by RICK DANLEY // January 2, 2015
HUMBOLDT — In 2008, as Thabo Mbeki was entering his final year as president of South Africa, the country was still feeling its way toward a racially integrated economy after decades of apartheid rule. Mining — gold, platinum, diamonds — remained the country’s industrial backbone. And Sandvik, a 150-year-old Swedish-owned supplier of mining equipment, held on as one of that industry’s major corporate players.
Bruce Kamanga, then 34, worked in the company’s Johannesburg office as a low-level clerk in the accounts payable department. It wasn’t a bad job. In fact, it was an advance of sorts; a generation earlier his grandparents had come to Johannesburg — the “City of Gold” — not to work in the mining offices but to labor in the mines themselves, extracting the city’s namesake mineral while reaping almost nothing of its profits.
“It was hard work,” says Kamanga, recalling his….
Originally published as “Stepping stones to success” in the January 2, 2015 edition of the Iola Register. http://www.iolaregister.com/news/stepping-stone-to-success
RG danley 