Fisokuhle Khumalo dislikes a couple of things.
One of them is the saying that Swazis love to throw around whenever someone comes up with a bold idea, “kuseSwatini lana”. It means, “This is Eswatini”.
It comes not to build but break; to discourage you that your idea won’t work in Eswatini. It’s also a reminder of your geographical location and how it supposedly limits your opportunities.
That saying irks Khumalo, an entrepreneur and ecosystem builder based in the Kingdom of Eswatini. It also fuels him to get done the very things people say can’t be done, to prove them wrong and see his dream come to fruition.
As a kid, before he ever heard the words kuseSwatini lana, he disliked something else. Medication. To date, he hates medication, in whatever form, and has a hard time taking any.
Here’s a story from his childhood:
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It’s 2002. Khumalo needs his regular medication; he was born with jaundice. But he can’t stand the taste of medicine or the feeling of the caps going down his throat.
His mother knows this. She also knows her son must take his daily prescribed dose, whether he likes it or not. And she is well aware of his tricks, how he usually stores the medicine in his mouth and, in true hellion fashion, spits it later.
Today, she tries forcing him to swallow. The little boy stores the medicine in his mouth, and as his mother struggles to get him to swallow, he suddenly collapses and goes still.
She shakes him. Nothing. Eyes closed, he is unresponsive. She checks to see whether he is breathing. He isn’t.
What has happened to her son? Trouble lands in her home, uninvited.
Frantic and afraid the little boy might be dying, she carries him in her arms and runs outside, where there’s a breeze. She hopes the breeze will blow young Khumalo awake. She shakes him harder, panicking. No response. Maybe Khumalo choked on the medicine, and he is now dead.
The thought of death scares her, and her adrenal glands fire. In desperation, she turns her baby boy and, holding him upside down by the ankles, shakes him. She’s hoping the medicine will flush out through Khumalo’s mouth, and he’ll get up. She’s a scared mother desperate to save her son by all means.
Nothing.
She calls out in panic to her husband, and together, they rush their son to a nearby clinic.
“Please save our son,” they plead with the doctor.
To their surprise, the doctor checks the boy, studies him with a relaxation that seems not to comprehend the urgency of the matter.
“Doctor?”
“This boy is alive,” the doctor says. The next words out of the doctor’s mouth shock Khumalo’s parents.
“He’s pretending and playing games.”
He then hits Khumalo a couple of times on his back. The boy, feigning to force his eyes open, responds. What a troublemaker, deserving of an Oscar for his acting skills!
Khumalo and the golf ball
Fisokuhle Khumalo was born in the late nineties in the Kingdom of Eswatini. They lived in a small town, Mhlume, which was a settlement area for the staff, like his father, who worked at a sugar company called Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation (now Royal Eswatini Sugar, “RES”). Khumalo’s mother taught at a high school in the same region.
He grew up with two sisters and a brother, but recalls always having a cousin around.
During a virtual interview in January 2026, the 2025 Mandela Washington Fellow told me another fascinating story about his childhood.
“My uncle, he’s dad’s elder brother, loved playing golf. One day, we were at my grandparents' homestead in Nhlangano. My uncle was hitting golf balls.”
The homestead had an expansive field for a compound that made for a good ‘golf course’. Whenever the uncle took his golfing stance, swung the golf club and drove the ball off the tee, he tasked Khumalo and his siblings and cousins with going after the ball, finding and collecting it.
It was an exercise the kids enjoyed, following the ball with their eyes as it soared across the sky and landed far away. Off they’d run towards the landing spot, jovial, competing to collect it and take it back to their uncle, pride smouldering in their eyes for a job well done.
“This one time I was standing on the wrong side of the field when my uncle hit a ball hard,” Khumalo told me.
“He hadn’t seen that I was on the wrong side. It all happened too fast.”
The ball flew like a deadly projectile, hitting Khumalo hard in the chest.
“I collapsed,” Khumalo recalled. This time, the fainting was real, unlike when he’d faked it to avoid swallowing his medicine.
“My sister and I always joke that we recreated the Hector Pieterson scene in the South African film, when a twelve-year-old Pieterson is carried into the house while his sister cries. My sister literally carried me into the house, crying, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead!’”
Here, Khumalo was referencing the 1992 musical/drama film, Sarafina, which recreates the true-life, tragic but iconic moment during the 1976 Soweto Uprising.
