NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.

I had been expecting him, but it was still a shock.

M. Cyril Ramphosa was once of the great heroes of the apartheid struggle. He was the young skinny guy next to Mandela. He was even described as Mandela’s favorite to succeed him.

Now, to me, he seemed nothing more than a racketeer. He had grown fat, and he had grown rich. His game was to move in on white-owned enterprises, take a piece at preferential prices, then use his influence to keep business going as usual. That wasn’t just me saying so. It was the opinion of people like Moeletsi Mbeki, the President’s younger brother. Black Enterprise Empowerment just merges the two elites, and one is no better than the other.

One of those who agreed with Moeletsi was Mma Ramosawa, in whose office I now sat. And across from her, next to me, was M. Cyril Ramphosa himself.

A shudder had gone through the warehouse when his long, black stretch limo pulled up. I think I was the last to know what was going on. Big Cyril was moving in.

Mma Ramosawa had offered him bush tea, which he disdained. While Ramphosa sat scowling I poured a cup for myself, into a mug with the company logo she knew I liked, which she now kept on a tray, by her own china cup and saucer.

I picked up the tray, placed it on her desk, my back to the visitor, then picked up the saucer and put it before her. Returning the tray to its place, I picked up my own mug and (perhaps inexplicably) tried to slink back into the background.

Ramphosa chose immediately to address my presence. “Your white company appears to already have a black partner.”

“No, Rra. My black-owned company has an active white partner,” replied Mma Ramosawa sharply. “Is this not what the Rainbow is about?”

“Pfaw,” he replied. “You take me for a fool. You own barely 10% of this company, Mrs. Ramosawa. Whites own the rest, all the rest.” This was news to me, but Mma Ramosawa’s silence at it spoke volumes to me. “If you wish this to be a favored company, favored by the rainbow you claim to be about, then we need to have an agreement.”

“An agreement?” Mma Ramosawa asked.

“An agreement,” said Ramphosa. Johnnic wants 20% of Always-On Technologies, at a 50% discount to your market price. A private placement, taken from the share of your white overseers, the so-called Virgin Maverick. And we will be doing a similar agreement with them as well.”

“No you won’t,” I said. “You’re not stealing the money of investors, the money of workers, or the money of Mma Ramosawa.”

Mma placed her hand on her desk, toward me. “You’re not the decision maker, Rra Blankenhorn,” she said.

“My apologies, Mma.” I said, red-faced. “You’re right, of course. My apologies, Rra Ramphosa,” I added, using the Mombasa form of address although I knew Ramphosa was a Xhosa, a Johannesburg native.

I took my cup, left the office, and went down the hallway to the open workroom. The nature of the business had changed radically in just a few months. Where before we had been producing our own goods, now we were mainly producing and testing prototypes.

Mma had signed contracts with Chinese manufacturers to produce the goods. That gave us competitive prices as American companies entered the market, which did after all depend entirely on open standards and distribution. The challenge now was to create systems in as many niches as possible on the one hand, and to gain distribution on the other hand.

In both these areas the importance of educated, white engineers and business marketers could not be underestimated. They could not be replaced. I was taken aback by the number of white faces I saw now, pleased to see white working alongside black, but then wondering about the relationships. Are these equals, I wondered?

And then I caught myself. What mattered at this point was speed, speed to prototype, speed to product, speed to market. If you’re worried only about carving up the pie, you quickly find you have no pie.

How many times had I covered this? At Control Data and Digital Equipment, at Xerox and even at AT&T, the moment a company took its eye off the ball it began to fail.

So rather than think hard about carving the pie I threw myself into helping bake the pie. Every team was anxious to show me their work and explain it. I offered what advice I could, emphasizing practicality, low unit costs, and simplicity of installation.

One engineer showed me what looked like a handful of bright seeds. Zigbee chips, he explained, sensors programmed to tap moisture levels and report back numbers at set intervals. A small Linux program, loaded on one of our servers or on any gateway linked to a Linux server, would calculate when it was right to turn on a drip irrigation system, installed separately. The problem was how we could make certain the sensors were installed correctly?

As he talked, I noticed, a black worker stood next to him, his eyes cast down, silent. I asked this man his name. When he gave it, I explained our problem and asked if he would come outside to help me with it. The engineer followed us, and I let him.

Outside the warehouse is a small lawn. I stood before it and asked the worker how best to distribute the chips so they would cover the area, bed down in the soil, and connect to the network. He explained how seeds are planted in his village. He showed me how children would poke fingers into the soil, drop in a seed, then go along the row.

“Can you adapt that to covering this lawn, and explain that to this gentleman in simple words, so he understands it?” I asked. He nodded.

I left them to it. Hopefully the engineer would now realize he was part of a team, not an overseer.

I went back among the tables, asking people about their work, answering what questions I could, and avoiding all questions about Cyril Ramphosa.

Around noon the work slowed. Most of the black workers opened lunchboxes. Even the engineers among them were supporting large families. Some of the white workers headed off for their cars and nearby restaurants.

I went back to the office, a lump in my throat, my heart pounding. Mma’s door was open. She was alone.

I saw tears in her eyes, but rather than barge in with questions, as I’d always done before, I went back to the table and got us more bush tea. Only when the tea was before her, and my mug was before me, did I sit down and look into her eyes, asking without words. (Why had I never thought of doing this before?)

“I told him to go away,” she said. “He said he would call a press conference, call me an Oreo, urge public pressure on me to share more with the workers.”

“With him,” I said.

“With him as representative of the workers. He wants 20% of the whole and a seat on the board. But that’s not the worst part.”

“It’s not?”

“He also expects it from Virgin-Maverick, or he promises to bring the people down on them.”