THE BIG READ
A SOAPIE FOR ALL SEASONS
Suidooster tells stories that need telling
Barakallahu laka wa baaraka ’alaika wa jama’a bainakuma fi khair.” It’s with this du’a (prayer) that Suidooster gives SA the pleasure of witnessing a Muslim wedding on screens for the first time in our country’s television history. And with those words, Carmen (Desiré Gardner) and Rhafiek (Irshaad Ally) are locked in an interracial and interfaith love. The cast members fulfil their duties as guests, dressed in traditional threads. But their best adornments are their smiles. This moment is clearly sincerely meaningful not just to the characters, but to the people who play them.
Undoubtedly, a similar semblance of joy sparks a warm glow in the hearts of viewers at home, who are witnessing what they have witnessed so many times before, only this time, the moment is being shared with approximately 400,000 other pairs of eyes all over the country. Old eyes, young eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes. Every race, every religion, every culture is watching.
This scene is one of the many that make Suidooster a soapie for all seasons.
In 2014 kykNET issued a brief calling for a soapie catering to the Cape audience. Bradley Joshua, the show’s executive producer, and Jaco Loubscher of Homebrew films, nursed a narrative with a difference: a show that would illustrate an aspirational coloured community. There is no lie here, such communities do in fact exist. Doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, property developers. These are not foreign professions among our people, they’re just silent ones that hardly ever make their way to primetime television.
“The pitch was firm in its responsibility to represent our lived realities. Our people are diverse and we reasoned for a fresh perspective,” says Joshua.
He’s an earnest man with constantly thinking eyes. His body is seated in his uncluttered office, but it’s clear his mind roves enthusiastically on set.
Every word he speaks is firm with conviction. “We are a people tortured by the stereotype of humour and a certain kind of aesthetic. The gangster on the corner, the drug dealer, and this show’s main purpose is to debunk myths.”
And so it does. But don’t get the wrong idea. The storylines are not tainted with the romanticism of illusion. Lives lived on Suidooster are faced with the same challenges they’re faced with off-screen and care is taken to address each one — like addiction or domestic abuse.
Beyond Joshua’s door the passages and alleyways of Atlantic Studios in Cape Town are abuzz. Exiting the office, I enter another world. Yellow doors are marked with massive signs — Casting. Makeup. Hare (hair).
My anxiety peaks when I come face to face with Jill Levenberg, who floats about in a gown and comfy shoes. “Ellen Pakkies, Ellen Pakkies, Ellen Pakkies, ” my head is wild with fan-girling. Levenberg recently delivered one of the most powerful performances in South African cinema as the lead in Ellen: the Ellen Pakkies story. In Suidooster she heartily fills the role of Mymoena Samsodien.
You know a Mymoena when you see one. She’s in all our families. The unselfish, lovable aunty standing in the kitchen, knee-deep in concern for her family and her food all at once. All you want to do when you see Mymoena is hug her. She looks like a good hugger.
And I can confirm that she is. The proof is in Levenberg, who embraces me warmly once I finally muster up the courage to compliment her.
Levenberg’s success in Suidooster as well as a film industry hungry for stories of brown people is reflective of a market that has finally taken the gap. This is confirmed when I chat to another stalwart in the industry, Denise Newman.
Newman is no stranger to the ebbs and flows of the acting world. She has gracefully ridden the tides of change, from her early years in apartheid SA to her role as Bridgette Adams, an upperclass woman with a dark secret.
“At the end of the day it’s about the money. And finally the industry has realised the need for these stories,” she says.
Back in the 1970s and ’80s, Newman had no issue with saying no to roles that didn’t fit her political identity. “It’s always been a conscious decision of mine to not get caught up in stereotypes,” she says, cut short by a cast member who twirls in front of us in a red ballgown. The actors are preparing to shoot the New Year’s Eve episode on set downstairs.
Newman continues once the young actress has danced her way through the door: “We can’t get stuck in playing that same image of ourselves.” While she speaks, her hands are busy with the intricacies of the knot she is fixing around her waist on her blush-pink silk gown.
Haji Mohamed Dawjee is blown away by a show whose stories go beyond stereotypes
‘It is so nice for once to show the rest of SA how we live, where we come from and how we grew up’
Cydwyn Joel, another iconic face in the TV industry, echoes a similar sentiment when it comes to embracing the opportunity to play someone more authentic, someone more like “who I really am”, he says.
Joel plays the role of AB, a doting father in Suidooster and the patriarch of a Muslim family. Even though the actor is not Muslim, there’s a great degree of pride and comfort in playing AB.
“This is the first show that features a Muslim family. It’s historical. Why wouldn’t I want to be involved in something like this?” he says.
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know how many white people have ever heard the words shukran (thanks) or alhamdulillah
(praise be to Allah) before those words were scripted into this show.
Becoming AB is not a giant leap for Joel. “You know, in District Six, we grew up with Muslim people, we have them in our families even. Our cultures are so mixed and it is so nice for once to show the rest of SA how we live, where we come from and how we grew up.”
But his most passionate point, one that he shares with clarity, is about language. Hands flailing like those of a conductor reaching for final ascent, Joel says: “It’s so nice, for once, that people get to see how we speak. And why must we be ashamed of that? For so long, I have been expected to speak Afrikaans a certain way. I have been treated as though my Afrikaans, or a coloured Afrikaans, is less than the Afrikaans spoken by say … people from Pretoria. But it’s not. It’s real. And rich.
And I don’t have to be ashamed of that.”
Few books have been written about the hues of the Cape communities. History has robbed our people of their narratives, isolating them on the sidelines of stereotype. But where books fail us, pop culture persists, and Suidooster is the benchmark for a future filled with stories colouring beyond a host of politically imposed lines.
Outside of the Muslim marriages there is aspiration, and the passions that play in lives of a South African demographic we seldom get to see. Outside of the dynamic dialects of the Afrikaans language that sing to the ear, Suidooster is a mutual romance between a city and its people who have a host of beautiful stories to tell.