Gogontlejang Phaladi's life story

 At a tender age of four, popular child prodigy Gogontlejang Phaladi shocked her pre-school teachers when she told them that she wanted to go and look after her paralysed mother.

Her mother Onnameditse Phaladi had been involved in a car accident. “One day I was shocked to find her cooking rice,” says the mother. GG, as Gogontlejang, now 23, is known, has always been a rare child. What her mother recalls from when she was eight months old is that her nanny fed her traditionally-brewed drink because she would not sleep. She would then oversleep and when she woke up, her parents realised that something was not right with her. “Blood tests indicated that she had been fed Bojalwa jwa Setswana and when we asked the helper, she said it was because she was refusing to sleep,” she says. But again, even as a toddler, GG would always clean up after her mess and liked order, according to her mother.

She says that even when they forced her to watch children’s TV programs like Sesame Street, GG would refuse and opted for Molemo wa Kgang, BBC and CNN. Her mother says that even her bedroom was always adorned with pictures of state presidents and policy makers. What she also recalls is that at the age of five, Gogontlejang faced rejection after rejection when she wanted to register her NGO called Gogontlejang Phaladi, Pillar of Hope Organisation. The NGO is mandated with community capacity building, human rights advocacy, promoting gender equality and doing humanitarian work. It took seven years to finally register it. “They were saying she was young and suggested we register it in our names, which we refused. We even sought legal assistance,” she says. After her NGO got registered, then came another challenge: Traditional leaders would not let her address them at Kgotla meetings.

Her message was simple - That the poor, sick, women and children should be cared for. To them, it was a sign of disrespect for a child to address elders. But her mother says after finally allowing her to speak, they started wanting more of her. “They stopped demanding a Letter of Permission and started to praise her good speeches,” she says. While at primary school, Gogontlejang turned herself into an activist for children’s rights. Her mother says that she stood up and spoke against teachers who were sending pupils back for not paying school fees and for coming to school with uncovered books. “She’d go straight to the head teacher and say that it was not the children’s fault that their school fees weren’t paid,” she says.

Because of her rising stardom then, Gogontlejang was regarded as mentally-disturbed by members of the public. People were saying she behaved like an adult and that she should just be a child and play with other children. It was at the age of seven when her parents took her to South Africa to see psychologists who confirmed that she was perfectly normal, and that she is a child prodigy. “They told her that she was seven but had the mind of a 17-year old,” says her mother. Her father, Greek Phaladi, describes her as a humble and kind child. He says that he observed many differences in her from her age-mates when she was growing up. “Even at church, she maintained order and would report her cousins for misbehaving, yet she was five years old,” he says. Not too long ago, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II recognised her as the 10th Commonwealth Point of Light award recipient for her humanitarian work.

In psychology research literature, the term child prodigy is defined as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain to the level of an adult expert performer. Child prodigies are rare, and in some domains, there are no child prodigies at all. The list includes, among others, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an Australian who first took up the harpsichord when he was just three years old. He composed his first piece of published music at age five, and by his teen years, he had already written several concertos, sonatas, operas and symphonies.