Connie Masilo-Matsunyane is one of South Africa’s hottest soap opera stars. BAFANA KHUMALO followed her trail and uncovered the real Connie
SHE seems thrown by a voice on the other side of the cellular phone requesting, nay demanding with desperation, an interview the following day. But she recovers quite quickly, explaining that she can only meet a day or two after that. Connie Masilo- Matsunyane, one of South Africa’s rising queens of the small screen, one of the cheerful continuity faces in between programmes on SABC1, and bad girl Karabo Moroka in the soap opera Generations on the same channel.
A few days later, at the SABC canteen, she orders a vitamin-filled fruit juice, almost in silent admonition of my strong, dark coffee. She launches into the tale of a long journey from Kimberley where she was born in 1970…
When she was five years old her parents moved to Botswana and her greatest concern at the time was trying to speak Setswana as spoken by the Batswana people: “Having grown up speaking Afrikaans I found it very difficult to adapt to this new language.” Her father, originally hailing from Botswana, had decided to return home and take his family with him. What he had not counted on was his family’s unwillingness to accept his coloured bride from South Africa – particularly considering that a bride had already been chosen for him by the family.
He moved away again and ended up in Lobatse, where he and his family spend most of their time. It was there, in a local karate dojo, that he would train with the gawky, tomboyish Connie who was so thin that he thought she had tuberculosis. “I don’t know how many check-ups I had,” she recalls.
And it was there that Masilo senior first entered his daughter in a beauty pageant. She sees my raised eyebrow and explains that although her father was in many ways a very strict, there was also another side to him. “We had so many rules like not going out during the week, but he was very open. He also probably thought that by entering me in this pageant I would be less shy than I was at the time.”
This bit of creative child-rearing seems to have worked wonders, for the young Connie went on to win the furniture shop-sponsored pageant. The minor triumph had her sent to Johannesburg to compete in the regional – Southern African – leg of the contest. Part of the winning prize – which, of course, included furniture – was a braiding course at a hairdressing school in Johannesburg.
Moving away from her family in semi-rural Lobatse to live with a relative in Soweto was traumatic: “After a week I wanted to go back home, ” she says of the experience. She stayed in Emdeni township, considered by some to be a particularly violent part of the already violent cluster of townships. Traveling to and from the centre of town was not a walk in the park either: “People would talk and I could not understand a word of what they were saying.” Growing up in unilingual Botswana was not much of a qualification to deal with the multiplicity of cultures in Soweto.
This was, however, not the end of the world for a very young Connie who, through her new-found contacts in the growing television industry, had happened to hear of auditions being held for a local television drama. She won the lead role – something which still seems to surprise her ten years later. “All I thought I would be doing in South Africa was to do my braiding course and then go back home and here I was getting a lead in a major television production.”
This was the beginning of her extraordinary success in the television drama industry. A success that has seen her included in seemingly every second drama churned out by the extremely prolific – and distinctly uncreative – African language drama department of the SABC. A success that has her appearing in two disparate dramatic roles at the same time: as an upwardly mobile doctor with a social conscience in the series Soul City and as a truly bad girl in Generations. “With the doctor in Soul City, that character is like Connie and therefore not difficult to play.” The real rider was playing Karabo Moroka – a spoilt brat who ends up in the clutches of a destructive drug habit.
“I don’t smoke or drink and I don’t have any friends I know to be taking drugs … I really had to search deep inside myself to find that desperation. The inability to leave the character in the studio was another obstacle. Sometimes I would go home and find myself shivering as I would have been playing a scene where she was experiencing withdrawal symptoms.” As if that wasn’t enough, the character’s violent mood swings proved just as difficult. “I sometimes wonder what method actors go through,” she says, half to herself.
She gathers her belongings as she tells that in addition to her continuity work, she is in the process of negotiating a radio job. “Until the contract is signed, I cannot say which radio station though.”
It seems the gawky girl from Lobatse has finally arrived in the big city.