Gaby Magomola in two different worlds

Gaby Magomola has literally lived in different worlds – each vastly removed from the other over time, space, purpose and quality. And yet, it all converged into what he calls a single “sweep of circumstances” which propelled him along an extraordinary journey through life.

From the dusty but secure township streets of Bekkersdal, to the dehumanising degradation and cruelties of being a political prisoner on Robben Island, he went on to become a successful banker – both on New York’s Wall Street and back in South Africa.

Now Magomola, a former senior executive with Citibank, Barclays Bank and African Bank, chronicles this journey – both painfully and joyously – in his book, Robben Island to Wall Street.

“What made me write the book was a combination of things – it was a necessary cleansing, a spiritual journey and an attempt to contribute to the historical record,” he says. But, he adds, it was also an inspired book – inspired by his wife of 40 years, Nana, to whom he refers to as “an amazing influence in my life”; by the young people he has met and who view him as a role model; by the many friends and mentors he met along the way.

He was inspired also by the thousands of other prisoners who passed through the archway underneath the words, “we serve with pride”, and disappeared into the clutches of a notorious island prison. Some never made it back home, the pain of their loss is still fresh in the book.

Magomola was one of the more fortunate ones. But it was Nana, having heard his many stories and experienced many things with him over the years, who urged him to record it all in a book for the benefit of future generations.

He begins his story with an account of a return visit to Robben Island in 1994 for the making of a television documentary together with famous former inmates: Dr Nchaupe Aubrey Mokoape, a community physician; Nelson Mandela; Dr Neville Alexander, a prominent academic; and Deputy Chief Justice, Dikgang Moseneke.

“I carry Robben Island in me; it is etched in my soul for eternity,” Magomola says in the book.

And in an interview, he tells me how Cape Town can never be “a normal city” for him: “Whenever I fly to Cape Town, I sit on the right-hand side in order to see the island as we get to the city. I will forever associate Cape Town with Robben Island.

“It is a city I know by its prisons, Robben Island, Pollsmoor, Roeland Street. The Somerset Hospital at the entrance to the Waterfront is where I was sent for a [tuberculosis] checkup as a prisoner. Table Mountain for me will always be just a distant backdrop to the stone quarry where we crushed stones on the island.”

In the book, Magomola writes about the relatively carefree life of growing up on Venterspost mine and in Bekkersdal with his beloved mother Mme, father Ntate, sister Semakaleng and brother Malefetsane, blissfully unaware of apartheid – until he went off to high school in Krugersdorp.

What happened to him in life hereafter he ‘blames’ on “good people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu” whom he met as one of his teachers. Tutu, together with others such as Stan Motjuwadi, another teacher, and his principal GG Mamabolo, all helped shape his political awakening.

Increasingly, Magomola experienced the harshness of apartheid, particularly after moving to another high school closer to Johannesburg. Then in 1959, he and others were expelled from school for truancy and holding political meetings.

Magomola found work, and tells in the book how he pretended to be Coloured in order to access employment that was forbidden for black Africans. In the interim, he had joined the ANC Youth League.

However, it was the events in Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 which shook the young Magomola, and “years and years of accumulated rage” and a belief that the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) was more militant and aggressive moved him to join that organisation in 1962.

Then, on a Sunday in March 1963 – a day dubbed the “Sunday of Surprises” by the people of Bekkersdal – a string of shiny cars carrying white men in suits entered the township.

Magomola and several of his comrades were arrested and carted off to prison.

After betrayal by a former comrade, they were tried, convicted and incarcerated at the notorious prison farm called Leeuwkop Maximum Security Prison.

What followed was a particularly harrowing experience for Magomola and his fellow prisoners, and also for those reading about this in his book. “I wanted to be completely frank and candid in the book. I wanted it to touch the soul, to show what really happened in some of these prisons.

“I have not met anyone who has read the book who has not come back to me and enquired about the Leeuwkop prison chapter,” he says.

