The Outsider: The Biography of Herman Mashaba

By Prince Mashele

Across the world, outsiders have been infiltrating the theatre of mainstream politics: Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine, Donald Trump in the US, Emmanuel Macron in France, Hakainde Hichilema in Zambia and, in South Africa, Herman Mashaba, who went from being a business tycoon to Johannesburg' s mayor and founder of his own political party, ActionSA. In his trademark opinionated fashion, political scientist Prince Mashele traces Mashaba' s life from dire poverty to building the Black Like Me empire. He delivers a fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of Mashaba' s dramatic rise to the Jo' burg mayor' s office, managing the fragile coalition with the EFF and seeing off ANC dirty tricks. New information and insights abound in the tale of Mashaba' s bitter falling out with the DA. What emerges in this biography is a portrait of a pragmatic man with a passion for capitalism, a novice politician who defies ideological boxes. In Mashele' s hands, Mashaba is also the perfect foil for our troubling political machinery, revealing ever more sharply the fault lines of South Africa' s political system and the rot of the ANC in government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookstorm
• Release date: Sep 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9780639795737

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PREFACE

Since about 2007, South Africa has been undergoing precipitous decline and seismic political change. The country has been caught up in a chaotic transition from anti-colonial liberation to a new and uncertain type of politics. The now-soiled moral standing of the African National Congress (ANC), exacerbated by brazen corruption and perennial ructions in the party, is a symptom of the generalised decay in South Africa’s body politic.

By the early 2010s, the signs of the ANC’s impending fall had become more visible. A significant segment of black South Africans had begun to express support for parties opposed to the governing ANC. The Democratic Alliance (DA) became so emboldened as to depict itself as a potential alternative government, trumpeting its successes in the few municipalities it was governing in the Western Cape, and Midvaal in Gauteng. There was a palpable feeling of confidence on the part of DA leaders as they imagined themselves at the helm of the state.

The birth of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), on 26 July 2013, manifested yet another symptom of the ANC’s irreversible slide into the political grave. The EFF was formed after its founding leader, Julius Malema, and his deputy, Floyd Shivambu, were expelled from the ANC. Barely three years after the EFF was launched, the party secured sufficient votes in the 2016 municipal elections to enable the DA, for the first time since 1994, to constitute coalition governments in three strategic metropolitan municipalities that had hitherto been governed securely by the ANC: Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg and Tshwane. At this stage, even the dimmest observer could discern that the hand of history was busy rearranging our country’s future.

The political tumult that engulfed South Africa in the 2010s generated a cloud of dust that obscured the thoroughgoing change in the country – a decisive shift from the shattering disappointments of a hopeful past to the anxiety of an uncertain future. As someone whose occupation involves monitoring the pulse of the South African nation, the gravity of the transformation that was taking place did not escape me. The book I co-authored with Professor Mzukisi Qobo, The Fall of the ANC: What Next?, published in 2014, was an attempt to awaken South Africans to the magnitude of the changes that were taking place. Alas, it seems to be the fate of the prescient never to be taken seriously when they paint pictures of a new world.

As corruption, factional infighting and leadership indecisiveness continued to devour the soul of the ANC, and as leaders of the DA and the EFF grew more exuberant about their political prospects, a new political phenomenon was taking hold in Europe and the United States (US). This development was captured by British political columnist and TV presenter Steve Richards in his 2018 book, The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Has Lost Its Way.

In 2014, a businessman and banker who decided to storm the political palace, Petro Poroshenko, was elected as Ukraine’s president, and was succeeded in 2019 by a comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky. In 2018, a new populist party, the Five Star Movement, formed in 2009 by Beppe Grillo (comedian and blogger) and Gianroberto Casaleggio (web strategist), secured 32 per cent of Italy’s national vote, thus enabling the party’s leader, Giuseppe Conte, to form a coalition government and become prime minister. This is only a snapshot of a wider trend of outsiders who have captured Europe’s political theatres.

