It was a caucus about transformation and we were going to appoint a committee, almost like a task-team, to deal with certain issues. I was the only woman at the meeting and when it came to electing the members, the men started appointing each other. Eventually, one of them realized that they did not have any female members, so they said to me, ‘Come and sit on the panel so we can have a woman.’ I said no.’”
Despite repeated requests from her colleagues, Ntambi Ravele declined adamantly. She made it clear that she would stick to her decision.
“I wasn’t going to be part of something just because I was a woman. Especially because I had experience on my side,” she says.
At the time of the convention, Ravele had served as national co-ordinator for Women and Sport South Africa, represented the country at the International Olympic Committee, chaired the Supreme Council for Sport in South Africa’s zone VI Women and Sport Committee, and won the president’s Sport Administrator of the Year title. She had credentials many people in the room could only dream of and she was not going to allow them to be undermined by a politically-correct, gender-based appointment.
“When those types of things happen, you get to a point where you can’t even feel offended. You can only sit back and laugh.”
Ravele had the last laugh as the team that was set up turned out to be nothing more than a talking shop.
“Nothing ever happened after that,” she says.
But much has happened for Ravele. She has served as president of Netball South Africa in the mid-2000s, during which she obtained a television rights deal with the public broadcaster, the SABC, and corporate sponsorship worth R10 million ($913,000). In April 2013, she got into the boxing ring with BSA. It is her most challenging role yet, but she has already packed a serious punch.
When Ravele was appointed, she identified the most pressing issue in boxing to be that of compliance. Mismanagement, be it from administrators or promoters, resulted in embarrassment. Veteran super middleweight boxer Dingaan ‘The Rose of Soweto’ Thobela had his license revoked because he was over the age limit and did not fight actively for the stipulated period. And Noni Tenge, South Africa’s first female world champion, was stripped of her IBF title for not competing often enough.
“We really needed to clean up the industry. We had to change our image by looking at licenses and payments. We had situations where licenses were not issued properly, others where fighters were not paid within a certain time and fights were being canceled.”
To address these issues, Ravele had to reach a consensus with boxing promoters, whom she met at the National Sports Indaba early in her tenure. She extracted commitments from them that would pay greater attention to playing by the rules.
“We put systems in place and now we have to make sure we work within these systems. Money must be paid within a certain time frame and the promoters must have registered companies that operate properly. For example, they must all have a tax clearance. We will be making sure all these things are abided by,” says Ravele.
Her first step towards reviving South African boxing was to find a common ground regarding television rights for fights. Broadcast deals are one of the largest revenue streams for sports, who controls them has major implications for how the game is run.
During Ngconde Balfour’s tenure, Ravele’s predecessor, BSA had no control over which matches were televised on the public broadcaster and which were sold to pay television.
When boxing promoters Golden Gloves reached an exclusive deal with satellite service SuperSport to broadcast its fights, BSA could do nothing. Similarly, BSA was powerless when the SABC decided it would no longer televise matches.
At the recent Boxing Indaba, all promoters agreed that BSA could negotiate dates with broadcasters for fights. While it does not solve the problem it is a step in the right direction.
Now, BSA will hold discussions with SABC, SuperSport and e.tv to decide which one will commit to showing live matches. Ravele will also discuss SuperSport’s Golden Gloves deal to see if they are willing to adjust the terms when the contact comes up for renewal. Promoters will then bid to have their fights televised on the dates BSA agrees on. She has also guaranteed smaller promoters, who develop boxing by giving unknown fighters a chance, that they will get their fights on air for a minimum fee.
In this way, Ravele hopes that boxing can reach the masses rather than only be accessible to the elite.
“We want to move away from the monopolies and make sure that we have television channels that give us coverage at prime time, so that we can promote the sport,” says Ravele.
Her reasons for wanting more coverage are two-fold. On the one hand, it will be financially beneficial to BSA and everyone involved in the sport, and on the other, her goal is to restore boxing to the prominence it once enjoyed, in terms of results and among its fans.
“We used to have a lot of world champions and we need to get back to that level. At the moment, we are not there. If you think back to the days when Baby Jake Matlala was in his prime, everybody knew who he was.”
Because of the relative anonymity of IBO super middleweight champions Thomas ‘Tommy Gun’ Oosthuizen and junior lightweight title-holder Kaizer Mabuza, South Africans may see boxing as a sport in decline. That is not the case, of the 122 titles that South African male boxers have won, 32 were earned in the last five years.
What is concerning is that many of these titles are with the smaller federations, Ravele vows to change that. She also hopes that female fighters, who are known almost exclusively as Tenge, can start making headlines. Ravele was part of the committee that paved the way for women to participate in boxing in South Africa. Today, she wants to be the driving force behind making champions of the fairer sex.
“South Africa has not been involved in women’s boxing for that long and because it’s quite new, we need to support female boxers and the set-up they work in. At the moment, there are very few women promoters and trainers and we have to create a system where more of them can come through. I’d like to see more women trainers, especially because they understand the challenges facing women in the sport and they allow women to prepare in way that is comfortable for them,” she says.
But what about the challenges Ravele will face as she aims to lift BSA off the ropes and into the center of the boxing ring?
“I have been in the industry for a long time and the only thing I want is to do my job to the best of my ability.”
While she continues fighting to put boxing back on track, after she ends her tenure with the pugilists, she will concentrate on her business and work as a consultant for various sports federations.
“I think I will enjoy that kind of work because people respect me for who I am. In the early days during meetings, some of the men may have expected me to make tea during the breaks or something like that. I never did that and I never will.”

