We arrive at the studios of Ashes To Ashes around lunchtime; the busy set of one of Africa’s popular soap operas is quieter than expected. We are told to wait for Nambitha Mpumlwana, South Africa’s award-winning actress, as she is applying make-up; 15 minutes and we’re ushered in.
The woman herself is in black tights and a matching flowing chiffon blouse with slippers like she is watching TV instead of appearing on it.
This set is indeed a home from home for Mpumlwana, who spends most of her life here portraying the owner of a funeral parlor and the matriarch of the Namanes, the family around which this TV drama revolves. She offers a tour; every inch means a lot to her.
We make our way to her comfortable dressing room. She points to a wall full of notes.
“This is very important to me. I put up my schedule for month, week and day so that I know what I’m doing. I also put up directors’ notes,” she says.
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I am curious about why this dressing room is so important to her. She alludes to her difficult past when black leads were few.
“For Nambitha to say where is my dressing room? They had to say how badly do we want her? Then somebody said, you want her? Build her a dressing room. However, if I was a white lead, I would not have to have that conversation, because it’s expected that I would want my privacy,” she says.
This was one of the many skirmishes when she arrived home from Canada and a lifetime of political exile. Mpumlwana was in politics by the age of 12 and in exile, in Lesotho, at 13.
“Somebody decided I should go to Lesotho. It was the most traumatic time of life. For the first time in my life, I discovered that there are black people who don’t speak Xhosa and I discovered that there was a language called Sesotho. I was shocked,” she says.
Mpumlwana on the sets of Ashes to Ashes in Johannesburg
“I am in boarding school and I learned Sesotho within a few months; I’m 13 years old and I’m trying to figure out everything. Easter holidays people go home and I didn’t have anywhere else to go and that was it. I’m in exile and didn’t know what that meant until I had nowhere else to go.”
At the age of 15, she flew to Canada to live with a mother she didn’t know.
“I’ve never lived with her before, I’ve met her a few times,” she says with a deep belly laugh.
“I am 15 now, she’s going to live with a teenager she doesn’t know?…I was the elder child living with the siblings that I had never lived with and didn’t know, with a mother I wasn’t familiar with, she wasn’t a very available parent especially to a teenager, it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Her mother was a full-time psychology student who worked full-time. Mpumlwana was in high school and working.
“I started working by the time I was 16 years and haven’t stopped since. I was working as a babysitter to put food on the table. I don’t think there was ever a time when I knew that I could do this professionally. I think when I saw my first play I was four years old and I noticed the power of the stage and what they were communicating and how they made me feel sitting in the audience.”
“I remember getting up on stage in King Williams Town when I was about 10 or 12, somebody was supposed to perform but they didn’t pitch and somebody said well she can sing and they got me on stage to sing. As soon as I started performing, they were still, when I became aware of that I froze and I forgot the rest of the song. I flew off the stage,” she says through a chuckle.
She never stopped entertaining, from Ndlamo (Zulu) dancing in the streets of King Williams Town to marching with drum majorettes. Another watershed moment came in exile, in 1985, when she visited Moscow and saw jazz musician Jonas Gwangwa’s Amandla – the globe-trotting anti-apartheid musical.
“I saw the way they transformed on stage, I saw the magic.”
Mpumlwana wanted to run away to join the show, but instead started a dance school in Canada. Her career took off when she returned to South Africa in the first flush of democracy, in 1994, to take a job as a TV presenter.
“I got advice that if you want the audience to know you, you have to be on television, that’s how South African audiences work, they don’t go to theatre, they don’t read reviews. So I took a job as a continuity presenter on SABC3…before I worked at television, they didn’t look at my resume, which was really strange.”
It wasn’t easy, but it worked. Mpumlwana has played numerous lead roles on television over the years: Justice for All, Saints, Sinners and Settlers, and award-winning Yizo Yizo and 7de Laan. Her role as Pearl Luthuli in The Lab won her Best Actress at the SAFTAs in 2007. For years, she played Mawande, a hardcore business woman in South Africa’s longest-running soap opera Generations; this despite a vow never to act in soap operas.
“I turned Generations down about five times then I said ‘okay God, what are you trying to say to me?’
I only turn down roles if I feel that the story is not genuine, I don’t expect everything to be in perfect condition but I expect growth where I go.”
On the big screen, she acted in the Oscar-winning film Tsotsi and alongside Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor in the award-winning Red Dust – a South African tale of the healing of its painful past.
“I remember being on a set and doing a read-through and Hilary Swank walked in and said, ‘hi I’m Hilary, I’m so sorry, I’m running late’. It was about…I acknowledge who I am, I’m not going to impose who I am on you. There’s a very big difference between the two. You are my colleague and that’s all there is to it.”
She danced with Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, in the film Invictus, which also starred Matt Damon. Then with Angelina Jolie in Beyond Borders. The latter film taught Mpumlwana to stand up for her rights. The story goes she had left her son behind for the shoot, only to find a fellow actress had been allowed to bring hers.
She plucked up courage and asked her producer for equal treatment. The producer agreed, then a family tragedy struck.
“Half-way through [the shoot], my father was quite ill and he passed away. When I went to bury my father in Port Elizabeth, they flew me down, rented me a car, looked after me basically from beginning to end. When I flew back, they flew my son back with me, and when I came back, they had hired a nanny who was going to educate him during the day. My trailer had all the amenities we needed and he had a home…I came back, then I was a problem, again, because I said ‘wait a minute’; I wasn’t wrong.”
Mpumlwana on the sets of Ashes to Ashes in Johannesburg
A problem was how she was often seen. Mpumlwana fought for make-up on set to suit black skin. She clashed with directors when she questioned why they insisted black actors put energy in their lines yet not ask the same of white actors.
Mpumlwana also refused lines she felt weren’t realistic.
“People have gone around calling me diva and prima donna. Then I say… you do know that the prima donna is the first lady, don’t you? You know that diva is a woman of destiny? So thank you.”
“Then I embrace that, I teach that, and this platform gives spread, more ears to reach and more hearts to reach, more souls to free, it might be stifling in some way but I think I’m preaching the gospel of significance, so I don’t regret it.”
Diva or prima donna, clearly one of the few to see life beyond the greasepaint.
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