Today started with a session at the IBM South-Africa headquarters. With our team’s diverse backgrounds it looked like a mini United Nations session 🙂 We were briefed by the country general manager on the specific business context like the black economic empowerment act. The goal of this act is to promote the hiring of people from previously disadvantaged communities. Over time the composition of companies should represent the population distribution in the country and SA should be master of its own destiny.
Second stop was the Apartheid Museum which was a real eye opener for me. To see everything you would need at least three hours, we had to rush it just a bit but it was well worth the time. I knew of course what apartheid was in a broad sense but the exibition really brought home the horrors of that period. What struck me were the movies of the politicians that started apartheid and how they justified their actions as being for the greater good, i.e. ‘see how we are helping these helpless black people’. It had, of course, nothing to do with protecting their self interest… The struggle that Nelson Mandela went through and the perseverance he showed to SA and to the world are hard to describe. However, through many historical documents, pictures and video’s the museum does give a sense of what happened. I now understand a little bit better of what Mandela went through and one cannot but have enormous admiration for this amazing leader.
For dinner we went to a nice Indian restaurant and had a suberb meal together with the two main sponsors of our project. Tomorrow morning we start the first working session so now is the time for some final preparation…
