To say black South Africans lacked business acumen until others arrived is not an analysis. It is arrogance, and history does not support it
By Zola Pinda:
No one taught us how to trade – Black South Africans were not waiting to be taught how to trade.
They were already trading, building, borrowing, saving, transporting, wholesaling, manufacturing and organising long before 1994. They did so under pass laws, forced removals, influx control, racist licensing regimes, police harassment and an economy designed to deny them ownership. To suggest that black enterprise only became serious when later entrants moved into local markets is not just historically false. It is insulting.
That myth has circulated too casually for too long. It appears in lazy commentary, in shallow policy language and in the conceit one still hears in some quarters that township commerce only became disciplined, competitive or sophisticated when others arrived to show black South Africans how business works. That claim must be rejected outright.
South African men were not lazy. South African women were not bystanders in the economy. Both built markets under siege. Both created systems of circulation, savings, supply and exchange under conditions far harsher than those of the democratic era. That is not sentiment. It is the historical record.
Soweto Built Its Own Capital
If South Africa wants proof, it needs only begin with Richard Maponya and Ephraim “Mshengu” Tshabalala, the twin pillars of Soweto’s commercial history. Maponya’s rise in retail, property and hospitality was not a post-1994 miracle. It was evidence of black commercial ambition operating under active repression. Tshabalala, born in 1910 to farmworkers, rose from work as a forklift driver and bus driver to become one of South Africa’s earliest black millionaires. Beginning with a butchery in Mofolo, he built supermarkets, petrol stations, bottle stores and the iconic Eyethu Theatre, one of the earliest black-owned cinemas in the country. No one taught these men how to trade. They built anyway.
Nor were they isolated exceptions. Alongside them stood Dr Nthato Motlana, Connie Ntshona, Paul Mosaka and Kgosi Augustine Butana Chaane Motsepe — teacher, trader, traditional leader and patriarch of a family whose influence would later extend into mining, finance and national public life. These names matter because they expose the lie that black South Africans entered democracy economically blank. They did not. They brought with them commercial memory, institutional experience and long-tested entrepreneurial instinct.
Black Business Was Organised
If Maponya represented visible township capital, Sam Motsuenyane represented the organised backbone of black business. Through NAFCOC, the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry, he helped give black enterprise institutional voice, strategic direction and collective force. That legacy matters because one of the most patronising myths of the democratic era is that black enterprise before 1994 was merely a scatter of informal hustles — energetic perhaps, but unstructured and institutionally thin. That too is false.
Black business built chambers. It built advocacy networks. It built financial imagination. It understood what too many policymakers still do not: enterprise without organisation remains vulnerable. NAFCOC was not a symbolic ornament. It was one of the most important instruments of black commercial self-assertion in modern South Africa.
From The Pavement To The Chamber
That tradition later found powerful expression in Lawrence Mavundla. In 1986, he founded the African Council of Hawkers and Informal Businesses (ACHIB) to organise and defend black traders against police harassment, municipal exclusion and economic contempt. That was not a side issue in the economy. It was part of the economy’s beating heart — the world of pavements, rank economies, stalls, small goods, circulating cash and daily survival.
Mavundla later rose to the presidency of NAFCOC, linking the world of pavement traders to the apex of organised black business. Under his leadership, NAFCOC was associated with a R1 billion enterprise development initiative for black-owned small and medium enterprises. That fact alone should silence anyone who still speaks as though black business institutions lacked seriousness or scale.
As ACHIB approaches its 40th anniversary in November 2026, South Africa should recognise what is being marked: not merely the longevity of an organisation, but the endurance of black economic self-organisation under hostility and neglect.
Beyond Johannesburg — The National Map Of Black Enterprise
This history was never confined to Johannesburg. In the former Transkei, Agrippa Mayaba built hotel and bakery enterprises under homeland-era constraints. In Bophuthatswana, Sam Molope built one of South Africa’s first black-owned bakeries into a major industrial operation, while Habakuk Shikwane built manufacturing capacity under deeply restrictive conditions. Herman Mashaba launched Black Like Me from Ga-Rankuwa because apartheid geography left black industrialists few other routes to scale. In the former Ciskei, and across Eastern Cape commercial zones, families such as the Headbush, Tini and Kakaza families sustained local economies in transport, retail, butcheries and funeral services. In Venda, as in the other homeland territories, black enterprise carved out room within deeply unequal political geographies.
