Mandisa Ndaba
Mandisa is our down-to-earth, girl next door with a bleeding heart, couched in the yummiest looking package a man has ever set eyes on.
You can immediately tell – Mandisa is no walk-over. She’ll give you her last cent, but she will not be duped, she has spent her whole life facing up to reality, and has had no favours done for her to get to where she is. She scrimped, and saved, and fought life to get this life that she has.
Mandisa knows that she is not exactly where she wanted to be, but where she is is infinitely better than where she was when she was growing up. Mandisa is someone good to have on your side, because she will back you up. She will be sure to tell you how wrong you are, and to make sure you know that she knows, but, she will back you up, and she will be that shoulder to cry on when you need it.
Mandisa has a terrible secret that she has hidden from everyone, a secret that has caused her unflinching view of marriage and commitment, a secret that makes her unwilling to trust or hope that she is worthy of love. Her uncle Levi sexually molested Mandisa when she was just 12 years old, after her father and her mother fought and threw them out. They holed up at Levi’s house, and he acted on his baser instincts and sexually molested Mandisa. He shattered her belief that adults are there to protect you, that human beings can be trusted, and he damaged her ability to believe in the basic goodness of people. This is what is underlying her refusal to marry or even think about marriage – because he caused her to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with her.