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March 31, 2025 • 15 mins
This episode of Good News with Twanda Black features K.A. Mulenga... K.A. Mulenga is a passionate children's book author with 40 published titles. His stories inspire, educate, and entertain young readers worldwide. With a love for storytelling, he creates engaging tales that foster creativity, kindness, and life lessons. His books are enjoyed by children, parents, and educators alike.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Thank you for joining me today on Good News with
Twanda Black. We're we are discovering some of the most
inspiring trials to triumph stories and empowerment moments. Call up
a friend and let them know it's time for some
good news.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to Good News with Twanda Black. I'm your host,
and we talk with folks from all walks of life
about their good news. Because you know what, if your
brothers and sisters.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Are doing great, that's good news and we should celebrate.
Sit back, relax and enjoy.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
This phenomenal guest joining us today is Klena Moulinga. He
is in South Africa and it is so good to
have you. Thank you for getting up at two o'clock
in the morning to talk to me.

Speaker 4 (01:00):
It's my pleasure and thanks for having me so.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Koalnga is a children's book author of forty published titles.
They were all just phenomenal titles. But first of all,
tell us a little bit about yourself. Have you always
been a writer? How did you grow up?

Speaker 3 (01:17):
You have siblings?

Speaker 5 (01:19):
Okay, yeah, I've always been a writer from as far
as back as I can remember.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
I remember my first book I wrote when I was
ten years old.

Speaker 5 (01:29):
And I was born in Zambia, which is a country
in Southern Africa. Yeah, my dad was a journalist. He
was actually the first black editor of Zambia Daily.

Speaker 4 (01:43):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (01:45):
Yeah, and so there was always a reading and writing culture.
Now I have two brothers and two sisters. One brothers
passed away and the other brothers in the UK, sister
in the UK, and the firstborn sister is back in Zambia.

Speaker 4 (02:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
You travel a lot, huh.

Speaker 4 (02:10):
Yeah, Yeah, I get around. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
So did you go to school in Zambia or South
South Ambria?

Speaker 4 (02:20):
So I went to school in Zambia.

Speaker 5 (02:23):
My my elementary school the way up to high school,
and then I started college in Zambia. I did a
few years in England, went back to Zambia, worked a bit,
and then moved to South Africa in nineteen ninety nine.
So yeah, I've been here quite a while. All right.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
So let's talk about your writing career starts a book
at ten. Do you still have that book or did
you rewrite it?

Speaker 5 (02:51):
Yes, that's actually the first book that I published. Obviously,
I really when I was ten years old. Well, one
writing competition when I was still at back on Zambia.
I think I was in the fourth or third grade country, remember,
But yeah, it won a writing competition. And I wrote

(03:14):
another one when I was eleven, and that also won
a prize. And but what I did is in twenty twenty,
I think it was just after lockdown. We were on
our way from church, my wife and my three kids,
and my son at the time was eleven. He said

(03:38):
there was a writing competition at school, and I told
my family in the protect, oh, I could hear some
help because I used to write when I was about
your age. And none of them, they know nothing, believed me.
They were just in shock because I'm.

Speaker 4 (03:55):
A qualified to count it.

Speaker 6 (03:59):
So yeah, once I heard the shock and the laughter,
I said, let me try to show these guys what
I've made of And I dusted everything off, and I
still had my first book from when I was ten.

Speaker 5 (04:12):
I had it in my head. I just rewrote a
bit and renamed it and then yeah, a long story short,
I saw that I still had that passion and decided
to get to get a talkish and from then now,
from one, it's now fourty.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
So your books are.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Character You talk about character issues because that's a huge
thing with our kids today. So talk about some of
the titles that you've read.

Speaker 5 (04:43):
Okay, so yeah, they all have like a life lesson
attached to them. So the first one, which I did
write when I was ten, it was called The Obstinate Donkey,
but I renamed it to Donk and the Stubborn Donkeys.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
So if one day, right, I didn't get it, you updated, Yes,
I updated. Yeah. So it's all about.

