Lekau Sehoana’s clothing business had been around for nearly half a decade—but its sudden popularity and the humble beginnings of its founder made it look like a miracle out of nowhere. Founded in 2019, after a series of other genuine attempts at entrepreneurship, Sehoana sold Drip to consumers as the township dream; it was what happens when the enduring legacies of colonialism—and apartheid—that continue to make townships a spatial reality in democratic South Africa aren’t a factor. That tagline—the township dream—could often be seen splashed in bright letters on the company’s fleet of vehicles and the billboards that came to be at the center of a controversy that will likely come to define the legacy of a man once thought to be South Africa’s most popular entrepreneur. The poster boy of the country’s neoliberal possibilities.

In 2022, during an interview with Sehoana, popular radio presenter and podcaster Sibusiso Leope remarked that the colorful billboards advertising Drip sneakers on Sandton’s M1 road were like “an announcement of a new sheriff in town.” A relatively new and black-managed business advertising in Sandton isn’t insignificant: Sandton is the largest and most visible concentration of South Africa’s symbols of inequality. In 2019 Time magazine put photographer Jonny Miller’s drone image of a leafy Sandton neighborhood against an Alexandra township defined by the congestion of informal settlement structures on its cover. The point? Illustrating the sharp inequality that now defines much of the country. It’s in the few kilometers that divide Alexandra township and Sandton City that the country’s contradictions are most vivid. For Sehoana, advertising in Sandton was more than the pronouncement of a business or product; to advertise in Sandton is to announce both flight and arrival—like many who found success in the continent’s richest square mile—he had defied the dispiriting conditions of the working-class neighborhood that raised him. But as he would come to find out, defying spatial colonialism as a young businessperson eager to prove himself was one thing—sustaining a business was another.

There was something joyous—even exciting—about watching someone who once described himself as “a hoodrunk” realize the height of his potential. That joy was rooted in the impossibility of starting a business and holding your own. Only 1 percent of South African start-ups are said to grow to become viable enterprises. Drip was an attempt to distill an ungenerous township experience into a symbol of resilience. Its success lent weight to a broader cultural argument by some contemporary post-apartheid designers—about decolonizing the aesthetic and language—that defines the value of a cultural brand. They argued that a vernacular term and the history that tints it—stitched on a pair of jeans—can come to carry as much cultural value as a foreign luxury brand, even as its target market, elites in the South African context, seeks to mimic a Western lifestyle. Though “drip” is not a classical vernacular or indigenous term, it relied on and advanced that argument more than any other local brand that shied away from the politics of decolonial aesthetics and language.

Like any country marching to the beat of neoliberal capitalism, South Africa places great importance on acumen and sees business as a logical answer to some of its socioeconomic problems. What followed Sehoana in the wake of Drip’s liquidation were all the arguments about what he should’ve done and not done. Sehoana himself was a neoliberal crusader, often speaking of not just building a business but setting up systems that would ensure that the business outlives him. He was acutely aware of both the stakes and technicalities of turning a start-up into a behemoth. But there’s no amount of business acumen—or policy literacy—that can compensate for a poor cultural argument.

“Clothing is so close to the body, audiences take massaging from brands personally. More so, in the South African context where we already have so many issues around exclusion, audiences are sensitive to messaging that echoes exclusion as it relates to class, gender, and race,” says fashion writer and historian Khensani Mohlatlole when I ask whether a poor cultural reading of an audience or consumer base can be fatal to a business. Sehoana successfully packaged social fugitivity into a sneaker—but could not sell it at the market. As a result, Drip as a symbol of upward mobility came to be more important than Drip as … a decent product.

When he announced its liquidation, much of the discourse about Drip revolved around what everyone considered to be his obvious mistake: rapid expansion (at the peak of his business, Sehoana oversaw 18 retail stores across the country). But the most obvious mistake and inherent limit of Sehoana’s business was a lack of cultural buy-in. Many of the South African local clothing brands that have been successful in the post-apartheid era anchored their survival and success on courting or attaching to a cultural phenomenon. Mzwandile Nzimande and Sechaba Mogale exploited South Africa’s hip-hop scene to make their clothing brand Loxion Kulca synonymous with cool. On the cover art of their 2008 album Can’t Touch This members of the legendary South African kwaito group Trompies stand against a split background of tires, scrap metal, and an empty township street, a tribute to their respective working-class backgrounds. They wear Dickies’ iconic utility shirts that have come to be synonymous with certain aspects of Kwaito’s visual or aesthetic culture. It isn’t a sponsored image but speaks to the American clothing brand’s success in embedding itself with a South African cultural symbol which has ensured its success as a business. Dickies has never officially endorsed or sponsored Trompies but ask any South African which brand they associate with the group they’ll say Dickies. Or which group they associate with the brand, they’ll say South African kwaito group Trompies. It was the same reason American brand Reebok broke rank with international apparel brands’ unspoken boycott of kwaito, because despite its popularity and crossover appeal, it was essentially a critique of the exploitative conditions (“hase mo’state mo”) that attracted foreign brands to the country and offered kwaito star Kabelo Mabalane the country’s first sneaker (Bouga Luv) endorsement deal in 2005.

