Sixty two years ago, on August 9, 20,000 women of all races, classes and creed marched, singing and chanting, babies on their backs, to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital city, to deliver a petition to then Prime Minister J.G Strydom against the introduction of the apartheid pass laws.
This meant black women were not allowed in urban areas for more than 72 hours unless they possessed a pass with the holder’s details, including payment of taxes and permission to be in these urban areas. The march was led by the struggle stalwarts: Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, Sophia Williams-De Bruyn and Rahima Moosa.
“I didn’t see much of Helen Joseph at the march, she was in front of the crowd. She was a big strong woman and she led the march with other strong women. They told us that women are holding passes and if we don’t demonstrate against [the government], we [too will one day end up] holding these passes,” recollects Ramnie Naidoo to FORBES AFRICA. She was only was 14 years old at the time, escorting her mother at the march.
Pictured here is Helen Joseph (1905-1992), founding member of the Federation of South African Women, and Rahima Moosa (1922-1993), union activist and member of the Transvaal Indian Congress, both co-leaders of the 1956 Women’s March.
They have been immortalized in the Long March To Freedom, a procession of 100 life-sized bronzes celebrating the pioneers of South Africa’s journey to democracy, at the Fountains Recreation Resort in the City of Tshwane, Gauteng, South Africa.

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Celebrating Women With Monumental Strength

Khothatso Laurence Tsotetsi’s office in South Africa’s capital city Pretoria, is a profusion of pink – a beaded pink flamingo stands tall on his desk that’s draped in a pink table cloth; also here are grey couches with pink patterns and a pink mat adorning the floor.
His spacious studio with multiple rooms is just the setting for our photoshoot and interview.
Millennial fashion designer Tsotetsi has made a name for himself in South Africa’s fashion industry with his sophisticated, elegant pieces for women particular about their look, and has had his creations showcased at a number of fashion weeks.
Born in Soweto, a township in the southwest of Johannesburg, in 1988, just before the apartheid era ended in South Africa, Tsotetsi moved around a lot as a child.
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“My father was a politician, that’s why we moved from one place to another. We moved from Soweto to the Free State [a province in South Africa]; we lived in the Vaal for some time until I eventually moved to Pretoria in 2009, and since then I’ve been practicing from here.”
As a young boy, he says, his behaviour was peculiar compared to other boys his age. Where they played football, he played with fabric.
He was interested in dress designing and started with some needlework; all this evolved in high school when he figured out that designing was what he wanted to pursue. In tertiary school, Tsotetsi started showcasing at fashion weeks every season.
After graduating with a BTech degree in 2012, and with a National Diploma in Fashion in 2013 from the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), he lectured on construction, patterns and creative design at TUT for a few years.
By then, he was already involved in the eponymous business he had started in 2012. Tsotetsi KL, his brand, was doing well.
“2012 was when I got my big break at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Johannesburg when African Fashion International (AFI) brought Alek Wek to walk for my show; from there, I did Black Fashion Week Paris,” he recalls.
This meant hard work, sacrifices and the relentless pursuit of his passion.
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As an assistant, Tsotetsi packed scraps of fabric for South African fashion mogul Clive Rundle for six weeks, coordinating scraps by color and fabric. Tsotetsi knows it as Rundle’s aesthetic. Rundle has sold womenswear for decades and showcased his work on ramps across the world.
“I taught art and design at a high school in the Vaal for a month and on the weekends, I would work at Clive Rundle’s; after that month, I worked permanently every day at his Johannesburg studio in the [central] business district. That’s when I started helping with the clothing and the shows, and then I worked with David Tlale in 2014 under a mentorship program, the AFI Next Generation,” says Tsotetsi.