Men Expect Me To Make Them Tea, I Never Will

“Is there anything that you haven’t done, that you’d still love to do?” I asked Zwelakhe Sisulu towards the end of the interview.
After a deep sigh, he pointedly and regrettably replied, in his trademark baritone voice, “The reason I got into journalism was because of my love for writing. Then I was diverted. I never did what was my first love. I hope that one day I’ll get a farm in some remote area, age gracefully and write.”
Well, it was not to be.
Just over a month later, death would put paid to that wish along with the hope of the journalist who was interviewing him.
On Thursday October 4, I was chairing a public discussion in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape when, the Managing Editor of FORBES AFRICA, Chris Bishop, sent me a text message saying that Zwelakhe Sisulu had died.
It was barely a week after we had published, as part of our October issue, a nine-page focus on the increasingly volatile mining industry in South Africa. Five of the nine pages focused on the chaos in the platinum sector, while the other four were dedicated to manganese mining, looking at whether new players like Kudumane Manganese, of which Sisulu was chairman, were doing anything different to avert the crisis that the platinum sector was experiencing.
Sisulu’s encounters, and views, were the thread that held together the manganese article. Chris and I had subsequently spoken about going back to Sisulu, with the hope of possibly getting him to grace the cover of one of our future issues. The leftovers from my interview would form a good basis from which we could build a really strong lead story about the rise and rise of a journalist-turned-entrepreneur, who had so excitedly told me, “There’s nothing as exciting as being an African in Africa today”.
I knew that it would be one of the easiest stories I would ever be able to tell, for Sisulu himself was the master story teller. Like a good journalist, he had the amazing ability to tell so much, so well, in so few words. When, for example, I asked who had inspired him the most in his life, he gave a simple yet sophisticated reply, “It’s difficult to say, but the man I admired greatly was Oliver Tambo. He’s somebody who stood head and shoulders above everybody else. Joe Matthews looked through you like a prosecutor. Madiba tapped you with a jab. Oliver Tambo hugged you.”
I immediately got the picture, or rather, the message.
Like his hero Tambo—the man who held together South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) for decades in exile, while other leaders like Mandela were in prison—Sisulu appeared soft, yet his intellect was so sharp, his organizational skills impeccable and his determination steely.
Never the one to shy away from new challenges, in July 1978, a mere three years after kicking off his journalism career as a cadet reporter and merely 28 years old, Sisulu was elected president of the newly founded Media Workers’ Association of South Africa; the same year he was appointed news editor of the Sunday Post.
Two years later, he would lead the longest and biggest strike by media workers in the country, ending in successful wage negotiations, albeit the authorities would retaliate by forcing the proprietors of the newspaper he worked for, The Post, to close down.
As if that was not enough, Sisulu—alongside fellow journalists who had led the strike—would be banned for three years, placed under house arrest and would not be allowed to work as a journalist, attend public meetings or even go to townships other than the one in which he lived.
Following the lapse of his banning orders in 1983, Sisulu would get a Nieman Fellowship, a mid-career journalism award entitling him to a year’s study at Harvard University. And it was during this time, sitting among the audience listening to a speech by his hero, that he would not only rekindle his childhood memories of how warm Tambo was, but find other good reasons for admiring him.