The most dramatic evidence of this new phenomenon manifested itself in 2016 in the US, where an attention-obsessed billionaire and shamelessly mendacious megalomaniac, Donald Trump, stormed into the White House by defeating an old hand in politics, Hillary Clinton. Before beating Clinton, Trump trounced a whole line-up of traditional political rivals, in the process capturing and instrumentalising the Republican Party. The entire world was stunned.

The outsider phenomenon would reach African shores when the successful businessman Hakainde Hichilema, after five attempts, was eventually elected Zambia’s president in 2021. Hichilema’s untraditional manner of doing politics was clearly inspired by what was going on in the wider world.

Watching these global events from a politically turbulent and changing South Africa, I had a hunch that, in its own subtle ways, the phenomenon of the rise of outsiders was well afoot in our country. After reading The Rise of the Outsiders in 2018, I became convinced that I had spotted in South Africa what Steve Richards had identified in Europe and the US. Instead of engendering discouragement, the doubt that crept into my contemplation served to intensify my growing conviction.

The outsider I saw as the South African embodiment of the rise-of-outsiders phenomenon was Herman Mashaba, the successful businessman who had shocked most observers by joining the DA and, quite unpredictably, becoming mayor of Johannesburg. I spent long hours and sleepless nights trying to convince myself that I was mistaken in thinking that Herman Mashaba was the outsider with the potential to upset South Africa’s politics. To be frank, I was a victim of my own prejudice. When Mashaba announced his decision to enter politics, I was quick to dismiss him as an impetuous novice who would be quickly chewed up and spat out by the grinding jaws of South Africa’s pulverising political machine.

My hunch haunted me throughout 2018. Repeatedly, the image of Herman Mashaba potentially upsetting South Africa’s politics on a massive scale visited my mind. At some point I was convinced I was right. My next problem was that I felt as though I had insufficient knowledge of the man. I also had a sense that, like me, the South African public did not quite know who Herman Mashaba was. After reading his short autobiography, Black Like You (2012, second edition 2017), I felt I had been given an appetiser and was waiting for the main course. Even his second book, Capitalist Crusader: Fighting Poverty through Economic Growth (2015), did little to quench my thirst for knowledge. After all, these were books written by Herman Mashaba about himself. The idea of someone beating the drum for himself and dancing at the same time has always sat uneasily with me.

To be clear, I felt that Mashaba’s two books were not comprehensive enough, that they did not situate him properly in the socio-political context of his upbringing and adult life. My conclusion, therefore, was that the books left important gaps for those who seek to understand Mashaba’s character and its making. I also did not think that the books, especially Black Like You, managed to approach the kind of brutal honesty with which, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau reflects on his own life in his autobiography, The Confessions. I found Capitalist Crusader a tad unstructured, and therefore unsatisfying. In short, I felt there was still a great deal to be explored about the man.

And so, in the last quarter of 2018, I contacted Mashaba to request a meeting, which he granted. I met the then mayor of Johannesburg at his home, where I presented my idea of writing his biography, a book that would go far beyond what he had already written about himself. I learned at that meeting that his then chief of staff, Michael Beaumont, had already begun writing a book focusing on Mashaba’s work in the mayoral office. Mashaba immediately appreciated the comprehensiveness and wide-ranging nature of what I proposed. After another follow-up meeting in the presence of his wife, Connie, I was assured of the access I needed to write the kind of book I had in mind.

When Michael Beaumont’s book, The Accidental Mayor: Herman Mashaba and the Battle for Johannesburg, eventually came out in 2020, it became clear to me that a book written by an insider has its own strengths and disadvantages. Apart from the book’s narrow focus, Beaumont’s position as Mashaba’s subordinate in the City of Johannesburg imposed real limitations. There are things one can and cannot say about one’s boss. That is just how life works. This is not to subtract anything from the valuable insights contained in The Accidental Mayor. Those who have not read Beaumont’s book are indeed at a disadvantage.

As I embarked upon the research that produced the book you are now reading, it became clear that I had got more than I bargained for. There was no piece of information I asked for that I was not given. For three years, since the beginning of 2019, I became an almost permanent presence around Herman Mashaba. I followed him to public events in Johannesburg, and to those of his then political party, the DA, and eventually those of his new party, ActionSA.

