Forty Chairs in a Borrowed Bakkie

The morning the warehouse let me go

I was a warehouse man for eleven years. Forklift, stock counts, night receiving, the lot. I was good at it, and being good at it is exactly what made me think it would last. Then the company restructured, which is a polite word for a bad morning, and on a Friday in Soweto I walked out of a gate I had walked into thousands of times, carrying a plastic packet with a mug, a spare pair of gloves, and a letter thanking me for my service.

For a while I did what everyone does. I sent CVs. I stood in lines. I sat in my yard in Orlando and watched the days go past and felt myself getting smaller. My wife, Nomsa, never once made me feel like less, but I felt it on my own, which is worse.

The thing that changed everything was small. My cousin was doing a memorial at his place and he was short of chairs. He knew I had a bit of space and a few plastic chairs and two trestle tables left over from a stokvel we used to run, and he asked if he could borrow them. I carried them over. Afterward he pushed a fifty into my hand and I tried to refuse and he said, no, you saved me, I was going to hire and it would have cost me four times that.

I walked home holding that fifty rand and something turned over in my head. People around here always need chairs. Weddings, funerals, church, unveilings, birthdays. Always. And most people do not own forty chairs. But somebody has to.

Saying yes before I was ready

I started small and quiet. I had maybe fifteen chairs and the two tables. I told a few neighbours, and word moves fast in the townships when it is about something useful. A church function here, a small party there. I would carry the chairs by hand or in a wheelbarrow if it was close, and I charged little, and I was careful, and I always came to fetch and deliver myself so people saw my face.

Then Mama Dlamini from two streets over came to my gate. Her daughter was getting married. Not a small thing, a proper wedding, a hundred and twenty guests at a hall in Soweto, and she wanted me to do the chairs and tables. A hundred and twenty. I had fifteen chairs.

I should have said I could not. Any sensible man would have said it. Instead I heard my own voice say, yes Mama, I can do that, and then I stood at my gate after she left feeling like I had swallowed a stone. Nomsa found me there. I told her what I had done and she did not shout. She just said, okay, so now we make it true.

That was the beginning of the most frightening and the best month of my life since I lost the warehouse job.

Borrowing a bakkie and everything else

First I had to find chairs. I could not buy a hundred and twenty, not with what I had. So I did what people here have always done, I built a web of favours. I borrowed from two men who also had a few chairs each. I hired a batch from a fellow in Diepkloof who ran a bigger operation and did not mind renting to a smaller one for a cut. I counted and recounted until the numbers finally reached where they needed to be.

Then there was the moving of them, which I had not thought about hard enough. A hundred and twenty chairs and a dozen tables do not go in a wheelbarrow. My brother in law has an old bakkie, a tired white Nissan that smells of paraffin and has a door that only opens if you know it, and he agreed to lend it to me for the weekend if I filled the tank and brought it back the way I found it. I have never driven so carefully in my life as I did with that borrowed bakkie stacked to the sky and tied down with rope I checked four times.

The wedding itself taught me everything at once. I learned that you must arrive earlier than early, because a bride's family is nervous and an empty hall makes them more nervous, and the sight of chairs going up calms a room. I learned to set a straight row by eye. I learned that when it rains in Soweto on a wedding morning, and it did, you carry chairs through mud without letting one of them get dirty, because a dirty chair at a wedding is your name being spoken badly for a year.

There was one detail I will never forget. The family had hired a set of fancy see-through chairs for the top table, the elegant kind, Tiffany chairs, from a proper company in town, and mine were the ordinary plastic ones for the guests. I remember standing at the back looking at that room, the shining special chairs at the front and my honest borrowed ones filling the rest, and thinking, one day the whole room could be mine. Not the same chairs. But mine.

The wedding went well. Mama Dlamini paid me in full and added something on top and hugged me in front of everyone, and three people asked for my number before I had even packed up.

Deciding to stop borrowing

After that weekend I sat down with Nomsa at our kitchen table with a school exercise book and we did the sums properly. Every job where I borrowed or hired chairs, most of the money I made went straight back out to the people I borrowed from. I was working like a mule and keeping a mouse's share. If I owned my stock, the same jobs would feed my own family instead of somebody else's business.

So we made the decision that felt huge at the time and small now, we would buy our own. Not all at once, we could not. But in batches, every job putting a little toward the next batch. I spent evenings finding out where to get sturdy chairs that would survive being stacked and moved and rained on and sat on by uncles who had enjoyed themselves. I priced everything. When I finally found a supplier with solid plastic chairs for sale at a price that made the maths work, I bought my first thirty of my own, and stacking those in my yard, knowing not one of them had to go back to anybody, I felt taller than I had in two years.

It grew from there the slow honest way. Thirty became sixty. I bought my own tables. I saved toward a small trailer so I could stop leaning on my brother in law's patience, though I still fill his tank now and then out of respect. Nomsa keeps the bookings in the same exercise book, now onto its third one.

What the yard looks like now

These days my yard has stacks of chairs against the back wall under a lean-to I built to keep the sun off them. People know my gate. A funeral on a Wednesday, a wedding on a Saturday, a church anniversary on a Sunday. I have regulars now, families who used me once and come back, and pastors who phone me directly.

The trust was the real thing I built, more than the stock. In this community your name is your whole business. If you deliver late, if a chair collapses under someone's grandmother, if you are rude, you are finished, and no amount of stock saves you. So I show up early, I count out loud in front of the client, I fix or replace anything the moment it wobbles. When a child at a party the other week dragged a single plastic chair over to the fence to stand on it and reach a mango, and the mother started apologising, I just laughed and told her a chair is meant to be used, that is the whole point of it.

Sometimes I think about that Friday I walked out of the warehouse gate with a mug in a plastic packet, feeling like the world had decided it did not need me. It turned out the world needed exactly what I could do, I just had to be the one to see it. I did not plan a business. I answered my cousin, then I answered Mama Dlamini, and I kept answering, and one yes at a time it became the thing that feeds my family.

The borrowed bakkie is long back with my brother in law. The chairs are mine.