The young designer had to shadow famed South African designer Tlale for three months before Tlale’s first New York Fashion Week show.
From both designers, Tsotetsi learned a lot and infused it with his own method, understanding the business side of fashion and not just the creative aspects. He developed a clientele base and streamlined his business into what it is today.
<div id="attachment_36562" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-36562" class="wp-image-36562 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-158-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-158-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-158-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-158-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-158-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-158.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Tsotetsi in his spacious offices with model, Fath Mncube. Photograph by Motlabana Monnakgotla</div>
Over the years, he has learned a great deal and gained a lot of experience in the industry, showcasing his creations yet constantly questioning himself about what is more important: money, fame or social media likes.
“Still, why showcase,” he asks.
“As soon as it’s a company, it’s an entity with different principles: human resources, finance, graphics, photography and all of that, but as a small business, you cannot afford those services, you have to step in as the owner and play those different roles, ask for favors, manipulate people, lie, and do all of those things. So for you to be able to maintain the business, you need to be making money and paying staff. Those are the dynamics that have been in place from 2014 until 2018.”
In the eyes of the young creative designer, growth meant making money.
Among many other rich and famous names, Tsotetsi has dressed the likes of Hulisani Ravele, a radio personality and former YoTV presenter; Precious Moloi-Motsepe, a fashion entrepreneur and philanthropist, who runs the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week; and Rorisang Thandekiso, a South African actress, presenter and musician.
“I know Khothatso from high school, so he’s been making me stuff since but my real first was my first SAMAs [South African Music Awards] in 2010, it was amazing and futuristic. This year, I’m at the SAMAs in June doing the red carpet and presenting an award; he’ll be dressing me for both. We did the SAFTAs [South African Film and Television Awards] together. That dress took everybody by storm, and everybody absolutely loved it. It was just beautiful to look at people respond to it,” says Thandekiso.
Tsotetsi KL caters for a market that is distinctively chic and sophisticated.
“It is women that are of a peculiar kind who want to portray classiness in an elegant way. They want to stand out, they have exaggerated style and thoughts and they are one in zero,” says Tsotetsi.
The brand does bespoke and high-end garments and is currently working with Luminance, a fashion and lifestyle concept store present in the upscale Hyde Park Corner mall in north Johannesburg.
<div id="attachment_36563" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-36563" class="size-medium wp-image-36563" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-101-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-101-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-101-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-101-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-101-768x1151.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-101-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tsotetsi-101.jpg 1366w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />Faith Mncube of Fabulousdotcom Models. Photograph by Motlabana Monnakgotla.</div>
The garments seen in the photos are from the 2014 fashion weeks from different seasons. Tsotetsi’s favorite is a ruffle dress.
“It was a highly publicised look from the SAMAs’ [edition] 21. It was a dress that Kelly Khumalo [South African singer, actress and dancer] wore and it was one of its kind at the time; it was bigger than what it is in the image. It was 180 meters before it was tailored. It is one iconic look that we photographed for the feature,” he says.
Tsotetsi KL will be turning six years old in August and is slated to have a spectacular fashion show for Women’s Month, observed in South Africa every year that month. Tsotetsi employs four permanent staff and three interns. They are all hard at work in his studio preparing the next line.
For the lad from Soweto obsessed with needlework, he has his work cut out for him.

