A beer pioneer, South Africa's first Black female brewery owner trains a new generation
'When you are brewing you must constantly check your mixture,' Nxusani-Mawela instructs them. 'We are looking for a balance between the sugar and the grains.'
The 41-year-old Nxusani-Mawela is an international beer judge and taster, and is believed to be the first Black woman in South Africa to own a craft brewery, a breakthrough in a world largely dominated by men and big corporations. Her desire is to open South Africa's multibillion-dollar beer-brewing industry to more Black people and more women.
At her microbrewery in Johannesburg, she's teaching 13 young Black graduates — most of them women — the art of beer making.
The science behind brewing
The students at the Brewsters Academy have chemical engineering, biotechnology or analytical chemistry degrees and diplomas, but are eager to get themselves an extra qualification for a possible career in brewing.
Wearing hairnets and armed with barley grains and water, the scientists spend the next six hours on the day's lesson, learning how to malt, mill, mash, lauter, boil, ferment and filter to make the perfect pale ale.
'My favorite part is the mashing," said Lerato Banda, a 30-year-old chemical engineering student at the University of South Africa who has dreams of owning her own beer or beverage line. She's referring to the process of mixing crushed grains with hot water to release sugars, which will later ferment. "It's where the beer and everything starts.'
Nxusani-Mawela's classes began in early June. Students will spend six months exploring beer varieties, both international and African, before another six months on work placement.
Beer is for everyone
Nxusani-Mawela's Tolokazi brewery is in the Johannesburg suburb of Wynberg, wedged between the poor Black township of Alexandra on one side and the glitzy financial district of Sandton — known as Africa's richest square mile — on the other.
She hails from the rural town of Butterworth, some 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) away, and first came across the idea of a career in beer at a university open day in Johannesburg. She started brewing as an amateur in 2007. She has a microbiology degree and sees beer making as a good option for those with a science background.
'I sort of fell in love with the combination of the business side with the science, with the craftsmanship and the artistic element of brewing,' she said.
For the mother of two boys, beer brewing is also ripe for a shakeup.
'I wanted to make sure that being the first Black female to own a brewery in South Africa, that I'm not the first and the last,' she said. 'Brewsters Academy for me is about transforming the industry ... What I want to see is that in five, 10 years from now that it should be a norm to have Black people in the industry, it should be a norm to have females in the industry."
South Africa's beer industry supports more than 200,000 jobs and contributes $5.2 billion to South Africa's gross domestic product, according to the most current Oxford Economics research in 'Beer's Global Economic Footprint.' While South Africa's brewing sector remains male-dominated, like most places, efforts are underway to include more women.
One young woman at the classes, 24-year-old Lehlohonolo Makhethe, noted women were historically responsible for brewing beer in some African cultures, and she sees learning the skill as reclaiming a traditional role.
"How it got male dominated, I don't know,' Makhethe said. 'I'd rather say we are going back to our roots as women to doing what we started.'
With an African flavor
While Nxusani-Mawela teaches all kinds of styles, she also is on a mission to keep alive traditional African beer for the next generation. Her Wild African Soul beer, a collaboration with craft beer company Soul Barrel Brewing, was the 2025 African Beer Cup champion. It's a blend of African Umqombothi beer — a creamy brew incorporating maize and sorghum malt — with a fruity, fizzy Belgian Saison beer.
'Umqombothi is our African way, and everybody should know how to make it, but we don't,' she said. 'I believe that the beer styles that we make need to reflect having an element of our past being brought into the future.'
She's used all sorts of uniquely African flavors in her Tolokazi line, including the marula fruit and the rooibos bush that's native to South Africa and better-known for being used in a popular caffeine-free tea.
'Who could have thought of rooibos beer?' said Lethabo Seipei Kekae after trying the beer for the first time at a beer festival. 'It's so smooth. Even if you are not a beer drinker, you can drink it.'
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The illusion of a father who was not quite real was only intensified by the fact that, after he left, they would only see him fleetingly. 'He would come to Europe once a year in order to go to the World Health Organization in Geneva. He'd whisk us off to London, to Harrods' toy department, where I'd buy plush toys. We'd eat in fancy restaurants and I could order what I liked,' Joanne remembers. 'After gorging on prawn cocktail and creme caramel for every meal, was it any wonder that these visits always ended with me being sick? Eat what you like for 24 hours, then nothing for 364 days. It was incredibly disruptive. After a while, when I was 11, I refused to go.' In 1976, when Joanne was 13, Briggs was appointed professor of human biology at Australia's newly opened Deakin University. She went to visit for a couple of summer holidays but then didn't hear from him again until she was 22. 'For reasons that were unclear, he had walked out of his job in Australia and moved to Spain.' 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Given her father's history of deception, I have to ask: has she considered that he might still be alive? Fortunately, not much fazes her these days. 'I recall a journalist contacted my brother and me as soon as the news broke, with a conspiracy theory that he was either in hiding or had been killed. This never got into the papers, but it stuck with me. Combined with the unexpected and strange nature of what had happened, from the Sunday Times in September to his apparent sudden death in November, the whole thing seemed to need another explanation. I think we both thought for a while he might not be dead or had come to harm related to the scandal. But these days I hardly ever think about the possibility, remote though it is, that my father didn't die at all.' One might sensibly assume that that was the end of the story. And, for the next 34 years, Joanne got on with her life, had a son and became a barrister. But this was far from the final chapter. 'When we were all in lockdown in 2020, and looking for things to fill our time, I was reading the Cumberlege report,' she recalls. Officially known as the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review, this looked at how the NHS had responded to women's concerns about a number of medical treatments. Now involved with the legal side of the detention and discharge of psychiatric patients, Joanne started reading the document for her job. 