IN RETREAT, Parkwood Estate, Lavender Hill and Grassy Park – and then later in Hout Bay and even in Kalk Bay – Clive Kolbe was known to hundreds of primary school children from poverty-stricken township homes as Die Broodman(The Bread Man).
They loved him. They waited eagerly for his bread-laden bakkie to drive into their school grounds. For the majority of these children, a Kolbe sandwich was their only meal for the day.
“I often ask myself, ‘Why?’,” he told me the last time we spoke. “Why should so many children starve when others have so much?”
In another time or another place Kolbe, who died last week, might have looked forward to a career as an international cricketer (he was a canny leg-spinner and a useful middle- to lower-order batter) or as a marketing executive. He was a top ideas person, too.
Kolbe’s problem and, in many ways, South Africa’s loss, was that his cricketing career had blossomed during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. This “disqualifed” him from playing international cricket.
With job reservation being another pillar of apartheid, he, together with tens of thousands of fellow black South Africans, could also not aspire to jobs that were reserved for white people only.
Except for a brief flirtation in the 1980s with “normal” cricket, Kolbe accepted his lot stoically, concentrating his energies instead into coaching young cricketers from the renowned St Augustine Cricket Club to reach their full potential.
It was after he retired from work as a printer that he began thinking about helping others – especially the children of the Cape Flats.
“After retiring I felt a bit lost,” was how he put it. “I needed something to keep me active. And so I decided to focus on school feeding. I can proudly say that every cent I collected for this purpose was directed at the poor.”
He paid out no wages. There were no bonuses. Nothing. All he wanted to do was help the poor.
Kolbe and his long-time supporter, Heart FM radio personality Aiden Thomas, approached a number of companies, organisations and business people to help his project, which he named Aquarius, get off the ground.
But it was not only South Africans who were fired up by his enthusiasm…
Former South Africans in Australia also started fundraising efforts to help “Die Broodman’s” sandwich appeal fund. Kolbe even persuaded a group in the US to donate to Aquarius.
“Clive was filled with a determination bordering on single-mindedness to make the project work,” said Hilton Kolbe, his cousin. “He’d get up early to go to the bakeries where he had an arrangement to buy loaves of bread a little bit cheaper than shop prices. From humble beginnings, and using a bakkie financed by an insurance company and topped up with petrol by an hotel in Claremont, he started delivering bread to about half-a-dozen schools in the poorest areas of Grassy Park and Lavender Hill.
“As donations increased, he expanded his round to more than 15 primary schools, adding Retreat, Hout Bay and Kalk Bay to his route.”
Even illness couldn’t stop him. After a series of strokes, he appointed someone to drive his bakkie. But he still made the trips around the townships, even though he had difficulty walking and keeping his balance.
The last time I saw Kolbe, he was already ailing. He told me it never ceased to amaze him how school attendances shot up on “sandwich days”. “It brought tears to my eyes every time the extent of the hunger among the young in the townships was driven home to me,” he said.
“The children knew I wouldn’t disappoint them. They knew that I would be at their school, come rain or sunshine, on the days I committed to be there.
“Some of them would ask me if they could take a sandwich home for a brother or a sister,” he said. Others waited until I left in the hope of getting a free loaf to take home.
“It is unbelievably sad,” he said. “Most of us can’t even imagine the hardships some of these children have to endure – even before they get to school.”
Kolbe was always on the lookout for different ways to help the children: it was for this reason he increased the bread run to include milk for the children. In winter he organised soup kitchens to add to the sandwich delivery service.
He also persuaded contacts in the US to pay for raincoats for hundreds of township children.
And, at Christmas time, he employed young people to pack thousands of lolly bags, as a Christmas treat for them.
Later, he even introduced a scholarship programme – two bursaries a school, worth R1 000 each for 15 schools – for poor and deserving students to pay for uniforms and books as they prepared for high school.
Die Broodman will be sorely missed.