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From Packing Scrap To Dressing Up Alek Wek

African turned on African. Mobs looted shops, threatened lives and smashed anything they could get their hands on. There were languages from across Africa shouted through the streets of the capital of Pretoria on this confusing afternoon – one language was heard above the rest; the language of the boot.
By 11AM, in Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, angry youths stood by the side of Townlands Road – rocks in hand. Earlier they had thrown rocks, witnesses said, at any vehicle entering where the so-called foreigners live. A police van stood by, just out of rock range.
For the mob, getting rid of fellow Africans, they call foreigners, was their aim; bigotry their game.
“All those who are selling drugs, nyaope (South African street drug), doing prostitution and human trafficking should voetsek (go away in Afrikaans). Would Robert Mugabe allow me to sell drugs in Zimbabwe? No, never! So why is our government failing us. This is war that’s not going to end. As you can see, it started slowly but let me tell you it’s going to get huge,” says Thembi Skhosana, a South African protester in Marabastad.
In many ways Skhosana epitomized the ugly threat on the streets.
“If our government doesn’t tell these people to go, people are going to die. [The government] is used to killing people, like they did in Marikana, so even now blood will be spilt,” she says.
Skhosana criticized the authorities for failing to clamp down on foreigners without permits.
“It’s best that we take the matter into our own hands. Police have failed. When they take bribes that means they’re also taking things into their own hands; we might as well deal with this our own way.”
On the other side, people also prepared to deal with things in their own way.
In Marabastad, Somali immigrants took up machetes, sticks‚ rocks and knives.
A Somalian shop owner, who sells groceries, Ali Abdul Hasen, came to South Africa as a refugee in 2006 to escape terrorist attacks.
“I came to South Africa for peace, stability and to provide for my family. When I came here I believed I would forget the sound of bullets, and killing each other. In Somalia there are terrorist attacks; you can get injured and die, but not from knives and axes to cut you into pieces,” says Hasen.
“They’re attacking us so we have no choice but to fight back. We have closed all our shops in the townships and came to this area, and now they’re attacking us here, again. We have to counter attack; it’s just tit for tat,” he says.
A woman wearing a peach-colored dress emerged waving a machete and shouting in her mother tongue. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but she wasn’t stopping for anyone.
Then we heard screams and shouting of enraged Somalians, everyone running to the left, chasing a young man in his twenties. When they caught him, the Somalis beat him up. We thought they were going to kill him. Police fired stun grenades to disperse the attackers. A journalist in the crowd was hit in the back by a rubber bullet.
Protesters looted the clothing and home appliance shop of Pakistani Muhammed Yaqoob. The floor was strewn with broken glass and debris. A dismayed Yaqoob walked gingerly over the broken glass, counting the cost of his empty shelves.
“I was at home when I received a call that my shop has been broken into. They took mattresses, shoes and blankets which amount to R50,000 (around $3,800),” he says.
“Life is better when there is peace. We are here to work for our families. And I believe that we are providing jobs, in this shop alone we have three ladies we hired. I’m also involved in feeding schemes providing food to local churches and giving blankets to street kids. But these are the same people who were among the group that stole our stuff,” says Zahid Afzal, chairperson of the area’s business forum.
In 2003, Afzal traveled 7,617 kilometers from Pakistan to Pretoria for business. He makes about R5,000 ($380) a week and sends half of it to his wife and two children. He’s contemplating going home, even if it’s not that safe there.
“Most of us are here because we are under threat of terrorism in Pakistan. There’s lots of bomb blasts happening in every part of the country. If this continues we have no choice but to go back home,” says Afzal.
About 40 shops have closed in Mamelodi and Atteridgeville, in Pretoria, and 12 houses were burned in Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg. According to Brigadier Sally De Beer of the South African Police Service, about 136 people were arrested for looting and being in possessing firearms and drugs.
“I’m actually not willing to stay in South Africa as I can see the situation is like this now, I’d rather go back to Somalia. I’m sure if I’d be killed in my country I would be killed by a terrorist, not by civilians,” says Hasen.
While we were in Atteridgeville, police arrested South African protesters, confiscating a firearm as well as needles and drugs wrapped in a black shopping bag. By this time it was chaos.
“I was born to die. If I die today, it’s fine. But your mother will be killed first. F**k you,” shouted a man, believed to be a Nigerian, raising a middle finger to the mob.
“The dislike of foreigners in the use of foreign labor from Africa, India, and Europe to undermine black economic and political power during the apartheid period… this has conditioned people to see foreigners – particularly Africans, but also those from other regions – as a threat. This sense of threat has been exacerbated by public statements and actions from officials in all parties, police, and people in society at large,” says Loren Landau, from the African Centre for Migration &amp; Society at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Inequality and unemployment make it worse.
“Unless the conditions leading to these attacks change, violence will continue,” he says.
“Public education is a start, but this will not counter the incentives and benefits of violence for those who lead it. We will need the police to hold organizers responsible; to reconsider how we plan and manage our cities and to hold politicians to task when they demonize any group in our society, including refugees and other immigrants.”
According to the Nigerian Union South Africa spokesperson, Eneka Ezinteje, about 800,000 Nigerians are currently in South Africa.   According to reports, about 116 Nigerians were attacked in South Africa in the last two years. In 2016, 20 were killed.
How many Africans have to die before something is done?

