Turning visions into reality
It seems she has always had the insight to understand the place where individual style and identity intersect with the political
● It’s January 2024 and I come bearing news. Make a vision board — it works.
Four years ago Ponahalo Mojapelo (Pona for short) created a fake Dazed magazine cover for her Instagram account. In it she is lying at an artistic angle, with short natural hair and barely-there makeup.
This image is the proof, my friends. Commit your dream to paper — or the internet in this case. Because dreams come true.
Fast forward to late last year and Pona made the real cover of Dazed, a British lifestyle magazine.
“The last time I was in Dazed Rihanna was on the cover, I was in an editorial, nothing crazy, and I couldn’t get a copy because they were like, ‘Girl, we can’t give copies to everyone who is in the magazine.’ But now I have two copies and I am on the cover and Rihanna is inside the magazine. When I saw the physical copy I literally fell to my knees crying.”
It’s a slightly cold and wet Joburg day so we are sitting inside at Flames, the restaurant at the Four Seasons in Westcliff. The view from the window is doing its best to convince me I live in the urban forest everyone is always touting as Joburg’s greatest asset — and it is indeed spectacular. I sometimes forget.
Plus we have all the rare and wonderful wildlife in these parts. Take our lunch for example: we are Somizi-adjacent — he is having an under-the-radar lunch dressed in shocking pink, with a large feather contraption that could be a hat resting on the floor. Take that, Cape Town.
Pona has ordered bubbles and oysters and, at the risk of irritating you with my cheesy humour, I have to state the obvious — we are in the correct place at the right time, because this “girl” is on fire.
She has walked the shows in Paris with Thebe Magugu and starred in his campaigns, signed with a British agency and just returned from an 18-stop international tour DJing with Moonchild Sanelly, who was opening for Gorillaz.
“Playing at Glastonbury was crazy for me, I didn’t even think I could dream that big. I take nothing for granted at all. I’m a big crier, so when I’m super grateful and overwhelmed at how good life is, because it has also been really bad, I am always crying, and always seizing the day.
“I never slept, I wanted to see everything. I wish I had those cameras in your glasses that can record everything I was seeing — it was surreal. Sitting backstage playing cards with Damon [Albarn].”
To add to her accolades she has just been voted most stylish model by South African Style Awards. The award acknowledges the entirety of the person for their contribution to the cultural firmament as opposed to simply their sartorial sensibility.
She has immense personal style — today everything she is wearing is thrifted except the shoes, delightful Mary Janes she got in Cape Town where her romantic partner lives. “I talk to her first thing in the morning and last thing at night.”
Pona has the kind of effervescent energy and drive that differentiates style from fashion. She has an individual identity that made her one of the cool kids at Wits University, working for the Bubblegum Club and reigning in the streets of Braamfontein. And a sensibility that defines the present moment.
It seems she has always had the insight to understand the place where individual style and identity intersect with the political. Pona was in matric the year the Pretoria Girls High hair drama exploded into the national consciousness.
“The rules around black hair were so much longer than the rules around white hair, it just felt really wrong. I had cut my hair at the time and I was told my hair was too masculine and I must do community service.
“But it was not only around the hair. You couldn’t speak vernacular on the school property because it was an English school, and every time we would congregate as girls just hanging out, they would say please disperse, it’s not allowed. So it was just these racist attitudes, so like the hair thing, we used that to pivot into the bigger picture, and the rest is history.”
Her mother tried to rein her in because she did not want her to jeopardise her university career.
“She was like, ‘Girl, you have two months left at school,’ but I guess I was behind the scenes writing speeches. I am happy we started the conversation.”
Her mother, a psychiatric nurse who Pona spent two years with in Australia when she was pursuing postgraduate studies, died when she was in second year in 2019.
“I had to leave school, because she got sick and I could not pay for my fees. I started DJing and modelling. I definitely wasn’t making enough to sustain myself, but I just walked in faith that it is going to work out. At the same time I broke my ankle. I fell down a flight of stairs on my way to a gig in platform shoes and I just went to the gig, played my set for an hour and a half and then left to go to the hospital.”
I hear this story and it is clear to me that Pona Colada (her DJ name) has the crazy work ethic, the resilience and the fairy dust that explain her success.
None of this just fell into her lap, but I can tell you this for free, I am on my way to make a vision board right now.