I also observed Mashaba in private settings – while dining with his family or having fun with friends. I interviewed villagers and relatives who grew up with him, and visited the places where he grew up. Almost every second weekend, I sat down with Mashaba for interviews on various aspects of his past and present life. There was a hard-and-fast rule from the beginning, however: the subsequent book would be mine, and I would therefore have the final say on its contents. In short, Mashaba would have no right to tell me what to write and what not to write, other than suggesting factual corrections – such as dates, names or places. Indeed, proud writers are finicky about protecting the independence and integrity of their work. The Outsider is a book I own fully. I hope that when you finish reading the last page, you will feel that you know Herman Mashaba better than before.

As I was contemplating how to approach the book, it dawned on me that Mashaba’s life is in a way interwoven with that of our broader society. This is the realisation that made me adopt a style that may seem to transcend my subject. It seemed to me that Mashaba’s life provides a viewpoint that allows us to see the wider vista of the socio-political affairs that have shaped and evolved into the idea and reality we call South Africa.

It is obviously premature to judge whether my hunch was right about Mashaba’s potential impact on South Africa’s body politic. The game is still on. The player is busy running and sweating on the field. But most honest observers have already agreed that, after the 2021 municipal elections, Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA emerged among the biggest winners, especially in Gauteng. Let the future be the judge. History is disdainful of critics whose elected role in life is to ridicule those who dare to say or do something, even if they are wrong.

Chapter 1

A window on southern Africa

As soon as young Herman became conscious, he was made aware that his father, Silas Matinte Mashaba, who died in 1961 when Herman was two years old, was Shangaan. Although he always acknowledged his ethnic heritage, Mashaba has never really invested time to gather details about his Shangaan family tree. The problem was that there was no one from his father’s side who could share stories about the circumstances that took the first Mashaba, great-grandfather Samtseu, to the farming area of Rama, about 30 kilometres southwest of Hammanskraal, outside Pretoria. As people of oral traditions, Africans generally do not leave behind written records that detail the evolution of their families. What younger generations get to know about the history of their families emanates largely from stories told by older members, seniors who themselves received the stories from earlier generations.

The problem with oral tradition is that children who grow up in households where the custodians of their family history are already dead have no other way of retracing the evolution of their family trees. This was Mashaba’s predicament. He was born into a Sepedi cultural environment and had no one from the Shangaan side of his family to initiate him into his Shangaan heritage and culture. There was no one to tell the young boy where his paternal line originally came from. The boy was immersed in the Sepedi culture of his mother and the community he found himself in, which explains why Mashaba never spoke the language of his father’s blood, Xichangani (Shangaan dialect).

Where it all began

The story of how Mashaba’s great-grandfather, Samtseu, came to settle north of Pretoria provides a window on the vast and tumultuous nineteenth-century movements that left a permanent mark on the demographic face of southern Africa. This was the period known as Mfecane (in Nguni) or Difaqane (in Sesotho), meaning ‘forced migration’. The people who are called Shangaan (or Machangana in the vernacular) emerged from this forced migration and, over a long period of time, incorporated or assimilated people from other ethnic groups, eventually congealing into a culturally distinct tribe.

It all began with a warrior empire-builder, Soshangana Nxumalo, who fled from the place we today call Nongoma in KwaZulu-Natal and trekked with his brothers and followers towards Delagoa Bay (in what is today Mozambique). This was at a time, in the 1820s, when the Zulu king, Shaka, was expanding his kingdom. Having heard of Shaka’s menacing approach, Soshangana mobilised his people and fled to the northeast. During his escape, Soshangana conquered and disrupted the settled lives of people he encountered on his way. It was a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of everyone against everyone. Shaka’s forces did pursue Soshangana, and the latter stamped his military authority by defeating the Zulu army at Bileni (c. 1828).