There Will Be Blood, Brother

IIt’s a sunny Thursday, and I am at the Mobile Military Health Formation of the SA Military Health Service in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital city, to meet Limpopo-born Molatelo Nkoana, a 31-year-old woman who has dodged more bullets than most.
Nkoana’s running a little late, but then she arrives, sallying into the boardroom. She is on duty and in uniform, and proceeds to tell me about her life and the career she almost embarked on.
After completing her secondary education, Nkoana says she first went on to study and train as a nurse. But that wasn’t to last long; she gave it up midway – to join the military, a decision she would never regret.
“Basically, it was about the money, I was young and wasn’t getting enough money, so I went on the market,” says Nkoana.
The enthusiastic 22-year-old applied, and was recruited three months later, reporting to the Thaba Tshwane military base in Pretoria for basic training. She also trained in Kimberly, Bloemfontein and the Western Cape.
Nkoana had thought only the physically fit could join the military, but soon discovered it offered multiple careers one could explore. With her nursing background and experience, Nkoana chose to be a paramedic.
In March 2013, Nkoana was one of the 200 soldiers of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) selected to go to the Central African Republic (CAR) as part of South Africa’s peace-keeping mission there.
They would go on to fight a series of battles outside Bangui in the CAR. And Nkoana was the only woman on the frontline.
Michel Djotodia, leader of the rebel alliance, Seleka, had declared himself the new president of CAR and forced the then serving president, François Bozizé, out of the country.
It wasn’t going to be an easy task for the SANDF.
Nkoana takes me back to noon on that fateful Friday on March 22, 2013 when she first spotted the rebels; she remembers it all like it was yesterday.
She literally transports me to CAR with her vivid detailing of the series of events that unfolded. As she relates this story of death and danger, I hear the bullets, the gunshots and the rebels roar; I see the ravages of war in CAR.
Nkoana was amongst the first to see the rebels attack.
“We saw a civilian running away from those people, the rebels. I was at the gate of the base’s duty room. I ran to the sick-bay as a medic and told the people that the rebels are coming, the rebels are coming.”
When she reported it, nobody believed her. But she persisted, proceeding to gather her bulletproof vest, helmet, and weapon.
Her fellow soldiers only believed her when the Officer Commander (OC) ordered them to prepare and check what was happening outside the base. He tasked a team from the special force.
Around 5PM, this team was ambushed by the rebels, but they fought back tenaciously, and the rebels fled.
Three men of the special force team returned injured, one shot in the chest, the other had sustained a fracture in his femur and the third was wounded.
For the first time, the base knew it was rough outside.
“As medic personnel, we took them to civilian hospitals outside to get other doctors to help us,” recalls Nkoana.
Around 10PM the following day, the rebels came back again firing bombs. The SANDF could hear the entire din from their base. The Sergeant Major asked Nkoana to go with them to replenish food for the soldiers who had been on night vigil.
She grabbed her medical bag, helmet, bulletproof vest, weapon and left with the men, not hesitating for a minute.
It was around 12PM, when she along with the others drove 15-20 kilometers to the location of the stranded soldiers; it was quiet when they got there, but as soon as the rebels saw the SANDF vehicles, they started shooting again.
“We went out of the car and took cover, and then we started shooting back. While fighting, I managed to get one of the guys that was injured and suggested I take him back to the base because he could not run, fight or do anything,” she says.
The OC opted otherwise and Nkoana and the injured men had to wait even as the bullets rained over their heads.
At 5PM, as they were heading back to camp, the squad was ambushed again. This was when a number of lives were lost, says Nkoana, for the first time sounding emotional.
They did what they did before: stop the vehicle, step out and take cover.
As Nkoana was taking cover, one of the soldiers had been shot in both legs and was screaming out for her. She bandaged him but the chaos was far from over; yet another soldier was calling for one of the two medics that were there. He had almost missed a bullet but it had grazed his neck.
By then, Nkoana and the other medic could see dead bodies all around them. The injured soldiers shouted to them to leave because they were going to die.
“We told them we can’t leave. We are still alive and we can at least take cover with you. Let’s move to a safer place; the guy that was shot in the legs said he couldn’t walk and we should leave him there.”
The team refused and carried him to safety.
Around midnight, the OC called from the base asking for Nkoana. Many of the soldiers were already back at the base, but the young woman had stayed on with the other fighters.
“When they called, I switched off my phone because it was loud and we could hear the voices of the rebels from where we were hiding.
