Pepe Marais - Growing Greatness: A Journey Towards Personal and Business Mastery

During the first quarter of 2010, I was invited by a friend of mine, Allon Raiz, to one of his Medici business dinners. Allon is the founder of Raizcorp, an incubation company whose purpose is to accelerate the growth of small entrepreneurial enterprises. In my opinion, he is one of the leading entrepreneurs in our country, a mastermind behind the success of many of the businesses under his tutorship, and a person I highly admire and value.

To my left at the table was an empty chair, reserved for an invitee who was running late. He finally arrived, in time for our entre, in the form of the flamboyant ex-MK fighter, Chief Economist and Vice President of the Industrial Development Corporation, Lumkile Mondi. Even before sitting down, Lumkile announced loudly that he and some friends would be climbing Kilimanjaro in September that year, and that they had two spots open. Anyone want to join us? he asked in a boisterous voice. I didnt know him from a bar of soap, but I had learned over the course of my journey that the only way to overcome my fears was to step boldly into those opportunities where few people are willing to tread. My hand shot upwards while my jaw dropped downwards: Im in.

And so I found myself a few weekends later, accompanied by my wife, repeatedly climbing the stairs of the Sandton Towers, with my twenty-month-old boy strapped firmly to my back. Together with the other members of our party, we would sweat through flight after flight of those stairs over the weeks to come: Khanyi Chaba, an executive working at Standard Bank, Irene Jacobs, an executive working at Coca-Cola at the time, and Vincent Charnley, former president of the Institute of Waste Management of Southern Africa (IWMSA). I am blessed to call myself a friend of Sibusiso Vilane, the first black African to summit Everest, who agreed to shepherd our party up Kilimanjaro.

On day one of our six-day hike up Kilimanjaro, I experienced for the first time in my life what it felt like to be a minority in a social context within our group of seven. I remember how the majority of our team were conversing in isiZulu, then suddenly stopped upon realising, We have abelungu with us. After some lively laughter, they quickly changed back to speaking English. I also remember overcoming hell on the night of our final summit, reaching the top of Kili just before daybreak, after a back-breaking ten-hour climb. But, most of all, I remember spending eight solid hours above the white clouds at Karanga Camp, after scaling the Barranco Wall the day before. It was as if the entire trip was designed for this one episode to play out.

We arrived at Karanga Camp just after eleven oclock that morning, at minus ten degrees. We had just survived a pretty treacherous climb up the Barranco Wall, where one wrong step could send you toppling 200 metres down. It was to be the shortest hike of our six-day climb and we would be spending the remainder of the afternoon resting, in preparation for the second last leg to Barafu Camp from where we would attempt the summit the following evening. While tightly huddled around the tiny plastic table in our teeny-weeny tent, Khanyi suddenly leaned towards me, looking me straight in the eyes. I remember her exact words to this day as she asked, or rather instructed, Pepe, I would like you to tell us the story of your life, in the way you would like us to know you. I remember her exact tone of voice, the sincerity in it, even the way she pronounced my name. This simple question unlocked a deeply profound eight-hour sharing session between seven strangers, who afterwards walked away friends. And although most of us would never see each other again after our expedition into the depths of each others souls, there would forever be the deepest connection between us.

I would like to tell you the story of my life, in the way I would like you to know me.

I was born on Tuesday, 5 November 1968 at 8:45am, weighing in at 3 pounds 3 ounces and measuring 18 inches. It was Guy Fawkes morning, and one could say I entered the world with a very small ceremonious bang.

My first living memory is that of my mother sitting on a black and white toilet. I must have been less than three months old, lying on my back in my little crib, looking up at her from the level of a chequered black and white floor. There was a tiny window to the left of the toilet, way, way up on the wall. The sun was shining brightly through it, backlighting my mothers head, making her appear like an angel. It was a contented moment. The calm before the storm called life.

My mother was the eldest daughter of my Ouma Ellie and her husband, Oupa Theunis. Ouma Ellie died on 30 December 2015 at the age of 93. I was 46 then and on holiday in Costa Rica with my wife Heidi and our little boy Jasper. Oupa Theunis had died when I was nine years old. I have a distant memory of the event. I was standing next to his freshly dug grave on a slippery slope outside Stellenbosch, surrounded by many other mounds of red clay and equally red eyes and runny noses. I had my own sakdoek , a piece of cloth that I was meant to use to blow my nose. But I was not going to cry, because big boys dont cry. As Afrikaners, we were not meant to cry, ever, and sluk jou trane (swallow your tears) was the order of the day.

I did not visit Ouma Ellie as much as I would have liked to in her later years. She was by then living in an old age home outside Stellenbosch, and we were in Johannesburg. But every time I did visit her, she would always tell me how much she wanted to write a book. Every single visit, she repeated this same dream of hers, over and over in her soft, whispery voice, right down to the last time I saw her. I was staring into these ancient yet youthful eyes, while massaging the crooked feet of this limited yet unlimited, narrow-minded yet deeply wise, old but young at heart, wrinkled human being. She went to her grave without ever writing her book, and so never fulfilled one of her lifes dreams.

Ouma Ellie came from a very, very underprivileged background. Her husband Oupa Theunis left school at the age of 13 to learn a trade in bricklaying. His craft led him to join Murray & Roberts, where he later became a site foreman. At the time of my mothers birth, he was renting a piece of land from a German on the Cape Flats on which he built a small home with his bare hands. There was no electricity in their house, no fridge, not even a radio. They had no running water either and used a metal bath and a wood-fire stove to heat water in their kitchen. I am conscious that to this day millions of South Africans still live like this.

Oupa Theunis had the means to buy a car only 20 years later, in the 1970s. Before then, he got up at 5am and walked five miles to the station to catch the first train in order to arrive at work at 8am sharp. He was never late. On Saturdays, he did building work for the German.

Into their humble home were born my mother and her first three brothers and two sisters. Over the years more and more joined their ranks, totalling 12 in the end. Ouma Ellies final son and youngest child arrived more than two decades later, shortly after the birth of her first grandchild, my elder sister. By her early thirties, Ouma Ellie had lost all her teeth as a result of calcium deficiency, a by-product of permanent pregnancy.

From the moment my mother and her siblings could walk, the children had to work in the vegetable gardens that were planted around the house. During the week, before school, they would harvest the vegetables which were then sold for extra income on Saturdays at the local market. The kids were clothed mainly in second-hand shirts, pants and dresses, mostly donated by welfare. On the odd occasion, my great-grandmother used maize bags to sew my mother a dress. My mother finally owned her first new dress at the age of 17.