Matopos Guest House

His father had a number of wives and Amos has 29 siblings. The people were poor and most were poorly educated; Amos’s father, Chief MZ Mdluli was illiterate but Amos remembers him with the utmost fondness and respect. Specifically, Amos mentions his father’s concern about the fact that poverty drove the heads of households to the far-off mines of Witbank and Johannesburg to earn a living so that they could put food on their families’ tables. “Some of the men started new families when they were away; some didn’t come back. It was very disruptive. My father decided to do something about that.” 

Chief Mdluli died in 1998 but he had already sown the seeds of his dream: identifying a part of the ancestral lands that would be used to empower the community through tourism and ensure that the environment should be conserved for future generations. In 1999 building started on what, in 2001, became the four-star Phumlani Lodge. With no experience in running a lodge and little previous exposure to tourism and hospitality, the Mdluli Trust hired a management company to run the lodge. For the Mdluli people the lodge was a godsend, each job created in the community helping to support up to 10 people. The relationship with the management company soon foundered, however, and at the end of 2002 Amos Mdluli was brought in to save the lodge from mounting debts and to turn it around.

Slowly and deliberately, the lodge was indeed turned around, attracting a growing number of local and international guests as Amos embarked enthusiastically on marketing its world-class facilities and stunning Bushveld location.

While he worked around the clock to rescue his community’s most prized asset, Amos began to realise the potential of the tourism industry – and his aptitude for turning strangers into friends. In 2005 this realisation prompted him to start Glowing Tourism Services in Nelspruit. His plan was to spend two years concentrating on growing the travel-agency side of the business and then, when this was established, to venture into the capital-intensive transfer and tour-operating side of the business. That is precisely what Amos achieved, in his third year investing in a number of luxury vehicles.

Travel-agency bookings grew steadily, from national, provincial and local government, the Nepad organisation, parastatals and corporates. In early 2008 Amos formed a joint venture with a Johannesburg-based tour operator to provide transfers but after the better part of a year he decided to concentrate his energy and time on Mpumalanga. Recently he acquired Matopos Guest Lodge, a sprawling guesthouse perched, eyrie-like, on a hilltop above Nelspruit with views that seem to go on forever.

On September 1 2008 disaster struck Amos and the Mdluli Trust when the reception block at Phumulani Lodge was destroyed by fire. It was largely Amos’s responsibility to settle the protracted insurance claim and to see the lodge re-open, as it did on April 6 2009.

While he laboured to turn Phumulani’s disaster into eventual triumph, Amos was quietly building Glowing Tourism Services. The logo of the business is the rhino – for good reason. “The rhino is one of the Big Five, and that is just what we see Glowing becoming,” explains Amos. “When I was growing up, there was a perception that the tourism industry was only for whites. But, thanks to the encouragement and training I received, I was able to create a business that showed our people they could make it in tourism.”

Glowing, Amos says, is “making it” in the cut-throat tourism industry because its six staff are always attuned to the client’s needs and expectations. “Our standard is to give a quote within 30 minutes. If it’s a particularly big or complicated quote and we need a bit more time, we’ll explain this to the client and keep them updated all the time.”

The 39-year-old says that winning the Etaya award for Mpumalanga feels “really great”.

“I feel really honoured to have been made a finalist. It makes me a role model for young entrepreneurs. I like to think that it sends them a message that if they work really hard they can reap the rewards.”