A glimpse into Anele Mdoda's engagement party
Kaya 959 host Sizwe Dhlomo, a close friend of Anele, shed light on the matter as the family spokesperson.
'We wish these two incredible people an eternal union, filled with love and fulfilment. We look forward to the next phase of their ceremonies as this was the initial step. In African culture a groom never really concludes lobola, but we are pleased the Mgudlwa royal house of the AbaThembu kingdom have honoured ooHlathi in bringing these two together in this dignified traditional process,' he said.
According to Khaya Dlanga, also a close friend of Anele, the approach ensures the groom remains committed to the union and maintains a strong relationship with both families.
While the lobola negotiations have been finalised, the traditional wedding ceremony will take place at the groom's family home. The couple and their families are excited to move forward with the next phase of their ceremonies, which will include traditional and civil elements.
'To clarify, what took place was not a wedding. It was the final stage of the lobola process, along with a ceremony called ukwamkela abakhwenyana, which is to say the formal acceptance of the groom by the bride's family,' he wrote on X.
'In our isiXhosa custom, lobola is not a one-off payment, even if you can afford to do so. It is supposed to be done in stages and traditionally it is never entirely finished or completed. This is deliberate. It ensures the groom remains present and committed to the union of both families, rather than disappearing once the celebrations are over.
'What happened was the final lobola ceremony and the moment the groom was officially welcomed by Anele's family. In other words, ooMfene were welcoming ooMadiba.
'The traditional wedding has not yet happened because it takes place at the groom's family home. So while the couple are referred to as the bride and groom, this was not the traditional wedding itself.'
As the couple celebrates the significant milestone, they have requested that they not be approached for press engagements related to their marriage.
The families look forward to the traditional and civil ceremonies, which will further solidify their union.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Maverick
10 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Breakfast With Mugabe — laying a ghost to rest, awakening a monster
At a time when authoritarians are having a global moment, Calvin Ratladi, 2025's Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, directs a slow-burn psychological thriller about a liberation hero with a deeply contested legacy. The stage is a divided realm, its representation of Harare State House, circa 2001, visually emerging from the raw earth, bursting up through the rubble and detritus of an African wasteland. The presidential living room, where most of the play's intrigue unfolds, is surrounded by a landscape that's been literally and metaphorically pillaged. First the colonisers came, and then something else: each, in turn, have infiltrated the earth, dug into it, taken from it, poisoned it, left bodies and other secrets buried beneath it. It's in the privileged setting of Robert Mugabe's domestic quarters that we first meet his wife, the malicious and manipulative 'First Shopper', played by Gontse Ntshegang as a woman you don't want to mess with. Slippery, full of machinations, used to getting her way, she struts around the furniture, bending the ear of a white psychiatrist and tobacco farm owner named Peric (Craig Jackson), who has been summoned and is waiting to conduct his initial consultation with the Zimbabwean leader. Grace Mugabe's initial niceties – offering Peric a beverage as she talks him through the president's disturbing visitations by an ngozi, the malevolent spirit of a fallen comrade – unsubtly hints at her own ever-burgeoning self-interest. Along with expensive taste in clothes, she has an instinct for survival and every chance she gets unabashedly tries to persuade the doctor to see her point of view – she needs her husband cured of whatever affliction ails him. Peric, who has treated other Zimbabweans afflicted by unwelcome spirits, is reverential, respectful, polite. Whether or not he recognises his hostess for the viper she is, is unclear. When Mugabe finally enters, you're left with little doubt that this is both a man assailed by some unnatural force – and a tyrant to be feared. 'I have been informed that I will not live forever,' he tells Peric. It's a joke delivered deadpan, but it's also possible to detect in Themba Ndaba, who plays the titular despot, a menacingly unironic desire to rule forever. Also on stage is Zimbabwean-born Farai Chigudu as the bodyguard/secret policeman, Gabriel, who like some well-attired bouncer seems to be forever lurking on stage. His role? Well, he's a bit like 'Chekhov's gun' – if you introduce a musclebound thug in the first scene, there should be thuggish violence somewhere down the line. The production is Breakfast With Mugabe, first directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Sir Antony Sher in 2005. It's now playing at the Market Theatre after a brief debut at Makhanda's National Arts Festival. Directed by Calvin Ratladi, this year's Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, it was penned by the Cambridge-based playwright Fraser Grace, who came across a 2001 newspaper report about the Zimbabwean president receiving treatment from a white psychiatrist. While reports suggested he was being treated for depression, the play imagines that Mugabe was in fact battling a malevolent spirit. The playwright, after watching a performance of Ratladi's production, wrote in the UK's Guardian newspaper that he'd been interested in what might have been at the root of Mugabe's transition from revolutionary hero to dictatorial monster. The play is wordy, dense and fraught with the strangest sort of tension. And, despite the title, breakfast never comes. Cue, instead, a succession of lengthy conversations unpacking not only what might have led to this supernatural stalking, but an unravelling of history with some of the unwritten bits coloured in. While it leaves little doubt as to the rot of paranoia and corruption that's infected Mugabe's regime, it's also a reminder of the colonial context from which that regime emerged. Rather than a one-sided condemnation, the dialogue also digs into Mugabe's bitter memories – such as being refused permission by Ian Smith, in the course of his 11-year imprisonment, to bury his young son. Ratladi, who is 34, was born in Limpopo and grew up in Witbank, the son of a miner, says that 'over the years, as I have been finding myself as an artist, what seems to recur in my work and which I found them paralleled in the play are issues of land, and issues of memory and power'. Those issues are deeply mired in the dialogue, but they are also conveyed in the design. For one thing, Ratladi's own past is right there on the stage, represented by the shattered landscape. 