– Dr Fundile Nyati is CEO of Proactive Health Solutions
Words from Pelokazi Madlingozi
Bhuti Mteto was always my hero: from the first memory I have of him, which goes back to the age of three. He would act like a ‘mother hen’, fending off anything, or anyone that threatened my wellbeing. I would run to him crying and he would tell me to be brave like a boy and make me confront the bullies. It made me fearless, which didn’t always work in my favour. In my teenage years, most boys were scared of me because I would intimidate them. Bhuti Mteto would even confront our mom, telling her not to raise her voice at ‘the child’ (me) because she would make me nervous. He was my protector and my hero.
When Mteto went overseas as part of the Youth Science Olympiad, I was scared that he would never return because no one in my family had ever gone abroad. When he did, he brought me a miniature of London’s Tower Bridge. It ignited my passion for overseas travel.
I doubt that he will like my reference to the fact that in higher primary he sang so sweetly that he was placed with the female voices in the school choir. We teased him.
Because of the standards he set at school, our mom and dad expected nothing less from us and at times it made life difficult. He always excelled, setting the bar very high for his younger siblings. In my first year at St John’s College, the teachers told me in no uncertain terms that as Mteto and Fundile’s younger sister, I was expected to achieve excellent grades. The pressure helped mould achievers in our family.
In his university years, Mteto and his friends listened to Radio Freedom and his political icon was former president Thabo Mbeki. I used to fear that Mteto would get detained, or disappear like other student activists. Although he didn’t realise it, he was a big influence on my political activism when I got to university. I did not listen to anyone who held views that differed from his.
The quest for academic excellence our parents instilled in us fuelled the work ethic we all have today and within all of us is a streak of business leadership, which we learned from our mother. I could never trade this for anything.
– Pelokazi Madlingozi is an Executive Manager at Proactive Health Solutions
Chapter 2
Johannesburg 1986
Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is within our power. – Benjamin Disraeli
My previous experience of the City of Gold had been as a cosseted sixteen-year-old science olympiad student. As an adult, I found it somewhat daunting and I became aware, more than ever, of the many sides to South Africa. Afrox head office, where I was to undergo a training period, was in Selby, near the city centre. Blacks weren’t allowed to live there so I had to find a place in Soweto, which was the closest township – about an hour’s ride away on public transport. I’d never stayed in a densely populated area before, let alone in one that was a hotbed of political activity. A protest campaign, which took on various forms, was gaining momentum across the country: in Soweto there were rent boycotts, mass stayaways and a spirit of defiance that even a constant military and police presence couldn’t dampen. In the city and surrounds there were occasional bomb blasts at railway stations, police stations, hotels and shopping centres.
I put my head down and concentrated on my new job. Afrox had invested in me, paying my fees from the second semester of my first year for the duration of my four-year degree. A condition of my scholarship was that during my university holidays I had to work at Afrox air-separation plants. My first job had been at a gas plant at Maydon Wharf in Durban, where I was issued with company overalls, gloves and boots and assigned to a boilermaker, who taught me how to weld. If my father had seen me – as a boilermaker’s gopher – his preconceived ideas about engineers would’ve been justified. Later, through guided experiments, I learned to research methods to improve oxygen yields from air. Gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, helium and argon are present in the air. Through cooling them past their boiling point, they are separated into components, transforming them into liquid oxygen and nitrogen – required for Afrox’s production needs. It was my first stab at chemical engineering.
The only person I knew at Afrox HQ was the labour relations manager, Lot Ndlovu, who had recruited me. He was an industrial relations expert whose ability to sidestep unions in favour of workplace forums made him useful to Afrox. Under him, grievances never made it beyond the factory floor. Cosatu had been launched in 1985 and its programme of ‘rolling mass action’ unnerved many in white-run industries. In the ’90s Lot would become president of the Black Management Forum (BMF), CEO of People’s Bank and a proponent of the reversal of inequality through realistic negotiated targets – Black Economic Empowerment.
But in the ’80s, black corporate professionals were limited to a few experiments like me. It was tough. Lot’s only advice to me was ‘don’t mess up’.
With his help I found a place to stay in Diepkloof – an electrified, fairly modern two-bedroomed house I shared with a guy from Limpopo. My housemate John and I took turns to do the cooking; he produced pap and I made umngqusho onembotyi (samp and beans). The rent was R200 a month, my salary R2 500, so I had enough left over to send money home. My three siblings still had to get through university; my mother wasn’t as strong as she used to be and business-wise there was competition in Tabase as other trading stores had opened up.
There was a bus stop a few kilometres from my new Soweto home and I caught a Putco bus to work every morning. I wasn’t exactly the epitome of sartorial elegance. I didn’t own a suit and wore the same jacket and tie every day, with mismatched trousers and shirts.
Afrox abided by the Sullivan principles, developed by African American preacher, Reverend Leon Sullivan. He’d been on the board of General Motors in the US during the ’70s and had used his corporate foothold to act against apartheid. General Motors was the biggest employer of black workers in South Africa at the time and, through pressure from Sullivan, had adopted a code of conduct that promoted corporate social responsibility and non-discrimination in the workplace. It encouraged other companies to do the same. So when I got to work at Afrox, segregation was temporarily suspended and I could use the bathroom, canteen and other facilities alongside white colleagues.
But I was still the elephant in the office. I was the only black engineer and the first black person ever to have been awarded a bursary. Apart from Lot Ndlovu, who was on another level, the only other black employees were cleaning and support staff. Not only did I have to make sure I didn’t ‘mess up’, I would have to be the elephant that danced.
I became conscious that I – along with fellow bursary student Ruth Stenhouse, a Wits Chemical Engineering graduate – was an experiment. Afrox’s internal newsletter, Inform, featured Ruth and me smiling broadly with our mentor, Dave Bawden, the operation engineer gases:
As Afrox prepares for the future so its manning patterns, as with its technology, must mirror a changing world. The selection of Ruth Stenhouse and Mteto Nyati as Afrox bursars and then engineers-in-training gives an indication of the staff who will provide our technical expertise and leadership in the years ahead.
Both these young graduates are members of minority groups: Ruth was one of three woman graduates in her class, Mteto, the only black graduate in his.
When questioned about being the first woman engineer at Afrox, Ruth, in her practical and forthright way, said she believed it was an advantage. ‘People are not likely to forget you,’ she said.
Mteto came to engineering along a traditional route; the mechanical fascination of repairing old cars told him where his interests and aptitudes lay.
Ruth and I, the rookies, were sent off to Afrox plants in Germiston and in Brits, the domain of the white male. I was pleased to have her with me. The looks we got and our exclusion from certain conversations made us acutely aware that we had to shatter