Patricia Gorvalla: Feisty businesswoman and community leader
1930-2013
PATRICIA Gorvalla, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 83, was a businesswoman and iconic figure in the coloured community of the Western Cape.
She was their “mother of the nation”, a title conferred on her by prominent educator and former South African ambassador to the US Franklin Sonn. She was also widely and affectionately known as “Auntie Pat”.
Patricia Scott was born in Bellville on March 17 1930 and qualified as a teacher. She married a fellow teacher, Phiroze Gorvalla, and, in compliance with the law as it applied to coloured women in those days, had to give up teaching.
To supplement his teacher’s salary, they operated a taxi from the Bellville taxi rank, taking turns and often driving well into the night. They transported patients to hospital and workers to and from the factory.
She devoted herself to building up their taxi business while he became the principal of a school in Newlands.
She was devoted to him, but clearly the dominant partner.
She was strikingly good-looking, charming and confident, and knew exactly how to use these attributes to open the doors of the apartheid officials and bureaucrats. Once inside she proved herself a hard-headed, aggressive and persuasive negotiator, convincing them that if they really believe in separate development, they must allow coloured people like herself, rather than whites, to run businesses in their own areas.
She won tenders to transport patients to and from Karl Bremer Hospital and gradually acquired a fleet of kombis for the purpose. In order to service her growing fleet, and with financial assistance from the Coloured Development Corporation, she launched Pat’s Motor Spares, Pat’s Body Works and Pat’s Service Station.
In those days, it was entirely un- heard of for a coloured woman to own a filling station, let alone run it herself. But this is exactly what Gorvalla — always very hands-on — did.
She was there most Friday nights, mucking in with her employees while keeping an eagle eye on them.
From transport she branched out to property development and built the Gorvalla Group of 11 companies and three close corporations.
She was forced out of her family home in Oakdale, Bellville, by the Group Areas Act. When she refused to leave she was threatened with jail.
When her light-skinned husband, who had moved in with her, tried to argue their case, the apartheid government invited him to reclassify as white. The fact that he would not, as a white person, be allowed to live with his wife was apparently neither here nor there. He rejected the offer and they moved to Bellville South.
When she became wealthy, she sought — and was granted — special permission to live in “white” Durbanville, where she built a threestorey mansion that she filled with tourist souvenirs from her extensive travels overseas (her more intellectually inclined friends thought they were terribly kitsch, but her money did not turn her into an aesthetic snob).
There were also large portraits of her husband, who died in 1988, in the house. She remained devoted to him until the day she died and never remarried.
Gorvalla was a member of the SAUS committee on trade and development and accompanied President Nelson Mandela (who publicly recognised her contribution to the community soon after his release from prison) on trade missions to Britain, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Despite her wealth and connections — from 1990 she hosted a succession of political bigwigs, overseas in- vestors and ambassadors — she remained the same endearing figure, “Auntie Pat”, in the community.
She was generous with her money. In the early 1960s she began helping coloured families evicted from their homes by the Group Areas Act to raise collateral for mortgage bonds, which led to the launch of a home owners’ association.
She was a pillar of the Anglican community and, in 1990, the church gave her its highest award for service by the laity, the Order of Simon of Cyrene.
She was a long-standing and, typically, very active member of council at the University of the Western Cape — it awarded her an honorary doctorate — and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
In 2005, audits exposed the fact that her companies had been awarded tenders worth millions by these institutions. At the UWC, students organised a petition when one of her companies was again awarded a tender to transport students in spite of a poor record of service delivery. A task team recommended that the company be excluded.
She raged against her fate after being diagnosed with cancer last year and continued running her businesses from bed. She gave her staff hell if she thought they were slacking off.
Gorvalla is survived by three children. — Chris Barron