Zoleka Mandela

Zoleka Mandela was born in Soweto, South Africa. She is the founder of the Zoleka Mandela Foundation and of the Zenani Mandela Campaign for road-safety awareness. Mandela is also an ambassador for the global SaveKidsLives road-safety organisation, and the author of the autobiographical When Hope Whispers. She is the granddaughter of Nelson Mandela and Nomzamo Nobandla Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Zoleka Mandela was interviewed about her life, career and hope for the future for 200 WOMEN, a book and exhibition project founded on the principle of gender equality comprising original interviews and accompanying photographic portraits. This landmark project is the realisation of an epic global journey to find two hundred women with diverse backgrounds, and to ask them what really matters to them.

Q. What really matters to you?
What I try and do every day is see how I can use my life to better the lives of others. It’s never too late for anyone to rewrite their life’s story, and that’s what I’ve done. I want to remind people that you can always pick yourself up, no matter what you’re going through in life – having abused drugs and alcohol for over seventeen years, I celebrated my sixth year of sobriety in 2016. So people can always decide to start making better choices.
I started the Zoleka Mandela Foundation in 2013, and it’s really just an extension of myself; I call it my other baby. It was an opportunity for me to give back to my community. The pillars of my foundation are representative of the things that I’ve gone through in my life: we look at breast cancer awareness, because I am myself a breast cancer survivor; having lost a child in a road accident, we also focus on issues of road-safety awareness; and being a recovering addict, we speak to youth about issues like the dangers of drugs.
I always say, ‘As much as we’re different people, all our struggles are the same.’ Some are shocked at my struggles because of the family I come from. But I think it’s important that people know that it doesn’t matter who you are in life or where you are in terms of your status – we all have real-life issues and things that we’re struggling with. It’s great if people are able to relate to my story and journey, and see that you can turn things around. It’s just a matter of making the right choices for yourself – but you have to change in order for things to change.

Q. What brings you happiness?
My four children. I say that because I think for the very first time in my life, if ever I felt like I had some kind of purpose, it was when I gave birth to my first child. Every single child of mine that has come into my life has really shifted things in me and made my life even more meaningful.

Q. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
One of the most difficult things that I’ve come to accept is how I failed my daughter as her mother. I lost my daughter Zenani in a drunk-driving accident in 2010, and, unfortunately, at the time I was still quite heavily into addiction. I wasn’t with her when she died – when she needed me. I had been so dependent on drugs and alcohol for so long in my life that it was difficult for me to be the mother that she deserved, or for that matter, the mother any of my children deserved. Now, I just try and live my life knowing that I’m staying clean every day and ensuring that I do things that would make Zenani proud of me.

Q. What would you change if you could?
I would change the number of children that die on our roads. It’s a shocking number – we’re losing 500 children a day everywhere around the world. It’s so unfair, because we all know the answers as to how to ensure their safety, and our children, who aren’t able to protect themselves, must be able to get the protection they deserve. This has a lot to do with how I lost my daughter; I feel like she needed me there in order to protect her, and so this is my way of celebrating her memory – with the road-safety campaign work that I’m doing both nationally and internationally.

Q. Which single word do you most identify with?
The word would be ‘hope.’ The title of my autobiography is When Hope Whispers. Simply put, I know that there is hope in my life and there’s still hope in the lives of others.