Where do I start in talking about what I learnt from my father? There was just so much. To say that I was moulded by him is an understatement. So many aspects of who I am today are a result of the person he was, and what he taught me, through his words but far more through his daily actions.
In the general-dealer shop which he ran — and which I helped in from when I was about 10 — most of his customers were black Africans, a great number of them poor. There were a few of the customers who were fairly well-off, but they were by far in the minority. Some of those accounts used to run for years. But, the beauty of it all is that sometimes — as many as five years later — someone would come and say, “You know what, I owed you this money five years ago; I’ve come to pay now.” My
My father showed me a lot of trust when I was running his second shop. It is the same value that I always try to apply in my work at: when I give people opportunities, I trust that they will make the most of them. And if they make a mistake then I say they must learn from them. If it’s not a fatal mistake, or there’s no reputational damage, then it’s fine to make a mistake. And I trust that they will learn from those mistakes. That’s an approach I learnt from my father.My dad loved his sport.
Values of old came through in the way my father hosted. His view was a simple one: in essence, he was saying to the visitors, if you’ve come all this way from out of town, you must come home to eat with me; you can’t eat in the restaurant or the café, you must come to my home. Everybody got involved in everybody else’s life, in happy times and in sad times and my dad immersed himself in service to others. In every respect, in every aspect, being part of the community and helping to build community spirit was the key thing that I learnt from my father. He showed me that you should never isolate yourself from the community; you should not be outside of your community. Everything you do is — and should be — about and for your community.
When I moved to Durban, he would often call just to check on me. I was sometimes neglectful in calling him; it should have been the other way around. When I got married, he would check on me and my wife, and my children. He would do that with all my siblings, and he did it with all his brothers and sisters. It was really a lesson to learn: how to care. How never to stop caring. I couldn’t have asked for better role modelling. He really did his best as a father, as a brother and as a son.
Far beyond the Country it self.
God Bless him, a man who knows what Ubuntu is in word & deed❤️❤️ better than those who coined the word but forgot its meaning🖕🖕
Dr Sooliman should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, likely the most remarkable Saffer alive today.
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