According to Daily Investor, Tasha’s founder and Grammy-winning DJ Nkosinathi Maphumulo are partnering to expand Leonista, a premium Karoo agave label, from a building in the Eastern Cape town that Minister Gayton McKenzie renamed on 6 February despite more than 21 000 objections.

(If you are keeping score, that is roughly 83.6% of residents who did not want the name change, which in local governance terms counts as a polite suggestion.)

The venture is not starting from scratch. Leonista was founded by Sarah Kennan in 2017 and has been distilling agave from Tim Murray’s farm, Roode Bloem, just outside the town. Murray’s family has grown agave there for five generations across 120 hectares, using methods that involve smoke, fire, and the kind of patience that only Karoo farmers seem to possess.

Sideris told Daily Investor the pair plan to “take the story of Africa in a bottle to the world”.

The spirit will be served in Tasha’s bars and restaurants. That gives Leonista something most local craft brands never get: a built-in distribution network across 45 locations in South Africa, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

The timing is either perfect or painfully ironic, depending on which resident you ask.

As we wrote previously, Graaff-Reinet was already on the map as a weekend escape from Gqeberha, with jacaranda-lined streets and a growing reputation for something more interesting than just passing through. Our travel guide from March listed the Camdeboo National Park and the Valley of Desolation among the reasons to visit. Now the town, or Robert Sobukwe Town if you are reading a government gazette, is getting a celebrity-backed distillery.

The rename itself is still raw. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the Pan-Africanist Congress founder who was born and buried there, is a towering figure. Supporters, including the PAC and the Economic Freedom Fighters, say the rename honours a liberation hero, while opponents, including the Democratic Alliance and AfriForum, say it erases nearly 250 years of history and threatens tourism.

The DA collected over 21 000 objections and AfriForum sent legal letters, and despite a Stellenbosch University study found 83.6% of residents opposed the change, McKenzie gazetted it anyway.

Whether the agave plant cares what the town is called is an open question. The piñas will still be slow-roasted and the copper pots will still distil. The Karoo sun will still beat down on 120 hectares of spiky leaves that have survived five generations of ostrich booms, bankruptcies, and at least one upside-down still.

What is new is the money and the reach. Kennan built Leonista from a home distillery experiment into an award-winning brand with an international footprint. Now she has Sideris’s restaurants and Maphumulo’s global profile behind it. That is the difference between a craft project and an export play.

The launch is expected by the end of 2026. By then, Robert Sobukwe Town will either have settled into its new name or the court cases will still be grinding on. Either way, there will be agave.

And if the spirit is half as smooth as the branding, somebody is going to make a fortune. Probably not the residents who just wanted to keep their street signs.

DAILY INVESTOR

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