'I grew up in the mines,' he says, 'so what you see is the landscape of my childhood.' Indeed, the representation of the land, this violated earth, in Ratladi's rendition of the play is of something forlorn, quite sombre. Never mind the various people and factions involved, it is the silent earth that has been witness to everything we have done to it in its name: acquiring it, fighting over it, digging it up, drilling into it, taking from it, burying our secrets and the bodies of the dead in it. 'The ground also has its own vibrations,' Ratladi says. 'But there's also violence that's being done on this thing called land. For me, it's a kind of penetration, a violation. And the question arises: how deep into the earth does the system in fact go?' Ratladi says he was drawn to the play by themes close to his heart, fascinated with the idea that 'what this figure of Robert Mugabe was actually grappling with might in fact have been a spiritual issue'. He also wanted to reveal the human side of its characters who are larger-than-life historic figures. He says he had wanted – as a director – to be able to enter into a dialogue with the work and with its author. 'Deciding on this play was a matter of discovering what sits in the body as important knowledge and figuring out how to work collaboratively with someone else's writing – to have a conversation with the work and also include the interests and embodied experiences of the performers.' The play does not pander, nor does it give any easy answers. 'I'm trying to open a conversation,' Ratladi says. 'As much as we can discuss Mugabe's passionate rhetoric about the land and his insistence on taking things back, this is the same man who earned seven degrees while in prison, and who embraced Western ways of thinking. And there's the fact that he sought medical help in Europe, rather than in the people around him.' And so questions as to Mugabe's true beliefs – and his motivations – remain. 'When I look into the story, I think there was a spiritual awakening, perhaps a calling, that wasn't fully embraced,' says Ratladi. 'And it caused a lot of suffering.' Like several Shakespearean antiheroes, most notably Macbeth, evidence of Mugabe's autocratic self-delusion is everywhere in this play. He possesses an ability to terrify that he wields with frightening calm. When he initially meets Peric, his first test is to demand that the psychiatrist puts on a different necktie, an act of supplication for which the white doctor has a lengthy, feasible excuse. Peric's apparent bolshiness – psychiatric professionalism tinged by thinly disguised colonial patronage – is something Mugabe seems to let slide. First it's the refusal of a necktie that would render him a member of Mugabe's staff, and then it's the manner in which Peric lays down the ground rules for the therapy sessions as though he were talking to just another patient. What's perhaps most frustrating about Peric is his blind refusal to recognise just how dangerous the man he's treating is. At various points, you might suspect it's naiveté, perhaps pompousness. Through a certain lens, it's evidence of deeply rooted colonialism, an assumption of some unstated privilege so engrained he's not even aware it exists. Peric, despite his relative position on the social rung, refuses to bend to Mugabe's small tests, and it's no accident that Grace Mugabe tells him that he and her husband are 'so much alike'. The two men lock horns in a weirdly convivial manner. Theirs is an unspoken conflict that drives the play's underlying tension, unease and menace, a feeling that anything can – and is likely to – happen. Whatever its cause, the audience senses the friction and feels the under-the-surface power struggle implicitly. 'When I direct, I always tell my actors that if someone deaf were to watch, they'd still follow the story,' Ratladi says. 'So, if you were to watch my show with earplugs, you would still 'hear' the production. If you are blind, you would still follow. That's how I approach the work: with a desire to cater for more 'other' audiences.' This idea of widening the audience is a metaphor, too, for Ratladi's belief that 'the South African conversation needs to be far more inclusive, to welcome to the table a wider range of people'. 'Right now, as theatre-makers, we're not listening enough,' he says. 'Theatre made during apartheid had a clear 'state of advocacy'. These days, we're all over the place. Under apartheid, the status quo that needed to be defeated was very clear. But what is our status quo today? What are we currently critiquing? What are we challenging? I think we're all over the place. 'After the centuries of coloniality, we should as a nation be asking ourselves more fundamental questions: 'Where are we as the people?' and 'Where do we go from here?' I think those are the stories we, as theatre-makers, should be telling, the ones that pose questions, stories that dare to ask, 'Where in actual fact we are as a nation?'' These are not questions that are answered in Breakfast With Mugabe. The play does not try to patch up the past by offering a theory about the future. Ratladi's hope, though, is that it will perhaps help you to recognise that your perceived reality is a kind of acquiescence to the status quo; if you let it wash through you, it might just wake you up, encourage you to get involved in a consequential conversation that desperately needs to happen. DM Breakfast With Mugabe is a co-production of the National Arts Festival, The Market Theatre and Festival Enterprise Catalyst, in association with the Calvin Ratladi Foundation, with contributing funding from Standard Bank South Africa. It is playing at the Market Theatre until 10 August.
