Who are South Africa’s leaders of the future? The Mail & Guardian chose 20 hot under-40s, already making waves in a range of fields, to look out for.
Tshilidzi Marwala
An associate professor in the school of electrical and information engineering at the University of Witwatersrand, Marwala was awarded the Bronze Order of Mapungubwe this year by President Thabo Mbeki. Marwala obtained a bachelor of mechanical engineering magna cum laude from Case Western Reserve University in the United States, later completing a PhD in computational intelligence at Cambridge.
Fatima Hassan
”I’ve always wanted to do law that brings about social justice,” Hassan says of her work as a lawyer with the Aids Law Project. She obtained her bachelor of arts and LLB degrees from Wits University and her master’s degree from Duke University in North Carolina. Apart from waging a legal war against the state for the provision of anti-retrovirals in hospitals, she has also fought against patent laws at the World Trade Organisation, to give people living with Aids access to cheaper anti-retroviral treatment. An associate described her as ”a person who kicks ass”.
Nkhensani Manganyi
Manganyi has made every list of future stars the M&G has compiled in the past six years. In 1997, she made the cut as a promising actress and comedian after staging the comedy It’s a Funny Country. By 2000, she had changed fields and was setting out in the fashion business through the establishment of her clothing label, Stoned Cherrie. She is now a talk-show host on Mojo with partner and husband Zam Nkosi. They have two children, providing proof that women can have it all.
Thoriso Magongwa
Soweto-born Magongwa is the 21-year-old principal dancer with Ballet Theatre Afrikan. His first major work, a ballet called Je Suis (I Am), was showcased at the State Theatre in Pretoria in February. When Magongwa was 16 he competed in the Prix de Lausanne in Switzerland, gaining a place in the semifinals against the best ballet dancers in the world. In 2003, he was nominated for an FNB Dance Umbrella award, as well as an award at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees.
Thando Mama
Mama is a 27-year-old Durban-based multimedia artist who was born in Butterworth in the Transkei and studied at the Durban Institute of Technology. This year he was presented with the Belgian Community Prize at the international exhibition of Dak’Art 2004 for his video piece We are Afraid, a critique of contemporary news broadcasters.
Gugu Moloi
CEO at Umgeni Water, Moloi is an independent non-executive director of the FirstRand Group and was appointed to the Financial and Fiscal Commission by Mbeki. She was born in Bulwer, KwaZulu-Natal, and completed a BA in law at the University of Durban-Westville and a master’s degree in town and regional planning at the University of Natal. Moloi is the owner of Zimele Africa Networks and is married with three children.
Sizwe Nzimande
Nzimande was appointed chief operations officer for the Premier Soccer League in September. The former head of sponsorships at Absa is now responsible for sponsorship and broadcasting rights negotiations.
Lesetja Kganyago
Kganyago is the Director General at the National Treasury. He has risen through economics research work for institutions ranging from the Congress of South Trade Unions to the Reserve Bank. He is driven by twin passions. The first is to make the Treasury an employer of choice for black financial and economic professionals. The other is for black professionals to become ”a living embodiment” of the Financial Services Charter. He has variously been described as ”a bright economist” and a ”brilliant banker”.
Jonny Steinberg
Whether farm murders or life in prison, Steinberg’s brilliant explorations of the grim side of South African life and human nature have received wide acclaim. His book Midlands, published in 2001 and exploring farm murders in the turbulent KwaZulu-Natal region, is regarded as one of the most important non-fiction works of the past decade. He followed it up this year with The Number, a compelling analysis of prison life.
Steinberg is one of the prescribed writers on a module within Columbia University’s ”English and Comparative Literature” course that looks at post-apartheid writing. He is also a columnist for Business Day. Steinberg holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford, having studied as an undergraduate at Wits University.
Thandiswa Mazwai
This was the year when Mazwai successfully broke through as a cerebral artist, a status she has long craved. Her solo debut, Zabalaza, ranges from the playful to being regal and then spiritual. She won best female artist at both the Metro and Kora awards.
