Event: JSE

Cape Flats to the JSE author Phakamisa Ndzamela in conversation with former Brimstone executive Lawrie Brozin At a time when black economic empowerment is increasingly reduced to a shorthand for elite enrichment, Cape Flats to the JSE enters the conversation as a deliberate counter-narrative. The Johannesburg launch, held at Exclusive Books in Rosebank on Thursday, positioned the book not only as a company history, but as an intervention in how South Africa remembers and debates B-BBEE. Author Phakamisa Ndzamela was explicit about his intention. The book challenges a dominant narrative that portrays empowerment as a failed project benefiting only a politically connected few. Instead, it uses the rise of Brimstone Investment Corporation to argue for a more layered understanding of how empowerment unfolded in practice. Brimstone, founded in 1995 by Mustaq Brey, Fred Robertson and Rashid Seria, is presented as a case study of an alternative model. From modest beginnings, the company grew into one of the country’s longest-standing black-controlled firms on the JSE, building a portfolio across sectors including fishing, healthcare and financial services. But the discussion at the launch made clear that this is not a simple success story. Ndzamela traced the origins of the book to his postgraduate research in business history, where he struggled to find black-owned companies with sufficient archival material to support rigorous analysis. Brimstone stood out because it had kept records, minutes and institutional documentation, allowing its trajectory to be reconstructed with unusual depth. That absence of documentation is central to the book’s contribution. Without recorded histories, the story of black business is either reduced to anecdote or dominated by a narrow set of high-profile deals that have come to define public perception. In that sense, the value of Cape Flats to the JSE lies not only in the story it tells, but…