Copy Director and former Editor of Bubblegum Club, a Johannesburg-based publication and cultural intelligence agency bursting the bubble of traditional media, Lindiwe Mngxitama is a woman whose work reflects the self and she is carving out space for monumental change.
“Actually, I never thought of myself as someone who’d be in the media space,” says Lindiwe Mngxitama, the former Editor and current Copy Director of Bubblegum Club, a Johannesburg-based publication and cultural intelligence agency working across a multitude of mediums.
Born and raised in Johannesburg, Mngxitama lived with her maternal grandparents – in Sebokeng – for the first six years of her life, before moving to Observatory, Johannesburg to live with her parents.
Mngxitama’s time at Bubblegum started with a piece focusing on her grandmother, Mantsane Alina Qhenase “MaMpho” Mavuso, who she cites as one of her first soul mates and great loves of her life, impacting her work.
Getting caught into a bubblegum web
Mngxitama submitted “Muffled Echoes from The Wake; requiem or MaMpho” – her piece for her grandmother – to Bubblegum Club in 2019, before applying for the position of assistant editor at the publication, and ultimately becoming the editor later that year.
Her work in both academia and the media space first took shape through her grandmother. For Mngxitama, her grandmother’s embodiment of love was an act of resistance which propelled her life beyond the confines of oppressive structures, such as white supremacy.
As a black-queer femme, this is deeply influential to Mngxitama’s practice and how she moves through spaces and her storytelling.
During her time at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits), Mngxitama studied English Literature and Politics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), before pursuing a postgraduate degree in African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits).
Mngxitama loves the unique space that African Literature falls into in academia, and describes her time studying it as “interesting, complicated, rewarding and tasty”.
“Maybe it had to do with how Black the department was. Maybe it had to do with how much I felt at home in the department. It felt like home,” recalls Mngxitama. “I could arrive, not knowing all the answers – complicated and messy and with my thoughts incoherent – and that would still be legitimate and be made room for.”
This for Mngxitama is particularly significant. She notes that entering spaces that have not been historically favourable to people historically “marked by gender and race” – such as academia – can feel like being in a constant state of mourning. Adding to this, one also has to continue combating challenges outside of the academic space.
For the love of writing
Lindiwe Mngxitama describes how her journey to writing started as a reader.
“A lot of the gifts that my dad would give me took the shape of books. So, these worlds, these characters, these words, these adventures that we imagined and created and tabulated by the authors and writers that I read as a little kid, became a sort of avenue of escape. An avenue of being able to access the world and other worlds.” AUDIO: Tamia Retief
Mngxitama recalls two different stories that explain how writing and the media industry came into her life.
“I think an interest in media came a lot later in my life, and a little bit by accident,” says Mngxitama.
She describes herself as a shy and anxious child, and notes that her path to becoming a writer started with her being a reader.
Mngxitama read a range of books throughout her childhood, from Harry Potter, Judy Blume, The Spiderwick Chronicles as a young child, to Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Thirteen Cents as she grew older. “I think through having these stories as my deep, intimate companions growing up, it made me realise that there are so many ways to know the world.”
Mngxitama’s entry into the media and academic world was through curiosity and what she describes as “a calling”.
“I think I’ve always been a deeply curious person. Not just for curiosity’s sake, but I think there is something about people who are creative. And that’s why I also call it a calling.”
She describes the calling as something within that urges one to get closer to knowing and understanding the existence of life and manoeuvring through the different ways of thinking and what her presence meant in the world.
Writing with curiosity
“Lindi consistently shows vulnerability and depth in a world that often demands our total superficiality. And the rigour of her ability to write and to create, to think and contemplate, to express and explore, mark her as one of the most important voices in South Africa, and the whole continent,” says Holly Bell Beaton, friend and fellow writer on Mngxitama. PHOTO: Instagram/Lindiwe Mngxitama
In line with her desire to always be curious and to question things, Mngxitama’s approach to her work is “rooted in a practice and politics of radical love as world building and resistive strategies and tools and modalities”.
For Mngxitama, it is all about learning. “I think whatever it is that I’m working on – be it an article, editing someone else’s work, a curatorial endeavour that I’m taking on – I always starts from a point of assuming that I don’t have all the answers and leaning into the pleasure of discovery. And who knows? By the end of this process, I’ll learn something new about myself and my relationship to the world.”
Recently, she stepped down as Editor and stepped into the role of Copy Director at Bubblegum Club. “I’ve done my work, you know, and it was time to pass the baton onto someone else and see what else the publication could become,” she explains.
Mngxitama hopes for her work to go beyond the traditional boundaries of media.
“I’ve always thought about my work as a space that I’ve carved out that hopefully relegates to the centre’s narratives that have been made invisibilised. And that is more than just media work. I think that’s political work. I think that’s ancestral work. I think that spiritual work. I think that’s effective work. I think that’s community work.”
Mngxitama says that her drive to continue the work she does comes from a place of being intentional in her purpose to leave the world better than it was before, beyond “the genocidal and extractive mechanisms of capitalism”.
Love as a driving force
Casey Delport, a fellow journalist and friend of Lindiwe Mngxitama, copy director at Bubblegum Club, describes Mngxitama as a “wordsmith”. “Conversations with her can often turn into these beautifully eloquent sessions of mental poetry. She’s just so naturally talented in expressing mundane and ridiculously complex issues and ideas not only in a way that is easy to understand but in a way that makes you almost jealous that you couldn’t phrase it so beautifully,” says Delport. PHOTO: Instagram/Lindiwe Mngxitama (@somethingwecantfindalone)
Mngxitama is described by longtime friends in the industry as “intense love” with a “knack for endless care and consideration”. This is according to Holly Bell Beaton and Casey Delport, who have both been contributors to Bubblegum Club and have worked with Mngxitama in both professional and personal capacities.
“Her ability to nurture and guide, stands out, and it is to this that I owe my career to today,” says Beaton.
And someone who started working with her more recently, such as Nkamoheleng Moshoeshoe, an internal writer at Bubblegum Club since April 2022, describes Mngxitama as “an expressive and vivid human being that almost translates to an ethereal experience for the people around her”.
Deep love is a driving force for Mngxitama’s life – from her love of her grandmother, to her love of literature and the art of storytelling. Love through community is the rock on which Mngxitama stands on.
“We are each other’s monuments at the end of the day. Particularly as people who’ve been made marginal. We are each other’s monuments and I hope that the work that I do can be a monument of deep love, a monument of deep care, a monument that speaks to the multiplicity of our existences in our lives and our stories.”