Chapter 2: Chelsea Triggers the Idea

...continued from yesterday 11 May 2026..

“Listen Johan, how old are you? How long have you been working here?” Suddenly Peter was fascinated with this scrap of a kid who had no trouble inserting the jack under his car and applying the huge amount of force needed to unscrew the wheel nuts.

“I’m old enough sir, I’ve been working here now for a few months, but I’m reading a lot, one day I will be my own boss, just like you.” Johan smiled broadly. Peter noticed that Johan had all his teeth and that they were sparkling white, very unusual for a kid from Cape Flats.

In less than three minutes, Johan had replaced the flat tyre with the inflated spare and stood beaming at Peter. “Have a good evening, sir,” he smiled at Peter knowing that he had made a good impression.

“Thanks,” said Peter. He slipped his hand inside his coat pocket and took out a R10 note and pointed it in Johan’s direction. “Thanks again,” said Peter.

“No sir, no charge,” Johan’s smile was contagious.

PRESENT TIME

Johan grinned as he remembered that chance meeting with Peter Ackerman. And how, in the months that followed, he had more chance meetings with Peter. Eventually, when he was old enough to obtain a driver’s license, he was “promoted” to Peter’s chauffeur. That was when he listened to Peter during phone calls from the car. That was how he learned how to succeed in business.

His big break ultimately came when white-owned companies in South Africa were legally forced to engage in black economic empowerment. Most whites adopted a strategy of teaming up with the devil they knew. Peter realised that the only non-white person he knew and trusted was in-fact, Johan. At 24 years old, he made Johan a director of Ackerman Construction.

Now the wind blew gently across the Flats, the clouds seemed to be dissipating, it would be a good day, he thought. But he knew enough to know that the Cape weather could be as unpredictable as the mind of a woman. And the Cape’s residents were used to the possibility of experiencing the weather of all four season in one day.

Johan was an ardent supporter of English football club Manchester United, who, he reminisced, ended the 2004 / 2005 season in 3rd place, behind Arsenal in 2nd and Chelsea, who won the league. Such was Chelsea’s dominance since the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich took over the club and injected his oil-made billions into the London club, that in January of that season, already Chelsea had an unassailable lead of 13 points over United.

Johan wondered if he could buy the hearts and minds of the Coloured people in the Cape, in the same way that Abramovich used his money to buy success in English football. He understood the nature of politics, but more importantly he understood how the Cape Flats worked, he knew that the key to mobilising the apathetic residents of the Cape Flats was to engage the gang lords who ruled the Cape Flats.

He reasoned that since the Coloured population was by far the majority in the region, outnumbering both black and white population groups, it was just a question of offering the masses the right incentive and making it worth their while.

He needed a face though, someone who could speak to the masses, the Coloured masses primarily. Someone they could relate to and trust. In the past, only one candidate had met that brief, but as history was to prove, Alan Boesak, would not stay the course.

Whether it was his decision to divorce his Coloured wife and marry a prominent white woman, or the subsequent conviction of fraud in the mismanagement of donor funds that lost him the credibility of the masses, was water under the bridge now.

But the former church and political leader certainly had the potential to gain the trust and support of the majority of the Coloured population in the Cape. Johan wondered idly if, at that time, the ruling party, of which Alan was a member, had engineered his prison conviction, to keep him out of politics long enough for the ANC, which had a largely black leadership, to ensure that their constituents were not overwrought by the Coloured vote.

Blacks in the Cape had a deep-seated mistrust of Coloured people. Many old folks claimed that during the apartheid years, Coloureds were “the white man’s dog” and that they ate and slept better than the black man. Recent press reports over housing delivery in the province proved that tension between Black and Coloured was alive and thriving, both sides were losing patience fast.

Johan now also reandomly recalled a story in the press back then when the white Afrikaans community in South Africa had been up in arms when a London-based magazine had descried the Afrikaans language as “ugly”. This lead to one of the wealthiest Afrikaners in South Africa to withdraw millions of pounds worth of advertising support from a the magazine. It seemed to Johan that now, as increasing views on the role and significance of the Coloureds were being described by non-Coloureds on social media and podcasts as “the forgotten people",  the time for the Coloured community in South Africa to stand up and be counted had arrived.

It was Friday morning; he had golf this afternoon with his cousins Shawn and Ian. He would make his proposal to Shawn this afternoon. Shawn still had ties to the gang world, Johan knew this because it was in Shawn’s nature to hold on to that side of his personality. When they had been teenagers, he would go to the drug yards with Shawn and watch him smoke Mandrax and Dagga (Marijuana) with his friends. Sometimes they would walk onto a yard in the midst of street justice being dispensed.

Continued tomorrow 13 May 2026, before 12pm