1st Annual Miss Mashau 2021

ABOUT

Borne from the aspirations of a young teenage girl from the rural Ha Mashau village in Venda, Limpopo, the idea of a pageant for local young women that focuses on truly empowering them through awakening them to their uniqueness, intellect and heritage. The pageant calls to young women of all shapes and sizes, complexions, level of education or backgrounds and aims to allow each individual to display their strengths and talents without the constraints that societal norms often belittle young girls into thinking less of themselves simply because they have been evaluated on standards that they do not conform to. The pageant is the brainchild of Charlotte Mashau in conjunction with Mapfumo Mashau, Tshedza Mashau and Khodani Mudau and it holds the full support of the Ha-Mashau Royal House. The year 2021 marks the project’s inception, with the intention to make it an ongoing annual event which will expand into other areas of youth development for the community of Ha-Mashau. “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein Many young women from rural South African communities find themselves disadvantaged because they do not have access to the many resources available to their urban counterparts. As if this is not bad enough, they are further handicapped by being classified using those unreachable standards. The Miss Mashau Pageant aims to disarm the handicap by making young women aware that they are more than just what society deems them to be. Their intellect, uniqueness, cultural heritage and many other factors are parts of the holistic definition of what it means to be a ‘beautiful’ woman in South Africa and the global community in general.