Марк Любнер: от уличных банд в Йоханнесбурге к созданию фонда помощи детям

Marc Lubner tells me he was 12 years old when he discovered that the safest way to survive Johannesburg was to join as many gangs as possible. Newly arrived from Bulawayo and living in Waverley, he exchanged a childhood of “short pants, my dog, my bicycle and the veld in front of me” for a considerably more combative city. His strategy worked until, inevitably, it did not. After a friend was badly stabbed at a party and he walked away with a lifelong scar etched across his skull, his friend’s father laid charges and broke the code. The boys were summoned to the Doll House, the legendary Louis Botha Avenue roadhouse where Joburg’s nocturnal tribes once converged for toasted cheese sandwiches, flirtations and trouble. They arrived with golf clubs and found themselves surrounded by what Lubner remembers as “a hundred motorbikes, aircraft carriers and tanks”. “My friend said, ‘This is my brother’s car. I can’t let them damage it. Marc, you have to get out.’ I said, ‘If we get out, we’re dead.’ But we decided to do it the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid way. We got out, stood back-to-back with our golf clubs and said, ‘Okay, come.’ They must have thought, ‘These guys are completely mental.’ And they left. “Sometimes, standing your ground is more important than trying to rationalise your way out.” We are having lunch at Ti Amo, the Italian family deli that began in a Shell service station in Sandhurst, helped spark Johannesburg’s gourmet-garage phenomenon and has now expanded into a bakery, restaurant and neighbourhood gathering place at Nine Yards. Over delicious focaccia and hot-smoked pastrami on sourdough, Lubner’s life reveals itself as a series of decisions about exactly what he stands for. His father’s philosophy was equally emphatic: ‘If you want to be a bum on the beach, that’s fine. Just make sure you are the best bum on the beach’ His childhood home in Bulawayo was filled with all kinds of people. “We didn’t grow up with racial biases or religious differences. My dad was globally engaged and always bringing interesting people into our home. There was no such thing as ‘you can’t’. It was, ‘You can just make an effort.’” His father’s philosophy was equally emphatic: “If you want to be a bum on the beach, that’s fine. Just make sure you are the best bum on the beach.” After Hyde Park High School, high school rugby, military service (where he realised he was comparatively too small for rugby and focused on tennis) and a BCom at Wits, Lubner joined the family’s PG Group. His grandfather, who had risen from pulling a cart through Johannesburg collecting and repairing discarded furniture and glass, sent him to learn glazing. When Lubner returned from Britain with one of the group’s largest export orders, his reward was an overall and instructions to run the Benoni branch. More valuable were the lessons absorbed on his grandfather’s Friday sales calls. “He would walk in through the back door, never the front. First he would look at the stock in the warehouse. Then he would say, ‘How are you? How is your husband? How is your child doing at university?’ He became a friend to his customers, and they became friends to him. He taught me how to be a mensch.” If a customer could not pay, he restructured the debt rather than destroying the customer. When Lubner pointed out that one debt was secured against a house, his grandfather asked, “Are you going to be the man who throws him and his family out of their home? Because if you take a mortgage, you must be prepared to execute it.” Those were important life lessons. Lubner eventually left the family business, a painful decision for the eldest grandson who was expected to lead it. “I wanted to be my own person. I was tired of being in an organisation where, because I was the boss’s son, I had to work harder for less and continually prove myself.” He brought Sega television games to South Africa, sold the business to CNA Gallo and, after completing an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and spending time in the US, returned home because he had “bought into the Mandela dream”. Responsible kindness means your intervention succeeds when that person no longer needs you — when they are capable of breaking the mindset of victimisation that poverty imposes. I am so glad my own children are carrying that legacy forward —   Marc Lubner He subsequently led Umbono Investments, one of South Africa’s early black economic empowerment company, but became disillusioned. “I saw a handful of individuals making inordinately large sums of money that stayed in their pockets and didn’t flow back into the townships. I had returned because I wanted to see the transformation that my family had worked for.” Then Nelson Mandela telephoned. Lubner assumed it was a friend playing a practical joke because Mandela was more likely to be calling his father and responded with his own Mandela impersonation. The silence alerted him to the fact that he was, indeed, speaking to the president. Mandela had promised to help Thando Manyathi, a little girl with Möbius syndrome whose face was paralysed. Lubner located a leading Canadian surgeon and brought a medical team to South Africa. “I thought, instead of sending one child overseas, let’s bring the skill here and teach it in a public hospital. That was the beginning of the Smile Foundation.” The organisation now facilitates reconstructive surgery and medical training in state hospitals across the country. Today, Thando welcomes visitors at its reception desk. Lubner later joined his father, Bertie, at Afrika Tikkun and helped turn a collection of generous but disconnected projects into a cradle-to-career model that supports children through early development, education, care, skills training and employment. Its governing principle is what he calls “responsible kindness”. “Charity is where the giver feels good about giving something they have to somebody else. But what happens when the charity ends? Responsible kindness means your intervention succeeds when that person no longer needs you — when they are capable of breaking the mindset of victimisation that poverty imposes. I am so glad my own children are carrying that legacy forward.”