What questions would you ask if you had a chance to meet Raymond Ackerman, Donald Gordon, Adrian Gore, Koos Bekker, Herman Mashaba or Pam Golding? What would you want to know about how they started out; how the spark of an idea kindled into an empire? What drove them to become the success they are today?

Written by some of South Africa’s leading journalists, writers and academics, and edited by Moky Makura, whose 2008 book Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs shed much-welcomed light on entrepreneurs on the continent, these are the stories of how the country’s top businesses were created, as told by the people who created them.