As I settled into married life with Tish, it became painfully clear that my R30,000-a-month salary from CH Chemicals wasn’t going to stretch far enough to cover my obligations to both households.
That’s when I remembered Essential Botanicals—the idea I’d had while at the Denmar Clinic. Years earlier, in the early ’90s, I’d inherited money from my dad and used some of it to buy the South African franchise for a range of essential oil-based products: bubble baths, shampoos, skin creams. I’d filed the recipes away and lost them, but I managed to track down the guy I’d bought the franchise from. To his credit, he honoured our original agreement and sent me the recipes. I was genuinely grateful.
Next, I got hold of John Cartwright. At that point, he was still living in his basement room in Lanseria, jobless after his business collapsed when Fishy Pete’s went under. I pitched him the idea: “Look, I’ll buy a bakkie—South African for a light pickup—and finance you. Think you can make these?” I showed him the recipes. Before he became a web developer, he’d been a surfactant chemist. He looked them over and said, “Yeah, sure.”
Thank God for credit cards. I put a deposit down on a Mazda bakkie, gave John some cash, and off he went. He found an old friend with a surfactant manufacturing facility, sourced all the ingredients, and we settled on two products to start: a shampoo and a bubble bath. The full range had about thirty products, but we thought starting small made sense.
John was brilliant on the technical side. He blended the ingredients into two genuinely lovely products and designed a classic, elegant label. We printed a batch, poured everything into long glass bottles with cork stoppers, and they looked fantastic.
All John had to do was find shops to stock them. I was prepared to supply them on consignment. But he just never got off his arse. I don’t know if it was laziness or something else, but he had zero ambition.
The project fizzled out. John kept driving my bakkie, though. I couldn’t bring myself to take it back—without your own transport in South Africa, you’re screwed. Public transport where he lived was non-existent. I kept paying the R1,400 a month. “Find a job,” I told him. “Pay me back when you can.” He never did.
Meanwhile, I focused on making Neil’s patents work—especially the self-tamping rock bolt.
In deep-level mining, they drill holes into the hanging wall and insert rock bolts, packing them with cement to stop the rock face from collapsing. Neil’s idea was to replace the concrete with polyurethane—a two-part chemical that sets solid when mixed. it can vary between rock-hard and foam depending on the application. I came up with a system: two condoms, each filled with one of the polyurethane components, placed side by side inside a cardboard sleeve. I designed and hand-carved a mixing head from hard polyurethane. It looked like a small pineapple with teeth. Once I was happy with the original, I made a silicone mould and cast a batch for testing.
The procedure was simple: shove the sleeve to the top of the hole, attach the mixing head to the top of the rock bolt, place the base of the bolt into a handheld pneumatic drill, and drill like hell. The spinning ruptured the condoms, mixed the polyurethane, and the expanding foam filled the space between the rock and the bolt, locking it in place. It was actually pretty damn ingenious, if I say so myself. And it worked.
But the polyurethane with density strong enough to replace cement was just too expensive. Neil was convinced we could make it viable. I wasn’t so sure.
I went down to the Anglo-American mines in the Vaal Triangle three or four times. It’s an experience I never want to repeat.
You spend twenty or thirty minutes descending in a lift, three and a half kilometres underground. Then you drive for miles through tunnels until you reach the stope—a gold seam just centimetres thick. The heat is unbearable, around 45 degrees. The rock burns to touch. Refrigerated air is pumped in just to make it survivable.
The miners lie on their sides, drilling into the seam. Behind them, others shovel the ore into carts. Twenty or thirty metres back, the stope collapses centimetre by centimetre, in a controlled fashion, as they inch forward. They prop it up with cement packs, but the process is relentless. The miners work twelve-hour shifts. They’re all Black men, drawn from generations who’ve done this since the 1880s. They’re paid almost nothing. They live in male-only compounds, sending every rand home to families in the old apartheid “homelands.”
This was the source of wealth for people like Rowena’s father, Basil Hersov of Anglo-Vaal—the luxury, the global properties, the obscene affluence. All of it built on men lying on their sides in the dark, risking their lives for scraps.
It sickened me. To this day, I’m disgusted by that industry. Maybe it sounds self-righteous. But if you see that and feel nothing, I don’t know what to say.
The self-tamping rock bolt never took off. The economics just didn’t work.
So I turned my attention to the next project—the solar panel, with its black fluid inside the clear polycarbonate. But that’s for the next chapter.