At a time when mortality is such a fragile thing death has become part of our everyday. A passing. A moment of sadness. Another passing.

The news of Dolly Mokgatle’s death on Sunday stopped me in my tracks.  Dolly (please permit the familiarity, as I knew her) was one of those South Africans who touched many parts of our national life.

When I met her in the early 1990s I was a library assistant at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) and she was part of the ring of legal greats who made that institution so revolutionary. Her circle – John Dugard, Gilbert Marcus, Halton Cheadle and Edwin Molatlhegi – all would be shapers of the new country.

Dolly was an attorney at CALS and its allied law firm, Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom, and she started her legal career at the formidable Black Lawyers Association.

I was a painfully shy young student with all apartheid’s inferiorities firmly planted and sown. To have someone like Dolly ask my name and my story and to always treat me with kindness and as if I were someone with an opinion worth hearing was deeply empowering for someone to whom the system had broadcast only the message of worthlessness.

Sheryl Sandberg is famous for teaching women to “lean in” to leadership, but it’s people like Dolly who taught a generation of us to speak up and stake a claim. At Peotona, the woman-owned company started by her with the other powerhouses Cheryl Carolus, Thandi Orleyn and Wendy Lucas-Bull, they lived the motto of mentorship in ways that really should be chronicled better.

State Capture has given black empowerment a bad rap, but companies like Peotona show their potential every day.

“People stand on podiums and promise things,” says leadership strategist Dudu Msomi. “But then they don’t come through… Dolly always did. 

“She was honest, and a no-holds-barred person,” says Msomi, who remembers the last Wisdom Personified (a leadership dialogue Msomi hosts) Dolly addressed when she answered frankly about the tensions between non-executive and executive directors on boards she had served on.

At the time of her death she had been on a score or more of blue-chip boards and will be recognised in the annals as an excellent director. This is why she has been heralded largely as a business leader in the week of her passing, although she served her country in many ways.  

In the early years of democracy she was CEO of Spoornet, MD of Eskom’s transmission group and held other senior jobs at the electricity utility long before it was rent asunder by the rentier class of executives. As a board member of the regulatory body Nersa she long ago realised the need for a distributed energy model which, of course, has never happened.

I last bumped into Dolly in September 2020 when the first Covid-19 wave had abated and we were allowed to travel interprovincially again. We had gone to the Kruger and on our return at Milly’s, the trout stop, bumped into her and her husband with friends, who were on their way back from a birthday golfing weekend. She had also recently started horse riding.

We hadn’t seen each other for years and greeted each other as warmly as one can in these strange Covid times. She did the Dolly thing I now know to be signature: she greeted and asked interesting and interested questions of my husband Spencer and friend Farooq. Then she said we should meet sometime and talk about energy and Eskom and important things. I would have come away so much wiser about the direction our energy policy needs to take.

Dolly was a passionate advocate of a good education as the path to empowerment. She was on Unisa’s Council and brought a “broad spectrum of competencies”, the university said in its note of her passing. “Mme Mokgatle’s quality of work and dedication to the service of Unisa and society, in general, was truly impeccable and inspirational. All will sorely miss her.”

Rothschild executive chairperson Martin Kingston, who worked with Dolly for nine years when she chaired the Rothschild Foundation, described her as “an extremely vivacious individual with a broad range of experience. She was exceptionally insightful and thorough”.

“Education was a particular passion for her and through her we ramped up the number of beneficiaries. She combined charm and authority with humour, and she was quite effortless in her ability to engage across boundaries, be they social, gender or race.”

She was also an associate governor of Michaelhouse and deputy chancellor of the Board of Trustees of the Anglican Church diocese in Johannesburg.  

In the fellowship that has shaped my life, the Africa Leadership Initiative, we learn to harvest the lessons of great lives and to live them. Dolly’s was such a great life. I hope we harvest her lessons.

She was 67 years old and left behind her husband and five children. The cause of death had not been released at the time of writing. DM