One night last week, they hosted a scotch tasting at the dealership, an event intended to lure buppies into buying or test-driving cars. Men wearing pin-striped suits and silk ties trickled in after a long day at the office. They mingled as the hired DJ pumped up the volume and Jason, the young white tasting host, poured ruddy scotch into thin flutes. "The real reason we're here tonight is to drink!" laughed owner Ciko Thomas, as he coaxed the crowd into a circle, announcing that a financial services representative was on hand if they felt the urge to purchase a BMW. "This is the only African black-owned dealership in the country, and it's our home and your home," he said.

The guests politely sipped scotch. Jason seemed to know his crowd. As he instructed the men to swirl and sniff their drinks, he joked that he had the biggest nostrils, eliciting a collective laugh from the crowd. Pointing to one guest who was puffing away, Jason noted that the Cohiba cigar nicely complemented the aged Glenfiddich.

Jason used to manage Katzy's, one of Johannesburg's hottest black bars. Surrounded by expensive clothing shops in an upscale mall, Katzy's is where "you show me your gold card and I'll show you mine," as one scotch-drinking guest said. Jason hosts tastings all over the country, dabbling in anything from caviar and cigars to cognac and champagne. He tells me that, without a doubt, he increasingly caters to the buppies.

And the buppies are growing more discriminating in their tastes. "I only drink whiskey now. I gave up beer altogether," said the dealership's financial services representative, 29-year-old Andile Makhunga. "It's a much more quality drink. The people we socialize with, the people in this class, spend more money on what they drink, and if you want to get into that market, you do the same."

According to owner Mncedisi Mayekiso, the dealership's secret to success is quite simple: Know your customer and treat him or her well. That's easy for the 33-year-old, who is a perfect reflection of his customers. "Look around here. These are our contemporaries, and they are starting to make decisions," Mayekiso explained as a massage therapist making the showroom rounds worked the knots out of his shoulder muscles. "We said we'll do it differently: We'll mingle with customers. We socialize together and watch football together. We went to university together. We grew up at the same time and aspire to the same things."

Besides Katzy's, Mayekiso and his friends hang out at Wandie's and Nambitha, two stylish joints in the most affluent neighborhood of Soweto, the sprawling black township on the edge of Johannesburg that not too long ago was racked with protest and violence. Nambitha is surrounded by large homes, and its front parking lot is jammed with BMWs and Mercedes on weekend nights. Yet, just a short drive away, on the other side of Soweto, blacks continue to live in abject poverty, with extended families sleeping in one- or two-room shacks.

Mayekiso, who studied at the University of Cape Town on a scholarship from the U.S. Agency for International Development -- and says his role models were Mandela and Bill Gates -- was among the first blacks to attend a top-notch, previously whites-only university. His driving ambition was to succeed in a way never possible for his parents' generation. In his first job as a marketing trainee, Mayekiso's salary doubled that of his father's.

"We were extremely lucky. When I go home [to the working-class township in the Eastern Cape], I see my contemporaries and now they ask me for money. I look back now and I say, those people could've done more if the situation had been different. We have those stories to remind us where we come from," Mayekiso said.

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