She is the elder daughter of Nelson Mandela and his second wife, Winnie Mandela.

She was nearly born in prison, as Winnie Mandela was arrested close to her birth in 1959, and when she was four her father was sent to prison - where he would stay for the next 27 years. Not until 1974, when she was 16 years old, could she visit him.

Mandela-Dlamini studied at Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa and science at Boston University a student at Boston University, in 1990, Zenani’s father Nelson Mandela was released from prison. She talks about her father and not seeing him until she was 16 years old. African law prohibits children seeing prisoners until age 16.
Zenani's mother, Winnie, had been detained by apartheid police for taking part in a women's protest shortly before giving birth to her in Soweto in 1959. Her father was imprisoned when she was five. There would be no innocence of what it meant to bear South Africa's most famous surname.
After Mandela was elected president and his divorce to Winnie, Zenani was chosen to accompany her father to his inauguration and become the stand in First Lady of South Africa until her father remarried on his 80th birthday to former Mozambique first lady Graça Machel.