Spaza shop blues

Trundling off to a midday appointment eParkeni was running late for, we fell upon a sight that elicited palpable sighs, stopping us screeching in our tracks. Zama-Mbishe Store, for around two decades an enduring institution to township entrepreneurship, was closed shut, seemingly for good. Endearingly known as kwaMbishe – The Uglyish One’s – in reference to the hulking maverick who started it all those years ago, this was way more significant than just another spaza shop going under. 

The chained up burglar bars, absence of customers loitering out on the stoep, the silenced clang of the till jerking open signified the death of something that had been a marvel in an industry so replete with bad endings. Its founder, raised on the ash-strewn, sometimes violent causeways of the Old Location had, since he was yay high, learnt to crease his brow and roll up his sleeves. 

With a formidable frame, a heavyweight’s sturdy hands and a look that dissuaded anybody who might be foolish enough to mess with him, he would deploy that same unflinching brawn when he first undertook a vending business. Its beginnings were nothing much – a hasty put-together of racks of chips, biscuits and a rusted payphone trading under the open sky. Learning by trial and error and with measly stock, the place bore all the reliable indicators of an enterprise off to nowhere. But alas! Mbishe would soon buy a car, move out of his parents’ home and leave those who might have snickered at his efforts biting the dust. 

“Mbishe,” says a businessperson whom we’ll call Mr Alto, “was serious, didn’t play around. Not even when other shops were sinking, the guy kept it together.” Mr Alto remembers him as “resilient,” “the guy who faced challenges head-on,” before wistfully shaking his head and muttering, “why did he have to die?”

As with one of his deceased grandfathers, the “hustle” gene was a birthright coursing thickly down to Mbishe’s bones. The elder man, a traditional healer known as uMhlekazi – the Honourable One – inspired this piece published a few years ago on City Press. By the time of uMhlekazi’s demise, his Thembalethu store had upgraded from meekly trading inside his modest dwelling into an impressive compound of brick and mortar with a fleet of taxis lining the parking lot. It boasted floor-to-ceiling shelves, commercial fridges, gleaming floors and had an ubuntu-like credit facility, with loyal customers buying “on the book.”

Today, gone is the Honourable One’s ready smile, too his no-nonsense grandson, and with them that courageous entrepreneurial spirit to which the spaza economy owes its hard-fought origins.

Behind the Honourable One’s till nowadays stands a Bangladeshi. Street wisdom had – evidently wrongly – generally assumed that because a bulk of foreign nationals operating in SA were Muslim, the liquor trade would be spared. Human ambition, however, often takes on a life of its own. For instance, right next door to Thembalethu at Hans Brothers tavern, a venerable watering hole where locals have been drowning their sorrows, dancing and fighting since the 80s, a foreign national daily rakes in the profits. Virtually all the other once-booming drinking establishments have been met with the same fate. 

Nowhere than downtown Colesberg is the phenomenon most elaborate. Notice that clutter of shops stretching from the bottom of Church Street where the stop sign is all the way up to the old ABSA building, almost all are manned by a foreign national. The hardware store guy is East Asian; the barber is West African; a Bangladeshi sells you furniture and repairs phones; a Ghanaian mends your shoes. Ignore the stalls at the N1 government building, also the little store where women sit huddled over sewing machines as well as a white mechanic in a soot-stained overall and there isn’t a locally-run store to point to. 

Is this beginning to this smack of xenophobia? Couldn’t be further from the intention. On the contrary, it seeks to mull over a conundrum that has puzzled researchers and politicians alike: How do migrants from some of the most turbulent regions in the world not only thrive but manage to wrest a multi-billion Rand industry from right under the nose of locals? 

Take Solomon, the Ethiopian who’s been supplying the writer’s daily bread for over ten years. He barely speaks a word of English, struggles to work the speedpoint and when he first arrived, he shared a room hardly bigger than a cubicle with two of his countrymen. One of those was Emmanuel whose own start-up days, going door to door selling linen and curtains, were hardly anything to write home about. Add to this the oft-volatile situation when you are a foreigner offering credit to locals and being met with a nonchalant, “come next month,” when the time to collect  rolls by.

Evidently, Emmanuel has subsequently managed to smous a lot of duvets and drapes when you do the inventory of his impressively-stocked shop in town, the big bakkie that he drives around in delivering goods to some of his clients and his capacious rented flat. Solomon came here to get away from the wars that have reduced his native country to rubble. The journey was brutal, “by car, by foot,” he says, “lots of fighting in Somalia.” The social and cultural shock and high crime that lay waiting in Johannesburg notwithstanding, he nonetheless slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and came anyway.

