If you’re familiar with 17th century African political history, the name Nzinga may ring a bell. During her 37-year reign of Ndongo and Matamba (modern-day Angola), Queen Nzinga Mabande defended the independence of her kingdoms from the Portuguese’s rapid expansion into South West Africa to control the slave trade. Over 300 years later, the legacy of this queen is one of wisdom, intelligence, and strength.

In 2021, meet Queen Nzinga’s namesake, Nzingah Oniwosan — a classically-trained pianist, plant-based chef, teaching artist, and founder of the wellness blog, Yes Baby I Like It Raw, and CEO of holistic health app, 365 Zing. Calling in from her hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Oniwosan has been based in the States since the beginning of the pandemic but ordinarily would move between Florida, and Haiti — the country her family immigrated from. A self-described serial entrepreneur, she also has businesses in both countries after founding Impact Hub Port-au-Prince, a co-working space for social entrepreneurs, and Chi Tita, a non-profit organization, in 2016.

“I suffered from childhood obesity. I was pre-hypertensive and when I was 11 years old then I got diagnosed with a brain tumor, as well as the autoimmune disorder called scleroderma, and polycystic ovary syndrome by the time I was 14. It was a pretty difficult time in my life to be quite honest,” she says. “I was dealing with my mom's mental health issues and I was being molested at the time and so it was just a lot of things just being thrown at me. Essentially, the doctors were telling me that I would have to be on medication for the rest of my life in order for me to live a long life. So fast forward, I went to college and something clicked — I broke down to breathe and to heal...so I decided to take a holistic approach to my healing that was very African-centered, and through that African-centered holistic practice, I was able to heal myself.”

After years of being an overachiever, Oniwosan found herself unchallenged in university and this created an opportunity for her to finally carve out time for unpacking accumulated trauma and tend to past wounds. “I always knew I wanted to be a healer. I thought my work as a healer looked like I was going to be a neurosurgeon; I kind of pivoted from that and took a holistic practice as my career choice,” she continues. “And so as I started to do more work with women and in the community, I recognized that I was limited in my capacity with only so many people I could touch. I recognize that a lot of people need the things that I was able to do in order for me to reverse my conditions and to move to a space where I was thriving instead of surviving. And so I felt like an app would be the best way to do that.”

This app would become 365 Zing, an idea that’s been in the making for the past 5 years and launched this January. The high costs of developers encouraged Oniwosan to learn to build the platform herself in three months, signalling her entry into the world of wellness tech. Mostly a one-woman-operation at the moment, she works with instructors to lead courses from restorative yoga to motivational portraiture and is gearing up to hire more staff. “Zing actually means vitality. So 365 days of the year, we’re seeking vitality in mind, body, and spirit,” she explains. “At the core of this app is really, how can we help you heal? How can we help you find sustainable practice with regards to wellness? If we're really talking about transforming the way people approach wellness, you have to integrate them all. Community is also a major component for me as well. So how do we engage with each other? That's another element of the app that I think a lot of apps don't have but I have a dating component to it where you get matched like you would like on a dating app based on questions that you answer and you can message each other and move on from there.”

Repeatedly, Oniwosan emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to healing as inspired by her teachers Dr. Llaila Afrika (author of African Holistic Health and Nutricide), Dr. George Love, and Yeyefini Efunbolade, to name a few.

“Everything is interconnected. Everything you do has an impact not just on your physical self but your spiritual self, and so when we start to look at traditional African spirituality and culture, there is no separation. As we become more westernized in our approach, we've started to separate things and deal with them from an individualized perspective. So spirituality is not something that you do only on a Sunday, or in my case, I grew up Seventh Day Adventist, so on a Saturday — it's something that you do all the time. You recognize that God is not only outside of you, God is inside of you. And if you recognize that you are a living, extension of God, how then would you treat yourself. And from a holistic practice, we say that when we see illness in the physical body, there's some type of incongruence in the spiritual body, and the mental body. So disease doesn't start physically. Disease starts spiritually, and mentally. And so when we talk about healing, we do not just focus on the external body. And from a Western perspective, everything is physical, right? We work out because we want to have abs [and a] big, but small waist — that's the thing now, right? Whereas when we look at traditional practices around the world, not just an African practices, it is centered on having a strong spiritual foundation, and everything builds out from there. This is something that I've been doing for myself and studying for the past 20 years,” she says.

She likens this to the principle of polyrhythm found in West African dance, where different parts of the body may move differently at the same time, but come together to perform a collective performance. Not being one thing is integral to how Oniwosan navigates her multifaceted artistry and business acumen. “Research has shown that children who are exposed to the arts are better problem solvers. They're better at being critical thinkers and it means that they can take off one lens and put a different lens on and look at something differently. I really feel like my being a classically trained pianist and an artist in every sense of the word has really helped me move forward in the world and be the dynamic person that I am. I don't think in a unilateral way, and that even helped me to build my app, right? But I'm often offended because the challenge for me is either people know me as a super nerd, who studied neuroscience and was supposed to be a doctor, or as an artist, dancer, painter person that they don't expect to be as intelligent or business oriented as I am, because they only see artists in one perspective,” Oniwosan shares.

Regardless, again and again, Nzingah Oniwosan has proven that she dances to the beat of her own drum.

Nzingah Oniwosan will be leading a Morning Therapy and Therapy Session at AMAKA’s Our World Festival on Sunday May 2nd, 2021. Please click the link here to register.