VODCAST: ‘JDV On Air’ – Kingsley Holgate on playing the long game

JDV On Air is a vodcast on leadership, risk and the people who take it on. Host Johan de Villiers talks to entrepreneurs and adventurers about what they’ve learnt the hard way. He then breaks it down for Currency readers into lessons for business leaders.

In this interview, humanitarian explorer Kingsley Holgate – arguably the most-travelled person in Africa – talks about malaria nets, the long road north, and why patience is the most underrated discipline of all.

One calabash, 43 crossings, one investing lesson

Cape Point. A beaded Zulu calabash. A scoop of seawater off the rocks at the bottom of Africa, a tot of Captain Morgan poured in, the lid sealed tight. Holgate stowed it in the back of a Defender and pointed the nose north. Three months and one continent later, he tipped the contents into the Mediterranean.

He’s done that 43 times.

I had the man across from me in the studio recently – white beard, calabash, the lot. I went in expecting to talk about danger: the 60-odd bouts of malaria, the borders that don’t much like being crossed, the lion stories. He gave me all of it, cheerfully, the way another man might recount a tricky round of golf. But what I walked out thinking about was none of the danger. It was a balance sheet.

Because here’s what Holgate’s foundation has quietly banked while the rest of us watched the rand: 481,000 mosquito nets handed out, 224,000 pairs of reading glasses, and more than 63Ml of clean water. No-one wrote a single cheque for those nets. The total is one net, one village at a time, repeated for 30 years until it stopped looking believable – patience doing the work most governments cannot.

A lesson in compounding

That, if you’ve ever opened an investment statement and wondered why the dull index fund quietly thumped your clever trades, is compounding – the least glamorous force in finance, and comfortably the most powerful.

We’re terrible at it. The market wants the result now, the 10-bagger by Friday, the call that makes a good dinner-party story. Holgate’s method is the opposite, and an unglamorous one: show up, make the small deposit, drive away and come back the next year to do it again. None of it worked because of any single net; it worked because he never stopped.

I will put my hand up here. For years I chased the same quick result – the dramatic deal I was sure would change everything, the market-timing call I was certain held the story. It mostly lived in the consistency I was too impatient to commit to. Holgate started his major expeditions at 50 – the age many start eyeing the recliner – and let a 30-year position run.

Holgate has also solved something the market is dreadful at: succession. His son Ross has been on all 43 expeditions; his grandson Tristan, 24, now drives one of the Defenders, a battered workhorse the family calls “The Stomach”. The position isn’t liquidated the moment the founder tires – it is handed across, intact, to someone who already knows its every rattle. Most family businesses I know would give a great deal for that kind of continuity.

Don’t sit still

The lesson turns dangerous when people hear “be patient” and translate it to “sit still”. Holgate never sat still. He planned obsessively, packed the malaria pills and the satellite phone, knew to the kilometre when the next 20 were 20 too many, and lived by a line worth more than most risk models I have read: prepare to make friends, not confrontation. Buy-and-hold only works on something worth holding, fed steadily by someone who has done the homework. The man who buys rubbish and refuses to sell isn’t being patient. He is being stubborn in a cheaper suit.

For the investor worn out from being flung around by every screaming headline, Holgate is the model: the small, well-chosen deposit, repeated, will outlast your cleverness every time. If you are hunting a quick double by month-end, he has nothing for you – go and lose it somewhere else.

That calabash is still going. Southern-tip seawater, sealed, carried the length of a continent and poured into a far northern ocean – the same ritual, 43 times over, and counting.

Johan de Villiers is the author of ‘Overlanding Through the Boardroom: Using Adventure Principles for Success in Business’, which is published by Rockhopper Books.

ALSO READ:

• VODCAST: ‘JDV on Air’ – from near paralysis to Dakar finish
• ‘Overlanding Through the Boardroom’: importance vs urgency
• ‘Overlanding Through the Boardroom’: why team selection matters

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