Inside Coca-Cola

by Neville Isdell

  We returned the sheep early the next morning—no harm done, we thought. However, some other students had been caught attempting to break into the zoo. The police, after apprehending them, told them they could avoid charges if they told who purloined the sheep. We honorably, therefore, owned up, without realizing we would potentially be charged with stealing the animals. Eventually, as this very serious process evolved, we learned that a judge dismissed the case. We discovered that the judge had also been forced as a first-year student to endure the same ritual at our residence and therefore understood our circumstances. Our only punishment was a letter from the vice chancellor to our parents. My father, a career police officer, was none too happy, but I had dodged a bullet indeed. The judge ended up being the doyen of the South African judicial community. I recently sat next to him at a dinner, and even though he is now in his late eighties, he remembered the incident, confirmed his role, and still found it highly amusing.

  For the three years I was in residence at Cape Town University, I was a Pepsi drinker. Cape Town in those days was the one part of South Africa where Pepsi had leadership. The whole of the university was exclusive to Pepsi. Although I was a Coke drinker back home in Lusaka, this was the one time of my life when I was forcibly a Pepsi consumer. Even in those days, when I consumed a soft drink outside the university, I chose Coca-Cola, showing the importance of product availability. Cape Town today is a thriving Coca-Cola franchise, built by the Forbes family, which turned a very weak franchise into what is today probably the strongest and best-run franchise in South Arica.

  In college, I played on the rugby team, having reached a height of six foot five inches. Rugby was my main sporting passion and for me a lesson in teamwork and life. Every winter we went on tour, playing all over Southern Africa, which promoted great bonding. Today when I am in Cape Town, I still meet whenever I can with my former teammates.

  Sociology captured my attention and I decided to become a social worker. Qualification as a social worker required students to do practical work. For example, I was assigned to do follow-up visits in the shantytowns of Cape Town for burn patients who had been at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital. Friday nights were drinking nights in the shantytowns and on occasion fathers would come home, get in a fight, knock the stove or lamp over, and the child would get burned. I would go in and conduct a case study to determine if the father was abusive and if the family would be able to stay together. I did six months of this intensive, sometimes heartbreaking work.

  I was elected to the student council on an antiapartheid ticket and in 1964 became the editor of the college newspaper, where I wrote editorials against the government’s efforts to get rid of the small percentage of non-white students at Cape Town University. Although the college was more than 95 percent white, government officials wanted to go further and make it 100 percent. (They never quite succeeded and today it is a vibrant multiracial college ranked 105th in the world and first in Africa.)

  “The University of Cape Town was a hotbed of white opposition to apartheid,” my classmate and rugby team member, Hugh Coppen, recalled. “It was at the time the most liberal education you could get in South Africa.”

  Coppen remembers South African security police sitting in the classroom of one professor, Jack Simons, waiting for him to say anything considered seditious, which he often did. On occasion he was jailed. Students would picket the jail and demand his release, recalled Coppen, the son of a white farmer from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), who now lives in San Francisco.

  My views of apartheid sometimes clashed with my image as a rugby player. Rugby was the national sport of the Afrikaners and I remember once in the bar of the main stadium after a match a policeman approached me and said, “What’s wrong with you? We thought you were one of us.” He simply couldn’t understand how a rugby player, a member of the club, could oppose apartheid. “Be careful, we are watching you,” he warned. Later that year, my house was raided by the security police who were looking for seditious material. They found none, missing my copy of Mao’s Little Red Book tucked away in the back of an old bookcase.

  On one issue related to apartheid, I was faced with a difficult moral dilemma. The government of South Africa had decreed that all dances on campus had to be racially segregated. The student council passed a resolution to halt dances until they could be opened to students of all races. The problem was that some of the dances were fund-raisers for a student organization, SHAWCO, that provided a health clinic, low-cost food, and other assistance for the poor in Windermere, a suburb of Cape Town. I knew through my social work that this help was desperately needed. The protest would have hurt the people we were trying to help, while we continued our privileged lifestyle. I believed we had to find other ways to protest and I was among the minority on the student council who voted against the resolution to ban all dances. I was the only member of the campus antiapartheid organization to do so. I resisted peer pressure and went against the grain, refusing to increase the suffering of those we were trying to help. I am still unsure to this day whether I was right or wrong.

  It was during my college years that Zambia officially gained its independence from Great Britain. I organized a party for the Zambian students at Cape Town University. At midnight on October 24, 1964, in the ballroom of a local hotel, with the British ambassador present, we lowered the British flag and raised the Zambian flag for the first time as we sang its anthem, “Stand and Sing of Zambia, Proud and Free.” I am sure that the availability of free beer for impoverished students added to the sense of history.

  Although I was training to be a social worker, I again began to experience the lure of a business career. Many of my friends at the university were from wealthy families in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Their fathers owned businesses. They lived in what seemed to me were palatial homes and arrived at school driving brand-new cars. I didn’t have a car. I was now mixing with a different group of people. I felt a level of inferiority, sometimes a level of resentment at the financial differences, but more than anything, aspiration. I was a policeman’s son, but I felt like I could one day reach the same financial status of my classmates and their families.

