Kwa-Jola Boutique B&B

They were making their way to one or other of the famous Wild Coast resorts, to stay in hotels and be waited on hand and foot. One day she would have that life, Nombeko promised herself, but first she had to go to the wholesaler for her mother, to buy sugar and tea. After school she might have to chase up some of the people who owed her mother’s little trading store money.

“I wasn’t one of those people who tell you they went to school hungry and without shoes,” says Nombeko today. “I had shoes and I was never hungry, thanks to my mother’s business. But I noticed that the teachers, the nurses and the policemen in Lusikisiki had no cars. I wanted a car like the abelungu (white people) I saw going on holiday. I saw that the way to get these things was to go into business.”

Unemployable

After graduating from university Nombeko, today aged 38, worked in community development for two-and-a-half years, at which point she realised that she was “basically unemployable”.

“I could not stand to be employed,” says Nombeko. “It all came from being so involved in my mother’s business. I was the youngest of eleven children but I was entrusted with stuff, like picking up supplies, collecting debts. I used to suggest to my mother that instead of just hoping people would come into the shop, we should put a stall out on the road.”

In Durban Nombeko set up a training consultancy business that has flourished and today employs four people. Living in La Lucia (“basically it’s northern Durban,” she says) Nombeko one day drove past a house that was perfectly positioned in a leafy garden, on a  ridge, a stone’s throw from the La Lucia Mall. It was for sale and Nombeko wanted it. “I wanted it so badly I would drive past the house  back and forth daily; as if I expected it to suddenly somehow change.”

The slightly tumbledown but perfectly situated house was being let by two long-term residents and two rooms were rented out on a casual basis. The premises were nowhere near what the irrepressible Nombeko wanted for the boutique B&B she was going to create in her mother’s name. . “We knocked down walls and put in doors. We spent R250 000 on landscaping the garden alone. Finally, on 24 December 2006 we received our first guests.

The guests have been arriving ever since; a mix of corporate and leisure travellers, most of them South African.

“The name of my business is Kwa-Jola Boutique B&B. It’s named in honour of my mother’s clan (Joli-Nkomo, Mphankomo, Qengeba, Mpondomise Lomthonyama to give it its full name.),” explains Nombeko.

Boutique finishing

Kwa-Jola is in every aspect a boutique B&B. Finishings and even crockery are funky, contemporary and African. There are four designer rooms, three en-suite and one with its own, separate, bathroom. Her breakfasts are spectacular, Nombeko says, and her beds the most comfortable in Durban. Complementing the boutique theme is Kwa-Jola’s own upstairs spa. Really more of a guesthouse than a B&B, guests are free to enjoy all the amenities, and Kwa-Jola regularly hosts small functions including receptions for VIPs and corporate team-building sessions and meetings.

Despite the small fortune she has already spent on landscaping, Nombeko is planning to do even more to turn her gardens into a subtropical paradise. TEP, which has always stood by the B&B with marketing support, she says, has offered to assist with the second landscaping project.

She’s hoping that they might also support her realise her ultimate dream for Kwa-Jola: an art centre displaying the work of her many local artist friends. As with the B&B itself, the art centre will honour the memory of her mother, the woman who turned Nombeko into one of La Lucia’s foremost entrepreneurs.