Lebohang Masango

We look forward to catching up with PhD candidate, writer, poet, social anthropologist, and UNICEF Volunteer Program Ambassador Lebohang Masango about the sequel to “Mpumi’s Magic Beads”, a children’s book that is available in all 11 of South Africa’s official languages.

Mpumi’s Magic Beads is Lebohang’s debut book that was awarded the 2018 South African Independent Publishers Award for Children’s Books and 2019 South African Literary Award for Children's Literature. The sequel and latest offering is titled “Mpumi and Jabu's Magical Day”, and follows the adventure that unfolds when Mpumi, a hearing girl, and Jabu, a Deaf boy, meet for the first time. The children learn that although we are all different, we are also the same in many ways. 

The book was co-authored with Professor Claudine Storbeck, the Director for the Centre for Deaf Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to Hi Hopes, Wits’s early intervention partner for families of deaf and hard-of-hearing babies.

Lebohang holds a Master of Arts degree in Social Anthropology and has been published in “Connected Lives: Families, Households, Health and Care in Contemporary South Africa, edited by Nolwazi Mkhwanazi and Lenore Manderson (HSRC Press, 2020)” and “Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City edited by Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden (Wits Univeristy Press, 2020).”

Outside of writing, Lebohang is a lecturer at North West University. Her poetry has also been published in Mike Alfred’s Twelve + One (Botsotso, 2014), a poetry anthology of Johannesburg poets and To Breathe Into Another Voice (Real African Publishers, 2017), a Jazz poetry anthology edited by Myesha Jenkins.