The South Africa-Middle East Business Bridge is the Cape Town leg of My Most Trusted, hosted by Dina Gates. A warm introduction is the only way to meet someone here. No bots, no spam, no cold outreach.
the mawsim. Arabic for the season. It is where the word monsoon comes from: the time of year when the wind turned and the Indian Ocean could be crossed.
Long before anyone flew from Cape Town to Dubai, the Indian Ocean was already a trading floor. Merchants from Arabia and the Gulf sailed with the mawsim, the season when the wind turned and made the crossing possible, and at every port they relied on a trusted agent who knew the local market and would vouch for them. The flight now takes eight to ten hours, and the old rule still holds: the crossing is easy once somebody at the other end knows who you are.
Every club has an idea like this one, and it belongs to the place rather than to us. It is not a slogan we handed out.
Dina Gates holds the South African end of the Bridge, from Cape Town. She runs Dina Gates Recruitment, where she works as a talent acquisition specialist, finding the right people for businesses that are growing. Her work already turns on the thing this Bridge is built on: the best candidate, like the best business contact, usually arrives through somebody who can vouch for them. She meets people face to face in Cape Town and online anywhere.
Dina Gates is a real person in Cape Town, not a logo. That is the point. Somebody has to know both people for an introduction to be worth anything.