Online Reporter
“The Anele Podcast: Her & Now” is returning for a second season this September, with renowned broadcaster Anele Mgudlwa.
Despite Mgudlwa’s apprehension about entering a market she felt was saturated, she did it and figured a few things along the way.
“I think the reason I’d avoided doing a podcast so much is because I hadn’t quite figured out what Anele podcast is going to be, and I figured it out inside of doing the podcast.”
Mgudlwa agreed to do the podcast with First for Women because she believes in the Her & Now report.
The inaugural Her & Now report asked South African women one question: how are you feeling? The study put language to something many women had only ever carried quietly.
“The Anele Podcast: Her & Now” helped unpack the report by having real women share their stories and dig into the study. The second edition of First for Women’s Her & Now report finds South African women stretched thin by systems built without them in mind,
“I said yes, because at face value, I am a successful woman, like everyone was like, ‘Oh, Anele successful,’ but the podcast allowed me to ask myself a lot of questions that I brush off, because I’m successful.
“Ultimately, success is not what rocks you to bed at night, and you sleep properly, and I was asking myself the difficult questions that allowed me to open up as well.”
In the first season, Mgudlwa found herself speaking about things she never spoke about, such as not being able to grieve her mom because of her role in her family.
“Feeling like the family, my family didn’t allow me to grieve my mom cause I was the one with the solutions in our family from when we were kids. If I could see the family is not feeling well, my parents in a fight, I know I’m gonna bring the jokes and make everyone laugh, right? To cut the tension.”
Mgudlwa’s mother passed away in 2009, and only now, when they did the podcast in May, did she sit down and acknowledge that her family didn’t allow her to grieve her mother, because she had to be the strong one.
Each episode left Mgudlwa having learnt something new from each of the public figure women who were guests. From Pearl Thusi, Rachel Kolisi, Tumi Morake, Masasa Mbangeni, Nozipho Tshabalala, Mantsoe Pout, Sinovuyo Mondliwa and Sinenjabulo Zungu, they left her with something.
Mgudlwa is excited for the second season and feels a bit more prepared, and knows what she wants to do better on the new season.
“When I watch the podcast back a lot, there are times I’m like, ‘you should have kept quiet there, they were going to go into more, they were going to say more, they were going to share more’. But because I’ve got my broadcaster hat on, I want to fill the silences, and you want to move on to the next conversation.
“I’m looking forward to listening a lot more, to just letting the conversation breathe.”
First for Women’s second edition of its research, titled A World Built for Someone Else, fittingly released during Women’s Month, draws on qualitative and quantitative research gathered from more than six thousand South African women since 2025.
“People think that you fail because of the wrong decision. No, you fail because of no decision. Because as soon as a woman makes a decision, that becomes the right decision because you throw your everything into that.
‘This is the conversation; I want that to come through more because more women need to see it, hear it, feel it from people who just made a decision.”
The report asks a harder question than last year’s. If women are already doing this much work to hold their own lives together, are the products and institutions around them lightening that load, or simply assuming women will keep coping regardless? – IOL
