Word: richards
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Americans who come to see Lucy in Houston or on tour might come to see Ethiopia too. But scientists say that argument is wrongheaded. "People will go to Ethiopia to see Lucy, but why should they travel to Ethiopia if Lucy has come to their local museum?" says paleontologist Richard Leakey. "Sending Lucy or any other original fossil to America will bring status to second-level U.S. museums. It will do nothing for Ethiopian tourism or for science. It sets a terrible precedent. It is exploitation of the worst kind...