  In order to earn some extra entertainment money in college, I worked on Saturday mornings at a local clothing store. I was hired not because of any knowledge of clothing but because I was a minor rugby star. The University of Cape Town had many rugby teams, with different levels of competition. In 1964, I had reached a second-league team, but progression to the first league seemed unlikely that year since there were two players firmly entrenched on that team in the position I played at the time, lock forward. In my junior year, I was offered a spot on a first-league club, if I would leave the university team. The other team was not very good but it was in the first league. My father advised against it. “I don’t think there is any point in being a first-league player with an inferior club,” he said. “You know my dictum to you, ‘Always strive to be the best.’” That was a lesson for life. It made it easier over the years to turn down job offers without even thinking about it from companies that were not of the stature of the Coca-Cola Company. My father was certainly the most influential person in my life.

  After taking his advice and staying with the university team, and making the first team weeks later, I was chosen in 1965 for a team of players drawn from South African universities for a match against Argentina. This was a taste of true first-class rugby.

  After graduation from college that year, I landed a job as a manager trainee at Edgar’s Stores in Johannesburg and ran a retail store for about six months before an offer arrived from a Coca-Cola bottler in Zambia. It was owned by Maurice Gersh, a Lithuanian Jew who had fled to Africa to escape the Holocaust, walking part of the way barefoot to Kitwe, Zambia’s second-largest city, and starting a business empire from scratch. At one time Mr. Gersh was the mayor of Kitwe, a fact I have always remembered fondly while discussing the close relationship I believe companies should have with the communitie
s they serve. I had dated Gersh’s daughter, Rayna, one of my early, great loves, in college but our relationship waned when her older brother married a Christian, sparking a family uproar. She later married a Jewish doctor. Rayna’s brother, Bernard, is one of the world’s leading cardiologists at the Mayo Clinic and remains a good friend. I had originally turned down a job offer from Mr. Gersh while I was dating Rayna, but now the way was clear and not conflicted.

  I arrived back in Zambia two years after the country had gained complete independence from Great Britain. Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, was both a socialist and a humanist. He led a nonviolent independence movement that never targeted whites as individuals, but did blow up rail lines and power stations to create disruption.

  Kaunda tried very hard not to be polarizing on race. He was all about the human being. In 1959, when I was sixteen, my geography master invited Kaunda, who had just been released from jail, to our school in Lusaka, and we had lunch with him. I expected a firebrand. Yet Kaunda was calm and balanced. I remember asking him, “Why aren’t you mad at us? We’ve had you in jail.” I can’t remember his exact words, but basically his reply was that we, the whites, were the ones who were making the mistake, right was on his side, and there was no reason for him to be angry. He believed that he would not be living up to his principles if he were influenced by the anger of the whites who had imprisoned him. Retribution was against his principles.

  My father also knew Kaunda, who as president of Zambia was named honorary head of the Irish Society and attended the St. Patrick’s night ball every year, which my father organized as head of the society.

  I was always sympathetic with Kaunda’s movement, but there were periods of uncertainty during the years preceding independence. White neighborhoods established security patrols. My father would be on watch at night, patrolling just to be sure everything was safe and secure.

  After independence in 1964, Kaunda nationalized many of the industries in Zambia, including the lucrative copper mines, but, fortunately for me, not the soft drink business. It was the beginning of the failed and often destructive era of African socialism led by well-meaning leaders, but later exploited by the less idealistic, often for their own benefit.

  Under Kaunda, the retail business was reserved for Zambian citizens, but permanent residents, mostly whites who had lived in the country for ten years or more, were allowed to own wholesale businesses, a system that still exists today.

  My first job was as manager trainee at a two-truck depot in a small copper-mining town called Mufulira. Cokes were sold to supermarkets, bars, and restaurants. My salary was $1,100 a year.

  Noting that one of the two trucks was often idle because there was only one salesman on the staff, I asked my superiors if the company would hire another salesman. They wouldn’t, so I offered to get my commercial driver’s license and was soon driving a ten-ton truck, “throwing cases” on every stop and adding new Coke customers. I doubled sales within a year. A fringe benefit of the physical labor was that I kept fit for rugby, and I was soon playing for the Zambian team.

  At that time in Zambia fuel was being rationed, a side effect of Britain’s economic blockade of Rhodesia, which had announced a “Universal Declaration of Independence” (UDI) in 1965 in order to preserve white rule. In retaliation for the embargo, Rhodesia stopped rail shipments of oil and other supplies from ports in Mozambique to the newly independent Zambia, a British ally, and a base for the South African National Congress, which was opposing apartheid in South Africa.

  In order to get enough fuel for our two delivery trucks, I’d drive twice a week to the Congo border on dirt roads in the dead of night with cash to pick up diesel fuel in forty-four-gallon drums, an activity that was technically illegal but kept the Coke depot running.

  The hard work paid off and I was soon placed in charge of an eight-truck depot in Kitwe and rewarded with a one hundred dollar cash bonus, nearly one full-month’s salary.