“I switched the phone back on and sent a message telling them ‘we are here, we are hiding, we’ve got two patients and we cannot get out of this cover’.”
Nkoana had full faith she was going to return home to her son in Senwabarwana, her hometown in South Africa’s Limpopo province. It kept her alive.
She thought she would be running on foot back to the camp because there was nothing that could rescue them.
Many soldiers died, but many of the rebels also died, so there was not going to be any mercy towards the SANDF.
Nkoana then received a text advising her and her patients to remain in hiding and stay calm. Around 4AM, she received a call asking if they were still undercover; they were then instructed to somehow make their way to the airport.
“The commander of the rebels was requesting the SANDF to go back to their country,” she says.
But Nkoana and the injured soldiers had to travel another 15 kilometers to the airport; she was still unsure of their safety. Their hideout was next to a tar-road and the rebels were driving up and down firing bullets into the sky.
A peace agreement had been signed, so the soldiers could go back to camp; get their belongings and head home to safety.
“[But] we were not sure the people in the streets knew of the peace agreement because if they see us they will shoot us; the agreements were done at the base and not in the streets,” says Nkoana.
They refused to come out of hiding.
They heard the Casspir (armed ambulance) that was sent to fetch them and the bodies of the dead soldiers, but they were still unsure if it was safe to surface. The vehicle went up and down, back and forth, looking for them.
“Around 7AM, the next day, we decided to go. They sent me a message to just surrender; I then told the guys ‘the Major says we should surrender’. I was the Corporal by then and the guys asked if we should shoot. I told them ‘no, because if you shoot one bullet, they will kill all of us’.”
Nkoana took command of the situation, complying with her superiors at the base.
The drama didn’t end there though.
Just as they got on to the road, the rebels came after them and took their weapons, bulletproof vests, ammunition and they were instructed to lie down. They then had to stand up and walk in a single file not knowing where they were being taken.
On the way, they climbed on to a bakkie (pickup truck) driven by other rebels which took them to their base. The soldiers at the base had started packing, and they had to pack up too. They were all then taken to the airport to head back home to South Africa. Finally, it was all over.
Nkoana was a 27-year-old woman who defied death at the hands of the rebels. She was honored with a bravery medal, invited to the opening of Parliament in South Africa in 2014 and was given the Sword Of Peace.
Like Nkoana, another South African woman was also honored for her bravery fleeing the rebels in CAR, with an equivalent of R3 million ($323,000 at the time) supporting the mission, in her bag.
Susette Gates, a mother of two sons, currently living in Pretoria, was deployed as the financial officer of the South African mission in CAR in charge of payroll. Before being employed by the SANDF, she had been a hairdresser, she says, laughing, when she speaks to us.
Like most people looking for jobs, she had applied for an open post at the Wonderboom military base and been accepted; she continues to work here.
I meet her at this base – she’s not in uniform – and in her own office adorned with family portraits, certificates and medals.
She was the only other woman besides Nkoana selected for the CAR mission. Those fearful moments in CAR are forever etched in her memory.
When the rebels were attacking the SANDF, Gates was watching a horror movie on her laptop at the base. Little did she know the horrors unfolding around her.
Ironically, she was informed about the chaos in CAR on the phone by her sister in South Africa. Only then did she realize there was no electricity and people had left their homes at the camp.
She called out to everyone but was the only one left. She was later relocated to another place where she spent the night.
“The next morning, I went back to get my belongings. The next thing the rebels were in the base and they took everything, they even took the cars,” she says.
“If they could grab food, clothes whatever. I had my money with me; they opened my bag and asked what it was. I told them it was clothes and asked if I could keep it, but the bag of money was under the clothes.”
Gates was released and managed to get away with the R3 million; the money she had hidden under her clothes and that belonged to the SANDF.
The trip to the airport was grim because all she saw was a dry and dirty town, gunshots going off in the background. On the flight back home, she knew there were dead bodies of colleagues on the plane. Gates almost kissed the ground when she landed in South Africa, she says.
Both these women returned as heroes and were honored by South Africa’s Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula in 2014. Of the 185 soldiers who survived the war, the two women stood out amongst the men. Today, there are other women fighting the rebels in the CAR like they did, risking their lives and saving the lives of the men around them.

