We gather for the Wine & Executive Club dinner with Epicurean Wines at the Fairlawns Hotel in Sandton on a day President Donald Trump has threatened to obliterate an entire civilisation as part of his war rhetoric.
To say I needed this refined and charming gathering does not begin to convey how much the evening feels like an antidote to the brutal tone that has prevailed in the world at large.
Mutle Mogase, one of the founders of Epicurean Wines, gently applies a balm to my embattled spirit as he discusses the philosophy that anchors their approach to winemaking.
“Great wine has to possess aromatic harmony, complexity, longevity and absolute balance. We do not make wine. We grow wine.”
At the risk of stretching the metaphor, you could transpose this easily to leadership. You do not make leaders. You grow them. And Saki Macozoma is from a vintage that increasingly seems to reflect qualities now rare in the world.
The Robben Island stalwart, and business and civil society leader, is nursing a cold, but has the good grace and depth of character to answer my questions with an innate energy that is clearly one of his strengths.
“I was born in Port Elizabeth in a township called KwaZakhele. My parents were moved there when the Group Areas Act was applied. At the beginning it was a shack. The houses were built later — two rooms, and then you could add another two. You would go to school and come back and find the other half had been added.”
He was a sporty child. “My township is famous for sport — rugby particularly, but cricket also. The sport I was good at was soccer. Soccer is a mind game. It is about strategy.”
Macozoma was arrested before he had completed matric — and, in many ways, Robben Island became his real education.
“In the three years when they did not allow us to study, I read everything I could lay my hands on, without the pressure of exams. That is the best part of my education. You are in a place where ideas have supremacy. Whatever idea or position you take, you must defend it. The next day you must defend it again. That compels you to read and read and read.”
He pauses, then adds, almost lightly: “I started with James Hadley Chase. I got to a stage where I was reading a book a day. You exchange in the morning, you read during the day, you exchange again in the afternoon. There was no television. You had to create your own imagination.”
I ask whether he is concerned about the impact of the incipient technological revolution on the next generation.
“I think if your cognition is exclusively pictorial, that is a limitation,” he says. “In a sense we are going back to hieroglyphics. You represent ideas with images. That is a problem. But I do not think we should say this generation is down. They know things we did not know. Most of us cannot do our children’s homework.”
He tells me he is at the forefront of the AI revolution at Vodacom. “One of the critical things about AI is that your capability is as good as your database. If the information is not in the data, AI is not going to invent it. Before you speak about AI, you are speaking about the collection and collation of data. The quality of that data is a much more important question than what AI produces.”
He leans slightly into the complexity of it. “There is a lot of hype about AI. I do not think we are where people think we are. There is no evidence that AI will invent something that humans have not touched. What is real is the ability of the machine to learn. That is explosive. The question is what happens when machines teach each other.”
It is here that the conversation begins to take on the new landscape where technology and power intersect with politics. “I think there is an idea now that you can fight a war without sending in your citizens. If people felt this was their problem, they would not start wars. The notion that you can do it remotely is part of the problem.
“The second immoral thing that has happened in the world is the idea that some lives are more important than others. If there is a genocide somewhere, it is not an issue; if it is somewhere else, it is. That tells you something about the world we live in.”
The conversation moves, inevitably, to leadership — or perhaps to its absence. “I know of no nation today that can say its leaders are the best, or represent the best of us. Politics has been so bad that the people who should be taking over are saying they are not going there. That is one of the most problematic things. Because politics matters. You cannot run a country without proper governance structures that are predictable and encouraging.”
I ask him: “What is to be done?” He laughs at my cheap Lenin quote.
“I do not think there is a single answer to what is to be done. What we did in our time was do what you can, where you are. We were not allowed to congregate. We were not allowed to organise. You do what you can. Small things become bigger things — like streams that become rivers."
This article was first published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