“Once again, my parents rushed me to the clinic, but the doctor calmed them when he told them I was okay. I had just fainted and had no broken bones.”
To date, Khumalo, a die-hard Manchester United fan, has a mark on his chest. His souvenir from his uncle’s golf ball back then.
The lawyer, inspired by the TV show ‘Suits’
In 2013, Khumalo joined Sisekelo High School in Big Bend. His dream was to become a lawyer one day.
“I wanted to become a lawyer,” he said. “You know the series Suits? I’d binge-watched it, and it inspired me and made me want to practice law. The film gave me fantasies of someday being able to think on my feet and defend people in court. I was attracted to the authority and intelligence that came with this profession.”
Suits is a popular legal drama TV series following an intelligent college dropout who fakes being a lawyer to work at a top-notch firm.
When passion is the flashlight in your hand, cutting a tunnel of light into the future, bold action follows. Khumalo, whose first cousin (sister in Eswatini) was a lawyer, followed her around and asked questions about the profession. The high-schooler also went as far as taking internships and job shadows at law firms, and he attended court sessions in Eswatini to observe and learn.
“I loved history, participating in debates and writing discussive essays,” he narrated over the Zoom call, explaining how, for him, it was the joy of “using evidence to argue out points”.
In school, Khumalo became a mouthpiece to other students in his team; he “argued on their behalf to make sure they were well represented during debate sessions where specific matters were tabled for deep dissections based on evidence”.
I asked him what sort of lawyer he dreamed of becoming. His answer came almost immediately: “A corporate lawyer. I wanted to start my firm and build a clientele of big companies.”
Just like in the TV show Suits, where the firm was a top-tier corporate law firm.
Another film inspires him: The Wolf of Wall Street
One assignment Khumalo had to work on in his form four involved coming up with a business plan. A two-month deadline meant he needed to start brainstorming ideas and getting his head down to work, as this was an important assignment. The business plan he’d come up with would form the basis of his continued studies in form five; he needed to pick a business plan that carried his passion.
I imagined this should have been a simple task for him, and it got me wondering why Khumalo conceded that he “didn’t have an idea for the business plan”.
How come? To me, it seemed an obvious choice that he went with a business plan for a law firm, a corporate law firm. So he’d spit the fire of words doused in the gasoline of law, set ablaze with the matchstick of authority and intelligence struck against passion. Just like the guys he watched in the film Suits, only that his profession would be real and not the product of a script and set.
To my surprise, Khumalo chose something completely different for his business plan. He was a kid with a heart whose ‘passion centre’ beat with different rhythms.
“I decided that my business plan would focus on a brokerage firm,” he told me. Khumalo must have sensed my next question, because he proceeded to answer it before I had a chance to ask it.
Once again, a film was involved in his decision—it’s amazing how much influence a scripted movie can have on someone. Fiction, indeed, is a ghost-like representation of reality.
“I chose a brokerage firm because I’d just watched a film that blew my mind: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which follows the true-life story of Jordan Belfort, who became a wealthy stockbroker. I liked how he got things done, his ability to close deals, and how, when he set his mind on something, he followed through to ensure it was done. That guy didn’t believe in rejection or failure. The film inspired me to start my own brokerage firm. I called it The Roaring Tiger Stockbroker.”
It was at this point that Khumalo chuckled at the fond memories of his business plan. I joined in.
Inspired by this new idea which had struck him in the chest like a golf ball, Khumalo delivered the business plan in a record one week, mocking the set deadline of two months.
He scored a 75%, which was great, and he “marvelled at the score and wondered what would have happened if I had taken more time to apply myself to the assignment.”
Elated and dreaming of a new future where he cracked the secret code to success in life through his brokerage firm, Khumalo presented his plan to a successful businessman, seeking an opinion on its potential.
“Wow, this is so good, congratulations,” commented the professional. Khumalo sensed there was a ‘but’ simmering. It didn’t take long for the expert to serve it.
“But it would probably work in South Africa, not in Swaziland!” (Eswatini was still Swaziland back then. It was not until April 2018 that King Mswati III declared a change of name, that the Kingdom with well-preserved Swazi culture became the Kingdom of Eswatini).
Instead of dimming Khumalo’s lights, these words motivated him more to “prove him wrong”.
“What did he mean?” Khumalo asked me, “There were only three entities listed on the Stock Exchange as of then. It felt as if the market was unexplored.”
