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Few places show Johannesburg to you as clearly as Alexandra.
Stand in Alex and look across the highway. Sandton is right there. Glass buildings. Cranes. Office towers. Restaurants. Generators humming through load shedding. The confident architecture of money.
Then look around you. Crowding. Broken infrastructure. Flooding. People doing the daily, exhausting work of making life happen in a place that has been asked to be “resilient” for far too long.
That contrast should make you angry.
But if you only look at Alex through what it lacks, you miss the people building inside it anyway.
Lebone Applegreen is one of them.
She is 22 years old, born and raised in Alexandra, and the founder of Lumos Coffee Creations, a township café brand with a dream big enough to make most people nervous. Lebone wants to build the biggest township café brand in South Africa.
After meeting her, I would not bet against it.
Lumos did not begin with a perfect shopfront, a big investor, or one of those start-up decks full of words like scale, disruption and ecosystem. It began inside her grandfather’s home, where Lebone was raised by her single mother. It began with what she had, where she was.
It also began with a gap she saw.
Lebone wanted to create somewhere young people could gather without alcohol being the centre of everything. Somewhere warm and playful where Alex could see itself in a different light.
So she built a café.
Coffee. Waffles. Milkshakes. Chicken. Chips. Comfort food.
When I visited Lumos, the thing that stayed with me first was not the food. It was the walls. Inside the kitchen, Lebone has vision boards, quotes and goals placed where she can see them while she works.
She moved between batter, oil, chicken, chips and conversation with the focus of someone learning a business in real time. There was no performance in it. No pretending to have everything figured out. Just a young woman in motion, doing the work, asking the questions, fixing the problems as they arrived.
Then she made me a waffle burger.
It was indulgent, clever, messy, sweet, salty and delicious and I’ve since been back for more.
While we spoke, Lebone told me what it has taken to keep Lumos going. She has faced robberies, with people driving up to the store and demanding the day’s earnings. She needed better equipment, more training, a bigger space, systems. The kind of support young entrepreneurs are constantly told is available, usually somewhere behind a form, a webinar and three people who never answer emails.
But what struck me most was how eager to learn she was to learn.
At one point, I looked at her menu and told her I thought she was undercharging. She did not get defensive. She pulled out a notebook and showed me how she was calculating her margins. She listened, took notes and has since made adjustments.
Talent and ambition matter, but humility and adaptability are probably the most important qualities for running a successful food business.
Since that first visit, I have watched Lebone keep showing up. After I shared her story on social media, a company reached out offering barista training, a proper restaurant-quality coffee machine and a revamp for the store.
Support Lebone because the food is good. Support her because the coffee is good. Support her because township businesses deserve customers, investment, training, equipment, mentorship and serious attention long before they become polished success stories.
Johannesburg’s future is not only being built in boardrooms across the highway.
It is being built in kitchens like Lebone’s. In notebooks, waffle irons and walls of inspirational quotes. In taxi rides to barista training. In young people who refuse to wait for permission before they begin.
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