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Heroes Among Men

Kerryne Krause-Neufeldt was on a roll. She founded her first beauty product business at 23 and was turning over $45,000 in the dying months of her company. But she lost it all on her worst day.
“I never thought in my wildest dream that anybody would steal my company from me. Seriously, how would they get that right?” she says.
Born in Pretoria, she was raised by a single mother who ran a hairdressing salon.
Krause-Neufeldt worked odd jobs while paying her way towards an Honours degree in marketing at the University of Pretoria. From working as a sales lady at a small outdoor store, she packed her bags and left for London on a two-year working visa, to toil for a sandwich making store, Pret A Manger. She was training to be a manager for one of the stores the company was going to launch. It was here that she learned how a well-oiled, structured company functioned. But after three months, she returned to South Africa on the promise of a job.
“The difference in having worked for Pret A Manger in London and coming back to work for this company was a culture shock of note and it was a defining moment for me. I realized there was no vision. I was never going to see this marketing position,”
she says.
She resigned after five weeks and decided to start her own business – a distribution company, supplying cheap eye masks that rejuvenated the skin and removed puffiness. She called up the principle office for the eye masks in Switzerland which did not have a market in Africa.
They offered 10,000 eye masks to sell in South Africa but Krause-Neufeldt needed funding to start this business. One of her mother’s customers was a lawyer who dabbled in business from time to time. He wanted to start his own business but Krause-Neufeldt convinced him that her business idea was more viable. But he wanted 51% of the business.
“He knew I was caught between a rock and a hard place. He said, ‘I’ll give you the money but its 50/50 for the business,’ and in that moment I was relieved I could get started on the business but somehow I knew it was the beginning of the end,” remembers Krause-Neufeldt.
The lawyer funded the first 2,000 units. She hired around 12 sales reps and did all the training and focused on the administration. She also hired Peggy, her best friend, who would distribute the units to the sales reps from a factory. The sales reps earned commission on all the stock they sold, while she earned a mere salary of $275, which she felt was too little.
Business picked up and more stock was brought into the country and South Africa became one of the biggest markets for eye masks.
After running the business for close to two years, Krause-Neufeldt told her business partners that they had to inject more money into it to meet their side of the deal. They were reluctant and felt she was becoming a problem.
Then, at peak season during November, three of her sales reps picked up units worth $91,000. Peggy counted the stock and gave it to the sales reps. They should have delivered the products and returned with the cash, but they never came back.
When Krause-Neufeldt approached her business partners about it, they said that the sales reps gave them the money and that they were investigating her for fraud.
“I asked them how much the reps were giving them and they said R30,000 ($2,740). I said they have R1 million ($91,000) worth of stock. I told them they were getting nailed, but I was the enemy,” she says.
Her boyfriend was a director in the company.
“I was fighting with my boyfriend at the time and I told him he can’t be playing golf all day and take a salary. I told him to do something and he said he’d be a sales rep.”
While in a meeting a few days later, the partners asked Krause-Neufeldt’s boyfriend whether he was earning commission. According to the contracts, it was illegal for directors to earn commission as part of their pay package unless the board of directors approved it.
“We went into a meeting and that’s the only dirt they could find on us,” says Krause Neufeldt.
The partners said they were going to open a criminal case against her and the boyfriend unless she signed over her shares and released the company to them. She tried to get lawyers in but had to fork out around $3,600 upfront. Krause Neufeldt couldn’t afford this with her small salary.
“I signed my shares for nothing and handed my company to these people. I didn’t have a choice in the matter,” she says.
Krause-Neufeldt lost everything. She also signed a restraint of trade agreement. She lost her distribution agency and a local market she had personally grown.
“It was the biggest trauma of my life. To be betrayed by everyone and you know I’d get calls from salons that would complain about my reps and I wouldn’t believe them. I lived for my staff. It was devastating.”
Krause-Neufeldt, however, refused to lie down.
“I just believed failure was the inability to get up again. So I resolved to get up the next day and start another company to show them,” she says.
She immediately started working on her next business, I-Slices Manufacturing. She had come across an Italian eye mask but it wasn’t in line with the quality she wanted. So she decided to develope her own product.
She needed the technology that would make the base of her product, Eyeslices. A friend introduced her to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a research and development organization. Here she found the department that worked on a hydrogel treatment pad for burn wounds but the idea was shelved in 1993 because it couldn’t be developed further.
One day, Krause-Neufeldt met Avie Kruger, a scientist who had worked in the CSIR polymer department, and helped her to develop her products.
She started her own laboratory in a cottage on a plot in Midrand, outside of Johannesburg, but there were no standard manufacturing methods or equipment available to produce the product she wanted.
Her mentor suggested she look into the food industry and she came across a machine which had oval cut outs, similar to those of Eyeslices. She contacted Ulma Packaging Solutions, a company that packages products such as yoghurts and meat. The next morning, they arrived at the cottage and started to help Krause-Neufeldt customize her machine.
It took about one and a half years to create the perfect Eyeslices products following the seven years of research. Today, Eyeslices is a reusable stable water-based hydrogel eye mask manufactured through a physical process of freezing and thawing.
Instead of placing cucumbers on your eyes, Eyeslices does that job better and it’s a product many beauty salons have stocked on their shelves.
The United States was I-Slices Manufacturing’s first distribution country. Today, the company boasts 19 other export markets including and hopefully followed by Morocco, Kenya and Nigeria.
Krause-Neufeldt says the challenge with exporting products on the continent is that Africans want brands to be successful in the overseas market before they buy. Regulations can also be a problem.
“Every single country in Africa, the regulations are different and they’re very onerous. They’re incredibly expensive,” says Krause-Neufeldt.
But she is not giving up just yet, she plans to grow the product and take it to many countries on the continent. She hopes it will be one in the eye for cucumbers.

