When Failure Goes Public: Legend Manqele on Scandal, Resilience and Reinvention

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 15:25:37 +0000

What happens when your failure isn’t private, but splashed across the press?
Legend Manqele, creative visionary behind Living the Dream with Somizi and other groundbreaking South African reality shows, opens up about the most public failure of his career. From newspaper headlines to losing clients, Legend shares how he faced humiliation, betrayal, and the “court of public opinion”… and what it really takes to rebuild your name.

Timestamps:
0:00 – Introducing Legend Manqele
1:01 – What failure means when you live in the spotlight
2:18 – Childhood, resilience, and lessons from moving often
5:02 – The morning he woke up to see his name on a street-pole headline
8:11 – Doing the right thing, but losing in the court of public opinion
12:34 – Protecting his team and business in the middle of crisis
16:10 – The conversations that didn’t help — and the ones that did
20:19 – How failure reshaped his creative process and standards
25:54 – Bravery, passion projects, and creating for the long run
33:03 – Forgiveness, betrayal, and why he’s still working on it
36:43 – Advice to young creatives on holding your name and voice

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Cheers to Failure is a live podcast about the stories we were never supposed to tell. The ones that cracked us open. The ones we stayed silent about. The ones that made us.

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