I Defied the Odds and Challenges That Faced Me at Birth, and Now It’s Time to Defy Gravity.

THERE CAN BE irony in even the happiest of sentiments—a fact that is surely not lost on Eddie Ndopu. The son of a South African mother and a Namibian father, Ndopu was born in 1990, the year Namibia attained its independence from South Africa, and just four years before Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black President.

Ndopu and his demographic cohort in the southern part of Africa became known as the “born free” generation—a sentiment suited to a time and a place when apartheid and other