Richard Branson - Business Stripped Bare

What kind of education did James Baldwin have?

’At school I was trained in Bible techniques. I received my education in the street.’

Were there good schools in America?

’How can there be? They are built by the white state, run by white powers and designed to keep the nigger in his place.’

Can the white man give you freedom or must the black man take it for himself?

’The white man can’t even give it to himself. Your record has not been very encouraging. I DON’T EXPECT YOU TO GIVE ME ANYTHING. I am going to take what I need — not necessarily from you, this is your myth — but I intend to live my life. I am not interested in what white people do. White people are not that important. What one is fighting against is not white people, but the power standing between a person and his life. It is as simple as that. It is not a race war, it is a war between poverty and privilege, freedom and imprisonment.’

I was transfixed by what Baldwin was saying to me — his vitriolic yet restrained anger at what he saw as the inequality of life.

In The Fire Next Time , written in 1963, he had predicted that in ten years’ time we would see the end of white supremacy. I asked him if he still believed this.

Baldwin replied: ‘I didn’t say it in quite that way. I said that this was a prophecy — and the prophet may well be right. I am telling you that Western societies are visibly in trouble and are visibly crumbling.’

‘Under pressure from the black man?’

‘Under the weight of their own lies.’

This was strong, urgent stuff for a white, teenage editor. It was an anger that I could not understand, because I had nothing to measure it against. I wanted to help change the world, but what did I know about the world?

Fred Dube, a black African, born in Johannesburg, a social worker married with two children, joined the African National Congress in 1955. From 1964 to 1967 he served four prison sentences for sabotage, in Ladysmith in Natal, Leeuwkop in Transvaal, on Robben Island and in Groenpunt in the Orange Free State. He left for England in July 1968, and became a bank clerk in London. He told Student that the poverty, homelessness and malnutrition in his homeland all stemmed from one problem: South Africa’s vicious and unjust apartheid society. Some time later I heard about the black activist Steve Biko, and then I encountered the name of Nelson Mandela. His parents called him Nelson because it sounded ‘white’, and they thought he would get on better in a whites-only society. He was viewed as a dangerous extremist by some in Britain but I began to know the truth about this incredible man.

When I first got to know Madiba — as he is affectionately known in Africa — I was always in awe and slightly nervous meeting him. Then when he smiled, his warmth and impish humour simply radiated into your heart: ‘Richard, it is a great honour to meet you.’ I soon learned that he says that to everyone on first meeting them! Here is a man who has suffered so much because of his colour and what he believes in. He was a victim of apartheid injustice, handed a life sentence at forty-six. His prison number was 466/64, which stood for the 466th prisoner admitted to the dreadful Robben Island jail in 1964. His cell was six feet square, the walls two feet thick. When he lay down his head touched one end and his feet the other. His first months in jail were spent with fellow political prisoners crushing rocks into gravel using a four-pound hammer. It was achingly strenuous and constantly painful. I have seen his cell — it must have been hell on Earth.

He says in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom , that ‘Robben Island was without question the hardest, most iron-fisted outpost of the South African penal system. It was a hardship station not only for the prisoners but for the prison staff. The warders, white and overwhelmingly Afrikaans-speaking, demanded a master–servant relationship. They ordered us to call them baas, which we refused to do. The racial divide on Robben Island was absolute: there were no black warders, and no white prisoners.’

Yet I have never witnessed one scintilla of anger or indignation from the man.

His spirit is best captured, I think, in the address he gave, not long after being elected president, at the unveiling of a statue of Steve Biko. ‘While Steve Biko espoused, inspired and promoted black pride, he never made blackness a fetish… accepting one’s blackness is a critical starting point: an important foundation for engaging in struggle. Today, it must be a foundation for reconstruction and development, for a common human effort to end war, poverty, ignorance and disease.’

Here are the characteristics of great leadership, contained in a handful of sentences. The concern for people is here; so too the easy intelligence Mandela brings to the judging of individual merits. There’s authority in these words, but they’re not hectoring or bombastic: they create for us a clear, simple vision of what has to be achieved.

The unveiling of Biko’s statue, sculpted in bronze by Naomi Jacobson, took place on 12 September 1997. Peter Gabriel and I were on hand — the only white faces in a crowd of around 100,000. I urged Peter to sing the song that had done so much to keep Biko’s name alive. That rendition of ‘Biko’, backed by Nelson Mandela and a crowd of 100,000, is something I will treasure to my grave. From the moment Mandela came up to shake my hand and thank me for my support, I wanted to do something meaningful for South Africa, to help it recover from its terrible wounds. I wasn’t a songwriter — and I didn’t have to wait long for the call.

There is one characteristic of Mandela’s leadership that isn’t apparent from his speech, but it is typical of most of the great leaders I’ve met: they are all inveterate salesmen! Mandela is an entrepreneur through and through. He absolutely will not stop. Whenever we were together, Madiba seldom missed an opportunity to pull a few strings for his country. He was in London one time, having lunch with Joan, Holly, Sam and me and a few close friends, and afterwards I wrote in my notebook. ‘ No lunch or dinner ever goes by without him asking a favour for someone in need: He came to my house with his new wife, Graca Machel, and his daughter, "That was a delightful lunch, Richard, Now last week I saw Bill Gates and he gave £50 million in dollars." Gulp! ’

I am proud to say that Nelson Mandela has become a close friend. As we pass his ninetieth birthday, he has remained an inspiration to me as a human being and I have many cherished memories of time spent in his company. I think it’s worth explaining how the former South African president’s astonishing acumen for business, coupled with his sense of duty, helped his country. For Madiba knew that the ‘long walk to freedom’ for his black brothers and sisters meant embracing a positive economic future. While he recognised it would take many years — even a generation — to reverse the inequalities of racial discrimination, he had few qualms about seeking my involvement — and that of other business leaders — if he believed it would bring jobs and wealth to South Africa.

One occasion was in September 2001, just days after the World Trade Center atrocities in New York. Tourism and business travel had dried up overnight, the whole airline industry was in meltdown, and I was sitting in the bath thinking how the Virgin Group could deal with the immense disruption to Virgin Atlantic when he phoned. Madiba’s voice was like an anaesthetic balm: calm and reassuring.

‘Richard, you said that you wanted to help South Africa,’ he said.

‘Yes, Madiba. You know I’m willing to help,’ I replied.