In townships they call it Black Man's Wish, the make of car whose initials translate into gleaming, incontrovertible proof that you have made it. To buy a BMW is to say your Soweto days are probably over.
So there was a sense of ceremony at Johannesburg City Auto when Nomsa Philiso was handed the keys to her first BMW, a 320i series.
Philiso, 35, stroked the dashboard, eased deep into the leather upholstery and flicked the ignition.
"It feels good. It feels right," she said. "But I'm still your typical black single mum -- who is now driving a BMW."
As South Africa prepares to vote today in the third election since apartheid's fall a decade ago there is a new generation of ambitious, wealthy black people trans-forming the country.
As fast as they are moving into senior positions in banks, multinationals and state-owned firms they are moving out of townships and into the once white-only suburbs of lawn sprinklers and pool filters.
Philiso, a financial manager at the public broadcaster SABC, swap-ped Soweto for a suburb called Florida and was now swapping her VW Golf for a US$42,000 BMW. Close friends were also thriving, she said.
"We were chatting and drinking whiskey last night when at one point we looked at each other and said, `We've done really well.'"
When the African National Congress (ANC) won power in 1994 it resolved to carve a black middle class from a society which awarded privilege to the white minority at the expense of the black majority who often lacked clean water and electricity -- a dangerous imbalance which risked dissolving the "rainbow nation."
A decade later, according to the department of trade and industry, black people have moved from zero to 10 percent of company ownership and occupy 15 percent of skilled positions. The richest black people's incomes have risen by 30 percent and you see them spending it in air-conditioned shopping malls and pricey restaurants.
And if there is a shrine for the new elite it is Johannesburg City Auto. The first wholly black-owned BMW dealership, it opened last year in the downtown district which used to be apartheid's capitalist citadel.
Despite the government's Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) scheme, which encourages companies to cede controlling stakes to black firms, fewer than 30 of 450 organizations listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange had significant black ownership, according to the BusinessMap Foundation, a research body.
White males still dominate the boardroom but in so-called "cappuccino" deals black people are sprinkled into visible but powerless positions.
"Black Economic Empowerment was an initiative of big corporations to gain allies in the new political class," said Moeletsi Mbeki, a businessman and critic of BEE, despite being President Thabo Mbeki's brother.
"It is the transfer of assets to certain individuals with connections," he said.
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