Speaker 5 (05:09):
Stereotyping and the indirect lady, because I mean, the whole
worlds donkeys are stubborn. But who are we to say
that every single donkey is stuff? So yeah, you try to.
I tried to teach kids that you can't just label
and say that a person is like this without actually

(05:29):
finding out more about that. And then I wrote with
learn his Best Friend Will, which I also wrote well
when I was a kid, I just renamed it.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
That's all about plastic pollution and anti bullying. It's also
about dealing with.

Speaker 5 (05:46):
Grief, so that on is for Yeah, it's not the
happiest of books, but it does.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
That's a good yeah for children, especially a lot of
times parents we don't know how to talk to our.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
Kids about grief. How do you deal with that yourself?

Speaker 4 (06:00):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (06:01):
Yeah, And then I've got Yeah, there's so many this
chapter Cheetah, which is about winning and losing gracefully. You've
got Terry and his Honest Horse, which was about honestly
being the best policy. And yeah, there's a whole lot
of things.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
So what have you come up with your titles and
what you want to write about?

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Do you just look around at life and say, hey.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
This is a good lesson? Yeah, so the titles.

Speaker 5 (06:29):
Obviously, what I did was I asked my family, the kids,
especially what their favorite animals were, you know, the top three.
So yeah, my daughter, I remember, love standards and loves horses.
The other daughter loved Cheetah, and my son loved lions.

(06:53):
So I tried to incorporate that into into the main characters.
And then some of them they were inspired by my
kids as well. Because Elaine the Elephant is about a
small elephant who struggles to do what her siblings do,
and that's that's sort of like what my daughter goes

(07:13):
through or went through now she's seventeen.

Speaker 4 (07:16):
Wow. Oh yeah.

Speaker 5 (07:18):
And then my son, he inspired me to write about
winning and uses basefully because he always used to be
a sore loser.

Speaker 4 (07:26):
He's a softowayer.

Speaker 5 (07:28):
So Chuck Pachita is about the dangers of iron and
seeing a sol user. So some of them, yeah, I
just they inspired my kids, and some of them I
can't explain it.

Speaker 4 (07:40):
They just the ideas just pop up.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
Do you have more titles in there?

Speaker 4 (07:47):
Yeah, you know what.

Speaker 5 (07:48):
I've got forty published, but I've got over fifteen manuscripts.

Speaker 4 (07:53):
Wow that I'm just Now.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
Who does your illustrations?

Speaker 5 (07:58):
Okay, so the current illustrations are done by a lady
here in South Africa, a lady I've never actually met
because she lives in a different town. But we she's
sort of like an enigma. She doesn't believe in in
telephone host she doesn't believe in WhatsApp like instant messaging everything.

Speaker 4 (08:19):
The only thing we do is email each other.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
I know some people like that email.

Speaker 4 (08:28):
My wife says, Now, I don't think that's a real person.
It must be a or something.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
You know, in this day and time, we never know,
you know, we just never know. We know.

Speaker 5 (08:42):
So basically, she's got an in house thing where she
does my editing, she does my cover design, she does
my type setting, and she's got an in house illustrator.
So yeah, I've never actually met the illustrator either, but
we just go back and forth on email sharing the ideas.

Speaker 4 (09:00):
When I'm happy with it, then yeah, for a lot
of the books already.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Awesome, awesome, And so what age would you say these.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
Books were for?

Speaker 5 (09:10):
Okay, I should say from Remember they say that you
can start reading to a child when as soon as
they're born, So I would say from newborn up until
depending on your reading ability, and go up to ten,
so you walked ten years old. Yeah, And I've also
got a middle grade novel which was not self published.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
It was published by a little.

Speaker 5 (09:33):
Publishing house in South Africa, and that's for maybe kids
up to I would say fourteen.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah, what's that about?

