SHE rose from owning a cleaning business, progressing to a nail technician and owner of a nail salon – to becoming the founder and CEO of Wisdom & Wellness, a hub (established while she was dealing with Post-Partum Depression – an experience she describes as a dance with darkness – which she never imagined would lead to healing of thousands) designed to empower, inspire and support a purposeful and holistic life.
Built on the foundation of community and wellness – it offers unique tools for holistic success through various platforms, which include a podcast (the #1 Female podcast in South Africa), Unlimited Fest, exciting events and a Sunday Nuggets newsletter.
All that in the firm belief that wellness is the key to unlocking a truly authentic life. Her life work is to help individuals take care of their mind, body and spirit. She describes her community as a movement of love geared to instilling faith and wisdom in each other so all can be holistically well!
It all commenced at Mhluzi outside the Mpumalanga Province town of Middelburg for the now 30 year old (at the time of this review) Nompumelelo Amanda Mondlane who was raised by a truck driver father who didn’t finish school (‘on my first day of school, I knew I had to get a job,’ he revealed) because of belonging to a poverty-stricken family, and a schoolteacher mother who forced her to attend speech and drama classes to assist her with stage confidence – something Ledwaba attributes to her having noted something she’d need for her future career – whilst she was young.
Known to most as Mpoomy (a variation of Mpumi inspired by a cool aunt who switched her name from Busi to Boocy), she accepted the Lord at 13, was baptized at 14, joined her church’s choir as its youngest member ever to lead a song at a Sunday service and got married to Idols South Africa season 9 runner-up, Brenden Praise, at 22.
Ledwaba’s account is compartmentalized into chapters relating her personal experiences of being ‘a work in progress’ and at whose conclusions are platforms of reflection upon which she urges readers to take stock of their own experiences by journaling their thoughts as a means of finding healing in writing. This review touches on some of them – some of which resonate with lived experiences.
Positing that she ceased being a child at ten, in a chapter titled, A Feminist is Born, Ledwaba – who is the eldest of three siblings – recounts how she had to bring her adamancy to bear upon her parents by having them reverse a decision to grant her 4-year-old kid brother his own bedroom whilst she had to share another with her younger sister in a new house the family had just moved into.
Figuring out that she was reduced to one of numerous firstborns who’ve had to cede their parents attention to younger siblings, she demanded: ‘How come Mtho gets to have his own room when I am older than him?’
In a segment ensconced in part two of the tome titled, The Good Wife, Ledwaba debunks, in
uninhibited terms bordering on mirth, her pre-conceived views regarding the age-old domestic role of a ‘makoti’ (bride) versus the rigours of a modern life and reality, thus: “In mine, my husband and I would have sex seven times a week, each day helped along by a different chapter of the Kama Sutra.” Alas, reality entailed one in which, for a girl, ‘the sun should not be hitting your buttocks’, as her paternal grandmother was wont to telling her.’
She’d met her husband shortly after having confided to a chum whilst listening to a John Legend song during her first year at varsity in 2013 that ‘the guy I’m going to marry is going to sing that song to me!’ and thereafter watching Idols contestant, Brenden Ledwaba, perform it on television and then informing her mom ‘I was going to marry this guy’ – all of which forecasts she ended up realizing! But being someone who, by her own admission, had given her life to God at age 13, she was racked with guilt borne by being in a sexual relationship with a pastor’s son afore matrimony –fornication her hypocritical self-believed was sending her straight to hell!
The progeny of parents who kept their being pregnant with her secret because of their not being married, would ask herself, ‘at what cost?’ was it that she was a committed Christian who loved sex enough to repeatedly be climbing into bed with a man and thereafter ‘repent’ in the hope that it would never happen again!
Living in condemnation and seeking release from sexual bondage sans the wherewithal to escape the trap of sin and addiction, Ledwaba writes that God told her she would be the one ‘to break generational curses’ – in her family’s case – of multiple children outside of marriage (the parents of her father, of which he is one of 11 children, never married), sexual addiction, alcoholism, illness, poverty and dysfunction.
From a background of bipolar disorder and mental health issues, the entrepreneur would suffer the heartbreak of losing a cousin to suicide in January 2020.
Elsewhere in the candid read, the young entrepreneur relates on her collision with sexual abuse aged 14 involving a guy she had a schoolgirl’s crush on. None any wiser that the encounter with the older man was tantamount to date-rape, she informs that only timely intervention then made her avoid becoming a teenage mother – although the incident resulted in a fallout with her mother which took all of twelve years to get over after she invited her over to discuss, for the very first time, what had occurred all that time back!
The tete-a-tete invoked the desired cathartic effect as a mother who had initially responded angrily to an adolescent daughter she deemed to had brought shame to the family by whipping her with a belt, now cried and apologized.
In a section on Trolls, Stalkers and Friendships, Ledwaba expresses shock at Black women being so mean to other Black women, upon discovering during January of 2024 a smear campaign being waged against her on X (formerly Twitter) which revolved around her perceived struggles to maintain lasting friendships all allegedly through fault of her own, in which, inter alia, she was accused of being ‘a mean girl and hides behind Christianity.’
Having endured online bullying, she became momentarily shaken by the venom until it dawned upon her the futility and cowardice of those behind the attempt at discrediting her – all of which, she noted, had very little to do with her!
How Did We Get Here? is the first tome by the early 21st century influencer, in which she retrospect, to borrow an excerpt from a synopsis written on the back jacket, on her upbringing, major milestones and the challenges she’s faced. It is a coming-of-age tale, in other words, which takes the reader on the author’s journey of self-discovery and which – to quote her: “I share my story to normalize talking about those shameful, hurtful things we keep hidden. I share my story because shame loses its power when we find safe spaces to share our truth . . .”
It is a no-holds-barred memoir of a young achiever who made her first million aged 27 and whose path to realizing her life’s dreams has been fraught with experiencing the downer of dropping out of varsity (her dad had spelt clear the sober implication of her not succeeding academically by pointing out to a shopping centre located adjacent to the academic institution and pronouncing: ‘If you fool around, you will work here’) and the up of, in 2023, braking into the Forbes 30 Under 30 (a set of lists of 30 notable people under 30 years old in various industries issued annually by Forbes magazine)!
Hers is also an account of a ‘born-free’ exposed to a multi-racial schooling environment who as she grew up in the ‘New South Africa’ had to manoeuvre through a dichotomy of ways of living as represented by her parents’ generation – as opposed to those of the post Y2K epoch, as represented by hers!
‘When women heal, generations heal’ reverberates an excerpt from the read.
A trade paperback, How Did We Get Here? is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R290.
