Mark Da Costa

Mark Da Costa was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1954. After school (matric) and one year’s compulsory National Service, he went to the United Kingdom. That was at the beginning of the coal miners’ strike and three-day working week. He worked as a tea boy on a building site for one year. He progressed to be a laborer and two years later became a ‘cowboy carpenter’. He lived as an illegal immigrant for thirteen years. He married in 1986 and had three children. He then with his family returned to South Africa at the end of 1989 and lived in Cape Town. He continued working on building sites, but in 2003 got divorced. He remarried in 2006, and with his wife and their two young children (5 and 3 years) in 2018 moved to the suburbs of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal… where he continues to study at the University of Life.