Speaker 4 (09:42):
So that book is a little mystery novel. It's not.
It's not one of I just tried to because I
was approached by the lady. She owns a publishing house
and kids go to the same school. We're not in
the same grade.

Speaker 5 (09:56):
But yeah, she was happy to to sign me on.
We signed an agreement and she was interested in in
the middle grade novel done by a South African author.
So my love of soccer, I decided to make it
about like a little soccer team and then they win
a prize and the Christ goes missing. So it's all

(10:17):
about the case of the missing soccer book.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
So just off the cup here, what is the environment
like where you live today?

Speaker 5 (10:32):
The environment in South Africa, it's I mean, it's still
Johannesburg is a beautiful country. First of all, the city
and the country are beautiful. There's a lot of what
can I say, corruption, So even though it is beautiful
and the people are a nice, political environment is not

(10:56):
the best at the moment. The good thing is that
the past elections, the A n C, the ruling party,
they didn't win a majority, and so there's a bit
of they don't they're not getting in their own way,
should I say so, We've got a lot of opposition.
So just to give you an example, like last month,

(11:18):
the finance minister wanted to raise the VAT, which is
like the sales.

Speaker 4 (11:23):
Tax, by two percent.

Speaker 5 (11:25):
But before we could do that, the opposition jumped in
and said, hell, hold on, you're gonna.

Speaker 4 (11:30):
Influence so many people and people's lives.

Speaker 5 (11:33):
So they sat and discussed and instead of increasingly by
two percent, they got it to preasent by only point
five miners.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Okay, exactly, not the best but much better.

Speaker 4 (11:46):
So yeah, that's the environment.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Where I think ural politics is just people right now,
it really is. What can you say, but look, tell
everybody where they can find your books, and because you
can get a whole set of them. Uh, And I
think for the kids, the kids need good character life
lesson books in this day and time, they really do.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
So tell everybody where they can find your books.

Speaker 5 (12:13):
Okay, So all the books are available on Amazon in
both ebook and paperback. They're also available on my directly
from my website for those in South Africa who in
Africa in general, any where there's no Amazon available, And
I've also got the ebook on a lot of other channels,

(12:33):
like it's called I'm just trying to think, so let
me just paper here, it's called drafted Digital. We have
put that on ebook and then I've also got them
on Teachers Paid Teachers and paperbacks are also available on
Ingram's pot as well.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
I saw that you get to go out and read
to the kids sometimes.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
Is that a lot of fun for you?

Speaker 4 (12:58):
Yeah? I love that. So I do grow out.

Speaker 5 (13:01):
To do readings at schools and yeah, that's that's like
the highlight of my career.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
So when do you have time to write besides being
an accountant, because that's a busy life right there in itself.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
Exactly. Yeah. I work late.

Speaker 7 (13:21):
And I wake up early, so I just learned to
divide my time between accountant, author, husband, father.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
That's right, that's right, exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
So they can find all of your titles and you
write under Ka Mulinga right correct.

Speaker 4 (13:44):
Yeah, and I'm on all social media as one.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
All right, all right? You ever come to America?

Speaker 4 (13:50):
Now, that's one place I really want to visit.

Speaker 5 (13:53):
Like I said, I've been to England, been to different
parts of Africa, yeah, and I'd love to come.

Speaker 4 (13:58):
To the US one.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
All right, you never know. You have to look us
up when you come.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Okay, This is Kolenga Mulinga and he is a very
passionate children's book author in South Africa.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
Forty published titles.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
They're also cute and well done and the titles are
just amazing. Thank you so much for joining us, for
getting up at two o'clock in the morning or two
thirty in the morning to talk with us, and all
the best to you and your family.

Speaker 4 (14:30):
Thank you so much, Thank you.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
Thanks so much for joining me for good news and if.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
You'd like to be a guest on the show, you
can reach out to me at good News at thepgnetwork
dot org, and of course, you can watch us on
all streaming platforms. I'm Twanda Black and I'll see you
next time with some good News
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