A Man Called De Luxe

One of the great characters amongst our people was a delivery driver who had renamed himself De Luxe Mamelodi, after Prinz Brau De Luxe, one of the major brands introduced by our German parent company. This is not an unusual practice throughout Africa, where people often adopt exciting foreign identities into their names.

I happened to sit next to him one evening in the pub and asked how his day had been.

“Terrible,” was the answer.

“Why, what’s the problem?” I asked.

He then explained he’d had some sort of disagreement with staff at The President Hotel over a credit note book belonging to the company, which he though they should not have.

It took me a while to understand what he was telling me, “De Luxe, just tell me what this credit note book looks like.”

He explained that it was a credit note book with a Prinz Brau letterhead. I asked one of the accounting personnel to fetch me a credit note book, which he did.

“Is it like this?” I asked.

“Just the same,” Was the answer.

I didn’t even finish my beer. I dashed round to the hotel and demanded the return of what was most certainly our property. After a considerable row, the said credit note book was produced. I just grabbed it and left. What they were doing was writing credit notes against the brewery to balance some of what they had removed from the till.

If it wasn’t for the pub, and De Luxe Mamelodi, it might have taken another six months to uncover this nonsense.

A year or so later, we ended up being asked to manage The President Hotel, along with all the other hotels belonging to the Botswana Development Corporation.