- MasterChef Season 4 contestant Onezwa Mbola started her own brand of handmade food products.
- Her brand, eMandulo, was inspired by her love for food and the rural lifestyle she leads.
- Onezwa is known for making food from scratch from ingredients she grows, raises or foraged.
Born and raised in the coastal village of Willowvale in the Eastern Cape, Onezwa Mbola - who was a contestant in the fourth season of Masterchef SA - has recently started her own line of food products named eMandulo.
The former Marine Navigator, who got into the field because of her love for travelling and desire to see other cultures, is now a professional cook. She says the love for food runs in her family, but for her, it only began after her mother’s passing because it became a way for her to reconnect with her by recreating the dishes, she would make for her.
Speaking to TRUELOVE, the mother-of-one tells us how her rural upbringing influenced her lifestyle, what she cooks and her business.
“Food has always been a family thing. Even farming, lifestyle farming, you know. Everything for us has just been centred around food because I come from a very big family with cousins and we all lived under the same roof. So, production of food always at the forefront.
“From breakfast, you would be thinking about what we’re going to have for lunch. So, gardening was the very next step to ensure that everyone is well-fed and we had all kinds of livestock to make sure we could feed everyone. So, it has always been about sustenance for us,” she fondly shares.
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Onezwa currently lives in Willowvale and leads a farm lifestyle, which she says is inspired by motherhood because she wants her child to experience the childhood that she had that comes with a lot of freedom, space and fresh air.
She tells us, “The sense of community I think is the biggest thing for me because it’s something that I didn’t have in the city - people that would help me up - and here I know that for raising my child, for food, I literally have people that I can call on all the time.
“So, rural living for me is about reconnecting with my family, reconnecting with my community and also just so that my child can experience the very best. Like, he doesn’t need to go to a petting zoo to see a goat, he literally lives with them, (she laughs) and he’s well-acquainted with all the animals and gardening. So, that’s what I wanted for him.”
Outside of food, Onezwa is passionate about sustainable living, as per the lifestyle she lives, and says she would love to be mainly self-sufficient in the next five years, with either her or the people she knows personally producing everything she eats or uses.
“I think my biggest passion right now is living a self-sufficient and sustainable life, being in harmony with nature and my surroundings. I think that’s very important to me because I want to take less from the earth, you know, and I want to give back so nurturing the soil that I’m farming. I want to just be in harmony and be at peace.”, she says.
Inspired by her travels to China and her mother’s cooking, Onezwa says her favourite meal of all time is chicken and dumpling, which also happens to be the first meal she prepared on Season 4 of MasterChef SA. She tells us more about her experience on the cooking show and how it affected her career.
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“My time on MasterChef was mainly about reassuring me that to make it into the top 20 must mean that I am talented in some way - it must mean something. So, that for me was very important in boosting my confidence and I think also pushing me to take more risks in my life,” says the Eastern Cape native.
“I think had I not entered MasterChef, I would not have started my business because I wouldn’t have had the courage that I have now to say 'okay, let’s start something, even if it fails, it’s still fine at least you did it,'” she adds.
Onezwa recently started her own brand of handmade food products, which she says is inspired by her desire to give people who don’t have or can’t garden the chance to experience food as naturally as it can possibly be.
“The essence of eMandulo is going back to a time when people shared whatever they had. Whatever you harvested, you would share with the people around,” she explains.
On what’s next for her, the YouTuber and entrepreneur says her biggest focus right now is ensuring that she provides eMandulo customers with quality products, and she hopes to take the brand globally and expand her product range.
“I’m also working extensively on my YouTube channel. I’m really trying to do this lifestyle vlogging but the village edition of it. So, I really want to focus on that because I feel like I still want to tell stories and rural stories, as authentically as possible so that people can see that this life is possible and it does exist,” she concludes.