Having escaped a potential forced incorporation into Shaka’s nascent Zulu nation, Soshangana deliberately proceeded to conquer other tribes (the Rhonga, Ndzawu, Hlengwe, Shona, Copi, Tsonga and others) to form a new empire, which he named Gaza after his grandfather. The process of establishing the Gaza Empire was a long one; it involved military clashes with numerous indigenous chiefdoms. The process was also an itinerant one. Soshangana moved around and settled in different places, thus disrupting the settled lives of people as far afield as modern Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi – all the way to Tanzania. For example, when Soshangana clashed with Chief Zwangendaba Hlatswayo of the Jele clan, Zwangendaba fled through several southern African polities all the way to Tanzania. That is why, to this day, people with Nguni surnames are found across the southern African region. True to its meaning, the Mfecane forced people to move around, in the process merging and amalgamating tribes and clans into new, composite nations.

From time to time, Soshangana’s forces also clashed with the Portuguese colonialists who had settled at Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), on Delagoa Bay. For example, in 1833 the Portuguese governor, DA Ribeiro, was forced by Soshangana’s army to flee the settlement and shelter on the island of Xefina. Thus, the Portuguese viewed the Gaza Empire as a menace to be obliterated. Indeed, military skirmishes between the Portuguese and the Gaza Empire were common. In fact, the eventual fall of the empire, in 1895, was brought about partly by incessant Portuguese military pressure. But this was long after Soshangana’s death in 1858.

When Soshangana died, his two sons, Mzila and Mawewe, fought bitterly over the throne, which their father had bequeathed to Mzila, the elder. Under military pressure from his younger brother, Mzila fled Gaza to settle and establish his throne in what the Afrikaners had demarcated as part of ‘their’ eastern and northern Transvaal. Having fled English rule in the Cape Colony, in the 1830s (during the Great Trek), the Afrikaners eventually founded their Transvaal Republic in 1852, after a series of military skirmishes with indigenous Africans.

The decisive victory of the Portuguese over the Gaza Empire was actually achieved under Mzila’s son, Nghunghunyana, who had taken over the throne after his father’s death. Nghunghunyana was captured in 1896 and sent to Portugal with his two sons, Godide and Buyisonto, together with members of his military.1 Indeed, Nghunghunyana never returned to Africa. He died in Europe.

After Nghunghunyana’s capture, Mpisane Nxumalo, Nghunghunyana’s uncle, acted as regent (1896–1910) for one of Nghunghunyana’s uncaptured sons, Thulamahashe, who was a minor at the time. To secure his kingdom against the constant menace of the Portuguese, and to avoid the fate that befell his exiled nephew, Mpisane moved from Gaza and settled in today’s Bushbuckridge. This is the location, to this day, of the Nxumalo chiefdom, or Amashangana Tribal Authority, in the village of New Forest, about 20 kilometres northeast of Bushbuckridge.

The question is whether Mpisane’s move represented the relocation of the throne of the original Gaza Empire, or whether it implied the dissolution of the original empire and the construction of a new one in a new place. In 2014, the then chief of the Amashangana Tribal Authority, Eric Nxumalo (who died in March 2021), went all the way to South Africa’s Constitutional Court to seek confirmation that he was the king of Amashangana, claiming that he was the great-grandson of the founder of the original Gaza Empire, Soshangana Nxumalo.

Before approaching the Constitutional Court, Chief Nxumalo had, in 2006, asked the Commission on Traditional Disputes and Claims to confirm his claim. The commission rejected the chief’s claim on the grounds that the Gaza Empire dissolved in the last decade of the nineteenth century, which essentially meant that it ended with the exile of Nghunghunyana – meaning that what Mpisane established at Bushbuckridge was not a restoration of the original Gaza Empire but the establishment of a new tribal authority. The Constitutional Court respected the authority of the Commission on Traditional Disputes and Claims, and therefore accepted its injunction on the Amashangana matter. Thus, the case was closed and sealed: the Gaza Empire fell in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Disputes relating to thrones in tribal societies are almost impossible to resolve, for such disputes typically go back to periods when even the legitimacy of the founder is contestable. We know, for example, that Shaka Zulu conquered an assortment of clans to construct his Zulu nation. We also know that Soshangana himself conquered people belonging to different clans and chiefdoms to build his Gaza Empire. The question is: does it make sense for a traditional leader in democratic South Africa to make a case for the legitimacy of his or her throne based on arbitrary acts committed by those who founded kingdoms by conquering others?