Pam Yako
The dynamic Yako is tipped to become the new director general in the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. She hails from Amatola in the Eastern Cape where in the early Nineties she worked with the Border Rural Committee. Yako was a municipal district manager until December 2001, when she left to join the environmental affairs department. She is currently the chief operations officer in the department. She holds a BCom degree from Rhodes University, a postgraduate diploma in labour law and certificates in human resources and local government law.
Jyoti Mistry
”People need to tell stories without being afraid of expressing their subjectivity,” says filmmaker Mistry, describing how she believes the texture and landscape of South Africa’s collective memory should be explored. She is the head of the television department in the Wits School of Arts. A Wits graduate with an honours degree in comparative literature, Mistry spent five years enrolled at New York University’s cinema studies department on a Fulbright Scholarship. She obtained her master’s degree there and her PhD. For two years she was a research fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Her latest film, to be screened early in the new year, is entitled We Remember Differently.
Christopher Malikane
Malikane is a maverick, brilliant economist in the making. He is completing a doctorate at New School University, New York. ”I have deep respect for David Ricardo and [Karl] Marx,” says. He completed his master’s at Fordham University, New York, after being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2001. He has worked for the National Institute of Economic Policy and his research areas include political economy, monetary policy and financial economics.
Mark Shuttleworth
The IT billionaire continues to be an intellectual leader in his field. He is now a leading proponent of ”open source” software. Open source allows sharing software without prohibitive licensing fees. It is said to be the answer to bridging the digital divide between the Third and First Worlds. And how is he handling that wealth, you may wonder. Well, he recently told the M&G Online: ”Being able to do whatever I want, in many ways, creates the responsibility to try to do the right thing for me and the people I care about.”
Schalk Burger Jnr
Burger is the new wonder kid of South African rugby. Born in 1983 in Port Elizabeth, Burger attended Paarl Gymnasium where he excelled at both cricket and rugby. After a successful Currie Cup season in 2003, Burger debuted for the Springboks during the World Cup in Australia. He went on to excel in the Super 12 competition this year for the Stormers. That earned him a place in new coach Jake White’s Test team line-up. This year he was named the Absa Rugby Player of the Year, as well as the International Rugby Board Player of the Year.
Trevor Immelman
Born in Cape Town in 1979, Immelman first swung a golf club at the age of five. He was playing off a scratch handicap at the age of 12. At 19 he became a professional golfer. In 2003 he finished number one on the Sunshine Tour’s Order of Merit. This year, he played the European Tour full time, managing two victories and securing a top 50 placing in the world rankings. That has guaranteed him qualification for all majors in 2005.
David Makhura
The Gauteng secretary of the African National Congress is widely credited for helping revive the province after the dissolution of its entire leadership under former premier Mathole Motshega. He is also a member of the ANC’s national executive committee. Alongside Buti Manamela of the Young Communist League and Oupa Bodibe of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, he offers hope for the future of the Tripartite Alliance.
Heather Sonn
Sonn is the CEO of Legae Securities. Politically sussed, she often squirts lemon in the face of those she should be ingratiating herself to. She tells big business that it does not give enough contracts to black brokerage firms and black men that they are more oppressive than their white counterparts. That’s chutzpah and we love it.
Ronnie Ntuli
Ntuli represents the next generation of dealmakers and black business people in the corporate landscape. The Edinburgh-educated newlywed is currently CEO of Andisa Capital, a financial services firm in which Standard Bank has an interest. He is also a director of Incwala Resources.
Bronwyn Keene-Young
The Media magazine nominated Keene-Young — deputy channel director at e.tv — as one of the 10 most remarkable women in the media. She is the former head of monitoring and complaints at the Independent Broadcasting Authority . In 1997 she was appointed acting CEO of the authority. A drama graduate at Wits University, her MA was on community radio broadcasting and she is the founder of the Media Monitoring Project.
Additional reporting by M&G reporters