Mandatally Manji: One Of Kenya’s Greatest Entrepreneurs Passes On

On 9th September 2006 one of the greatest entrepreneurs Kenya has ever produced passed on quietly. Most of the local media missed the news completely.

Who was Mandatally Manji? He founded the House of Manji biscuit empire that for years controlled the regional market for these products. Staring out with a small bakery in Ngara Manji build up a huge bread factory and then moved on to biscuits when he fell out with his business partners.

Manji grew up in Karatina (near Nyeri) and cut his teeth as a hawker in the market during his lunch break from school.

In honour of this great departed Kenyan business icon, I would like to share the entrepreneurial lesson that I took away from his fascinating biography which I had the privilege of reading in its’ raw form long before it was published.

It was during the second World War (early 1940s) and Manji’s bread business was rapidly expanding, then misfortune suddenly struck. As part of the war effort the local British authorities started rationing wheat flour and it had to be mixed with a generous ratio of maize flour. Naturally this ruined the quality of bread that Manji and even his competitors could produce. Sales fell off like a stone and Manji was suddenly in trouble.

He describes in his biography how he cracked his brain for a solution to his business problem for days on end.

Then one day he went home and his wife made some chapattis. She used the same rationed wheat flour containing a generous mix of maize flour. Suddenly it struck Manji how the chapattis still came out in excellent quality. What was his wife’s secret? She mixed the kneaded flour with plenty of oil. Manji rushed back to his factory and did the same thing with his bread. The results were so perfect that his competitors reported him to the authorities suspecting that he was breaking the law by using smuggled blavk market wheat flour. The governor himself turned up at Manji’s factory and watched him demonstrate his trade secret. That began a friendship that so manji name one of his best selling biscuits after the governor whose name was Sir Baring (biscuit was named “Baring.”).

That little tale is a great inspiration to me whenever I run into serious business problems that need to be transformed into opportunities.

Sadly Manji died a frustrated man, his giant House of Manji went through some serious financial problems and at one time declared bankruptcy. Still this did not water down the main achievements of this giant Kenyan industrialist.
================
Why Tom Mboya Had To Die