Cuthbert Simphiwe Ncube, who has died aged 62, was the sort of figure that institutions tend to accumulate rather than produce: a man of commerce who became a statesman of travel, and who held that the telling of Africa to the world ought, at long last, to be done in Africa’s own voice. As Executive Chairman of the African Tourism Board since its inception in 2019, he lent a youthful organisation its gravity, its itinerary and, not least, its conscience. He died on 7 November 2026. The cause of death and the funeral arrangements have not been announced.
Born on 2 June 1964, he came of age amid the colonial constraints that shaped the schooling of so many African children of his generation, as his own biography records, and he declined to be defined by them. His education was pursued with the appetite of a man who had been denied a library and then handed the keys: a master’s degree in tourism and hospitality management from UCAM, a diploma from SNATIKA, postgraduate study in commercial law and in project management at the University of the Witwatersrand’s business school, corporate ethics and governance at the University of Pretoria, the technical and financial evaluation of minerals at Imperial College London, tourism and international cooperation for development at George Washington University, and executive development at London Business School. It was an unusual syllabus for a tourism executive, and it explains much about him. He read the sector not as a pastime of pleasant destinations but as an economy, with balance sheets, supply chains and obligations.
His commercial apprenticeship was served in the unglamorous arithmetic of service. In 2000 he founded Kwela Fleet Management from his own savings and, brick by brick, built it into a respected car hire and chauffeur company in South Africa. Its growth led him into hospitality, and he opened Golden Feathers Lodges, a four-star lodge in the heart of Cape Town. Those who worked with him recalled a proprietor who understood, from the kerb and the front desk alike, that a visitor’s memory of a continent is assembled from small courtesies long before it is shaped by vistas.
Public life followed commerce. He served as a regional vice-president and board member within the family of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, sat as a non-executive director of the Sustainable Tourism Partnership Programme, and was non-executive director and vice-chairperson of the Sustainable Tourism Enterprise Management Institute of Southern Africa. His peers, with an affection that was only half a joke, came to know him as the Tourism Portfolio Whisperer, a tribute to his knack for coaxing coherence from the tangled interests of ministries, operators, investors and communities. In 2018 he received a Lifetime Leadership Award.
The African Tourism Board, which grew out of an initiative launched in 2018 and was formally unveiled at the World Travel Market Africa trade fair in Cape Town in April 2019, found in him its natural chairman. Under his stewardship it sought to act as a strategic partner among African countries, developing and marketing tourism programmes that answered the needs of local industries as well as the expectations of international visitors. He was tireless in convening. He co-hosted the Africa-Russia Investment Summit in 2024, led and pioneered an investment summit in Egypt in 2023, presented at the African Continental Free Trade Area gathering in Egypt, and spoke at tourism gatherings in Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi, Botswana, Jamaica, Mozambique and London. In 2025 he co-hosted capacity building and training in Malawi. As recently as July 2026 he led a delegation to the Kigali Genocide Memorial, a visit he regarded as inseparable from his work, for he believed that tourism, rightly practised, is a discipline of remembrance and restoration as well as of leisure.
He was, besides, a man of the continent’s quieter missions. His humanitarian journeys took him to Senegal, Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia, and his philanthropy touched education, health and the environment, with a particular tenderness for eco-tourism. He was candid, too, about the vexations of the vocation. The industry, he lamented, suffers from a want of collaboration among its own stakeholders, a failing all the more grievous in a continent already beset by disease, climate stress, poverty and political and economic instability. His remedy was unfashionably simple: that all parties should unite behind a single goal, sustainable tourism for economic growth.
It was that conviction which drew him to The Southern African Times. In [name and dates of the week he led for the continent], he gave Africa a week of focused attention, and his generosity of time and counsel to our teams was characteristically unstinting. [Add two or three concrete details of what the week achieved.] When we launched SAT Travel, the digital-first travel magazine of The Southern African Times, he supported it [specify how he supported the launch], with the quiet authority of a man who had seen too many African stories told badly by others to be indifferent to a new telling.
Together we had begun to sketch an ambition that he cherished: to spotlight African travel in the European market, and in the United Kingdom above all, as a deliberate means of growing the African travel industry itself. His reasoning was characteristically practical. Europe remains among the continent’s most valuable source markets, yet it too often meets Africa through a narrow lens of safari and cliche. A more literate, more luxurious and more truthful portrait, he argued, would draw longer stays and higher spend, and would carry that spend to the community lodges, guides, craftspeople and small operators who are the sinews of the sector. Chinua Achebe taught that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Ncube meant the lions to have their historians, and he meant the revenue of that history to remain at home.
That work is now ours to carry forward, and we shall do so in his name. [Add a brief personal reminiscence or a one-line tribute from Sandra Mavunga, CEO of SAT Travel.] The continent has lost a builder, and the many who knew him have lost a friend whose counsel was as warm as it was exacting.
Cuthbert Simphiwe Ncube, tourism executive, entrepreneur and author, born 2 June 1964, died 7 November 2026.