Such questions are extremely complex. The problem is that attempts to answer them enmesh myths, fabrications and emotions at the expense of reason and truth. It should therefore not matter, for modern South Africans, as to who is the king or chief of Amashangana. What is more important is, who are the people we call Shangaans today? In other words, who are Herman Mashaba’s people, and how did it happen for him to be born far away from his people in Hammanskraal?

Tsonga or Shangaan?

It should be clear by now that Mashaba’s people – Amashangana or Machangana or Shangaan – are mainly concentrated in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga province. They are called ‘Shangaans’ because they are the people of Soshangana. As the founder of the Amashangana nation, Soshangana has connected his people to wider and more mixed identities of the people of southern Africa.

Soshangana himself was an Nguni (or ‘Mungoni’ as Machangana would put it), and his people, too, have a Nguni heritage. Today, one finds in Bushbuckridge such Nguni surnames as Khoza (or Khosa), Zitha, Ngobeni, Nxumalo, Hlatswayo, Mkhabela, Ndlovu and indeed Mashaba – to name a few. These surnames are also quite common in KwaZulu, and they are found in eSwatini, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and as far afield as Zambia and Malawi.

When we say the story of Herman Mashaba is a window on the vast and tumultuous nineteenth-century movements that left a permanent mark on the demographic face of southern Africa, that is precisely what we mean. It is evident from the portrait painted above that the people we call Shangaans today cannot be separated from the Zulu people or the Swati people or the Ndebele people or the Rhonga people or even the Shona people. They were all disrupted or ‘diluted’ by the Mfecane.

When Mashaba tells people that he is Shangaan, some people remind him that he is a Tsonga, not Shangaan. In fact, there are people who are offended by being called Shangaan, preferring to be referred to as Tsonga. This raises the question: are Tsonga and Shangaan people the same, or is it a mistake to call oneself Shangaan?

As we have observed above, the Tsonga people were among those who were conquered by Soshangana. The Tsonga lived in Mozambique and were also affected by the Mfecane, and they have continued to move well into the twentieth century. Some of them have integrated into the Shangaan while others have kept their identity, and they are mostly found in the far northeastern part of today’s Limpopo province, around Giyani, Malamulele and Tzaneen. The surnames of the Tsonga are distinct: Mboweni, Makhuvele, Shilowa, Baloyi, Mashele, Shivambu, and so on.

Since the Tsonga and the Shangaan became part of the Gaza Empire under Soshangana, the two groups have generally identified as one in South Africa, even though they have cultural differences and speak divergent dialects. A Shangaan from Bushbuckridge speaks a dialect that is markedly different from that spoken by a Tsonga from Giyani. It is generally the Tsonga who remind Herman Mashaba that he is not Shangaan, when he is in fact Shangaan.

The Tsonga-Shangaan situation became even more complicated in the 1970s, when the apartheid government balkanised South Africa and corralled black people into ten ‘homelands’ demarcated for specific ethnic groups. The homelands were the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Venda, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele, KwaZulu, Lebowa and QwaQwa. The aim was to cement the isolation of Africans into distinct ethnic groups.

Given that both the Tsonga and Shangaan had no joint kingdom (since the Gaza Empire was long gone), the apartheid government decided to construct a single homeland for both. This was based on practical considerations connected to the socio-linguistic proximity of the two groups, a linguistic harmonisation that had evolved for more than a century since Soshangana conquered the Tsonga and others to form the Gaza Empire. But, in its scheme to create a single integrative homeland for both the Tsonga and Shangaan, the apartheid government had to find a leader who would be accepted as legitimate by the two groups.

