Kate’s first ‘wine’ was made by her mother from sugar cane juice. The ‘wine’ was sold in the neighboring Zulu villages for housekeeping money. Kate grew up in the small town of Dundee in Zululand, South Africa, the daughter and builder’s apprentice of an immigrant Saudi Arabian house builder. Kate’s only brother was the last born, so she naturally became her Dad’s ‘boy’ on building sites over weekends and holidays.
Kate’s mother was a product of South Africa’s plantation society; the daughter of a sugar cane farmer and a Zulu kitchen maid. Kate learnt many things about rules to obey and others to break from her mother.
Kate and her five younger siblings were brought up in the Islamic faith of the father. Classes in the Coloured education local state school were followed by religious instruction in the madrassa.
When news of Kate’s success in the exams in the final year of high school reached the family, her father brought the family together to explain that he had promised his elder daughter to a Muslim elder and any further education would depend on the will of the future husband.
The beauty of the seventeen year old had not gone unnoticed in Dundee. She had caught the attention of Mxolisi Jambela, a front of house manager in Dundee’s smartest hotel and a plan began to develop. Always well connected, Mxolisi persuaded the hotel chain to transfer him to the bright lights of Johannesburg, his hometown. When he arrived at his family’s home in Soweto, he had Kate by his side. Kate had eloped in search of further education and freedom from confining roles and rules, but there were no ‘open doors’ in the big city. This was during the last days of apartheid when the principles of ‘separate development’ were most strictly enforced.
Access to many institutions of tertiary education was generally denied to black people by regulation. In Johannesburg Kate had no family or community connections that would help her to ‘find a way’. Kate found a low-level clerical job at an international gasoline company and enrolled in an evening bookkeeping course at a private college.
For years, Mxolisi’s hotel service job kept the little family afloat, while Kate worked and studied. The birth of a son, Sizwe, stimulated a search for a larger home, something they found in a dilapidated house in an outlying Coloured residential area. Kate saw potential in the house and dredged her memory for her father’s lessons in carpentry, plumbing and bricklaying. Weekends were separated into two parts; Saturday morning was for purchase of materials and the rest was for construction and painting. When the renovations were complete, the house was sold and another adventure in house reconstruction undertaken.
And then 1994 brought a democratic government to South Africa for the first time and with it citizenship for the Jambela family of three. For Kate the next decade brought a host of opportunities. Her relentless drive and further study-driven qualifications boosted her ascent of the corporate ladder. She was appointed managing director of a leading company in the Cape Town gambling industry and the family moved south, buying a house with expansion potential in a beachside suburb.
The promising career began to lose its appeal when boardroom meetings brought conflict. Ethics questions over procedures and impacts arose almost every day in this new job. In a heated moment, on impulse, she resigned. Kate left the company car in the parking garage, took a taxi to the airport where she rented a car and began to review her life choices, sitting there in the car park.
She watched a middle aged man in worn clothing selling roasted maize cobs to passers-by from a converted wheel barrow. This brought back memories of the Dundee family life. Roasted ‘mielies’, as they are called, had been the treat of the week for Kate and her sisters’ childhood.
Kate bought a mielie from the hawker and talked to him about his life and ambition. His desire for “a strong, warm home for my family with a roof that doesn’t leak” changed her life. She promised him the house of his dreams and set out to learn how this whole new world of subsidised housing for Cape Town township poor worked. Using trial and error, she tackled the bureaucracy and vested interests in the competitive world of the People’s Housing Project to have a plot allocated to the shack-dweller’s family and set out to build this single house.
This was the beginning of a new career. The multiple barriers of lack of qualifications, the politics of civil servants, competition with corporate developers and the mysteries of credit filled her days with the challenges she loved. Over the next eight years she built six thousand secure, warm and dry township houses. As each of the new owners moved in, she planted a tree for them in the yard.
Sauvignon Blanc had been her chosen wine from the days when she was a junior in the accounts department. When she met Graham Knox at a consumer wine show she made him promise to provide some Sauvignon Blanc vines for her home garden and assist her to eventually make her own wine.
There had been growth problems with the trees planted at her township houses on the wind-blown Cape Flats, so she abruptly switched her greening project to incorporate a row of Sauvignon Blanc vines. This and the memory of Mama’s ‘wine’ became the ethos and general principle behind the formation of The Township Winery.
Kate and Graham devised a plan to trade in wine, developing assets that would enable the conversion of township land to vineyards and bring about a wine culture and creative income stream for the education-deprived and poverty-stricken township dwellers.
