Patrice Motsepe, from the depths of the mines to the heights of football, the prince of South African capitalism

He likes to tell this founding anecdote in the interviews and conferences he carefully selects. That of a family of siblings who pitched in to help their parents, who were shopkeepers, make their family shops prosper. "My father would get us up at 5 a.m. and we would leave in a truck to buy fruit and vegetables at the market ," said an affable and refined Patrice Motsepe, in his eternal, perfectly tailored midnight blue suit, during a youth summit in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2017. " We would close the grocery store and other businesses at midnight, and I had to stay behind the counter. Being behind that counter taught me what profitability was."

To add to the legend, the man was not born just anywhere, but in Soweto, the township that symbolized the racist apartheid regime (1948-1991) and was a crucible of the struggle for Black rights, where the future Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of state Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) also lived. When their youngest son was born in 1962, the committed Motsepe parents chose his first name in homage to the Congolese pan-Africanist hero Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961), assassinated just a year earlier – his second name, Tlhopane, means "the chosen one" in Tswana, a Bantu language.

But from Soweto, a poor and discriminated-against-the-wall neighborhood, he mostly recalls memories of hard work and hard work. The township in the suburbs of Johannesburg was home to "some of the best entrepreneurs in the Black community ," he recounted in 2022, this time in a Forbes magazine conference.

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