The man who built a business empire in Soweto – including his own shopping mall

Richard Maponya amassed his business empire, which includes the renowned Maponya Mall, during Apartheid-era South Africa, taking advantage of business gaps, clever timing, and a lot of hard work. 

Today, he is known as the grandfather of black business. He had to build his success in a world that was working against him. 

Richard John Pelwana Maponya was born in Lenyenye, a township in Limpopo, in 1920. He attended primary school in Spitzkop and completed his matric in Ga-Mamabolo, Limpopo.

Maponya later moved to Polokwane, where missionaries trained him as a teacher. With this qualification under his belt, he moved to Alexandra Township in Johannesburg in 1948 to become a teacher.

While at the pass office trying to register his move, he came across an Afrikaner man looking for people to work at his potato farm in Delmas.

“He asked for my documents, looked at my pass and all my documents and said, ‘This boy would fit in well with the group I am looking for’,” he told Forbes Africa. 

“I told him I was there to just register in the new area, but he took my pass, paged it, and he spoke in Afrikaans with another gentleman with him and said, ‘This man is 28 years old’… He took my pass and altered my birth year from 1920 to 1926.” 

“He also took my birth certificate and never brought it back to me. I think he wanted a group of people who were about 20 to 22 years old or so.”

From that point on, his identity was changed forever. He was loaded onto a truck with a group of young black men and taken to the potato field to work.

At the time, his uncle worked for a liberal Englishman, who helped Maponya get a dishwashing job instead of working in the field until he picked him up a week later.

When he returned to Alexandra, instead of finding a teaching job, which he had planned to do, he stumbled into a career in retail.

He came across a Department Store in Johannesburg CBD looking for a well-educated black South African. 

They offered more money than teaching jobs at the time, and the interviewer took an instant liking to him. 

He took the job and worked as a merchandiser for three months before being promoted to store fashion buyer.

Forbes Africa reported that he worked closely with the white manager, Mr Bolton, who taught him about fabrics, how to select clothes and customer service.

They selected clothes for black customers, and the designs flew off the shelves. His manager became the top salesman in the department store. 

In 1951, Bolton was soon promoted to the company’s chief exectutive after only a few years of working alongside Maponya.

Bolton was grateful for all of his help, but he knew he couldn’t promote Maponya above any of the white employees due to South Africa’s racial discrimination laws.

Bolton made Maponya a different offer: “I am going to let you buy clothing samples here so that you can sell them after hours and on weekends so you can make a bit of money,” Maponya recalled their conversation. 

And so, a new business venture was born. Maponya realised that people couldn’t afford to buy the clothes outright, so he sold the clothing on a ‘pay-as-you-wear’ basis in Soweto, allowing his customers to pay at the end of every month. 

The business was a success and allowed him to build up capital in his spare time. 

However, this endeavour was short-lived. A brain tumour forced Bolton to retire a year into this business, and the next manager wanted nothing to do with this arrangement. As a result, Maponya’s business could no longer continue. 

He resigned from his job and, with the money he had earned, started buying clothing from wholesalers, which proved to be another successful venture. 

He decided to open his own clothing store in Soweto. However, despite the help he received from Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela’s law firm, the government refused to grant him a license. 

They were able to secure him a license to trade daily necessities, so Maponya and his wife Marina, a cousin of Nelson Mandela, started a milk delivery business.

At the time, there was no electricity or refrigeration, which meant that people had to buy milk every day.

Forbes Africa reported that they employed a fleet of 10 boys on bicycles to deliver milk to customers in Soweto, the first business of its kind in the township. Eventually, they employed 100 people.

However, it wasn’t long before bigger companies started to take note of Maponya’s business. Where Maponya had bicycles, Clover had trucks – there was no competition. 

He went on to open Soweto’s largest supermarket at the time, Maponya’s Supply Stores. In the 1970s, Maponya expanded this business by setting up a butchery, two grocery stores, and a restaurant.  

These were later expanded to include a funeral parlour, a filling station and a car dealership called Mountain Motors.

As ambitious as he was, this wasn’t enough. Maponya wanted to build a mall. So, in 1979, he became the first black man to secure a 100-year lease for land in Soweto. However, it would take many more years before his mall dream could fully take shape.

Maponya had become an expert at spotting gaps in South Africa’s market, and when the wave of businesses disinvesting from the country as a result of Apartheid hit, he was well prepared to take advantage, the Maponya Institute explained.

When General Motors left South Africa in 1987, he opened supermarkets and bottle stores and started running a bus transport service.  

Similarly, when Coca-Cola pulled out of South Africa, Maponya formed a business group called Kilimanjaro Holdings, which acquired a bottling plant in East London.  

In 1994, after several attempts, he finally bought the Soweto land outright, and in 2007, he finally realized his dream by opening Maponya Mall. At R650 Million, this was the biggest investment that Soweto had ever seen.

“I fought for 27 years for that mall and was many times denied; they actually thought I was dreaming. When Nelson Mandela cut the ribbon to open the mall, that was the highlight of my life,” he said, as reported by the Daily Maverick. 

Maponya continued to grow his massive business empire in the years to come, and when he passed away shortly after his 99th birthday in 2020, he was still a working man. 

“I cannot retire. Retire and do what? I believe that for as long as I am alive and healthy, I must do whatever I can to benefit my community. I will work until they sing hamba kahle. I will die with my boots on,” he told the Mail & Guardian in 2005.

Richard Maponya died of old age on 6 January 2020 at 99. He was laid to rest at the Westpark Cemetery on Tuesday 14 January 2020.