“All of these identities converge on what I feel defines me most deeply,” she says. “Being a storyteller.”

That definition has taken her far: a Brett Goldin Bursary residency at the Royal Shakespeare Company, two Kanna Theatre Awards, a debut play that sold out in Vienna and Basel — and now, seven sold-out shows across Cape Town and Johannesburg for her production BLING!

Has she allowed herself to say she’s really good at this? She laughs. “I’m not sure if I have gotten to that point yet … maybe I never will.”

But those seven shows gave her something else. “It did cause me enough pause to consider that I might be doing something very right.”

The seed of BLING! was planted not in a theatre but in a Beyoncé and Jay-Z advertisement. Watching their 2021 Tiffany & Co campaign, Ngaba recognised the famous canary diamond, extracted from the Kimberley mines in 1877, not far from where her maternal family is from.

“I remember thinking: I wonder if I will ever get a chance to wear it … or even see it in person? Surely it isn’t such a ridiculous notion … that someone associated with the very place from which it was extracted should be able to wear it?”

The absurdity of that question became the engine of everything. She decided to become the diamond herself.

By the time she was awarded the Market Theatre Barney Simon Residency in 2024, she had already been performing the character of Phatsima Khullinan in public, testing the appetite, building a fearlessness around the idea. The archive deepened the work further — a photograph of her great-aunt Ruth Mompati alongside American political activist Angela Davis at a miners’ workers conference in Namibia.

“I love the process of combing through the archive and creating stories that reflect and refract as the archive does.”

From residency to rehearsal to stage, it “has been nothing short of thrilling”.

BLING! holds colonialism, repatriation and genuine comedy in the same frame. That balance, Ngaba is clear, is a matter of craft — hers and her director Ilana Dlangalala-Cilliers’.

“She directed and designed the show with such fine precision that it all became possible and beautiful to watch. She is immensely talented.”

South African audiences, when the show finally arrived, did not hesitate.

“People at home have completely adopted it as a story of their own and have demanded that it return already.”

As for the people still holding the actual Cullinan?

“Bring back our diamond. Also, bring me to London to perform this show there. It makes perfect sense. Then let’s go even more worldwide — this show is a wide conversation on global mineral history, it resonates just about everywhere.”

The sentiment couldn’t be truer and the industry has taken note: a Best Actress win at the Stellenbosch Toyota Woordfees, followed by a nomination in the same category at the 2026 Kyknet Fiestas — recognition she describes as “confirmation of acknowledgement of years and years of hard work from my peers and people. There is nothing better or more humbling.”

What comes next is more work — performing, researching, writing and what she calls “my bold foray into cinema”. She is open, she says, to all that is meant for her. After a diamond, it turns out, there is everything.

Wanted

Netflix’s much-anticipated series The Polygamist has just premiered and Gumede, who plays the lead role, is running on anticipation and very little sleep.

“I’ve always wanted a role like this,” she says. “People would tell me I was a good actress and I’d think, ‘No, you don’t actually know how good I am yet.’ This is the role that lets people see.”

She has an easy confidence and an open book quality that is disarming and instantly inviting. She tells me it is her default personality setting, learnt early in life. Born in KwaZulu-Natal, Gumede grew up between worlds. Politics, family obligations and circumstances meant a childhood spent moving constantly.

She attended nine schools, including boarding school, where her easy manner and adaptable nature became a survival skill. “When you’ve changed schools that many times, you learn confidence,” she says. “You learn that life is always moving and that you have to move with it.”

It was also a childhood lived against the backdrop of turbulent political years. As the daughter of the late National Freedom Party founder Zanele kaMagwaza-Msibi, who previously served as chair of the IFP, she grew up acutely aware of danger.

At the age of nine she discovered she could make herself cry on cue and delighted in convincing adults of imaginary dramas

She recalls overhearing conversations about political violence and worrying constantly about her mother’s safety. “There was a time my mother came home with a bullet hole in her car,” she says matter-of-factly. “Being away at boarding school was scary because I was always wondering what was happening at home.”

Yet it was her mother’s courage that shaped her most profoundly. “She taught me not to take nonsense lying down. She taught me not to be fearful.”

Acting entered her life early. At the age of nine she discovered she could make herself cry on cue and delighted in convincing adults of imaginary dramas. “When my mother believed me, I’d stop and ask, ‘So was that good? Do you think I can act?’”

Her mother saw the spark immediately and encouraged it. By high school Gumede was winning drama competitions and collecting awards. There was talk of law school, as there often is in ambitious families, but acting never loosened its grip.

So she set her sights on the US. At 19 she left for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. It was a leap of faith, not only for her but for her mother, who had watched her rebellious teenage years with understandable concern.

“I’d been giving my mother grey hairs,” she laughs. “I was naughty. Not criminal, just naughty.”

In Los Angeles, however, something shifted. “I focused completely,” she says. “I understood what it cost my mother to send me there. Every dollar mattered.”

