Patrice Motsepe learned business in his father’s spaza shop. He founded African Rainbow Minerals.
A lawyer who became the first black partner at Bowman Gilfillan, Patrice Motsepe began with contract mining, then bought marginal gold shafts and built a mining group.
Patrice Motsepe was born in 1962 to a chief of the Mmakau branch of the Tswana people, who had been a schoolteacher and later ran a spaza shop popular with mine workers. That shop was where Motsepe learned the basics of business, and had his first exposure to mining.
From law to mining
He earned a degree at the University of Swaziland and a law degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, specialising in mining and business law. In 1994, the year Nelson Mandela became president, he became the first black partner at the law firm Bowman Gilfillan.
That same year he founded Future Mining, which provided contract mining services, including cleaning gold dust from inside shafts at the Vaal Reefs gold mine. He introduced a pay system that combined a low base salary with a profit-sharing bonus.
Buying what others passed over
In 1997, with gold prices low, he bought marginal gold mine shafts from AngloGold on favourable financing, for 7.7 million dollars, and repaid the debt from future earnings. The company is now African Rainbow Minerals, with interests in gold, ferrous metals, base metals and platinum.
He acquired the football club Mamelodi Sundowns in 2003, joined the Giving Pledge in 2013, and has been president of the Confederation of African Football since 2021.
