Sthandiwe’s ministry of positivity
● Sthandiwe Kgoroge is the kind of woman who looks like she could break out into a warm, expansive and welcome hug at any moment.
She has the kind of EQ that feels like she has a direct line to the inner workings of your soul and will put it all right given half a minute — which is why she is particularly pleased to be cast as a villain.
Her latest role is in Redemption, a new telenovela on BET, in which she plays a member of a corrupt family that runs a church.
“She’s the baddy but justifiably so. She’s been done wrong; she loved a lot. I won’t give too much away. As an actress you draw from everything.
“As I was sitting here I was already observing, you know, watching people as they walk in. I create storylines in my head — like he looks so stressed, why? And the poor guy is probably just following the stock market.
“You have to be so observant and you take things in and you keep them in. I call it the hard drive. And then suddenly you get a character and then you draw from that.”
The innocent characters in Sthandiwe’s internal storyline are gathered for her entertainment at Croft & Co, the super-stylish neighbourhood café in Parkview.
The interiors have a glamorous Viennain-the-1930s element to them, but without losing the essential quality of being your local. Croft is buzzing with worker bees and the lunch crowd. I opt for breakfast – I love their scrambled eggs. Stha has a delicious lentil and halloumi salad. We stick to coffee and speculative fiction.
Sthandiwe tells me she feels vaguely guilty about representing the church in a bad, albeit nuanced, light. She is, after all, a pastor’s daughter. Her father was a theologian whose studies took him and his family to the US. She was born in Ohio and later spent time in Edmonton, Canada, before the family settled in Mapumulo.
“It is in northern KwaZulu-Natal, very rural. There was a Lutheran seminary, a college for pastors where my dad taught. It was so beautiful because there was such a mix of people and culture.
“When people say I always make friends so easily, I think it is because of my upbringing. There would be a pastor from Norway, a pastor from Germany, a lecturer from Limpopo.”
Later they ended up at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, so Stha’s social grace and her embracing perspective have deep roots in the experience of living in such diverse communities.
She studied drama and sociology and was a trainee producer at the SABC when she drove a friend to audition for Generations.
“I was chilling in the car, waiting for her, when I started talking to somebody in the parking lot who turned out to be the producer, and he said: ‘What do you do? Why aren’t you auditioning too?’ I said I was training to be a producer at the SABC. But he was persistent, so I did, and I think because I wasn’t fearful, I was just having fun, I was ‘OK, let’s do this’, I ended up getting the job. And we are still friends.”
We decide not to talk too much about her husband, actor Tony Kgoroge, and their three children, other than to confirm my impression of them as the ultimate tag team playing the long game for more than 20 years.
Sthandiwe has the quality of extreme calm in the eye of the storm. When I realise how many projects she is juggling I get a little tired. Never mind that she also runs a wonderful vintage upcycling fashion business just for fun. Have I mentioned she is probably the most stylish woman I know?
She is in Akin Omotoso’s The Brave Ones on Netflix, and several exciting projects are in development for which she is directing and producing.
“I was just recently on a panel for the National Theatre & Film Foundation where we are working on the women’s transformation agenda to really enhance where women are in the industry now. We have not progressed. I mean there have been steps in terms of scriptwriting, directing, producing, you see the acting, but you can literally count the women directors on your hands.
“We’ve seen all these amazing womenled projects, so it’s not just about pushing women for the sake of pushing women, but because they are amazing creatives like anyone else and just as capable.
“My dream is to act when I want to act, create as a director, producer as much as I want to. I must be saying here is the concept, let me try and get funding, instead of saying the barriers are such that it can only be once a year.”
I ask how she feels about South Africa and she promptly inspires me to follow her ministry of positivity. “I am doing a 90-day nonegativity cleanse with my daughter. We are on day seven, so you just don’t go to the negative feelings or statements. From the big stuff about the country, to the guy in the traffic behaving badly.
“The hardest one is the compliments. If somebody says ‘I like how you dress’, I always want to deflect it and go to the negative — ‘Oh no, this old thing, these cheap things’ .I am just trying to say thank you now and walk away.”