'My interest was sodium valproate, a mood stabiliser included in the review. But then I read about this other drug, Primodos, a hormone-based pregnancy test. 'I'd never even heard of Primodos but it kept popping up,' says Joanne, 'and to my astonishment so did my father's name.' In 2014, she discovered, Yasmin Qureshi, MP for Bolton South and Walkden, had mentioned Briggs in a House of Commons debate about Primodos, which had been manufactured by his former employer Schering. She then stumbled upon a 1992 Nature journal paper, Reflections of a Whistle-blower by Jim Rossiter, who was head of the ethics committee at Deakin University and had been quoted in Deer's Sunday Times article. 'Rossiter was angry about the way he'd been treated by the institution. He accused my dad of being abusive and unpleasant – and, while he's at it, he states that he doesn't believe that my father had a doctorate from Cornell. He suggests that he had made it up, and probably the prestigious doctor of science award from New Zealand University as well.' Joanne was intrigued. The red and blue theses were on a shelf in her brother's study. 'I thought: 'This is easily provable.'' She contacted Cornell University, which did indeed have a publication by 'Michael H Briggs, 1959' in its library. 'But somehow, I felt I couldn't just leave it at that. I contacted the librarian and asked for some screenshots of its pages. I suppose as a barrister I am used to proving things.' The pictures were of a volume very similar to the one in the UK. Almost the same, but not quite. The library version, the real one, isn't a PhD thesis at all – it's labelled a master's dissertation, one you'd write up at the end of a one-year course. And it has an account by her father of how he'd come to Cornell for a year to study for said MSc. He'd made the PhD up. From this point on, everything started to unravel. Further investigations revealed that the doctor of science award was murky as well. Two eminent scientists had rejected Briggs's application – but whether through an administrative oversight or someone acting in a more calculated fashion, somehow it still succeeded. Given that all this happened in the early 60s, the truth will probably never be known. At this juncture, Joanne started telling her friends about everything she had uncovered. 'I told them: 'You know all those things I told you about my dad, the incredible scientist? Turns out he made the whole thing up.' Many of them said I should write a book. When I had 8,000 words or so, I decided to enter the Bridport Memoir prize.' In 2022 she was named as the winner. Now published, The Scientist Who Wasn't There documents her father's extraordinary career as a liar and fantasist, but also explores the impact his actions had on his family. 'Writing the book gave me a much better understanding of my dad as a person than if I had not found out all these things about him. He would have remained a fantasy figure. I'd previously seen him as someone who moved ever upwards from job to job, opportunity to opportunity. Now I see it as a career of repeated flight, of him abruptly moving away from situations where he might get found out and towards lesser-known institutions who were grateful to have him. They thought he was marvellous because he told them he was – it's a classic conman routine.' Briggs did indeed work for Nasa, based at the California Institute of Technology. But Joanne believes the brevity of his sojourn there in 1962 holds the biggest mystery of all. 'He was only there for a year, probably less. I think something must have gone very wrong because that was his fantasy job, he was working on Mars probes. They probably rumbled him.' In 1963, shortly before Joanne was born, Briggs left Nasa and moved back to the UK to take up a research post at Analytical Labs, an animal feed laboratory in Wiltshire. It wasn't an obvious move. 'While researching the book, I looked into this mysterious lab and discovered it was known by another name at Companies House, and that it had never had any connection with agriculture whatsoever.' The company was based at Corsham, a Ministry of Defence base; when her father went to work there, this was also the home of the Central Government War Headquarters, the secret bunker intended to house the government in the event of nuclear war. Is she suggesting that her father was in fact a spy? 'I think of all the theories, it's the one that hangs together most coherently,' she says. 'He had extremely high security clearance because of his Nasa work. Why would you need that to work with animal feed?' In the book, she suggests that the animal feed work could have a link to the government's plans for agricultural capacity after a nuclear attack. Then there's the fact that a few years later, in 1966, Briggs suddenly went to work for Schering's UK research department in the area of hormone research – totally unrelated to either Mars or animal feed. Schering was on the radar of intelligence agencies because unusually, it had bases in both East and West Germany. How has all of this affected her? Joanne is delightful company with a dry sense of humour and, like her father, is a natural raconteur. 'Growing up, there was a sense of almost romantic longing for my father. As an adult, well, I have never been able to watch films like Father of the Bride. I've never been able to tolerate dramas about fathers and daughters. I couldn't face that loss, though I could probably watch one now. I've been married and divorced twice and I'm not currently married. So, my own ability to stay married may have been influenced by my past.' Does she believe her father harmed people? 'That is so, so hard to answer. If you look at him through the prism of fabrication and the identity that he'd created, he was not the scientist who he claimed to be. Would he have been able to make good decisions, or might he have allowed decisions to ride for a little bit too long? Would he have had the confidence to make difficult decisions and carry them out? He probably wasn't the best choice to be a director at Schering, whatever they wanted him to do there. I think that's about as far as I can go.' Does she feel disappointed in him? She stops to think. 'There's a French expression, 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner', which means to know everything is to forgive everything. He was a man who grew up reading science fiction and got the idea that he could be a spaceman, that he could know all of science. And maybe he thought there were people at Oxford or Cambridge that might beat him to it. Maybe he thought he hadn't the time to stand still and prove to everyone how clever he was – that he needed to fake it until he made it. And then he kind of forgot he was faking it.' The Scientist Who Wasn't There by Joanne Briggs is published by Ithaka (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