Living in California was transformative. The Hollywood dream suddenly became tangible. “You’d see people you recognised from television and realise they’re just human beings. It made everything feel possible.”

It also reinforced her belief in the power of imagination. “Everything I said I wanted to do, I’ve done. It taught me how powerful your words are.”

My acting coach used to say that life problems are acting problems. Every loss, every joy, every experience becomes part of the artist

Gugu Gumede

A chance encounter with veteran producer Dumisani Dlamini convinced her that South Africa still held opportunities. She returned home, determined to build a career before heading back abroad. But life had other plans. Shortly after her return, her mother suffered a devastating stroke. Gumede stayed. “It became clear why I was meant to be home.”

Seven years later, in 2021, her mother died from Covid-related complications. The experience changed Gumede profoundly.

“When you lose someone who is your everything, it changes you.”

That grief, she believes, ultimately deepened her craft. “My acting coach used to say that life problems are acting problems. Every loss, every joy, every experience becomes part of the artist.”

The years that followed were marked by steady work and persistence. From her breakout role on Generations to a succession of acclaimed television performances, Gumede quietly built one of the industry’s most impressive careers. It wasn’t always easy.

“When I started, people would say I only got opportunities because of who my mother was. But I studied this. I trained for this. I worked for this.”

Today, few would question her credentials. Which brings us to The Polygamist. The series explores modern polygamy through the eyes of the women caught inside it. Gumede plays Joyce, whose seemingly perfect life begins to unravel as her husband’s appetite for multiple relationships becomes impossible to ignore. What fascinated her most was that the story refuses to romanticise the situation. “This isn’t really about traditional polygamy,” she says. “It’s about women dealing with the consequences of men’s choices.”

She lights up discussing Joyce’s evolution. “At the beginning she’s soft and trusting. Then you watch her find her power. Her voice changes. Her posture changes. She becomes someone completely different.”

The role resonates personally. Gumede’s own father was a polygamist, as was her maternal grandfather. “So I understood the world.”

What excites her most is seeing women respond to the story. “We usually hear the man’s side. This time we hear all the women’s sides.”

Sunday Times Lifestyle

As the Encounters Documentary Festival entered its second week in Johannesburg and Cape Town, I watched a range of films that might each be described as “political”, but that vary widely in their methods and moods — and that have different, albeit complementary, ends in sight.

Declaring its ideological credentials in its title, Marxism and Period Pains by Mmabatho Montsho makes an urgent case for the recognition of the many ways in which women’s health and women’s labour are simultaneously ignored, taken for granted and exploited under capitalism. Interviewing women who are (among other pursuits) academics, unionists, school learners, athletes, artists and entrepreneurs, Montsho weaves a tale that is both poetic and polemical.

Making effective use of stop-frame animation and dwelling cinematically on the Edenic image of Eve’s apple — sometimes ironically and sometimes lyrically — the film rejects the originary patriarchal archetype of menstruation as a woman’s “curse” and challenges the everyday dismissal of dysmenorrhoea. It turns instead to solutions to the clash between “the production of eggs” through “the labour of ovaries” and the “productive labour” women must undertake to secure income: destigmatise women’s reproductive health, introduce menstrual leave, and protect workers’ rights.

In Amílcar, the combination of Marxism and poetry takes a different turn. Miguel Eek’s tribute to freedom fighter, farmer and intellectual Amílcar Cabral proceeds in leisurely fashion, splicing archive material with imagistic footage as Cabral’s own words (taken from private letters and soapbox speeches) bring coherence to the picture.

Born to Cape Verdean parents on the Guinea-Bissau mainland, Cabral’s great mission was to unite Lusophone West Africans and to liberate them from Portuguese rule. He was assassinated less than a year before Guinea-Bassau’s unilateral declaration of independence. While Cabral has become an icon of pan-Africanism and is seen as a martyr of anticolonial struggle — like Neil Aggett, subject of The Hour After Midnight, another film on the Encounters programme — Amílcar opts for an elegiac rather than a strident tone in treating his life and death.

Portuguese conquest is in the prehistory of another anticapitalist, anti-imperialist documentary, Olinda’s Golden Arches (directed by Douglas Henrique). This quirky Brazilian short film does not go that far back, but it does start with a brisk tour through the Cold War and reminds us of one of the symbols of its supposed end: the opening of a McDonald’s in Moscow in 1990, when more than 30,000 Muscovites queued up for tasteless hamburgers.

This is necessary context, Henrique argues in his jocular voiceover, for understanding how Brazilian politics in the early 2000s was encapsulated by a mayoral campaign in the coastal city of Olinda. Here, communist candidate Luciana Santos was up against crony capitalist incumbent Jacilda Urquiza. It just so happens that there was also a gastronomic, cultural and economic battle under way, as a McDonald’s franchise was forced on heritage-proud Olinda.

In short, as Henrique tells us, “Great minds think alike — and Jacilda’s was aligned with Ronald McDonald.” Santos won the election. Coincidentally, not long afterwards Olinda became “the first city in the world to bankrupt a McDonald’s”. But, like Hydra’s head, two new branches have since grown there.