“Oliver Tambo stood up and spoke. There isn’t a speech in the world that has made more of an impression on me than that one. The thing about that man was the way he would marshal his facts and use them as galloping horses. He was quite unequalled. I had always thought of the struggle in emotional terms. But when Tambo spoke I understood, for the first time, that there was actually a rational contestation, that it wasn’t just Amandla! Amandla!” recalled Sisulu.
On his return to South Africa in 1985, Sisulu was appointed editor of The New Nation, a new weekly publication sponsored by the Southern African Catholics Bishops’ Conference, one that, in more ways than the publications he had previously worked for, would become a bigger thorn on the side of apartheid’s apologists. Needless to say that more bannings, gagging orders and imprisonment would follow.
When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Sisulu became his press and private secretary, traveling the world with the revered statesman.
“No one would see Madiba if I didn’t want them to see him. The question rose to me very fundamentally when I was working for Madiba, do I want to be a gatekeeper all of my life?”
Following the historic 1994 democratic elections, after which Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president, Sisulu was deployed by the ANC-led government to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the national public broadcaster, as its first black Group CEO, a position he would hold until 1997.
After leaving the SABC he would become a businessman, with stakes in a string of companies that straddle mining, energy, telecommunication and the media.
As more messages came through to my cellphone on that fateful day, from, among others, board members of a community television station that I chair and which Sisulu’s broadcasting outfit generously supports through funding, equipment and training, and as tributes continued to appear on social media sites from fellow journalists—who either worked with him or who were inspired by his activism as  a journalist—my mind raced back to our encounter a
month earlier.
From the bits he had told me about the years he had spent outside the limelight focusing on building his business empire, I could not help but be in awe of the kind of model entrepreneur he had become, in a continent so desperately in need of them. He told me the story of how he was working with government of São Tomé and some Chinese business people. The terms were that the São Toméan government wouldn’t pay a dime, but after 18 years would own
the station.
Brutally frank, as he was kind, provocative even, he sneered at ongoing suggestions for the nationalization of mines in South Africa. Not surprising for a mining magnate, I pointed out to him during our interview, but he insisted his reasons were more practical than ideological. He cited as examples telecommunications utility Telkom as well as the SABC.
“The major challenge facing this country is the management of public assets. Until and unless we perfect management of public assets, we must not even talk of nationalization.”
Not far from the auditorium, from where I had just received the news of his premature death, was the state of the art minerals polishing factory Sisulu had urged me to visit. Based at the East London Industrial Development Zone, the factory was very special to him, he told me. He was passionate about the project because it was, in part, his way of giving back to the Eastern Cape, the largely impoverished province that gave birth to both his parents, struggle stalwarts Walter and Albertina Sisulu, as well as other outstanding South African liberation heroes like Steve Biko, Mandela and Tambo.

