What happens when the life you spent years building is suddenly placed at risk by a family crisis, and the one thing you never planned for arrives at the same time?
In “Divine Arrangements", bestselling author Takalani Mutshinyan, known as Takalani M, explores that question through food, family, culture and an unexpected romance.
Set against the world of Venda culture, the novel follows a woman who has built her identity around independence only to find herself forced to reconsider what she wants from love and from life.
Rendani Makwarela is a determined chef who has sworn off relationships after being left at the altar. Instead, she throws herself into her passion for food and spends a decade building a successful catering company that earns her a reputation among Venda's elite.
Her carefully planned life begins to shift when she meets Fhumulani Makungo, a divorced property developer. What starts as an unexpected romance soon becomes complicated when Rendani discovers that her father's struggling business empire has put her own catering company at risk.
Her business was used as surety, leaving Rendani with an impossible choice. She can enter an arranged marriage with another family willing to rescue her father's empire or risk her livelihood while pursuing the love she has unexpectedly found.
Food as a connection to home
For Mutshinyan, food was a natural way into Rendani's story. Her own childhood in Venda shaped the way she approached the novel and its relationship with food.
“My childhood in Venda, where my great-grandmother taught my cousins and me how to cook and tend to her farm, greatly inspired Divine Arrangements,” she said.
That experience also informed her approach to the farm-to-table movement. While the concept may be presented as a modern food trend, Mutshinyan pointed out that growing food at home and eating from family gardens has long been part of life in Venda.
“I am also fascinated by this ‘new’ era of farm-to-table, where families eat from their home gardens. This took me back to the lives of many families in Venda,” she said.
“The farm-to-table concept has been there for decades, so I wanted to paint that picture in a modernised way.”
Food therefore becomes more than part of Rendani's profession. It connects her to her roots, her ambition and the world she has worked to build.
When ambition meets love
Rendani's professional success is central to the story. She has spent 10 years building her brand and has plans to take it further. But when her father's business troubles threaten everything she has worked for, her independence is tested.
Mutshinyan deliberately placed her protagonist in that difficult position.
“I brought professional ambition into the story to create chaos and to tighten the plot, and I wanted to see how my female protagonist would come out of it,” she said.
At the centre of the novel is a question many readers may recognise: can a woman pursue her ambitions while making space for love?
According to Mutshinyan, there should not have to be a choice.
“In an ideal world, one doesn’t have to choose between love and success because the two can coexist,” she said.
Yet “Divine Arrangements” puts Rendani in a situation where those two parts of her life appear to collide.
“Life will always throw challenges at us, and it depends on what your heart desires. I always advocate for people to follow what their hearts desire because that is one step toward living a purposeful life,” Mutshinyan said.
Love when you least expect it
Rendani represents a generation of women who are increasingly comfortable defining success on their own terms. She has no interest in allowing social expectations around marriage to dictate her life.
Mutshinyan said Rendani reflects women who have chosen to prioritise their careers and independence rather than feel pressured to settle down.
“Unlike past generations, when society pressured women to settle down, get married and have kids, that is no longer the case,” she said.
Rendani believes that she has her future figured out until Fhumulani enters her life.
“But when she met Fhumulani, her heart wanted what it wanted,” Mutshinyan said. “When the love bug bites, it is never easy to ignore it.”
That tension between choice and fate gives the romance its central conflict. Rendani did not go looking for love, but she cannot simply dismiss what she feels when it arrives.
Keeping Venda stories alive
Beyond romance, the novel is also an exercise in representation. Mutshinyan wanted her stories to reflect the communities and places she knows while preserving aspects of Venda culture through contemporary fiction.
“Representation is very important to me. I am determined to write stories that resonate with my people because they mirror the realities of our lives,” she said.
For Mutshinyan, seeing familiar places and experiences in fiction matters. She also sees storytelling as a way of documenting traditions and preserving cultural memory.
“Since I learned that Venda-speaking people are a minority in South Africa, I desire to preserve my culture and traditions through my storytelling,” she said.
She also used fiction to engage with social issues in a way that is accessible to readers.
“I also use storytelling to bring light to our country’s social issues in a gentler way than other mediums.”
Choosing yourself
At its heart, “Divine Arrangements” asks readers to consider what happens when personal dreams come into conflict with expectations from family, relationships and society.
For Mutshinyan, the answer is not necessarily about choosing love or ambition. It is about making decisions that allow people to remain true to themselves.
“Since the release of ‘Divine Arrangements’, I have been preaching that it is absolutely okay to choose yourself even when it is not fashionable to do,” she said.
She is quick to distinguish choosing yourself from being irresponsible. Instead, she wanted readers to examine the decisions they make and consider whether they are sacrificing their happiness simply to please others.
“Often, we find ourselves in situations where we compromise our joy to make others happy. We are willing to give up our dreams to accommodate others. We feel guilty for putting ourselves first.”
For Rendani, that question becomes personal when the future of her business and her unexpected relationship collide.
And perhaps that is where the title “Divine Arrangements" finds its meaning. Sometimes life does not follow the plan we make for it. The challenge is deciding what to hold on to when everything we thought we wanted begins to change.
lutho.pasiya@nationalmg.co.za