Jeftha has been at Koopmanskloof ("Trader's Ravine") only six months and is not its founder. But unlike the women of Ses'fikile, he brings years of experience in the wine industry. In April he was hired as CEO and given an 8 percent stake by Stevie Smit, Koopmanskloof's 80-year-old owner. In 2006, Smit had transferred 18 percent of the land and the business--worth about $2 million--to 86 black farm families employed there, and another 18 percent to a group of black academics. "Stevie Smit has taken steps that the other wineries or estates were afraid to," says Jeftha. "He appointed a black man and gave him carte blanche."
The new CEO takes Cuffe on a tour of his cellars; then we drive the hilly property in a four-by-four. Vine bushes thrust like clutching fists through the rich soil, and cliques of dowdy guinea fowl trot fussily beside the road. Back in Jeftha's office, he describes the technical team he has assembled to improve the company's winemaking, the skills assessment of farm workers he is conducting, his plans to leverage Koopmanskloof's recently achieved fair-trade designation. Behind him stretches a wall of framed photographs. "You see here, all the pictures are of white people," says Jeftha with a sweeping gesture. "It would have been easy to put all ethnic stuff on the walls. But this is the history. This is the family and the management teams from over the years. I look at these, and I see the past, which I am starting to change."
Cuffe is ecstatic about what Koopmanskloof can bring to SABVA. Jeftha has a wealth of knowledge to share with the alliance. At least as important, he has grapes and a cellar, which gives the virtual companies an alternative to white producers. "This group needs people it can trust to do business with," says Cuffe as we drive away. "Owning the land and the cellars and the vineyards doesn't necessarily make the company a better value proposition. But owning those things and having a great leader makes it a fantastic value proposition. Rydal can grow the pie for the whole collective."
Heritage Link is only the first step in what Cuffe calls "a lifetime commitment to Africa." At home she keeps a folder of ideas for wealth-creating businesses on the continent, including one that combines DNA testing with ancestral tourism. She is unapologetically ambitious. "I've had it with the negative press about this place," she says. "I didn't get all this education and all this experience just to make money. I want to make change."
But her heart is divided.
The farmhouse of Diale and Malmsey Rangaka is humble, but sun soaks the wood-beamed living room, which is homey with fresh wildflowers and woven baskets. Malmsey is a former clinical psychologist and midwife. Diale taught literature at a university. During apartheid he had practiced what he calls armchair farming--reading agricultural weeklies for fun--but the law prevented him from owning land. In 2003, when a reorganization of universities threatened his job, the couple moved south and bought a 106-acre wine-grape and fruit farm.
Today, the Rangakas, with help from their son, own the M'hudi ("Harvester") label. The wines are made from their own grapes and produced by Villiera, a white-owned company down the road. The couple are ambivalent about SABVA--they were in, then out; soon they may be in again. Whatever their status, they want to work with Heritage Link. "We need Selena, because she knows the American throat," says Diale, who goes by Oupa ("Grandpa"). "We need her to be the battering ram to open the way not for South African wines--those other guys are doing very well, thank you--but for black-owned brands. To say, while we are new and while we are small, we are not necessarily producing junk."
I suggest he might want a better slogan than "not necessarily producing junk."
"She can help us with that, too," says Rangaka dryly. (Promoting the brand shouldn't be hard. A M'hudi Sauvignon Blanc won second place in its category at the 2007 International Wine Challenge in London.)
Rangaka's 18-month-old grandson, Xoan, toddles into the room. The big man catches him up and teases the tiny mouth with a spoonful of mint pie. "It's quite disgusting, isn't it?" he croons. Watching them, Cuffe gets that look of a mother halfway around the globe from her family who is presented with a child who reminds her of her own. At every visit we've made she has produced a booklet of photos from her 15-month-old son's daycare, mounted on construction paper and tied with a ribbon. A day earlier she'd recounted a phone call with her mother-in-law, who is staying with the boy. Cuffe had left him a stuffed bear embedded with a recording of her voice. Upon hearing it he had searched the house for his mother and, not finding her, begun to cry.
The Cuffes want four or five children, one or two of them adopted. A brood that size will make global travel harder. Ditto running a company. Cuffe says that while she educates the South Africans in the ways of American business, they are educating her about balance. At the SABVA training session in December, members had brought their children along. When vintners visited the U.S. last year, they couldn't understand why her son didn't join them on sales calls.
It is growing dark when we leave the M'hudi farm. From the car we watch Diale Rangaka moving stealthily along the side of the road, trying to capture an injured duck so he can bring it inside to safety. Cuffe is unusually quiet, whether contemplative or bone-tired I can't tell. "This is a real family business," she says finally. "Not a business where family members work, but a business where your grandkids are running around. I think that's lovely.
"I can never let my work ethic and my career make problems in my personal life," she continues as we head back toward Cape Town, where a long night of work awaits her. "I look at these people, and I know what it is I am supposed to be doing."