None of this should be romanticised. The homeland economies were compromised, distorted and often ugly. But they cannot be erased either. They form part of the national record, and that record says something unmistakable: black enterprise in South Africa was widespread, regionally rooted, adaptive and historically serious.
The Trading Arteries Apartheid Destroyed
The same is true of places too often remembered only for political violence or forced removals. Sophiatown was not just a cultural symbol. It was a commercial ecosystem of landlords, traders, restaurants, artisans and transport operators before the apartheid state destroyed it. Marabastad in Pretoria was one of the country’s great early trading centres, linking rural producers, urban consumers and African-owned businesses. Park Station in Johannesburg was more than a transport hub. It became one of the great arteries of black commerce, moving commuters, stock, produce and traders between wholesale markets, townships and rural communities.
Organised Commerce, Not Guesswork
There was also far more structure to black retail than contemporary amnesia allows. Metro Cash & Carry, later linked to Metcash, supplied independent retailers across townships, peri-urban communities and rural settlements. Through banner-store systems like Lucky 7, Buy Rite, Viva-Supa-Save, Pop-In and Square Deal, and later through Seven Eleven, independent black-owned shops retained ownership while participating in organised frameworks of bulk purchasing, inventory support, branding and supply logistics. That was not disorder. That was not guesswork. That was organised commerce.
Black South Africans understood stock, margins, customer loyalty, credit, turnover and reinvestment. They built stokvels, burial societies, rotating savings clubs, church savings systems and buying clubs when formal finance refused them. What they lacked was not business acumen. What they lacked was a state willing to recognise, finance, modernise and protect what they had already built. The current state failed what history built – that remains the democratic failure.
The challenge after 1994 was never to teach black South Africans how to trade. It was to capitalise and scale a living commercial tradition. On that test, democratic South Africa has been far too complacent. Access to finance remained weak. Working capital stayed scarce. Warehousing, logistics, security support and trading infrastructure were neglected. Municipal enforcement was inconsistent. Development agencies were fragmented. Workshops were offered where capital was needed. Slogans were offered where strategy was required. That is the real scandal.
Not that black South Africans lacked entrepreneurial intelligence. Not that township commerce lacked sophistication. But that a democratic state inherited a resilient black commercial base and failed to strengthen it with enough seriousness.
The Myth Ends Here
This is why the myth must now end. Any claim that black South Africans had to be taught commerce by later entrants is not only historically false. It is an insult to generations who traded under pass laws, police harassment, forced removals and structural exclusion, and still built enduring business traditions. The township economy was not imported. It was built — by South Africans.
That truth matters especially now, when small businesses, township trade and regional production are still treated as decorative sidebars to the so-called main economy. They are not sidebars. For millions, they are the main economy.
The Eastern Cape — A Blueprint That Already Exists
This applies with particular force to the Eastern Cape, a province too often described as broken when it is in fact neglected and strategically mismanaged. Magwa tea estates, Dimbaza factories, Tyefu, Zanyokwe, the pineapple belts around Peddie, Fort Cox College of Agriculture, Fort Hare University, livestock systems and rural value chains all point to the same fact: the blueprint exists. What is missing is not the possibility, but state seriousness.
The NDR and Economic Strategy Debate Must Start Here
The timing of this discussion is especially significant. As South Africa prepares for the forthcoming national dialogue on the National Democratic Revolution and the country’s economic strategy, that debate should begin with an honest appreciation of this history. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. The commercial foundations of black enterprise already exist. The challenge before policymakers is to capitalise, modernise and expand what generations of South Africans built under extraordinarily difficult conditions.
If that debate is to make a lasting contribution, it should concern itself less with myths about who taught black South Africans how to trade, and more with the practical reforms needed to unlock the full potential of a commercial tradition that has endured for well over a century.
The Point, Plainly Stated
South Africa does not need another lecture about entrepreneurship. It does not need condescension from those who do not know this history. It needs qualified economic leadership, sound financial systems, affordable stock finance, trading infrastructure, logistics, procurement pathways, compliance support, and deliberate backing for black-owned retail, black farming and small enterprise.
Let the point be made plainly:
Black South Africans did not need to be taught how to trade.
They were already doing it.
Under harsher conditions.
With less support.
At a greater cost.
That is our history. That is the answer. And that is why the myth must end.
Author bio: Zola Pinda is a Rhodes University-trained journalist, writer, and commentator specialising in South African economic history, township enterprise, governance and public policy. He previously served as Director of Communications for the Directorate of Special Operations (Scorpions) and the National Prosecuting Authority, and later as an Assistant Director-General in the South African government. – @NewsSA_Online
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