Since it would not be possible to manufacture a historical narrative that would dupe both the Tsonga and Shangaan into accepting one individual as the incarnation of their joint heritage, the apartheid government opted for a brutally practical solution: the government simply handpicked and imposed Professor Hudson William Edison Ntsanwisi, a Tsonga who was busy constructing and codifying a new Xitsonga language at the University of the North (also known as Turfloop, now the University of Limpopo).

Professor Ntsanwisi was happy to be so elevated. He named the new homeland Gazankulu, which means the ‘bigger’ or ‘older’ Gaza. This was obviously meant to slight the well-known Gaza of Mozambique, which is one of the reasons why the legendary former president of that country, Samora Machel, hated Ntsanwisi with passion.

From the outset, Ntsanwisi was acutely aware that he would be presiding over two distinct tribes, the Tsonga and Shangaan. That is why he gave ‘his’ new nation the official name ‘Vatsonga-Machangana’. As a linguist, Ntsanwisi saw his political elevation as a golden opportunity to stamp an indelible mark on his new nation. He declared the language he had constructed, Xitsonga, as the official language of the Vatsonga-Machangana nation. This meant that the Shangaan of Bushbuckridge and the Tsonga of the far north, including their scatterings across the country, would share the same official language. Xitsonga has since been and continues to be the official language of both the Tsonga and the Shangaan, even though the two tribes speak different dialects.

The second migration

If the Mfecane was the first period of migration that redefined the demographic make-up of southern Africa, the discovery of mineral resources (especially gold) in the second half of the nineteenth century represented the second significant migration. Not only did this process bring white people from Europe and North America to the southern tip of Africa, but the discovery also triggered the movement of Africans from the southern African region into the Witwatersrand (now Johannesburg) and other parts of what is today called Gauteng province.

Since the 1880s, the Witwatersrand has attracted millions of people from across the world, searching for economic opportunities. Since white people from the outset arrogated the legal right to own the mining companies that extracted the gold, this meant that Africans could only seek employment from whites. Some Africans came voluntarily, while others arrived as part of systematic labour recruitment schemes designed by the South African Chamber of Mines. Over time, Johannesburg became the centre of attraction for Africans who thirsted for material prosperity. Everyone wanted to go to the City of Gold.

Not all people who went to the place of gold found a job. Thus, some Africans drifted away from Johannesburg to the periphery, hoping to find work on white-owned farms. The discovery of platinum in the northern Transvaal in the 1920s also served to pull both white fortune hunters and black job seekers to the north. In fact, the northward pull had begun some years earlier, following the discovery of diamonds by Sir Thomas Cullinan in 1903, in what would become the small town of Cullinan (northeast of Pretoria).

The Africans who came to the Witwatersrand from other parts of the region were naturally drawn to existing human settlements. Thus, it came about that the originally Pedi and Tswana communities who lived north of Johannesburg, for example, absorbed Africans who came seeking economic opportunity.

Hammanskraal is one such community. The Pedi people are known to have lived in the area since the 1700s, and they were later joined by the Ndebele in the nineteenth century, as a result of the Mfecane. That a part of Hammanskraal has been named ‘Temba’ (‘hope’ in Nguni) reveals the depth of the aspirations of those who came to this place.

In 2018, the bones of Samtseu Mashaba, Herman’s great-grandfather, who, by all indications, came to the Rama area from Mozambique, were exhumed from a white-owned farm in Rama and relocated to a new burial site by the Mashaba family. Samtseu’s remains were discovered by pure fluke when Moloka Magolego, the son-in-law of Silas Parkies, Mashaba’s nephew, chanced upon a dilapidated headstone marking the grave of one ‘Samtseu Mashaba’. After receiving the news, the Mashaba family’s investigation confirmed that the remains were those of Samtseu, a Shangaan man who must have come to the area as a boy, driven by the same hope that drew other Africans to Temba.

