It was in South Africa’s home-grown soap operas that we first began to get a glimpse of how a post-apartheid society might look — albeit through middle-class lenses.
Starting with eGoli in 1992, followed later by Generations and Isidingo, and then Backstage and 7de Laan in this decade, soapies have bubbled up to provide a never-never land of aspirations: a place where apartheid and post-apartheid realities cannot enter and where painful apartheid memories are flattened and rewritten.
South African soap opera fans, like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, negotiate their society through the parallel stories of the families or communities portrayed in the programmes. Internationally, there are two favourite soapie moments: the wedding (which viewers often understand as ”the family is happy and content”) and the separation or kidnapping (read as ”all is not well”).
Our soapies provide those moments frequently and graphically. In eGoli, AndrÃ