Moneylove And Me In Africa

A Prosperity Adventure In South Africa

This summer a lot of attention was on South Africa and the World Cup. I met a charming young woman from Brazil on a San Francisco bus, and we talked about how excited her country was about the next World Cup happening there. She was on her way to watch the finals on TV. And my good friend Barry Dunlop was there for the finals, sending back some great photos. It took me back to a month-long trip to South Africa to do a series of seminars and workshops on Moneylove in 1989.

A Juicy Time Of Change and Transformation

In September-October of 1989, a lot was happening in South Africa. Apartheid was still in place, though everyone knew it was on the way out. Nelson Mandela was still in prison, though everyone knew he was on the way out. And millions of black South Africans were in dire poverty, but there were great hopes they were on the way out.

It was election time, and the Liberal Party had signs all over the country that said, “Vote Your Hopes Not Your Fears”. It was their motto and I adopted it for my theme of Moneylove presentations for mixed audiences of aspiring entrepreneurs in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. There is a certain kind of electricity in the air in the period just before revolutionary change in a country, and you could feel it in South Africa, as I’m sure you could in Berlin just before the wall came down.

An Excerpt From One South African Talk

I discovered some tapes from that trip in a box I had stored in a friend’s basement, and went back and listened to some of them. I plan to digitalize them and probably send them as bonus audios to members of The Moneylove Club, but I wanted to share the transcript of a short segment with you right here. I have rarely had the kind of attentive focus from audiences that was there that night–they knew their lives would never be the same again, and were ready for some new ideas and new direction. Talk about robust expectations! Not of what I was about to say, but of what they were about to experience in their lives and the life of their changing nation. Here is some of what I said:

“One thing that’s very true about success is that it’s a state of mind. There are people who have millions of rand, and they have beautiful homes, and they have beautiful families–and they’re not happy. Because they don’t think they’re successful. For whatever reason, they’re telling themselves they’re not successful. And if you tell yourself that, it doesn’t matter what you have or don’t have.

“If you tell yourself that you’re on the way to great prosperity and you can just about afford your rent, if you tell yourself that life is wonderful and you’re happy, you’ll be happy. But what I’m saying is that you can be a lot happier with a lot of money. And you don’t have to change what you’re doing, and you don’t have to change your level of integrity.

“Some people believe that in order to get rich, you have to become another person. Not true. You can be just as warm and loveable as you are now and do it with a million rand in your pocket. And, in fact, more so. If you have a million rand, you can have more time to be loveable.”

Snapshots Of A Nation In Transition

Many things stood out in that month in 1989, in addition to the fantastic audiences. The economy had been devastated by the international boycott led by the U.S., but the people of all classes and colors were amazingly friendly and hospitable. In fact, on the flight from London to Johannesburg on South African Airways, so many South African passengers walked up to me and introduced themselves, and invited me to their homes, and told me how happy they were to see Americans visit to learn the truth about their much maligned country, that it felt more like an interactive workshop than an airplane flight (despite it being the longest single flight of my life). Some of those passengers even showed up at a few of my presentations.

And the flowers were magnificent, as were the views, and Cape Town was like a cleaned up version of Miami, where I had lived for ten years. And the buffets were the most elaborate and delicious I ever encountered, topping even the extravagance of Las Vegas. It was strange to go through airport type security in every government building and department store. And warnings on the walls inside many of these buildings had pictures of various types of bombs, in case of a terrorist attack.  I almost lost my camera for trying to take a picture in Broadcast House, where I was being interviewed on radio. The security guard manning the XRay conveyor belt at the entrance who didn’t notice a camera in my bag was actually fired on the spot!  There had been a lot of violence back and forth, and it wasn’t totally over yet, though greatly diminished.

But for me one of the most telling moments was near the University in Pretoria. A young couple was walking on the sidewalk, holding hands. One was black and one was white. And my host nodded his head and said, “Two years ago that would have been a felony.”

Jerry