That Samtseu’s remains were discovered on a white-owned farm confirmed that his hope of finding a job was eventually fulfilled. But this is not exactly what brought joy to Herman and his sisters; what made the Mashabas more jubilant was to discover the founding father of their family, the Shangaan interloper who came to disrupt the ethnic purity of the Pedi people – Samtseu Mashaba himself. Soon after they reburied those bones on 29 September 2018, every member of the Mashaba family who attended the ceremony felt a strange moment of calm in their chest – as if, after he had been reunited with his descendants, the long-dead Samtseu decided to touch every Mashaba heart that was there.

Chapter 2

Growing up

The image of a successful person generally presupposes a comfortable upbringing. Stupendous success and accomplishments can easily obscure hardships experienced while growing up. It is hard to imagine a famous millionaire as a struggling girl or boy. When rich people tell stories of their poverty-stricken youthful lives, the stories have the incredulous ring of an embellished autobiography. Yet we all know that, short as it is, human life can, like a pendulum, swing between extremes. Penury and opulence can combine to define a single human life. Even as we are tantalised by a life that begins and ends in comfort, we are at the same time awed by success built out of hardship.

Indeed, the strength of a tree is revealed more by its roots than its leaves. Leaves wither away and reappear in spring; roots sustain a plant even in the bitterest of winter. We must study roots if we are to understand how leaves gain their lushness. In other words, we will not make sense of Herman Mashaba the successful businessman if we do not grasp how his roots sustained him from rags to riches. We must study his roots to understand how his upbringing and environment moulded the man who would become the mayor of the City of Johannesburg, the rookie politician who harboured the strange ambition to rescue South Africa.

Hammanskraal

When white settlers first arrived in different parts of South Africa, they registered their presence by naming their new settlements. Natural landmarks such as mountains and rivers were also given names that made it clear that the white man had taken possession of the natural environment. Generally, the new names were meant to soothe the nostalgic souls of the settlers by reminding them of their place of origin – for example, East London – or to monumentalise the name of a specific pioneer settler. Other names were designed to memorialise the name of a pioneer or founder settler. Pretoria, for example, was meant to immortalise Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius, the Afrikaner leader behind the creation of the South African Republic, or Transvaal.

Being a pioneer or founder settler did not mean that the person after whom a place was named necessarily had to be a leader. There are many places in South Africa that were named after ordinary settlers who were fortune hunters or who went around searching for fertile farmland. Hammanskraal, the village where Herman Mashaba was born and raised, is one such unheroic name. An Afrikaner farmer by the name of Hamman settled in the area in the late 1800s. Hamman was a livestock farmer who built a large kraal (pen or corral) to protect his cattle from lions.

Hamman set up his farm primarily to supply food to the booming mining community of the Witwatersrand. There were spinoffs for the local people since Hamman needed labour from the neighbourhood and provided food to surrounding communities. Thus, when the place was named after Hamman, the natives did not protest. Even after 1994, black people who lived in the area did not press the new democratic government to rename Hammanskraal.

Hammanskraal is a predominantly black settlement, consisting of rural and semi-urban areas such as Ga-Ramotse, Temba, Majaneng, Ga-Kekana, Makapanstad, Stinkwater and others. In 2020, the whole area had a population of about 30 000. While it is part of Gauteng province, there are parts of Hammanskraal that overlap with three other provinces: Limpopo, North West and Mpumalanga. This brings cultural wealth to Hammanskraal. Four African languages are spoken in the area: Setswana, Sepedi, Xitsonga and IsiNdebele. And Hamman’s descendants continue to farm and speak their language, Afrikaans, around Hammanskraal.

The birth of a high man

The month of December is a busy time in South Africa. It is characterised by all manner of festivities leading up to Christmas. It is during this time that migrant laborers are given an extended period to go home to spend time with their families and loved ones. Thus, December offers lovers who spend months apart the opportunity to enjoy each other’s company. Even schools are in recess, thus giving children playtime without the pressures of schoolwork. It is also a time when naughty teenagers experiment with things they ought to taste in adulthood. Suburban residents are either braaiing (barbecuing) or heading off somewhere on holiday. In the townships and rural areas, shebeens come alive in December. Pockets that are usually notorious for their perpetual emptiness have something in them at this time of year. In short, December is a month of joy and love. It is not surprising, therefore, that Herman Mashaba was conceived during this month. Hence his birth nine months later – on 26 August 1959.

