I can’t remember the exact year, but I do recall how, one December, I incessantly harassed my domestic worker grandmother and grant recipient grandfather for a “Dan Watson” arrow shirt and slacks, until they relented.
From those of us who were teenagers at the time, to much older fathers and malumes, stylish clothes bought at the Dan Watson clothing stores were “must haves”, definitely among the most prised items in any gentleman’s wardrobe.
The clothes gave us what people nowadays call “swag”, or made us “dapper”.
You simply weren’t the “it” guy in New Brighton, KwaZakhele or Zwide, if you didn’t own at least a few items from the shop.
The family of fairly good rugby players had been operating two clothing stores – one in Port Elizabeth and another in Uitenhage – when they decided to dump their white club and go to play for township teams.
The backlash was huge – at least for a short while – with the brothers banned for life by the white rugby league, ostracised by their neighbours and friends, and whites subsequently boycotted their businesses.
In the middle of uprisings in the ‘80s, led by ANCaligned organisations, a very effective consumer boycott was launched, inflicting untold damage to business.
Black, township-based businesses were, of course, exempted and so were the Watsons’ clothing businesses.
About 10 years or so later, the Watsons were away for a weekend when their 14-room cliff-side mansion caught fire and was razed to the ground.
They had asked two of their black employees, rugby players Archie Mkele and Geoffrey Nocanda, to look after the house.
The two suffered serious burns over of 40% of their bodies in the fire.
Three of the four Watson brothers were later charged with arson and fraud, accused of getting their employees to deliberately burn down the house so that the family could claim from insurance and perhaps rescue their nowailing business.
Throughout the duration of their court case the Watsons were never alone.
Their mainly black supporters, who often carried them shoulder-high, also shared their claim that the episode was all a well-orchestrated revenge plot by the apartheid system and its apologists, ostensibly to punish the family for standing up against racism.
More than 30 years later the family is again in the dock.
Family patriarch Gavin Watson’s self-confessed former “right hand man”, Angelo Agrizzi, has been singing like a canary, detailing incidents of corruption, money laundering and state capture perpetrated over the years through Bosasa, a Watsons-owned company now trading as African Global Group.
From making a R½m donation to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s campaign to become ANC president in 2017, to installing security equipment at some of his cabinet ministers’ homes, to paying millions a month to grease palms of board members, executives and senior officials of government entities, the Watson appear no less a version (albeit a cheaper one) of the Guptas.
The Watsons will no doubt soon come out guns blazing, denying and dismissing everything that’s been alleged over the past couple of days at the state capture commission of inquiry, and will definitely find reasons for their accusers’ behaviour and actions.
And yes, they won’t forget their struggle credentials and history.
Those who’ve been enabling them will do the same.
As the commission moves on to other cases of state capture, other thieves and thugs will also come around, tell us about their credentials and insist there would have been nothing untoward with the things they would have done.
They will swear that everything they’ve done in their lives, they did with best interests of others at heart and would never betray anyone’s trust in them.
While we are enjoying the spectacle, horrified at the revelations, watching the liars’ noses growing, hopefully we are all taking the moment, and reflecting on our own behaviour, attitude, motives and tendencies.
We can’t keep blaming others for disappointing or betraying us.
The exposés about the Guptas, the Watsons and others we are still to hear about are in fact revelations about many of us as well, especially those of us who are ambitious, greedy, or who can manipulate others using whatever means.
Like I did when I manoeuvred my poor grandparents, abused their love and got them to buy me those bloody expensive Watson clothes, many facilitated the family’s thoroughfare into the hearts and minds of many township residents.
And when they needed sacrificial lambs, there was Mkele and Nocanda.
Over the next year, as we discover how public money was raided and as names are revealed of people we would have thought we trusted, who assisted them in their acquisition of what Gavin Watson himself apparently calls “monopoly money”, hopefully we’ll reflect on our respective roles and complicity.