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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
A decade into democracy, South Africa's elite blacks prosper. But their glitz and glam hide a world-class inequality that only gets worse.
Apr 29, 2004 | Tshepo Boikanyo signs his name on the dotted line and in an instant becomes the proud owner of a $70,000 BMW. The 33-year-old lawyer, dressed sharp in a black suit, glides across the floor of the BMW dealership to ogle his new car. "I considered buying a Jaguar, but I opted for the BMW after test-driving one. And this is a black dealership, so I felt I had to bring my business here," he says. Litha Nkombisa, one of the dealership's four owners, hands him a bottle of champagne and the keys to his titanium silver 525 Coupe. "You see, they take care of me here," Boikanyo says. "It's like a second home."
It's Friday afternoon, the busiest time of the week at Joburg City Auto, South Africa's first black-owned car dealership. It sells only BMWs. Young black men stroll in unannounced during the lunch hour, accompanied by well-groomed girlfriends who coolly eye a fresh supply of polished "beemers," also jokingly known as "black man's worry," or "be my wife."
The two-story, glass-plated dealership building shines oddly bright amid the ruins of rundown downtown Johannesburg, where city streets bustle with impoverished pedestrian masses who could never dream of owning a Beetle, let alone a BMW. Inside the dealership, softly gurgling fountains lull shoppers as they weave between sleek black sedans and Technicolor convertibles. When the sales staff is busy with other customers, visitors can thumb through a copy of Enterprise, a black business magazine, or sit back and watch European models strut the latest styles on the Fashion Channel streaming endlessly from a widescreen TV in the dealership's cafe. After a much-touted opening last December, Joburg City Auto raked in record sales, selling 42 cars in its first month.
Once a sign of white privilege under apartheid South Africa, the luxury cars that now choke Johannesburg's congested highways are increasingly driven by buppies -- South Africa's rising class of young black elites who demand nothing but the best. Ten years after Nelson Mandela was voted into office as South Africa's first black president a milestone celebrated this week -- many blacks in their 20s and 30s who grew up in the country's impoverished townships are thriving. They make up the country's new ranks of lawyers, advertising executives, IT managers and business owners. They dine in the swankest restaurants, shop at the most exclusive malls, and toast with the finest champagne.
While the buppies flourish, their fortunes accompany a growing polarization between the haves and have-nots in South Africa. When Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) came into power a decade ago, hopes were high that life for the neediest would improve. Despite tremendous gains in righting past wrongs -- like creating the economic opportunities that made the buppies possible -- more than 40 percent of the population still languishes in extreme poverty. Only Brazil has a larger income gap. In South Africa, the top quarter of the population earns 85 percent of the country's wealth.
The four owners of Joburg City Auto are among the lucky. Childhood friends who grew up in the townships of Eastern Cape, South Africa's poorest province, the foursome rose through the class system with relative ease in the aftermath of apartheid's legacy of racial and economic inequality. And they mean business.