Sometimes coincidence suggests providence. Herman Mashaba was born at the height of apartheid, almost exactly a year after the architect of that evil system, Hendrik Verwoerd, became South Africa’s prime minister, in September 1958. On the other side of the political divide, the year and month of Mashaba’s birth saw the construction of a political home that would eventually accommodate Herman Mashaba, albeit temporarily. This was when Helen Suzman and a group of liberals broke away from the then United Party (UP) to form the Progressive Party. The Progs, as they became known in popular parlance, were the forerunner of the Democratic Party (DP), which would later morph into the DA. Where non-believers see historical coincidence, believers notice the hand of Providence.

What we know is that the day Herman was born, his paternal grandfather, Papa Koos ‘Kose’ Mashaba, went around the village telling everyone that a ‘High Man’ had been born in his family. He told people that his grandson would grow to become a very important person. There is nothing to suggest that the excited old man was religious, or that he possessed prophetic gifts. The village knew him for his love of alcohol and his loud and jolly singing when he drank too much. Maybe that is why nobody took him seriously when he sang and told the whole village about the birth of a baby he named ‘Highman’.

Even his own family did not take old Papa Kose seriously. He had earnestly asked his son, Silas, to name the new baby Highman. But nobody listened to the poor old man. Instead, the parents, Silas Matinte and Mapula Mashaba, named their baby Samtseu Philip Mashaba. These are the names entered on the birth certificate. Although his preferred name did not make it onto the birth certificate, the old man did not stop telling the village about Highman. In the end, no one in the village called the new baby Samtseu or Philip. As he became a boy, and later a teenager, everyone called him Highman. The name stuck. It became the young man’s real name in the community – even in the family, birth certificate notwithstanding.

As he was growing up, the young man did not know precisely why his grandfather had named him Highman. He embraced the name, but it at the same time felt a bit heavy. Becoming aware in a sea of poverty, the young man could not understand what was ‘high’ about his impoverished situation. To be called Highman while you wallow in poverty felt like a mockery. Also, the name sounded odd; the young man had never heard of anyone else called Highman. The closest was Herman, a name that landed well on the young man’s ears. So, when he became an adult, he decided to modify his name and have it registered on his identity document. That is how Samtseu Philip ‘Highman’ became Herman Mashaba.

Herman Mashaba is the fifth child of his parents. He had three older sisters (Esther, Florah and Conny), a brother (Pobani) and a younger sister (Nancy). The death of his father, when the boy was two years old, made it impossible for Herman to have lasting father-and-son memories. Other than the black-and-white picture of his father he has kept in his family album, Herman has nothing to remind him of the existence of his father. The role of father-figure was performed by Papa Kose, who literally adopted the boy from the day he was born. Even in later life, Herman’s face still lights up when he contemplates his grandfather. He is eternally grateful for the abundant love the old man poured unreservedly upon his beloved Highman.

As poor and uneducated as Papa Kose was, there was something important about the old man. He owned a bicycle. For black people in the rural world of his day, a bicycle was not a tool for exercise; it was an essential mode of transport. To own a bicycle meant that one could reach faraway villages. A man who owned a bicycle could even secure himself a beautiful girlfriend, and thus render those without such transport envious. Papa Kose rode high on his bicycle. Perhaps that is why he saw ‘highness’ where others did not.

Perhaps Papa Kose’s bicycle facilitated access to transcendence, allowing him to glimpse the future before it happened. Herman’s elder sister, Flora, remembered that nothing made her Ntate-Mogolo (grandfather) happier than Herman’s birth. ‘We thought the old man was joking,’ Flora recalled. ‘With hindsight, I now think we underestimated our grandfather’s soothsayer gifts.’

What was important about Papa Kose and his bicycle, though, was not girlfriends and such naughty privileges. Having gone out to work the whole day, Papa Kose would bring something back for his grandchildren. As a boy, Herman would