‘I Never Thought Anybody Would  Steal My Company From Me’

It was like re-living a moment in South African history, going back 58 years with Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, to the place where it all began.
We are outside the Union Buildings in the South African capital Pretoria, and De Bruyn is wearing a dark coat and shades on a cold winter morning.
She was hardly 18 when as one of four women leaders, she marched 20,000 other women to the Union Buildings on August 9, 1956.
Today, she is an elegant, demure grandmother, and the last living member of the famous four who led the protest, the others being Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph and Rahima Moosa.
It has not been an easy journey, and this particular moment stokes many memories of that historic day.
“I had no fear,” she said, as we made our way to Pretoria.
The women had decided that they did not need, or want, passbooks (special identification booklets that limited their freedom of movement) as black or colored women. And as she delivered their angst in a letter to the Prime Minister JG Strijdom, a major supporter of the apartheid government, on that chilly August day, De Bruyn and her comrades set the precedent for Women’s Day in South Africa.
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_6391" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6391" class="size-medium wp-image-6391" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Sophia-de-Bruyn_Womans-March-300x217.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="217" />The 50th anniversary of the march in 2006.</div>
The 1950s were a tumultuous time in South Africa. Mass meetings were often met with violence by authorities. And political organizations, designed to fight the system, were separated by race. The rule of law, which accorded non-white South Africans the status of second class citizens in their own country, was at its worst.
This was why the Women’s March was the ultimate act of defiance.
It was unheard of in those days for any woman, let alone colored women, to stroll around the Union Buildings, the seat of South African government. For De Bruyn, the buildings housed more than the men responsible for deciding their fate. To her, they were the “Holy Grail”.
And after surviving the travails of getting the women to Pretoria, she was unafraid of any consequences.
The women had journeyed far and raised a fortune to make the march. De Bruyn’s group arrived from the Eastern Cape in two coaches. They sold tea and scones at political meetings for a profit of three pence, and a shilling was earned from serving chicken stew and rice. These little enterprises raised enough to make the long trip north.
Originally, the women had intended to camp outside the Union Buildings for an entire week. But the logistics of that plan were too difficult to follow through. Instead, they organized within their splinter groups and made their way, separately, towards Pretoria. When she saw the women that day, De Bruyn says she was gratified.
“The glory of how they looked, and their dignity and grace, and that determination in lifting their feet in a place where no other African person had done before,” she says.
The women came in droves and that surprised De Bruyn. There were women of every race at the march and she remembers the splendor of that scene.
“It was a splendid day, [there were] women in all sorts of dress – Indian women wore saris, the African National Congress [ANC] women in their green, black and gold and others in their everyday wear.”
She didn’t realize how many they were until she “sat and looked back at them, in their thousands”.
After the march, De Bruyn committed herself further to the freedom struggle. As the 1960s ended, she joined her late husband, Henry De Bruyn, who was exiled in Zambia. While in Lusaka, she took evening classes and studied for her O level certificate exams. Three years later, she moved to Nairobi and earned a diploma in education. The De Bruyns did not return to South Africa until the early 1990s to a short-lived return. Soon after the ANC came to power in 1994, she moved with her husband to Jordan as the first South African diplomats there.
Even when in exile, De Bruyn concerned herself with the freedom of the South African women she left behind. She spearheaded the ANC’s Women’s League in Lusaka and, with the help of then ANC president, O.R. Tambo, forged a place for women in the party. But her concerns have shifted, over the years, to the freedom of younger African women.
“I think our young women have got it in them. Today, the things that are there for them weren’t there for us. What gives me a sense of gratitude is to see our young women and what they can do.”
When speaking about the 1956 march, De Bruyn is humble about her role in the protest. She insists that it was an “event of women” in South Africa’s history and not her own. Yet the memory and the triumph of that August day still drive her.
“It lives on in my psyche,” she says, taking a long, hard look at the Union Buildings.