Although the literature is sparse on the subject, author of KasiNomics, GG Alcock, is considered something of an authoritative voice on matters of the township economy. It is he at whom big corporates laughed derisively when he forewarned that the future of the spaza would be determined by these outside parties. Proved right by history, nowadays those same corporates have him on speed dial when trying to get a reliable assessment of the goings-on of the township.

One of his observations is how Somali and Ethiopian traders work together and are very organised. “The South African spaza owner,” says Alcock, “couldn’t compete with Shoprite, Pick n Pay and so on when they entered the township economy. The Somalis arrived long after the South African had been pushed out of that space and the Somali was able to much more competitively compete with Shoprite and Pick n Pay on price, on service, they offer credit to social grant recepients with no interest.” 

Fair enough.

However, it’s either this series of interviews are relatively old or it’s been a while since Alcock touched base with the kasi if his next vignette – that the foreign takeover is limited to the spazas and not the alcohol or fast-food industry – is anything to go by. Travel the country enough and you might be justified in raising a disagreeing hand.

Our businessman, Mr Alto, is one such Doubting Thomas. On his rounds, which take him across the platteland; Phillipolis to Kuruman, Gariep to Burgersdorp, even to far-flung outposts of the Eastern Cape like Komani (formerly Queenstown), he paints a grim picture. Many previous local tavern owners, he finds have been put out of business. 

“The foreign nationals,” he says, “are shrewd operators. Their bulk-buying muscle enables them to reduce prices so significantly that the local competitor ultimately doesn’t stand a chance.” Unable to compete, his saving grace is simply to let his premises out to these competitors and live off the rent. “That,” says the businessman “is the trend wherever I go.” “The spider-web doctrine,” Mr Alto calls it and it rings a bell with eParkeni. 

It conjures up vague recollections of a book, Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success, a Spider-Web Doctrine, whose title alone invariably had tongues wagging. Penned by Nigerian author, Chika Onyeani, the book pondered similar questions to the one now before us. For instance how was it possible that ordinary upstarts from Asia could take over a huge segment of New York’s meter cab industry? Or start franchise stores (I believe Seven Eleven was one of them). Onyeani makes mention of the spider-web doctrine wherein certain groups of people ensure that whatever they spend stays within their community. They deliberately and intently set out to buy from their own. 

But there is one score that Alcock is spot-on about; that large sums of rent money from foreign nationals indeed do pass into local hands. 

But what about the fast-food industry that he seems to insist has not been penetrated by foreign nationals? Big franchises, it appears, remain mostly owned by locals, but what is to be made of small-scale establishments in the form of fish ‘n chips stores and shisanyamas – you know those traditional street-food providers? From the top of my head, I’m able to count at least four foreign-owned such businesses in town – around a quarter of the total number.

What is to be done?

The reflexive reaction especially amongst political parties seeking political mileage is to find scapegoats and culprits, crafting opportunistic yarns along the lines of, “you are poor because of so-and-so.” Although this may well satisfy rhetoric, maybe even add numbers to the membership, sadly it doesn’t address the core issues: unemployment, inequality, lack of economic participation particularly in rural areas. It would seem that although some of these problems may be political insofar as immigration/border control measures are inefficient, there are more immediate failings.

One – and this is purely anecdotal – that is apparent to this writer comes in the form of a Mozambican/Shangaan acquaintance whose company he sometimes keeps. He doesn’t speak a word of English, even fluffs his Portuguese. But hand him a broken laptop, or DVD player, cellphone – any piece of broken technological equipment – and while you’re at it, ask him to put up a ceiling or to build a wall, fix the plumbing or electrify the house and Bob’s your uncle. He does it all in a day’s work. Still in his early twenties yet his handiwork is way beyond his years. Perhaps that is a direction SA can look towards; an overhaul of the education system and whilst we’re at it, look into training and upskilling aspirant farmers, welders, bricklayers – the sort of trades that don’t necessarily require formal employment. Those who knew the late Mbishe from his school days might say that he wasn’t always the sharpest pencil in the case. Yet he bought his first car when many of them were still living under their parents’ roof. And, with nothing but his own resolve would build an institution that would live on long after he was gone.