S Our brother killed himself with poison ...he was 18
TRICTLY star Oti Mabuse, who has proved a huge hit with viewers on new BBC reality show The Greatest Dancer, has been nursing a personal heartbreak .
Her older brother never lived to see what a success she would become because he committed suicide by taking poison at the age of just 18.
Oti, 28, appears alongside fellow dance captains Cheryl Tweedy and Matthew Morrison on the Saturday night contest.
The Strictly Come Dancing pro has two sisters and she is close to both. But their family suffered the tragedy of half-brother Neo’s suicide as they were growing up in the South African township of Mabopane, near the capital Pretoria.
His death meant that they were shunned by superstitious locals who thought it would bring bad luck to anyone associating with the family.
Oti’s older sister Motsi, a professional dancer on a German show called Let’s Dance, said: “He killed himself with a poison. And because the people of Africa are very religious and superstitious, something bad arose in our neighbourhood. With the suicide of Neo, our family was seen as one with negative energy.
“Because of this rumour, no one came to us any more, because it was feared that the bad energy applied to the visitor.”
Motsi is still at a loss to explain what drove Neo to poison himself but she cites the fact that he still remembered when the family lived in poorer circumstances and found it very difficult to adjust when B they went up in the world. orn when their mum Dudu was still a teenager, he had a different father to Oti, Motsi and middle sister Phemelo. The young mum and baby lived with her mother and clergyman father in Kraalhoek, in South Africa’s Northwest province, until she met young lawyer Peter Mabuse and then became pregnant with Motsi.
With her father’s encouragement, they married but in the early days were so poor they had to live with an aunt in Mmabatho, a two-hour drive away.
A year later, in 1982, when Phemelo was born, the family moved 150 miles away to the township of Mabopane where they lived in relative comfort. Peter’s legal career went from strength to strengthand today he is a High Court judge in Pretoria.
“Neo had witnessed the rise of my parents,” said Motsi, 38, in her book Chili in the Blood: My Dance Through Life, which has been published in Germany.
“He still remembered the cramped life, which for us younger siblings was more of a narrative than a truly experienced reality.”
Their mother also had a good job as a nursery school teacher, so the family could afford a house with “several rooms and a garden”.
But they were still a black family in apartheid South Africa and when Oti was born in 1990, it would be another four years before Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black leader and the savagely racist system was finally dismantled.
Motsi remembers all the sisters having to take a local community minibus to
their convent school because they were not allowed on whites-only public transport. She also remembers township riots and, while her parents were not involved in politics, she recalls hiding in her room when police came to ask questions. “We always knew when riots had broken out because we weren’t allowed to leave the house, even to go to school,” she wrote in her book. “Then the next day, when I was back on the school bus, I could see it was still burning everywhere and cars had been knocked over.” When police came to the house and asked her father questions “we children had to disappear into our rooms so we didn’t get anything from the conversations”.
The family believe that for Neo this was all too much. “I think all the changes had overwhelmed him a little bit, everything had seemed difficult to him,” said Motsi.
“He had gone to a private school but he had surrounded himself with people you might call ‘false friends’. It was a tough time for all of us, but especially M for my mum.’ otsi said his suicide came shortly after Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, which marked the beginning of the end for apartheid.
Oti, whose full name is Otlile, was just a tot at the time and she became the apple of everyone’s eye, helping to heal the family’s grief.
From an early age, all three girls showed a talent for dancing that they inherited from their mother and it was clear from the start that Oti had the star presence that has made her a hit on Strictly and now on The Greatest Dancer. She has told how their mum converted an empty office into her own dance studio because there were no dance schools her girls could attend.
“We were the wow girls, the showgirls – all three,” said Motsi in her book.
“And the biggest diva of all of us, that was Otlile. The name means ‘She has arrived’, and so has she behaved since the day she was born. Of us three girls, she has the greatest confidence, the greatest self-awareness.”
Although she was set on a career as dancer, Oti – who can speak eight languages – trained as civil engineer on leaving school just as a “back up” in case an injury wrecked her prospects.
Her sisters’ attainments are equally impressive – Motsi trained as a lawyer and Phemelo as a mechanical engineer.
“I was dancing when I was four and dancing has always been a part of my life,” said Oti.
“My mum was like, ‘School, school, school and after school you go and dance – no friends. You go to the dance studio – who needs friends?”
In 2012, already a dance champion in South Africa, Oti followed Motsi to Germany before coming to the UK to join Strictly three years later with her Romanian dancepartner husband Marius Lepure, 36. She’s been in the show for four series, coming second in 2016 with Hollyoaks’ star Danny Mac and seventh last year with cricketer Graeme Swann. Now fans are calling her the standout star of Simon Cowell’s new BBC show The Greatest Dancer, with enthusiastic tweets from viewers praising her judging skills and from fellow Strictly pros sending their congratulations. And, of course, plaudits from her family. For Oti, that bond is important. She’s close to Phemelo’s children as well as her sisters and often posts adorable images of them together. But it’s the words she posted online, next to the picture at the top-left of this page, with her mum and siblings when she was a baby, that express it best. She said: “My family always got their hands on me, blessing and take care of each other. “Through tough times, fun times and bad times, I know they’ve got my back... there’s no love like a mother and her children and Oti lost half-brother between siblings.”