The ranger reached for the radio and despatched a crackly word of warning to other guides in the vicinity. In the gathering dusk the outline of an angry bull elephant could be seen 100 metres away. It was moving at considerable speed towards the Jeep laden with British tourists.
A ponderous six-point-turn later, and with the elephant closing fast, the Jeep headed round the corner where several more elephants were blocking the track. The ranger span the wheel and surged off the track into the bush, crushing giant gorse bushes and bouncing off rocks to escape.
The two-minute drama in South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve would have been familiar to many a safari tourist over the years lucky enough to have had a dose of big game-induced adrenaline without a serious risk of being trampled on or mauled. But there was one big difference.
This one was not one of those tanned white Africans who for decades dominated southern Africa’s safari holidays. The guide was a black South African from the local village. Not only is Patience Bogatsu the country’s first black female bush guide but her position stems from an inspiring story of post-apartheid black economic empowerment (BEE).
BEE has become rather controversial in South Africa. It was designed by President Thabo Mbeki’s government as a way of redressing apartheid’s inequalities, by the transfer of meaningful stakes in traditionally white businesses to black entities.
But its critics argue that its main beneficiaries have been a small elite of black tycoons with connections to the ruling African National Congress.
In the past two years there has been a drive to reform BEE and to ensure that its benefits go beyond the “usual suspects” as South Africa’s “oligarchs” are known. Now businesses have to complete a BEE scorecard on which the transfer of assets is only one category, in a process that has been cumbersomely renamed BBBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment).
In the latest review of the progress of BEE, a Harvard University-led group of economists who have been advising the government last month issued a paper outlining a number of potential reforms. These include: increasing the number of points on the scorecard for companies that do BEE deals with new entities; focusing BEE on the middle and bottom of the economy; focusing more on training than on employment equity at top management levels; and, most controversially, deciding when success will be declared and the policy ended.
For all but the last of these recommendations, the economists could have been modelling their analysis on the empowerment project in the game reserve of Madikwe that has transformed the life of Ms Bogatsu and her fellow residents of the local village of Molatedi.
The reserve was founded in 1991, three years before the end of white rule. Ms Bogatsu is one of more than 20 local employees at the Thakadu River Camp, one of two luxury lodges founded in the reserve with an enlightened philosophy of trying to benefit the local community.
Outwardly, it resembles any other luxury African safari lodge. But the lodge has an added incentive for guests inasmuch as it is owned and largely staffed by people who were dispossessed under apartheid.
The operating company, the Madikwe Collection, pays 10 per cent of turnover and a rent to the community of Molatedi. In about eight years, it should have paid off the debt, the agreement with the operating company will expire and the community will have full responsibility for the lodge.
The breakthrough came in 1998 when the local villagers were identified as original occupiers of the land and were allowed to claim it back. In an arrangement with the local tourism and parks board, the villagers agreed not to claim back the land but rather to use it as an investment. Thakadu was funded by a combination of grants, including R1m from the Ford Foundation, and loans, primarily from the Industrial Development Corporation, the national development finance body.
The IDC approved its loan on the condition that an operating company managed the lodge for a period of time and oversaw training for the villagers before they took over the entire responsibility.
William Stephens, the joint owner of the Madikwe Collection, says the real challenge at first was to ensure that the community was not too weighed down with debt. “It’s been a real success story,” he says. “It is to be an asset with no encumbrance that will be a cash cow for the local community. We just need to get them out of bearing debt to the IDC.”
Ms Bogatsu, 30, is an equal enthusiast. She was 22 when she had her first taste of the bush – as a member of a theatre group performing oral history at a lodge 300 miles away in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. After a stint as the country’s first female black tracker she recently qualified as a guide.
A stint with her, rolling through Madikwe’s rugged landscape not only provides the bush lore – and escapist skills – one would expect from a ranger, but also the local African history and myths that few if any white guides could expect to know or would think to impart.
Fifteen years ago, she could at best have aspired to be a domestic worker. Now her colleagues say she could be the next manager.
“If you need something, you can’t rely on someone else to provide it,” she says. It is a slogan that those among South Africa’s new class of businessmen, who see BEE as a way of extracting easy capital out of companies, might do well to remember.