Magomola tells how people stopped reading the book at that point, some telephoned him in tears. His children, finding it too painful, also stopped reading at this point.

He says this has made him realise that there is a need to speak to the young people of today, to explain these experiences to them.

But more was to follow, and in December 1963, Magomola and his comrades were transferred to Robben Island where growing up was fast and harsh, but where he also came into contact with many people who left a lasting impression, including many of today’s leaders in all spheres of life in South Africa.

On the island, he encountered, from a distance, PAC leader Robert Sobukwe, who was held in isolation; and witnessed the arrival of Mandela and other imprisoned ANC leaders.

Here, too, he became ill with TB, but recovered after treatment.

Magomola recalls how he asked the prison authorities for and was given, against all odds, a trumpet that sometimes brought a lighter side to life on the island for him and his comrades.

Today, that trumpet is on display in the Robben Island Museum.

The book traces how Magomola was banished to faraway Polokwane after being released from Robben Island, how he began a new life there, met his future wife whom he married in 1971, followed by the birth of his children, his studying for and obtaining his BCom degree, and eventually being accepted to study in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship.

In 1978 he “stumbled onto banking” when Citibank employed him. Life in New York was good, where Magomola and his family made many new friends, including many South African exiles.

In 1982 Citibank asked him to return to South Africa as an “international assignee”; and after the bank dis-invested from South Africa because of apartheid, Magomola decided to remain and joined Barclays Bank in Johannesburg as executive assistant to chief executive officer, Chris Ball.

And thus began a relationship that left a huge impression on him. “Chris Ball had a major impact on my life and impressed me immensely as a leader. Here was a man who was prepared, at the height of apartheid oppression in the 1980s, to employ a black man with a Robben Island background in a senior position in the bank,” says Magomola.

It was Ball and the bank that also later backed Magomola in striking a first hammer blow against the Group Areas Act – the law that forced people of different races to live in separate, designated areas – by helping him relocate in defiance of the law to the white northern Johannesburg suburb of Wendywood.

The move, which Magomola had felt was necessary for professional reasons and for the education of his children, opened up something of a floodgate. Many more upwardly mobile professional black people followed suit, and five years later, the Act was repealed.

Magomola left Barclays when Dr Sam Motsuenyane asked him to join African Bank as chief executive. Later, Magomola was party to the creation of a second black-controlled bank and embarked on numerous other business ventures.

As South Africa moved along toward its emergence from apartheid rule into a bright new democratic future, he sought to play a prominent role in building a bridgehead to facilitate the entry of black people into the business world.

Magomola was also one of the early pioneers whose efforts led to the new ANC government adopting black economic empowerment (BEE) as its policy. “BEE has given rise to scores and perhaps hundreds of new entrants, mainly African, into the realm of real business in South Africa,” he says.

He himself was one of the early beneficiaries of BEE, and today he remains active in business, serving on various boards.

But, says Magomola, he believes it was his prison experiences that taught him to persevere in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds, and set him on the course of a life successfully lived.

It has also informed his definition of leadership: “Prison teaches one the ability of living beyond pain, suffering and humiliation. A leader is someone who can, under those circumstances, continue to have a vision, saying there is something better beyond this.

“It is a question of literally seeing beyond the walls of prison and saying to oneself it is still achievable. Robben Island taught us to internalise the pain until it becomes your armour.”

In the early 1990s, Magomola joined Trevor Manuel – later South Africa’s very successful Finance minister – and others to construct the Mont Fleur Scenarios. And it was the Flight of the Flamingoes that was singled out as the ideal scenario for South Africa. Did it materialise?

“I don’t believe we have perfected it, but there remains a strong resolve to get there,” says Magomola, and adds that he remains hugely optimistic about the potential and the future of his country.

And as he ends his book: “From South Africa I draw inspiration and always will... I am of this, and no other soil”. ▲

Stef Terblanche

“Robben Island to Wall Street” by Gaby Magomola is published by Unisa Press, Pretoria.