The paper hat manufacturer
Sandy Grant | Wednesday October 21, 2015 16:25
Local business initiatives were though, as far as I am aware, few and far between. The Protectorate Administration discriminated in favour of white businesses and generally discouraged both locals and Asian traders.
The Dikgosi were not much different ensuring that their own business ventures – bus transport with Bathoen and Molefi, for instance – had no competitors. Few locals were able to set up as traders. But then there was a statement proudly set out on the front wall of one very ordinary building in Mochudi in the middle 1960s which suggested that not everything had always been what it seemed.
This advert, for this is what it was, made the proud statement, ‘PIET MOLEFI FROM 1936 HIS MANFUCTURING OF THE PAPER HATS’. In the usual course of events, this astonishing statement would have passed into history without comment. The building itself must have long ago disappeared as presumably has Rre Molefi himself.
But it happened that the 1960s brought the first wave of the new outsiders to Mochudi who came on this astonishing statement and were intrigued. They, amongst them myself, met Rre Molefi and asked him to explain. From distant memory – and I wish that I knew more about that ‘1936’ - he said that he had worked in Johannesburg with a paper hat manufacturing company.
He explained that with the ending of the 2nd World War (1945) and the consequent celebrations, there was a paper hat boom. But with the implementation of increasingly oppressive racist legislation, Rre Molefi decided that he might be better off at home in Mochudi where he hoped to capitalise on his experience to create a new manufacturing base.
He would have known that he had not the slightest hope of doing so if he was unable to gain Kgosi Molefi’s support and approval Intriguingly, he pulled this off. He then constructed a building, a factory, if you wish, where he could begin to capitalise on world demand by providing at least a part of its demand for paper hats. According to Rre Molefi, it never worked out. The first problem that he encountered in Mochudi was that there was no one he was able to employ to make those hats.
Only a tiny number of people there had jobs. But when the rain came, the entire population disappeared to the lands leaving almost no one behind who he might employ. His second crunching difficulty was that the worldwide demand for celebratory paper hats evaporated after the initial euphoria was replaced by the grim realties of post war shortages and hardships. In the upshot, therefore, he ended up unable to find people willing to work for him and with a market that had almost overnight, ceased to exist.
In theory, Rre Molefi couldn’t go wrong and a CEDA of that time might well have backed him. But without available labour and a secure market, he had no chance.