Twenty-five years ago, in October 1999, I spotted an advert in the jobs section of the Mail & Guardian announcing that a Brazilian law firm was looking for an SA attorney with an LLM and two years’ experience, who spoke a European language, for a two-year contract based in São Paulo, with a Hotmail address for applicants to send their CVs.
Having had more than two years’ experience, armed with the LLM and having learnt Italian at school to be able to understand my biggest passion in life, Italian opera, I believed I fulfilled those requirements. I duly sent off my CV and was promptly offered an interview at the Hyatt hotel in Rosebank, Joburg, a few weeks later. The lawyer who interviewed me immediately started talking about what I would encounter when (not if) I arrived in São Paulo. I was offered the job a few days later.
That set the course for the rest of my career, which has been dominated by Brazil. I arrived in São Paulo in March 2000, the first, and to my knowledge so far still the only, SA attorney that has chosen Brazil (or did Brazil choose me?) rather than Europe or North America as an expat destination.
It was sink or swim, as I had to learn Portuguese and adapt to a society with customs and norms that are often vastly at odds with those in SA. The two years I lived in the amazing and vibrant city of São Paulo will however forever rank as the highlight of my career.
Upon my return to SA in June 2002 I was confident that my experience and exposure would be of great value and interest to a law firm in SA. After all, I thought, with all the contacts and experience I had gained in Brazil I could easily get major Brazilian clients, and any SA law firm would jump at that opportunity.
Well, I was wrong. I encountered a legal fraternity that scoffed at me for “wasting my time” (as one magic circle firm told me) in Brazil. This was after all a time when most South Africans, including big law firms, knew little about Brazil other than that it was a football playing giant, was home to Copacabana beach and the Amazon forest, and some other gross stereotypical generalisations about Brazilians.
No-one seemed to believe that Brazil was a powerhouse: home to some of the world’s largest construction companies; the largest bus manufacturer in South America (Marcopolo), which has a thriving plant in Germiston; the world’s fourth largest aircraft manufacturer (Embraer); a huge agricultural industry; and a market of 200-million consumers.
Undeterred by the setbacks, I decided to go it alone and set up my own law firm in January 2003 with the little money I had saved in Brazil, 100,000 SAA Voyager miles and a computer my godmother gave me. I went to speak to the Brazilian consulate in Cape Town and the embassy in Pretoria and told them about my intentions. I received a warm letter from the embassy, lauding my efforts and stating that it believed I would fill a gap in the market.
I found my new professional home in the Brazilian community in SA, and started getting as clients the Brazilian companies already doing business or looking to do business here with my standard sales pitch: get your SA legal advice in Brazilian Portuguese from a lawyer who has lived in, and understands, your country. It worked, and I realised I never needed a job, just clients, the very ones I wanted to offer the big firms on a silver platter.
Now, at the quarter century mark, is a good time to reflect on my observations of how the relationship between SA and Brazil has evolved in this time. During the noughties, with the commodities boom, Brazilian companies flocked to SA and Africa. Things slowed down in the second decade, largely due to the highly controversial Operation Car Wash corruption investigation that targeted many of the companies that invested in Africa, and the imprisonment of then former and now current Brazilian president Lula da Silva.
The impeachment of Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, just made things worse in an already polarised society. The hatred still runs so deep that a right-wing Brazilian recently tried to invade the Brazilian Supreme Court in Brasilia in an attempt to kill Justice Alexandre de Morais (who had blocked Elon Musk’s X in Brazil for breaches of Brazilian law). Sadly for the attacker, he was so inept that he ended up blowing himself up with his bomb when it ricocheted off the statue of Lady Justice in front of the court.
Meanwhile, new Brazilian investments into SA have largely stagnated. There were two notable SA investments into Brazil since 2020, those being Pepkor’s purchase of a similar Brazilian clothing chain called Avenida, and Naspers’s purchase of Brazilian food delivery enterprise iFood. Both were multi-million-dollar investments and are often used as examples of the roaring trade between our countries.
There are currently about 25 Brazilian companies operating in SA, and I am in the process of setting up three companies with the help of my Brazilian colleague based in São Paulo. Trade between the two countries is healthy, but when we compare that to the 600 German companies in SA — let alone two-way trade with Germany and the fact that German airline Lufthansa flies four routes between Germany and SA, the same number of routes Lufthansa flies to the whole of South America — the perspective becomes clear.
But there is a lot to be positive about. The annual Brazil Africa Forum held in São Paulo in October was attended by businesses, embassies, investment banks and politicians from all over Africa and Brazil, and all are eager for business to boom again, as am I.
The current commercial team at the SA embassy in Brasilia, led by ambassador Vusi Mavimbela and trade attaché Cecilia Iturralde, are doing a stellar job in promoting SA trade in Brazil. One standout activity of theirs is to promote SA wine, which has traditionally met stiff opposition and import duties that favour Argentine and Chilean producers, making good value SA wines exorbitantly expensive in Brazil.
But we don’t just want our wines in Brazil, we want Brazilian jobs in SA in the form of more factories that create employment here.
• Myburgh is an attorney practising law in Johannesburg and São Paulo.
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