If Henrique makes his point through whimsy and rapid-fire humour, Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman adopt the opposite approach to their subject in Nuisance Bear. This slow, beautiful film immerses the viewer in the snowy scenes of northern Manitoba, Canada, where humans and animals find themselves at odds.

Tourists flock to the town of Churchill to go on polar bear safaris. More than 300km up the Hudson Bay coast, Inuit families in the community of Arviat experience polar bears as a daily threat, rather than as the sacred counterparts their forebears hunted and respected. Climate change is pushing the bears south in greater numbers and increasing the likelihood of Avinnaarjuk: “nuisance bears”, adolescents who have been separated from their mothers too early.

There is no comforting end to this story. The film’s Inuit narrator, Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, describes polar bears as visitors who come to us from the past. But their future looks bleak.

Both Jephta and Matsunyane are Standard Bank Young Artist Award winners for Theatre in 2019 and 2023, respectively. And Jephta is the co-editor of Contemporary Plays by African Women (2019) with Yvette Hutchison, published by Bloomsbury for the Methuen Drama Play Collections. At the time of publication, there was a scarcity of published plays by women in Africa. The status quo persists. The editors noted that women playwrights are very productive in creating new works for the stage and are active in many community projects, but there is a significant imbalance in what is published by women in Africa.

This is the literary milieu within which Matsunyane’s book titled Plays by MoMo Matsunyane Vol 1 exists. But it also exists within an environment where South African theatre specialist publishers such as Diartskonageng, a publishing house by Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre 2017 Monageng Vice Motshabi, have an agenda to shift things. In addition to Plays by MoMo Matsunyane, the publisher’s roster includes an anthology of contemporary plays by South African women titled Hauntings, a partnership with The Writers’ Lab SA.

“The publishing of MoMo’s work is a partnership between MoMo and myself, based on years of collaboration and mutual support but defined primarily by a shared compulsion to rebel and to make work driven by resistance as an agenda,” Motshabi says.

Matsunyane’s writing sits in the mode of township theatre, which allows her to provocatively reflect the harsh realities of young women’s lived experiences in a visceral and colourful way. For her, “it is a gritty, raw, beautifully tragic and unfiltered theatrical world which gives us a chance to see how geographical and spatial oppression has had an impact on how we process inherited systemic trauma in today’s world”, she says.

She contributes to a lineage of township theatre playwrights such as Gibson Kente, Paul Grootboom and Selaelo Maredi.

“The publication of black theatre or township theatre plays in South Africa was political in the literary landscape because many of these plays were created for playing rather than for reading. And so, their publication becomes an archival activism because it is important to not only document what they did but make it accessible for transmission into the future,” says cultural scholar and performance artist Nondumiso Msimanga, who contributed a contextual introduction to the book.

“MoMo fits into this type of storytelling tradition, where plays like Have You Seen Zandile? by Gcina Mhlophe also reside. It’s a world of storying and performing that is important to have in publications because, even though Mhlophe’s work is not classified as township theatre, it has become part of the canon of black South African theatre, which values playmaking as much as the written play.”

Many of these plays were created for playing rather than for reading ... so, their publication becomes an archival activism because it is important to not only document what they did, but make it accessible for transmission into the future.

Nondumiso Msimanga, cultural scholar and performance artist

Together with contemporaries like Jefferson Tshabalala, Matsunyane’s employment of township theatre reveals it to be a site for new language development and artistic innovation. She works with the youthful township storytelling form, Maskitla as the framework for her theatre-making and writing process.

“Maskitla is a township storytelling game we played when we were young which has evolved over time. Originally, we’d draw boxes representing houses on the ground and allocate stones to each box. These stones — which represented the different characters, including the narrator — would be moved around according to how the story unfolded. I transpose this model on to stage and my writing,” Matsunyane says.

“It really allowed me as a child to access the scale of my imagination. In my most recent years as a creator, it’s become a valuable tool to uncover story, unpack characters and improvise.”

The plays included in the book are the two one-handers, Penny and Unlearn, as well as the award-winning ensemble production Ka Lebitso La Moya. They work with tragedy and comedy as fluid sides of the same coin. Unlearn (with Matsunyane as writer, performer and director) and Ka Lebitso La Moya (as writer and director) showcase Matsunyane’s vigour in settling into her artistic style. Both plays interrogate young women’s bodies as sites of violence and how the church, with society’s enabling, adds to the damage.

Matsunyane incorporates dark stand-up comedy (another passion of hers) into Unlearn in a gritty and raw script that allows her immersion and improvisation on stage. What could be mistaken as caricature is the visceral texture and colour of township life that is as charming as it is trauma-ridden. The comic-tragedy in Ka Lebitso La Moya weaves in irony and music to drive its dramatic point. In a somewhat Brechtian manner Matsunyane’s protagonists don’t get justice, so you’re left with the discomfort of the realities of the world we inhabit.