Where others saw the proverbial half-empty glass that spelt doom for it was close to empty, Khumalo agreed with them that, yes, it was half-empty, but it was his interpretation of the situation that was different—he saw an opportunity to fill the glass.
Yeah, who conditioned us to always say the glass is half full? For an entrepreneur like Khumalo, his thinking is different and informed by divergent thinking; the glass of stock-broking firms was half-empty, presenting a problem to solve by filling the gap.
The stubborn decision to go overseas for university, but build Africa
Fisokuhle Khumalo wasn’t an ordinary kid. After high school, when other kids were busy applying to universities in South Africa, Khumalo was cultivating his dream to study overseas in Russia, Taiwan or China. This time, his passion for law had come back, or maybe it had never left to begin with.
But he knew if he studied law in China or Russia, they’d teach him their law, and that would stop him from practising in Eswatini. He decided he’d pursue a business course, which could be studied and applied anywhere.
A true pan-Africanist, Khumalo wanted to live and work in Africa after his studies, to grow his home country and provoke the potential he knew existed in his fellow countrymen, even where they were too blind to see it.
“I wanted to study overseas, learn their wisdom, and then come back home and build, because we have the resources we need and we can solve our problems,” he told me. “Home is home, and we have the potential to solve our problems. The issue comes when Africans want to go abroad and not come back. Africa has the resources, opportunities and brilliant minds. We should realise who we really are, what we really have, and execute projects at home.”
At this point, I thought of Moses in the Bible, an Israelite who grew up in Pharaoh’s palace in Egypt, learned the skills and knowledge, and later helped get the Israelites out of Egypt.
The full picture of my random thought came fully completed and framed when, unprompted, Khumalo told me, “I’ve always had a Moses mission burning in my heart, to drive individuals out of a state and deliver them into a promised land.”
His parents were initially against his idea of studying abroad. They sat their son down and convinced him to apply to a university in South Africa. Khumalo did it half-heartedly and got an acceptance to study law at the University of Johannesburg. He didn’t go for it, however.
He instead got a job at his former primary school as a swimming, cricket and soccer coach, working with his closest friend. This was a job Khumalo says “was so rewarding, to date I talk about it, recalling the fulfilment it brought seeing the kids apply what we taught them and win tournaments.”
Khumalo saved his salary from the coaching job and used it to pay application fees for scholarships overseas. In April 2017, the East Mediterranean University in Cyprus, Turkey, accepted him for Business Administration, and they offered him a 50% scholarship.
Khumalo convinced his parents to pay the rest of the fees and cater for his flight and well-being in Cyprus.
“I am very grateful to my parents who helped me secure the spot to study in Cyprus, where the business bug really sank its teeth in me,” he told me.
A foreigner bringing Eswatini to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
“Turkey, a country in West Asia with a small portion of it in Southeast Europe, marked the most interesting time of my life,” Khumalo narrated.
When he was only two weeks old in the new country, he went to a restaurant with other Swazis he’d met there, students at his university. He wasn’t well acquainted with them, though they were building friendships.
“As we engaged in conversation, we noted how there wasn’t one place in Turkey that played Southern African music. They all played Turkish music. Out of the blue, I told my new friends that I could get them the restaurant we were at, and we could be coming to play our music there.”
Khumalo then stood and went to the restaurant’s bar, seeking to speak to the manager.
“I went over to the bar, accompanied by one of my friends. I asked for the manager, and was surprised when he actually showed up. But then there was a language barrier issue; in Turkey, they speak limited English.”
The conversation went something like this:
‘Merhaba, bro,’ Jamie, the owner and manager, greeted.
‘Merhaba!’ Khumalo responded, before launching into an explanation that they wanted the space to be inviting other Swazis in the country for a social evening and music from their home country. The idea was that they would get the space as Jamie got customers for his bar. Khumalo, however, quickly discovered there was a language barrier, so he tried to dumb down his English.
‘Bro, what you do here Thursday?’
‘What you say my friend?’ Jamie asked, trying to understand.
‘Me, my friends, those there, see?” Khumalo pointed at his friends at the table. “Come here, Thursday, play music. People come, hear music we play, you sell bar, make profit, us get happy.’
They finally understood each other, and Jamie warmed up to the idea. Thursdays, however, had another event happening at the restaurant, so he gave them Wednesdays, 6 to 9 p.m. Khumalo knew this one was a tough one to pull off; how would they get students to come to the restaurant on an evening when they had classes the next day?
