I have been meaning to write this particular article for the past month and a half or so, after a very enlightening and eye-opening conversation with a mate of mine who is part of our pub group that has been hanging out together at the local watering hole in our neck of the woods in northern Johannesburg for the past decade or so.
The said mate is an accomplished black professional and businessperson who gave some very interesting, thought-provoking insights into the psyche of the black middle class in contemporary times, which will form the basis of this entire article.
In light of the recent brouhaha about former PRASA head engineer Daniel Mthimkhulu’s fifteen year conviction by the courts for falsifying his qualifications and the damage that this does to the reputation of black professionals in the eyes of white Saffers (as if it should matter, but that is a conversation you and I will leave for another day) and how this feeds into white arrogance and supremacy as well as fallacious perceptions of black incompetence, ineptness and ineptitude, the timing of this particular piece could not be better in my view, despite having had it in the back of my mind for the past month and a half.
Of course, the irony of it all, without defending the Daniel Mthimkhulu’s of this world, is that I know first hand from my days co-running a recruitment business that focussed mainly on providing black professional candidates to clients within the financial services sector that there are many whites in the corporate sector who have reached the most senior, executive levels, despite being underqualified or not even qualified, but they have been there since the days of apartheid when they were appointed and they now have “experience” and “institutional memory” and now “qualify”(irony of ironies I know right okes) as skilled and competent.
Anyway, let me leave “uchuku” as my Xhosa mates would say and attend to the matter at hand. My mate that I mentioned above, is of the view that the current generation of black professionals have a sense of entitlement about where they should be in their careers, ceteris paribus of course. Yes, there are still issues of transformation to reckon with and institutional cultures that prefer “whiteness” over “blackness,” but for the purposes of this conversation with black professionals about black professionals, we decided to hold all such variables constant.
From my mates’ perspective, there is a lack of urgency and seriousness amongst the black professional and business class about becoming masters at their craft, experts within their field, the sharpest knife within the set. He spoke about Malcolm Gladwell’s highly debated principle, the “10 000 hour rule” from his well-known book Outliers: The Story of Success, which asserts that in order to become world-class and an expert at any chosen field, one has to dedicate 10 000 hours of hard work, sweat equity and focus to hone one’s skills. Of course, the rule itself is not some kind of magical recipe for success, but it is the principle that it espouses that is most important.
In my mate’s eyes, when black professionals start off their journey towards building a career and most often seeking to escape poverty by pursuing a formal higher education qualification, they have such a hunger, desire and intensity about them that they are willing to spend hours and hours upon end studying, “swotting” as it were to achieve their objectives.
This kind of attitude of learning, grafting and growing is then translated into the workplace once they enter into the field of formal employment, pushing very hard in order to build the ideal life for themselves and achieve their dreams and ambitions, but at some point, when they reach the “5000 hour mark” in terms of the “10 000 hour rule” in their careers(and again the principle here is more important than the number), they start to think that they have arrived, they believe that they know much more than they really know and actually see themselves as better professionally than they actually are, which then creates a sense of entitlement and eventually disillusionment with the “system”, which is against them (remember, we are still in ceteris paribus mode okes, so don’t throw your toys at me just yet please).
So, within this framework, it is between this “5000 hours to 10 000 hours” mark that we lose most black professionals and business people when it comes to becoming experts, industry leaders, top of their field and the system is often blamed unfairly, when it is a waning lack of ambition and focus as well as a false sense of “having arrived” and entitlement that is the real problem (again, please hold onto ceteris paribus here fellow darkies, lest we throw the baby out with the bath water).
Addressing the Association of Black Securities and Investment Professionals Conference in November 2016, this is what Joel Netshitenzhe had to say, which is most germane here:
“It is quite apposite that the issue of economic transformation for social change should preoccupy black securities and investment professionals. For, the curse and blessing of history has afforded you and other black professionals the responsibility of thought leadership in the cause of social change. We will all agree that such status cannot be decreed. It depends on self-generated agency: the preparedness constantly to improve the self and the peer group, and to act in a manner that advances social progress.”
From “0 to 5000” hours, it is easy to work hard and discipline oneself my mate argues, because the motivation is different and oft-times that motivation for darkie professionals is to escape poverty and build a better life for themselves than what they grew up in, but that jump from “5 000 hours to 10 000 hours” where one becomes an expert in a particular field, a leader within an industry or sector, a subject matter expert, is much harder than the first “5 000 hours” and is often the critical bottleneck for most black professionals. Hmmmm?
Food for thought I hear you say or complete bollocks I can hear some of you lot saying, with boiling anger at this “system darkie” that is “speaking from privilege.” Unless we get over labelling, characterisation and “excusology/blameology” (a favourite darkie pastime), we will never have the brutally honest conversations as black people that will assist us to change our developmental trajectory as a people.
In the same speech referred to above, Joel Netshitenzhe makes the salient point that:
“... economic transformation for social change should include, but cannot be confined to, the rise of the black elite. Otherwise, it will merely complement white entitlement to historical privilege with black-elite entitlement to larger crumbs that purchase co-optive silence.”
Our battle as a nation that is trying to build a culture of winning and success within its people, is against both white entitlement based on historical privilege and also black-elite entitlement based on wanting to sit at the dinner table “nomakanjani,” without having truly sweated it out.
Of course, if you lift the ceteris paribus principle, one could dismiss the whole conversation with my mate, this whole article and of course Malcolm Gladwell’s “10 000 hour rule” as complete drivel and raise legitimate objections about the importance of the environment one operates in, access to resources, social capital, the socio-economic context and other such factors in determining one’s success, but methinks there is a more subterranean, brutally honest engagement to be had amongst darkies as it were, when it comes to the subject matter that has informed this article. I will end off with words from a popular 1980s song by the renowned band Sankomota for greater emphasis, “O phutile matsoho, o shebile banna ha ba sebetsa, Wena…”
Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government; he is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.
