (Nelson) Mandela (Oliver) Tambo attorneys and asked them to assist me getting a license.”
AP Television
FILE: Soweto, South Africa, 18 September 2007
6. Wide of Nelson Mandela, former President South Africa, and Maponya cutting a ribbon at the official opening of the Maponya Mall, the largest mall in Soweto
7. Cutaway media
8. UPSOUND: (English) Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa:
“With this action we declare this Mall open.”
9. Wide Mandela and Maponya shaking hands
AP Television
Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 September 2008
10. SOUNDBITE (English) Richard Maponya, South African businessman:
“We need more business people to create more job opportunities. There is lot of poverty in our country and the only way we could address this poverty is by us creating a middle class. And as this middle class grows, it pulls other people who are down the ground to the level where they could have a subsistence type of a living.”
AP Television
FILE: Soweto, South Africa, 18 September 2007
11. Wide exterior Maponya Mall, bulldozer driving past
12. Close up wall sign reading “Maponya Mall”
13. Exterior of Maponya Mall
14. Wide of Soweto township, with cooling tower
15. Wide of Soweto township
STORYLINE:
When Richard Maponya did well as a clothes salesman, his white boss could not promote him under the rules of apartheid.
So the boss offered instead to sell Maponya damaged clothes for cheap. Maponya resold the clothes after work and on weekends, and earned enough to go into business himself.
Today, the 81-year-old owns supermarkets and car dealerships, as well as the biggest mall in Soweto.
Maponya is the most prominent in a small club of early black business people who have proved what an important role black entrepreneurship can play in building post-Apartheid South Africa. Yet his success also stands out for how rare it is in a country where a quarter of the workforce, most of it black, is unemployed, and most blacks still struggle in poverty 14 years after white rule ended.
Maponya showed early signs of entrepreneurial instincts. As a boy, he dammed a stream in the northern South African hills where his family raised dairy cattle, drew water from his pool for a vegetable plot, then sold the cabbages and tomatoes to earn extra money.
Yet he did not at first consider a career in business. He studied to be a teacher, about as high an aspiration as a black South African could have had in the 1940s.
The boss offered Maponya damaged clothes to sell to customers on a “pay as you buy” basis – the term he coined for what’s known today as layaway. The practice helped his business spread by word of mouth.
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