Athlete, entrepreneur and founder of Mzoli's Place, he ran the tracks of segregation-era Gugulethu with the same ferocious self-belief with which he built one of South Africa's most beloved institutions from a garage full of meat.
9 October 1954 - 6 June 2026
The man who lit the fires at Mzoli's Place is gone, but Cape Town will not easily forget him. Edwin Mzoli Ngcawuzele, 71, who died at his home in Gugulethu, Cape Town, on 6 June, after a long stroke-related illness, was that rare figure: a man who turned forced removal, political sacrifice and a garage full of meat into one of the most joyful places this fractured country has known.
In his youth, he was a champion middle- and long-distance runner who refused to compete in the racially controlled sporting structures of his time, sacrificing sponsorships, national selection and any prospect of international competition in defence of a principle that cost him, in 1976, 10 weeks in detention; a self-made entrepreneur who built a backyard braai operation into a world-famous cultural landmark; and a man of such implacable stubbornness that even a stroke could not convince him to sit down.
He was born on 9 October 1954. In the 1960s, when Mzoli was still a boy, his family was displaced and forced to relocate to Gugulethu under the Group Areas Act. He told IOL in later years: "My family was displaced from the...