The Citizen
a day ago
- The Citizen
AfriCAN Honoree Authors' Awards returns to Sandton
The 8th AfriCAN Honoree Authors' Awards has returned to Sandton under the powerful banner of No Borders, a call to unite the African continent through storytelling, soul, and shared heritage. The event took place at Sandton Library, Nelson Mandela Square and brought together authors from across the continent, including Namibia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Botswana, Cape Town, Durban and Limpopo. Organiser and founder of AfriCAN Child Your Time is Now, Anthea Thyssen-Ambursley, described the awards as a spiritual and cultural homecoming. Also read: Award celebrates bold women driving change in SA 'I don't see colour. I see soul. I wear all the colours, because I believe in one race, the human race. This event is about reconnecting with who we are, before we were divided by borders, race, or tribes.' A self-published poet and activist, Thyssen-Ambursley said the Pen Legends gathering is an act of resistance, memory, and prophecy. 'If you are roaming this earth and you are not changing anything, it means you have not paid your rent. Writers and creators are prophets; we are here to make people feel, think and act.' She pointed out that the event was entirely self-funded and has become a vibrant platform for authors across Africa to celebrate, network, and build bridges across nations. Also read: The 2025 Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Awards winners announced 'Tomorrow, the sun will shine on all of us. The rain will fall on all of us. So what makes us different? Nothing. What connects us is much more powerful,' she concluded. Follow us on our Whatsapp channel, Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok for the latest updates and inspiration!
The Citizen
a day ago
- The Citizen
Mango Groove brings its 40th anniversary party to Jozi after an ‘overwhelming' response in Cape Town
Established in 1984, Mango Groove has gripped South African hearts through song for more than four decades. Mango Groove is bringing its 40th anniversary to Johannesburg after a good run in Cape Town earlier this year. 'Kirstenbosch was such a special and moving show for us,' says lead singer Claire Johnston. Established in 1984, the ensemble has gripped South African hearts through song for more than four decades. To celebrate the milestone, Mango Groove first performed a one-night only show at Cape Town's Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in January and now the show is coming to Joburg in September. 'The response was overwhelming and affirmed that this is something we had to bring home to Jozi. After considering many venues, we knew the Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens was the perfect choice – family-friendly, stunningly beautiful and ideal for a day under our blue African skies,' Johnston said. ALSO READ: Mango Groove celebrates 40 years of 'Memories and Moments' at one-night-only event in Cape Town Coming to Joburg The Joburg concert will mirror the Kirstenbosch production while adding unique touches and surprises exclusive to the Jozi edition. These include special guest performances from former Prime Circle frontman Ross Learmonth and Majozi, a dazzling visual production and the Special Star dancers. 'This isn't just a concert. It's a moving celebration of our country and the journey we've all shared. It's about joy, connection and the power of music to bring people together,' Johnston said. Before there was a Freshlyground or Kujenga, there was the 11-piece band Mango Groove. Mango Groove has remained consistent in its output over the years and managed to stay relevant in an oversaturated live music space. 'The essence of Mango Groove is what the live show is. It's very much about the live music and the live experience. In a way, the whole market has changed now,' said the band's founding member John Leyden speaking to the Mail & Guardian about a decade ago. 'We have never stopped performing, but we are very selective of the shows we do. There is a danger of that in the South African market — that is very small — you can overstay your welcome. So we tend to perform two shows in a year.' NOW READ: Gregory Maqoma on portraying one of his ancestors on 'Shaka iLembe'
