As Long As They Don't Put A Bullet On My Forehead I Won't Stop

These days everyone wants everything now. Here is an entrepreneur who spent 27 years fighting for one building. This is just one battle in the 96 years of Richard Maponya, a fighting entrepreneur who drove Nelson Mandela in his first days of freedom.

- Ancillar Mangena

For 96 years, Richard Maponya has been battering down barriers of prejudice and proving that a black man can do anything.

His journey began in the dusty streets of Lenyenye, a township in the Limpopo province of northern South Africa, where he was born. He moved to Polokwane, where missionaries trained him as a teacher. With a qualification under his belt, he moved to Johannesburg, in 1948, in search of a teaching post and greener pastures. This was during the early days of apartheid and it wasn’t easy for a black man to do anything.

“Back in those days, you had to register your presence if you moved to a new area. I had moved to Alexandra township and I went to the pass office to register,” says Maponya.

There, he found an Afrikaner man looking for people to work at his potato farm in Delmas, 65 kilometers north east of Johannesburg. Little did he know he was going out of the frying pan into the fire.

“He asked for my documents, looked at my pass and all my documents and said ‘this boy would fit in well with the group I am looking for’. I told him I was there to just register in the new area but he took my pass, paged it and he spoke in Afrikaans with another gentlemen with him and said ‘this man is 28 years old’… He took my pass and altered my birth year from 1920 to 1926. He also took my birth certificate and never brought it back to me. I think he wanted a group of people who were about 20 to 22 years old or so.”

On that day, Maponya lost his identity forever. “I have employed lawyers to fix that but even in the archives of our government, they don’t have any records, so I walk as a man everyone thinks was born in 1926 yet I was born in 1920. This is one thing I never talk about, you are the first journalist I’ve ever disclosed this to,” he says as he reveals the pain of his past.