LOOKING BACK At A Landmark Day

For days, it had been tense in the cells beneath the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, in an eight-month trial punctuated by fear, loathing and laughter. For Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants, it was to prove a harrowing dance with the death penalty. Mandela was convinced he was going to die, according to his fellow defendants, and had started passing on his wishes to his fellow accused Denis Goldberg.
“He thought he was going to hang,” says Goldberg.
There was a good chance that they were going to hang. All were charged with sabotage against the apartheid regime. It was an accusation so serious that, if the prosecution proved a case to answer, the onus was on the accused to prove innocence—rather than being innocent until proven guilty.
The ambitious prosecutor, Percy Yutar, laid on the evidence with a shovel. He painted Mandela and co as desperate terrorists who had enough explosives to blow up Johannesburg. In giving evidence, Yutar would occasionally turn and smile to the special branch men in the gallery. Goldberg recalls how the special branch men would look at him and draw a finger across their throats in a threat of death. Goldberg gestured back with a jerk of the middle finger.
The antagonism worsened. Yutar ventured to the calm intellectual, Walter Sisulu, that life for the black man in 1960s South Africa was not all that bad.
“I wish you could live for just one day as we are forced to do and you would not make such a remark,” flashed back an angry Sisulu.
There was laughter when Ahmed Kathrada, one of the three survivors of the trial, gave evidence in the witness box. He was asked about a man, clearly him, referred to in evidence merely as ‘K’. He was asked did he know anyone with a name beginning with the initial K?
“Khrushchev,” replied Kathrada, referring mischievously to the Soviet premier of the day to the laughter of his fellow accused.
It all led to one moment that was to transform the public perception of those in the dock from terrorists to freedom fighters—the Benjamin Franklins of Africa in the eyes of the world press, in the words of defence team member George Bizos. To kick off the defence, the accused had opted for a statement from the dock. Mandela led the way with a speech that took six hours and went down in history.
&#8220;I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realized. But my Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.&#8221;
The late Arthur Chaskalson, then a young member of the defence team, told me in 2010: “There was a dramatic silence you could almost hear the silence in the court, you could feel it. It was absolutely quiet, not a sound.”
When the accused came up the steps to the court on June 12, 1964, they still thought they were going to hang. What they didn’t know was that a combination of the prosecution’s failure to press the case, diplomatic pressure and reluctance by the authorities to make martyrs out of them, was to save the necks of the Rivonia trialists.
When the judge almost whispered a life sentence, instead of death, the relieved trialists looked at each other and laughed out loud.
“Life and life is wonderful,” Goldberg says to his mother in the gallery.
More than 30 years later, Mandela, in one of his many shining acts of reconciliation, invited Yutar, the man who tried to hang him, to tea.
A few years later, Mandela opened the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, on February 14, 1995, that was to be led by Chaskalson. The next day, the court was to debate the death penalty and Mandela knew this was a moment for his impeccable timing.
&#8220;The last time I appeared in court was to hear whether or not I was going to be sentenced to death. Fortunately for myself and my colleagues we were not,” says Mandela.
“If he had been executed what would have happened?” asks Chaskalson in 2010.
I dread to think.

Tag: Pretoria

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There Will Be Blood, Brother

Heroes Among Men

‘I Never Thought Anybody Would Steal My Company From Me’

LOOKING BACK At A Landmark Day

Death, Life And Laughter