Man’s world, even on Housewives
In the 30 years that reality TV has existed it has often found success in three main elements that dominate even in the world of soapies and telenovelas that SA audiences most prefer. The show needs a hero – often quick-witted and exuberant, they have a lexicon that’s easily adopted into the modern day slang. They also need a villain, a melodramatic and reactionary cast member whose pettiness becomes the stuff that inspires instant viral memes. Most importantly, the reality show needs a story arc, something that the audience can keep coming back for.
In the case of the smash hit The Real Housewives of Durban, it is the heartbreaking story of two women who come together and face the legacy of a man they both loved very much. The first is businesswoman Ayanda Ncwane, who instantly sparkles on TV.
Ncwane’s flair for making an entrance and infectious one-liners quickly made her the hero of the show – especially with the levelheaded response to meeting her late husband and gospel sensation Sifiso Ncwane’s former flame that he left pregnant.
This old flame is Nonku Williams, a ditsy entrepreneur whose past at the hand of an abusive husband seeps through her interactions with her cast mates. There are numerous tear-jerker moments from the two women as they figure out how to reconcile their two worlds.
The reunion, which is the matric dance of all reality shows. The best outfits and all the drama come to a head. In an unexpected twist, Williams’s mother, The Queen, is invited to join the reunion to deliver heavy news.
Ncwane and Williams agreed to allow Williams’s daughter to take her father’s name earlier in the season. A fitting request considering she carries Wiliams’s abusive ex-husband’s surname and is a living reincarnation of her biologica father.
It is all soured by The Queen who reveals, and not surprisingly so, that there is a cultural process that must take place of damages, which Sifiso agreed to before his death. The person who must pay this debt is his widow.
Before the reunion drama, Williams and Ncwane never played up to the stereotype of them as two black women on a reality show or just two black women of the world. They broke the mould that limits women to being angry, hysterical and unable to resolve anything without resorting to pettiness.
It’s proof that women seem more than capable of resolving issues when men are either not involved or their rules do not apply.
Nevertheless, we get what could arguably be The Real Housewives franchise’s most vile villain. Williams’s austerity throughout Ncwane’s breakdown as she received the news of Sifiso’s damages was not only a sign of a calculated person but someone who knew that bringing the issue to a reality TV show would leave her foe between a rock and a hard place.
Many of our customs are sacred and not meant to be discussed willy nilly on reality TV, something Ncwane should have known. Having lost a mother in the same season Ncwane became an open book that could easily be rewritten by the wicked Williams family.
While her brother Phupho Gumede K admonished the unreasonable request, Ncwane was frustrated about being trapped into an answer as Sifiso had other children out of wedlock. This would ultimately change their stance as well.
The Williams family, which has much to gain financially from the world of mass consumed religion, stands to gain a lot from the link between the late Sifiso and whatever fortunes he left behind, especially the fortunes that old men can negotiate behind closed doors with rigid gendered lines.
It is this same world that the women of the Williams family have to navigate with a cold and shrewd approach. Their survival depends on playing the game.
What The Real Housewives has done in its explosive debut season has exposed the ridiculousness of cultural expectations. Society will always favour men. And even when they are grown, the privilege with which they can be irresponsible with pants below their knees often throws yokes on their wives’ shoulders.
Many men often leave their households where women have to raise the children by themselves, yet somehow crucial decisions are left to men over whiskey and bouts of blowing their own horns.
Would it not unburden women like Ayanda Ncwane and many others if they became leaders instead?
It’s time to stop “calling the uncles” and rather time to start calling the aunties instead.