Ms.
@AphiweMame • 8,016 subscribers
Culture Writer | Cartoons & Cereal | Umgcini Wamaxesha | Slytherin 🐍
Shorts
Videos
🏳️🌈Pride Month 📺SABC 1: After 9 (2007-2013) After 9 arrived at a fascinating moment in South Africa. On paper, the country had some of the world's most progressive protections for LGBTQIA+ people. But as we know, what is written in the Constitution and what happens around the dinner table are often two very different things. The show understood that gap. Its characters weren't just struggling with their sexuality; they were navigating family expectations, cultural pressures, career ambitions and the performance of being the "right kind" of man. SABC+ SABC 1
Ms.570,908 views • 2 months ago
📺 Emzini Wezinsizwa S3 EP5 (1997) Watching this scene again, I'm struck by how it captures a South Africa still learning the language of the new democracy. Tshawe jokingly calls Chirwali an "alien" while contrasting him with ANC exiles returning home. The tensions around mobility were already there, but the vocab was still forming. The confidence the series had in Black conversation *chefs kiss* It trusted viewers to recognise political references without explanatory dialogue. It believed ordinary Black life was already intellectually rich enough to sustain comedy.
Ms.69,737 views • 19 days ago
📺City Ses’la (2005-2010) -Clever use of physical comedy -The writing; humour is sometimes dry, direct, and perfectly timed. What seems simple is actually sharp, witty writing that keeps you thinking. -Cultural coding and everyday moments, giving it that effortless “fly-on-the-wall” feel.
Ms.191,990 views • 4 months ago
📽️🎶 After Robot: Kwaito Music in Johannesburg (2002) Every now and again, I return to this short doccie and each time, I’m struck by just how much the artists of the early 2000s carved out new ways of being. It reminds me of how kwaito musicians forged powerful and diverse cultural identities, even while facing systemic barriers in the music industry and a social climate that wasn’t always receptive to the “new wave.”
Ms.352,484 views • 10 months ago
🏳️🌈Pride Month 📺SABC 1: Society (2007-2010) Beth and Thuli's relationship was so important in the history of queer representation on South African television. I'm struck by how quietly groundbreaking their storyline was. At a time when lesbian representation was still rare on mainstream television, SABC audiences were watching a Black lesbian couple navigate love, friendship, visibility and the courage it takes to live openly.
Ms.67,845 views • 2 months ago
📺The Felicia Show (1995-2004) 31 years later, South African actors and Actresses are still speaking about low pay, missing contracts, unpaid royalties, and structural exploitation. To talk about SA pop culture without talking about labour is to tell an incomplete story. What makes this show powerful is what it revealsthis system is durable. The same grievances repeating across generations point to structure, not failure. What’s unsettling isn’t the critique it’s how current it feels.
Ms.161,625 views • 6 months ago
📺 SABC 3: Hard Copy (2005-2017) The show functioned as a site of meaning-making, translating real national anxieties into narrative form. Including events like the 2005 Togolese protests and the Dismissal of Jacob Zuma (14 June 2005), it grounded fiction in lived reality, allowing audiences to negotiate their own interpretations of power, legitimacy, and democracy.
Ms.63,612 views • 3 months ago
📺🧵Fun fact: when Coca-Cola Popstars was announced in 2002, we had no idea we were witnessing the start of a new era. Not just in reality TV, but in SA’s soundscape Let’s start with 101, the OG winners in 2002. The name? “101” the sum of their ages at the time. They showed us we could have an SA boy-girl group with Billboard dreams.
Ms.166,703 views • 1 year ago
📺 TV 1 aka SABC 1 (1995) “Operation Litter” Wits students protesting the dismissal of two campus cashiers accused of letting some customers take items without paying. Student solidarity, post-’94 the fight for justice didn’t end with democracy, it just moved to new frontlines.
Ms.127,311 views • 9 months ago
📺 Vuzu : Top Shayela (2011) TS walked so that vlog culture could run. Early blueprints for the attention economy where visibility itself becomes a form of currency. The show rehearsed what we now recognise as the vlog vernacular: aspirational intimacy, para-social bonds, and prosumer (producer-consumer) culture. It was a starter pack for influencer-era storytelling format migration from TV to timeline.
Ms.125,267 views • 9 months ago
📺 Kwakhala Nyonini (1987) One of the most striking aspects of uMfazi Wephepha (Thembi Nyandeni). Was her unapologetic nature. She was opinionated, assertive, and fiercely independent, traits rarely seen in black women characters on South African television during the 80s. Imo this iconic character not only captivated audiences with her charisma and complexity but also significantly impacted the representation of black women in SA on the small screen.
Ms.135,428 views • 1 year ago
📺 Isidingo: Nandipha Sithole (2000-2011) Part of a deliberate SABC public health strategy, South African television audiences were introduced to one of the most quietly revolutionary characters on our screens: Nandipha Sithole. Portrayed by the talented Hlubi Arnold, she became one of the few characters in mainstream South African TV who openly lived with HIV at a time when stigma was not just social, but deeply political. This was a critical cultural moment. South Africa was in the throes of the HIV/AIDS crisis statistics were staggering, myths and misinformation rampant. For black women, Nandipha’s story broke stereotypes. She wasn’t reduced to her diagnosis. She was smart, ambitious, flawed, loving, and resilient proof that life with HIV could be full and dignified.
Ms.123,203 views • 11 months ago
📺Dutch TV studios (1979) Angela Sibongile Makeba-Lee🕊️ Performing Ngoma Nkurila, I have always regarded Bongi as both inheritor and innovator. Inheritor, b/cuz her voice carried the unmistakable resonance of Miriam Makeba. Innovator, because she transformed that inheritance into something of her own, a diasporic sound, textured by exile and memory Her brief career culminating in her 1980 album, Blow On Wind, belongs to the long genealogy of women whose art carried the weight of political meaning. Sound can be lineage ❤️
Ms.91,045 views • 9 months ago
📺When We Were Black (2006) A seminal moment in South African television. Emerging in the early years of post-apartheid broadcasting, the series reopened the psychic and political wounds of black life under apartheid, using the intimacy of television to re-stage a national trauma. This scene captures the essence of what the show set out to do to make visible the quiet violences of apartheid that lived in the body, the home, the street. It’s not an act of physical brutality that shocks us here, but the psychic one the destruction of dignity, the forced performance of inferiority, the way the state choreographed humiliation as a means of control. To me the humiliation of Fisto’s father becomes a meditation on Black masculinity. Under apartheid, manhood was systematically stripped of authority and autonomy. In this scene, the father’s forced “dance” becomes a metaphor for survival under surveillance how Black men had to contort themselves to stay alive, even as they lost face in front of their children. Yet in showing that collapse, the series dignifies it naming the pain that shaped generations of fathers and sons. Nearly twenty years later, the scene still lands like a gut punch.
Ms.84,780 views • 9 months ago