Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

First,

There is a particular kind of loneliness that nobody talks about — the loneliness of being the “First” in your bloodline to build something from nothing. To be the “First” to graduate. The “First” to own. The “First” to sit at a table your family never knew existed.

Mteto Nyathi captured it precisely in his book The Only Darkie in the Boardroom, which chronicles his journey from a shopkeeper’s son in the Eastern Cape to CEO of MTN South Africa, CEO of Altron, and ultimately Chairman of Eskom. His story is extraordinary — and it is also a mirror for thousands of Black South Africans navigating that same invisible threshold: the one between where you came from and where you are trying to go.

No inheritance. No safety net. No blueprint. Just you, your hunger, and the invisible weight of everything that could go wrong. The Risk Nobody Warned You AboutSecond and third-generation wealth holders inherit more than money. They inherit social capital, networks, institutional knowledge, and buffer. If they make a bad investment, there is a cushion. If they fail, there is still the family name, the family assets, the family lawyers.

The first-generation creator risks something far more fragile — everything that has never existed before. They are betting with chips they minted themselves, at a table they were never formally invited to. One wrong move doesn’t just mean a setback. It means complete erasure. There is no floor beneath you when you built the floor yourself.This is partly why so many competent Black first-generation wealth creators refuse to lead South Africa’s State-Owned Enterprises. The pattern is well-worn by now: politicians shower you with praise when they need your reputation to rescue a limping institution, then turn around and publicly undermine the very people they appointed. Character assassinations dressed up as accountability. The list of names is long.Why would a first-generation creator accept that risk? Warren Buffett once observed that it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it — and that if you truly understood that, you would do things very differently. For someone with no family name to fall back on, no dynasty absorbing the blow, a ruined reputation is not a setback. It is an ending.

The Lows Are Bottomless

When you come from nothing, the lows don’t just feel financial — they feel existential. A bad quarter is not just a bad quarter. It becomes proof, in the darkest corner of your mind, that you were never supposed to be here. That the world was right to overlook you.The psychological weight of a low moment for a first-generation builder is incomparable to someone who has never known scarcity. For them, a loss is temporary. For you, it echoes every version of poverty you ever witnessed growing up — every sacrifice your parents made, every dream that was quietly abandoned so yours could survive.The lows hit differently when poverty isn’t history. When it’s memory.

Peniaphobia — The Fear That Never Leaves

There is a name for what lingers long after the success arrives: peniaphobia — the deep, persistent fear of poverty. For those who have never known scarcity, it may sound irrational. For the first-generation wealth creator, it is anything but.They have seen what poverty does to families. They have lived it, smelled it, felt its particular humiliation. So even when the accounts are full and the assets are real and the accolades are genuine, the fear doesn’t disappear. It shapeshifts. You do not “tap dance to work” but rather you are surviving in a suit. The trappings of success are real. The psychology underneath hasn’t caught up yet.The most honest answer is probably this: the ‘Firsts’ are doing all — calculating, performing, code switching, running, and surviving — and calling it ambition because that’s the only language the world respects. It becomes the reason you can’t sleep. The reason you check your accounts in the middle of the night. The reason you cannot fully enjoy what you’ve built. Your exteriority is adorned by trophies, badges and certificates and by every external measure you have transcended — yet you are still desperately poor inside your own nervous system. As the saying goes: the body keeps the score of where you came from.Success changes your address. It does not always change your nervous system. Deep down your nervous system knows it is much easier to fall back into survival mode and worse get stuck there again and comebacks are like finding a chicken’s tooth.

The Myth of the Comeback

The culture loves a good comeback story. What it rarely tells you is that comebacks are largely a privilege of those who already have connections, credibility reserves, and capital to draw on.For the first-generation creator, the margin for error is brutally thin. Reputation is their only collateral. Lose the money and — with enough grit — you can rebuild. But lose the reputation, the trust, and the relationships you painstakingly constructed with no social inheritance behind you, and the road back can be impossibly steep. There is no old-boy|girl network to vouch for you in silence. No family name that opens doors before you even speak. You have to earn every inch — and then, when things go wrong, you have to earn it three fold.

A Reputation Built Alone

Established wealth has institutions, legacies, and dynasties protecting its name. Old money doesn’t need to justify itself. It simply exists, and the world defers to it.New money — ‘Firsts’ , self-made money — exists under permanent scrutiny. Critics are always watching for the stumble, ready to reframe your success as luck, as BBBEE, as affirmative action, as exploitation, as somehow illegitimate. And this fragility doesn’t end once you’ve proven yourself. It persists, because there are always those who need your rise to be a fluke in order to protect their own worldview.You didn’t just build wealth. You built a narrative. And narratives can be rewritten by those with more power and platform than you — people who never had to build anything themselves.

The Political Threat — When Power Decides You Are a Problem

This is perhaps the most dangerous and least spoken curse of all.When the ‘Firsts’ rise high enough to matter — high enough to employ thousands, influence communities, or accumulate independent power — they become visible to the political class. And in certain environments, visibility is vulnerability.Legacy wealth has spent generations cultivating political relationships, making strategic contributions, embedding itself quietly into the architecture of power. The ‘First’-generation creator often rises too fast and too visibly to have built those protective alliances. They become a target. Politicians who feel threatened by success they cannot control use the tools available to them: regulation, investigation, public narrative, taxation, the quiet weight of institutional pressure. What took a lifetime to build can be dismantled with remarkable speed.The terrifying truth is this: in many environments, it is not enough to be successful. You need permission to remain successful. And that permission can be revoked.

The Deepest Burden

Everything above — the risk, the fear, the fragile reputation, the political exposure — is compounded by one final weight that cannot be quantified on any balance sheet.The ‘First’ carries the dreams of everyone who never made it out. The parents who sacrificed in silence. The siblings who believed when the evidence was thin. The community that watched and hoped. Every decision is loaded. Every failure is public. Every success comes with an unspoken expectation of return.They are pioneers without maps, building without guarantees, succeeding in a system that was designed before they arrived and will outlast them if they fall.The curse is not the risk. The curse is surviving all of that — clearing every obstacle, absorbing every blow, building something real from nothing — and still never feeling truly safe.Being ‘First’ is not merely an economic achievement. It is an act of extraordinary psychological endurance. It deserves far more respect, far more honest conversation, and far more structural protection than the world has ever been willing to give it.