(FORTUNE Magazine) – Ronald Gault, 51, a managing director at First Boston, 20-year tennis buddy of New York City Mayor David Dinkins, and onetime adviser to Dinkins's predecessor Ed Koch, has put together a program in which black South African managers will spend six months working for banks and other companies in the Big Apple. Purpose: to help them polish their financial skills so they can contribute to a post-apartheid society back home. In June some ten such managers will go to work for First Boston, Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Chemical Bank, and J.P. Morgan, as well as other sorts of companies. Each firm will contribute $37,500 to the cost. Gault drummed up support for his idea on both sides of the Atlantic. In two 1991 trips he met with heads of some of South Africa's largest companies, including United Bank. It was a surprisingly easy sell, he says. For one thing, the companies displayed ''an eagerness to be positioned in a post- apartheid society.'' Gault persuaded U.S. corporations that the program made good business sense for them too. The 1990 release of ANC leader Nelson Mandela helped. Says Gault: ''With Mandela in prison and the ANC involved in armed struggle, there was very little that American businesses were going to do.'' Gault, who grew up in Chicago, earned a BA in government and political science at Grinnell College in Iowa and a master's in public administration at the University of Michigan. His mother, Lillian, a precinct captain during former mayor Richard J. Daley's term, is a retired deputy sheriff. His father, Charles, is a baseball scout, most recently with the Detroit Tigers.