On a recent Thursday I meet Colin Coleman at Bellini’s.
The classic bistro in Illovo, with its bright white tablecloths and bentwood chairs, has been an informal clubhouse for Joburg’s business elite for so many decades it has taken on the mantle of an institution.
The investment bankers, finance types, tech bros and sundry fintech folk go there to tuck into the high-end comfort food — unpretentious French cuisine done to perfection.
More specifically they go for the insane crumbed olives, the fillet Suzette (some argue for Dijon), Joburg’s best French fries, vanilla cake (some argue for the carrot), and the banter.
The joyful hubbub and a spot of light table hopping have been pleasantly oiling the wheels of commerce in this town for as long as I can remember. Colin is in his element. He was, after all, the head of Goldman Sachs in Sub-Saharan Africa for more than 20 years.
The youngest son in a family of high-performing Colemans tells me that he had “a wonderful upbringing in a very bizarre world which was apartheid South Africa”.
I get the impression he is veering into the more agitated action state brought on by an existential 4.30am knock-on-the-door experience
He was consumed by his passion for tennis and training as an architect, but his older brother Keith’s detention by the apartheid regime when Colin was in his first year set the entire family on a course of quiet, industrious and brave resistance against the brutality of the state.
Colin says he answered the door at 4.30 one morning. “It was the end of September 1981 and this gigantic security policeman by the name of Capt Andries Struwig knocked on the door and said: ‘I am looking for your brother Keith. Where is he?’
“I said: ‘He isn’t here, but why don’t I go call my father [Max]?’ He came down and said: ‘Captain Struwig, this is an unearthly hour in the morning, why don’t you go away and come back at seven and we can sit down and have breakfast like two adults and I can tell you about my son?’ And he left, saying: ‘We expect to meet your son, we need to ask him some questions.’”
That knock on the door led to Keith’s five-month detention and galvanised the family. Max, who died in January aged 95, and Colin’s mother, Audrey, set up the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee and worked tirelessly for thousands of families.
“It was a big shock that your brother was in this place,” says Colin. “It’s just completely opaque, you didn’t know what was going on, you had no rights, no medical or legal rights, no visiting rights at all. And in the middle of that we knew there was torture, and this person we knew [Neil Aggett] is killed. So very quickly I became active in student politics, and then in 1986 I joined the underground of the ANC.”
After university he became the first employee of the Consultative Business Forum, “which was a group of progressive business people who had decided they wanted to engage with all parties in the political spectrum to help facilitate discussions”, he says.
“You must remember this was 1989 when things were at the height of conflict. Business was confronted with sanctions, labour unrest, with a reality that made it very difficult to do business.
“Eventually it became a trusted body that people across the spectrum would agree to discuss things with and we started to have multilateral discussions to bring people together around things like the economy or development issues.”
The group acted as a secretariat and became a trusted force in the build-up to the peace negotiations and Codesa.
His natural habitat, apart from Bellini’s, became this place that straddled business and politics, driven by a belief that the best hope for business and the country is a flourishing, democratic, open, corruption-free society — the kind of nirvana envisioned by Nelson Mandela.
He is working on a book on this subject and has won a Rockefeller Foundation residency to finish it. In a villa on Lake Como. Sounds marvellous. He recently returned to SA after spending a year in the US lecturing on African business at Yale as a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, after leaving Goldman Sachs.
I imagine he is at that point in his career where he could be resting on his laurels, making appearances on boards, as he does, writing op-eds, hopping to Davos and taking up residencies.
But I get the impression he is veering into the more agitated action state brought on by an existential 4.30am knock-on-the-door experience.
It is a high-stakes wake-up call we are probably all experiencing in SA given the disturbing headlines, the past month’s tragic anniversaries of Marikana and the looting, and the worrying economic trajectory of the past few years.
It seems that as a Coleman, this sort of dawn emergency prompts you to act. Through the CEO Initiative to combat unemployment he is co-chair with former Investec CEO Stephen Koseff of the Youth Employment Service nonprofit.
“The unemployment statistics are horrifying. In an economy that is shedding jobs, that one small private sector NPO has been able to create more than 82,000 jobs with 2,100 companies and pump R4.7bn into local economies — in 3½ years with no government funding — is remarkable.
“Can we do better? Absolutely. But we are one player in a broader ecosystem that’s making real progress on one of the biggest challenges facing our country, the only way to achieve our targets is to work together. It cannot be business as usual.”
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