South Africa: What Makes Bantus Buy

For 300 years, the subjugated Bantu blacks of South Africa have served Afrikaners as house servants, field hands, laborers and mineworkers. Nobody knew how they spent their wages, and nobody seemed to care—until South African companies searching for new consumer markets discovered an impressive fact: Bantus make up a market of 11,000,000 people with an annual purchasing power of $1.26 billion. Staggered by the potential of this "new" market, South African businessmen are now scrambling to beam their goods and advertising at the Bantu. One of the most important men on the beam is himself a Bantu, a Natal...