But he was determined to get it done. What he didn’t know was that this would be the beginning of his career as an entrepreneur running an events company.
Playing music to empty chairs before the great turnaround
“On the first Wednesday, apart from the four friends I’d been with, no one else showed up even though we had distributed an online poster invite. We’d named the event Swazi Lounge. I guess guys wondered who the hell these first years were inviting them on a Wednesday for some Swazi music. We ended up playing our music to empty chairs.”
They never gave up, though. Four Wednesdays later, Khumalo and his team were only attracting five more people, fellow Swazis. But they still jammed hard to Southern African music in a foreign country, bringing home away from home.
One Wednesday, Jamie had had enough of them.
“It was raining, and no people were coming. Jamie approached me, and I could tell he was frustrated because he wasn’t making sales from the bar as we’d promised him. He gave us an ultimatum that if by seven p.m. people hadn’t shown up, we had to close and leave. We started making calls to other Southern Africans, asking them to show up.”
A taxi pulled up outside the restaurant, and out of it jumped five people. A few moments later, another taxi pulled up, and a whole crew jumped out. People kept streaming in, one group after another, and Khumalo couldn’t believe his eyes when the small restaurant got packed to full capacity, with a spill-over of people jamming to the music from outside on the verandah.
“It was a crowd,” he narrated. “Since we were also live streaming, I guess the people who were watching from home decided to come to where the party was when they watched others dancing and having fun. Jamie’s bar business was suddenly selling to Swazis, Zambians, Zimbabweans, and South Africans – everyone was there! Jamie was so happy; he got drunk and joined us in dancing.”
Going forward, Khumalo and his team decided to build the momentum. Their dream was to grow the brand and attract a bigger audience.
“As we continued, I figured this model could be replicated in other cities in Turkey, and also countries where there were Southern Africans attending school, for example, Russia and China. China seemed like a low-hanging fruit because some of my former classmates were there. It presented an opportunity to franchise and grow fast.”
While they actualised the dream of reaching other Southern Africans in Turkey when they got a bigger venue and people would hire buses to come from other cities, their dream to expand to other countries never materialised.
I wanted to know whether Khumalo made a huge profit margin from this new business that had sprouted out of a simple conversation at a restaurant in a foreign country.
“At the time, we were blind to the huge business we had in our hands. We were doing it just to bring home music to the Swazis in Turkey. However, as the events got bigger, we introduced an entrance fee. We used the money for logistics, travel around Cyprus for events, and we split the profits amongst the team. It’s what we used to buy groceries and stuff.”
COVID, and heading back to Eswatini to…rear pigs
Towards the end of 2019, when the contagious COVID-19 struck the world and governments imposed restrictions on movement and gatherings, Swazi Lounge, which had seen a shift in name to Swazilounge (without the space), paused.
Khumalo was now a fourth-year student. As soon as the restrictions eased, he reached out to his parents in Eswatini and asked to fly back home, afraid that the pandemic would strike again and he’d remain trapped in a foreign land.
Back in Eswatini, he completed his degree virtually and graduated.
“I kept asking myself what exactly I could do with the business administration degree; go into a career in either of the business functions or become an entrepreneur? As a kid, I’d fallen in love with pig farming when my brother and I spent a lot of time at our home farm in Nhlangano. I did my market research, which involved talking to pork customers. How did they love their pork? Who were their suppliers, and did they care about quality? I also visited a couple of pig farms and started laying out my business plan for a pasture-raised pigs business. The idea was to deliver pasture-raised pork; there had only been one such farm in Eswatini, and it had closed,” Khumalo narrated.
“I saw a gap and wanted to rear pasture-raised pigs and, instead of just supplying pork, also sell pig feeds to other farmers. I recall frustrating my parents by regularly borrowing their car to drive to the farm.
“They started asking me, ‘you want to keep pigs? You just graduated, please go and find a job that will give you the security of an income, then later you can pursue your piggery farming dream’. I hated that statement ‘find a job’, for I knew that a job would consume my time and energy, ultimately sucking the life out of me.”
But Khumalo’s ideas shifted when he participated in a pitch competition and presented his pasture-raised pork business idea. The judges tore through his idea, and one of them hit him with the saying he disliked, “kuseSwatini lana”. This is Eswatini.
Khumalo confesses that, in frustration, he imagined gripping one of the judges by the scruff of their shirt.