  Trying to expand the Zambian Coke market necessitated amazing and treacherous jaunts on the road nicknamed the “Hell Run,” which connects Zambia to Tanzania and the Port of Dar es Salaam. With the border to Rhodesia closed because of the UDI, the Hell Run was now a main truck route. Small grocery stores and restaurants popped up for the truckers. Coke products were provided by itinerate vendors. I was assigned along with a Zambian coworker, Sandy Mwila, to survey the road to determine if we should launch our own distribution system. So one morning we set out in a Datsun van, with two sand-filled sugar sacks to stabilize the rear of the vehicle, for the trip to the Tanzanian border some three hundred miles away.

  In 1966, Time magazine described the Hell Run as “the world’s worst international highway” featuring dizzying, hairpin turns, treacherous sand, and mud. My wife has always accused me of driving faster on dirt roads than on paved roads, and there is logic to this. Driving fast on a dirt road means you literally fly over many of the ruts and corrugations.

  The Hell Run was in such bad shape that driving fast became even more hazardous. Before the border to Rhodesia was closed, this road was little used. Almost overnight, it became overwhelmed with truck traffic. With the continual transit of the trucks, drivers often found themselves heading almost blind into the dust created on the road during dry season. At least it wasn’t muddy!

  Sandy let me do most of the driving and I must admit that as a passenger, I would have been petrified at the speeds I was attaining. Yet youth is blind to risk and I probably took too many, but fortunately suffered no consequences.

  About 125 miles from the Tanzanian border we stopped for the night in a small town called Mpika. Arriving hot, sweaty, and tired, we checked in at the Crested Crane Hotel and found that that there was only one room available, even though we had booked two. And, there was only one bed! It was what you could call a queen-sized bed, but had been much used and was distinctly concave, sunken in the middle much like the inside of a bowl. This meant that if Sandy, who was a rather large man, and I were to share the bed, we would migrate toward the center with great rapidity. We asked if there was a mattress that we could put on the dirty concrete floor, but there was none. So we decided we were probably better off sleeping in very close proximity to each other for the night. Exhaustion is a wonderful thing because when we eventually got into bed I don’t think either of us moved until the next morning.

  The food was not much better than the sleeping arrangements. Before retiring for the evening, we went to the hotel bar for a Zambian beer and what we trusted would be a good dinner. The menu was rather limited and we both ordered steak and chips (French fries). The steak arrived looking rather gray and leaden on the plate. Our attempts to cut it proved extremely difficult, not because of the lack of sharpness of the knife but because of the leathery nature of the meat. Each of us managed to detach one corner. The battle with our teeth to make the meat digestible resulted in neither of us returning to our steaks for nutrition. Instead, beer and bread filled our bellies.

  The next morning we decided to take another risk by ordering steak, eggs, and chips—very soggy chips!—in the belief that the steak in the morning couldn’t be nearly as bad as the steak the night before. Yet when the steak arrived it looked familiar … the corners were missing. The eggs and chips, however, were nutritious enough.

  Back on the road, we took a thirty-mile detour off the Hell Run to visit the memorial near Kasanka where the heart of explorer David Livingstone was buried, the rest of his body having been shipped back to Westminster Abbey in London. We also toured the sprawling estate, Shiwa Ng’andu (Lake of Crocodiles), built in 1914 by an English aristocrat, Stewart Gore-Browne. You can image our surprise coming across, in the middle of the African bush, this magnificent English estate with well-manicured gardens, a chapel, a huge house complete with beautiful teak dining room table, silver candelabras, and a library stocked with leather-bound literary classics. Gore-Browne, a member of the Northern Rhodesian parliament, endorsed independence in the early 1960s, cau
sing a huge stir in British diplomatic circles. In the final years of his life, he pushed the British government to move quickly toward majority rule.

  It was in Zambia that I learned firsthand about the often adversarial relationship between Coca-Cola bottlers and the parent company.

  The manager of the bottling plant in Kitwe was Charles Hutchins, and he was really tough. When he lectured employees, Hutch, as he was called, would make us all stand up on our chairs. Imagine me, at six foot five, standing on a chair. That was his management style. He was a bully, and while it was effective in the short term, it was not a style I chose to emulate.

  Hutch didn’t like the Coca-Cola Company. Once, Coke sent in a newly appointed rep, Lionel Cork. Before Cork arrived for his first meeting with Hutch in Kitwe, Hutch told me, “I want you to come watch this.” When Cork arrived, Hutch was sitting behind his desk, with me standing beside him. There were no other chairs in the office, so Cork had to stand, a clear message as to who was the boss.

  As the company rep, Cork’s job was to help the bottlers increase sales. However, help from the front office is not always seen as help on the receiving end. Rather than escort Cork personally through the Kitwe marketplace, Hutch told him, “There’s a truck outside, help yourself.” So Cork rode in the truck for three days, inspecting the local stores. It was a game. Customers were giving Hutch feedback about Cork, and Cork was getting a reading from the customers and the market. When Cork returned to say good-bye to Hutch at the end of the inspection, there was a chair waiting for him. The relationship had been cemented, on Hutch’s terms, although in many respects, Cork had won. Later when he worked for me, Cork reflected on the experience: “There are many ways to skin a cat.”