Sehoana joined with Southern Africa’s biggest pop star, Refiloe Phoolo, a.k.a. Cassper Nyovest, in what he called the most significant partnership ever created between a non-athlete personality and an athleisure brand rumored to be worth US$5 million. Sehoana compared the structure of the deal to that between Nike and basketball legend Michael Jordan, which made the brand synonymous with US sporting and popular culture. With that agreement, he hoped to mirror what Nike did with Jordan and Dickies did with kwaito. At the time of the signing Phoolo was still Southern Africa’s biggest star at least by the numbers. To date, he remains the only independent Southern African rapper—of his generation—to fill successive major venues, including stadiums, to capacity. But for all his cultural weight, Phoolo could neither carry nor save Drip. It wasn’t the first time a business agreement centered around a celebrity fails to transform the fortunes of a local business. In the late 2000s, South African telecommunications company Cell C, attempting to hold its own in a fiercely contested markett, decided to rope in Bonginkosi “Zola” Dlamini, then Southern Africa’s biggest pop star. For three years, Dlamini would be the face of the company and have a brand of products, as part of what was billed then as the first endorsement deal of its kind. But though popular, Dlamini’s cultural weight would have little bearing on the fortunes of the company. Sehoana seems to have been hatching his bets on the miracle of a business deal driven by the appeal of celebrity too. It might have worked, but his corporate expansion seemed to have been moving faster than he could make a cultural argument about why people should ditch their treasured Nikes and embrace an obscure label out of a South African township.

In the world’s most unequal country, everything comes down to appreciating the nuances of class and race, but aspirant capitalists like Sehoana, who rely on the allure of upward mobility as a unique selling point of their business, rarely anticipate resistance or their intentions being read critically. This is how Drip, a brand that claimed a working-class background as inspiration, ends up with billboards in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the continent, assuming it will be read as a triumph and attract new business. It is also how Phoolo, a millionaire pop star, becomes the face of Drip when it claims to want to appeal to working-class consumers. Of course, as a businessperson in a country where the face of corruption and failure is black, Sehoana was always going to spend a disproportionate amount of time and money trying to scrub the stench of failure that comes with surviving structural issues.

The argument of a celebrity endorsement or marketing deal is that if enough elites embrace something, then ordinary people will uncritically embrace that same thing. Sehoana and Drip weren’t wrong to hatch their bet on Phoolo; he’s Southern Africa’s most significant cultural figure of the last decade. But if one listened closely, part of what went wrong in Phoolo’s partnership with Drip could be heard in his music. In the song “Phumakim” from his acclaimed 2015 debut album Tsholofelo Phoolo raps about being rich enough to transcend both the racial and class context of his upbringing. Phoolo was delivered to superstardom mainly by young black South Africans trying to escape and redefine the class context of their parents. So, it was easy to celebrate attaining wealth as a sufficient condition for social freedom, but as they’ve grown to become weary adults in the world’s most unequal country, it’s only natural that most would struggle to relate to materialism as a symbol of success. By the time Sehoana and Drip offered him a deal based on his celebrity status, the context of Phoolo’s fame was different. He was no longer the rapper who commanded the adoration of 20-year-olds who could be told to flock to Drip stores to purchase sneakers.

Phoolo’s partnership with Drip was part of a scorched-earth approach to their marketing campaign that made Drip popular even as the logical opium of the cool. But it comes undone when every cultural symbol Seohana deploys to hook the market misfires. A kit sponsorship of South African legendary football club Moroka Swallows, a collaboration with South Korean brand Fila, and another celebrity partnership with veteran house DJ Zinhle as the face of Drip’s signature perfume Finesse were all meant to inject the brand with cultural mileage. At best, those partnerships were an ode to a bygone era—Sehoana might have hoped that a bit of nostalgia and economic nationalism would endear Drip to a consumer base. But love and nostalgia are not tangible or even sustainable market goods.

At some point, Drip would have to qualify its claim as a business that is conscious of the realities of the township. Or a business that contends with the context of the environment it’s operating in or its market, in Drip’s case, the grit of township life. Sehoana sang praises to the township as an inspiration for Drip, but what seemed to have got lost in the liberal hymn of upward mobility is that townships are ultimately war zones. That people have made a life and community out of a township doesn’t alter the fabric of its reality: Poor policing and underfunded public health facilities mean death stalks every township corner. Overcrowded classrooms and a lack of recreational activities mean a disrupted childhood. Sehoana sold hope in a market saturated with hope dealers—when he should’ve been selling survival. Root of Fame (ROF), Phoolo’s signature sneaker and Drip’s most popular offering, is a case in point. ROF teased comfort but it’s quite clear from its design that a sewerage-spilling township street was not a factor in that process. The township of Sehoana’s imagination is not a place intentionally starved of resources to function effectively as a cheap labor camp but a portal of social possibilities. That might have been his most fatal mistake.

It’s not that Drip was above failure—life’s greatest teacher is often failure. In many cases, it’s even necessary—but Sehoana carried a different weight; the burden of culture. He was not allowed to fail in all the normal ways a person might fail. He was not a cultural immigrant. Unlike corporations, he didn’t have to exploit or harvest the intimacy and genius of the township to sell his product. More than anyone, he should’ve known the limits of his argument; one can only go so far with the narrative of triumph.