“The entrepreneurial mindset in Eswatini needs to change,” Khumalo ranted to me.
“It was that frustration that fuelled me to think of creating a platform that would build entrepreneurs instead of pulling them apart. What if we created a platform that gave entrepreneurs a chance to share their ideas, discuss with customers, and get a chance to sell and receive feedback on their products?”
The birth of Market Lounge
Khumalo called his closest friend, the one he ideated with the most.
“What if we use Swazilounge and the experience we gained in Cyprus running music events, to build an event where entrepreneurs showcase products and services?”
They named their new business Market Lounge. Repeating the Cyprus model, Khumalo approached a guest house in Manzini and asked to use their fields for his first event, where they’d invite small entrepreneurs to set up booths and interact with customers.
They invited a few of their entrepreneur friends to gauge interest, and once they confirmed the idea would work, they opened up to other entrepreneurs, charging them a fee. They also charged customers a small entry fee at the gate and invited a bar owner to set up, on the agreement that they’d split profits. This time, Khumalo was in his full entrepreneurial spirit, leveraging all angles to bring grist to the mill. The profits made enabled him to pay for the venue.
Khumalo later moved to Mbabane, the capital of Eswatini, where he found a bigger venue to run a second edition of Market Lounge. This time, he applied feedback and insights from the first edition. Since then, the experience of Market Lounge has improved.
On Market Lounge’s 7th edition, Khumalo’s team and some entrepreneurs advised him to remove the entrance fee at the gate. They felt it hurt the attendance of customers. But Khumalo had other thoughts.
“I took a risk and decided to increase the entrance fee instead,” he told me, laughing.
“I wanted the people to see the value Market Lounge offered. We were not just offering an opportunity to buy and sell but also a chance to interact with other entrepreneurs and learn. And if we let every Tom, Dick and Harry enter, we wouldn’t have the target market intended, therefore diluting our objective. We executed a new RSVP model where those who hadn’t reserved a spot had to pay at the gate. It worked, and Market Lounge grew from a one-objective event to an ecosystem for entrepreneurial development. We started ‘On The Red Couch’, a product of the ecosystem focused on bringing together business owners and entrepreneurs–existing and aspiring–to discuss entrepreneurship.”
Swazilounge did not die; it became the engine that ran Market Lounge Expo.
Fisokuhle Khumalo now runs two separate businesses: A rebranded Swazilounge that is a for-profit events company organising trainings, workshops, events and pitch competitions; and Market Lounge, an ecosystem for entrepreneurs.
Value from participating in the Mandela Washington Fellowship
In 2025, Khumalo participated in the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, in the Business in Leadership track at the University of Texas at Austin.
He told me about the key lessons he learned during the fellowship.
“I learned the importance of doing good while making good. I also learned to listen to my spark. Here’s the thing: the first message to hit your thoughts is always the true idea, the second one only comes to dilute the original idea. I now listen to and follow my spark as I believe it is a divine communication from above, giving me direction.”
It was also during the fellowship that Khumalo discovered he had two businesses in his hands, and learned strategies to run them separately but as parts playing a role in the bigger picture.
As we were about to close the interview, I asked him what his bigger picture was. He repeated his powerful Moses analogy.
“I have a Moses mission. I exist to drive individuals out of a defeated state and deliver them into a promised land of possibilities through my entrepreneurship. My dream is to see a hyper-proactive Eswatini and an Africa where an individual sitting in their house can think of a business idea and go ahead and scale it for impact and profit. We want to build a sort of Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs, where the seeds (ideas) they plant germinate and grow exponentially, beyond our own beliefs. With the opening of borders through the African Free Trade Agreement, African entrepreneurs can partner, do business, and realise an Africa where startups are leading economies.”
Fisokuhle Khumalo’s number one rule in life is Cav Thyself: a South African proverb insisting on the importance of knowing yourself, for everything is as you are within. It’s from within that everything arises or crumbles. The saying invites individuals into self-awareness and reflection to master themselves and understand their strengths and weaknesses, because only then will they find their true purpose and begin to lead the life that was ordained for them.
You can connect with Fisokuhle Khumalo via LinkedIn.
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This story is part of a series Lesalon Kasaine is writing, of the stories of select 2025 Mandela Washington Fellows. Read more about the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, a program run by the US Department of State. Lesalon was himself an MWF 2025 Fellow.
