Before there was a company, there were goats. Dumisani Lingamangali Ncube was born on 1 July 1989 in a thatched village on a farm in Zambia's Central Province, and his childhood job was herding goats and cattle, not sitting behind a desk — there was no desk yet to sit behind. The business instinct showed up early anyway: while still in grade nine, he started selling pamphlets to cover his own expenses, then opened a small kiosk selling basic foodstuffs. Nobody handed him a starting point. He built one out of whatever was in reach.
As a teenager he moved from goat trading into something with more range: importing blankets and clothes from Botswana and South Africa to sell back home — a supply chain built by a teenager with no capital beyond what the last trade had made him. He finished secondary school at Matero Boys Secondary School in 2006, then enrolled at a college in Kitwe to work toward a professional accountancy qualification, studying finance formally by day while continuing to trade informally on the side.
In 2012, Ncube and two colleagues started Gladtidings Software Ltd, building school management software for Zambian schools — a sharp turn from trading physical goods into selling something that didn't exist until they wrote it. It became the most widely used system of its kind in the country. Ten months in, it was generating a turnover of more than $200,000, money he immediately put back to work, branching into transport and construction businesses rather than sitting on it.
He went back and finished his professional accounting qualification in 2013 — the credential he'd started years earlier, picked back up once the business could afford the time. In 2015 he launched DLN Technologies, producing ID cards for schools and organisations and dealing in card printers and security technology. It was profitable within months, clearing over $13,000 a month.
The following year, French manufacturer Evolis gave him a performance award recognising that growth — making him the first Zambian, and the youngest African CEO, ever to receive it.
Ncube has since spoken at business and entrepreneurship platforms across the region — in Malawi, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and at Lusaka's Heroes Stadium — using his own path from a farm village to company founder as the case study, in front of rooms full of people who are exactly where he started. Zambian press coverage at the time called him, plainly, a farm boy turned self-made millionaire. The goats never got a mention in the headlines, but they were there first.
Sources: Wikipedia (citing Zambia Daily Mail and Zambia24), Nyasa Times — facts cross-checked across multiple accounts, not taken from a single source.
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