Novelwano Letsoela grew up knowing she wanted to do something ‘different.’ Today she runs her own engineering business, providing jobs for 25 people, writes Sue Grant-Marshall

It is a long journey from the little town of Cofimvaba in rural Eastern Cape to the mines and chemical plants on the highveld.

It is almost as big a trek as the metaphorical distance that this petite mechanical engineer, Novelwano Letsoela, has navigated from a childhood of selling her mother’s vetkoek and traditional Xhosa attire to winning the Engineer of the Year award in 2011 at Eskom’s Lethabo Power Station.

“I always wanted to be different, to make my mark, and the headmaster of our school at Ntshingeni, near Cofimvaba, encouraged us to move away from the traditional women’s careers of nursing, teaching and law,” says Letsoela. “He wanted us to be ambitious.”

And so Letsoela applied to do mechanical engineering at the then Eastern Cape Technikon in Butterworth