It Was Exciting To Be  An African In Africa

It was a beginning dogged by poverty, but inspired by dreams. Actress Terry Pheto’s family was too poor to own a television set and she grew up paying 10 cents a day to sit on the floor to watch TV with her neighbors. Now, she sits in Hollywood and makes a fortune from appearing onscreen in the soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful.
So was it by sheer luck that Pheto was chosen in a country full of accomplished and perhaps more experienced actresses? Vukile Madlala, the publicity manager at the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s SABC1, explains how it all started: “Since we are the channel that carries The Bold and the Beautiful as one of our longest-running soapies, the producers of the soap came down with a handful of their actors for a South African tour. It was during that trip that they discussed with us the possibility of developing an African character. They asked us to nominate a few actresses, and Terry Pheto was one of the actresses we put forward.”
It would seem that this move by the American producers was a calculated one. Madlala points out that The Bold and the Beautiful is still among the top five rated shows on SABC1. Simply put, viewers are still hooked—even after many years of watching the storyline unfold.
A look at general viewership trends reveals that while the craze over reality television is crushing the soap opera in the US, Africans are still tuning in—and in large numbers, compensating for the loss of viewers and income on home turf.
All of these factors have conspired to take a woman from Boipatong in the Vaal Triangle, near Johannesburg, to Hollywood. It has been a long journey.
Pheto has certainly come a long way from being the child whose family didn’t own a television. She had to drop out of college during the second year of an IT diploma, because there was no money for tuition, and joined a community theatre group.
It was a long apprenticeship that bore fruit in 2008. She found fame after being cast in the 2006 Best Foreign Film, the South African Oscar-winning movie, Tsotsi. Then, Pheto was selected as the face of international cosmetic giant L’Oréal Paris, following in the footsteps of Jane Fonda, Halle Berry, Beyoncé Knowles, Freida Pinto and Cheryl Cole.
Now, Pheto is playing the role of Dr Malaika Maponya in The Bold and the Beautiful.
“It was amazing playing a South African on one of the world’s most famous American soaps,” she says. “I didn’t have to learn a new accent, I didn’t have to venture too much into the unknown—all I had to do was make sure I knew my lines by the time I arrived on set because the level of professionalism there is unlike anything I have ever seen before.
“The production is like an incredibly well-oiled machine that runs with amazing precision. There’s simply no room for error or tardiness. You get only one take, and there is an expectation that you must get it right the first time,” she explains.
With the type of opportunities that she’s had at her disposal so far, Pheto would most certainly be forgiven for packing her bags and relocating to the United States permanently in pursuit of her own Charlize Theron fantasy tale. She already travels back and forth for classes and workshops. She has great connections and relationships with the South African community making it big in Hollywood—the likes of Gavin Hood, creator and director of Tsotsi, the very same guy who took a great gamble by putting Pheto and a few other community theatre actors in front of the camera for the first time.
But as I engage her on her current and future plans, it is pretty clear that the African continent features front and centre in her plans.
Growing her resumé as an actress is also top of mind for Pheto. She has recently been one of the main stars in a local movie called How to Steal R2 million, where she played the character of Olive—a feisty township girl who will do whatever it takes, even crime, to survive.
“I am currently reading scripts and attending castings. In our local film industry, you are lucky to do two movies a year. So I am constantly in search of my next big movie project,” says the lady whose portfolio includes roles in movies such as Catch a Fire and Goodbye Bafana, in which she played Zindzi Mandela.
Pheto also has ambitions of making it behind the camera. “A while ago, I got awarded a scholarship to study filmmaking and directing at the New York Film academy. And as soon as I can identify a gap in my schedule, I will be enrolling in that course,” she says.
She would love to collaborate with the stars and directors in Nollywood, the highly successful Nigerian movie circuit. “I admire how the Nigerians delight in their own culture and how they love telling their own stories. With the kind of viewership numbers they attract, and our sense of quality in production as South Africans, we can do really big things together,” she says with a smile.

Tag: SABC

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Men Expect Me To Make Them Tea, I Never Will

It Was Exciting To Be An African In Africa

TERRY PHETO