Leleti Khumalo was born in 1970 in Kwa Mahu, a
small black township north of Durban, South Africa. Like most black families
there, Khumalo's lived in dire poverty. Her father died when she was three
years old. Her mother supported the family by working as a domestic laborer.
Khumalo and her three siblings lived in a home whose sole piece of furniture
was a bed. In spite of these harsh circumstances, Khumalo found happiness in
music and dance. She was a born performer. At an early age, she participated in
Amajika, a backyard dance troupe organized by entertainer Tu Nokwe, a member of
one of South Africa's most celebrated musical families.
At age 15, Khumalo was swept out of obscurity in
almost fairy-tale fashion. When South African musician, actor, and playwright
Mbogena Ngema was looking for new talent for a musical he was developing, he
came to the garage in which her youth group was rehearsing to scout for
performers. After seeing what Khumalo could do, Ngema simply asked if she
wanted to do a play. She said yes. The musical eventually evolved into the
international blockbuster Sarafina! Ngema cast Khumalo in the
title role, and neither her career nor her personal life has slowed down since.
She became a star and, eventually, married Ngema.
Sarafina! tells
the story of a 1976 student uprising in Soweto against apartheid, and includes
moving and horrible accounts of youth being tortured and
"disappeared" by the white South African regime. Until she auditioned
for the play, Khumalo rarely considered the injustice of apartheid—it was just
the way things were. "When I was a little girl, I just thought it was
natural for all black people to be so very poor," she was quoted as saying
in a 1992 Premiere magazine story. "In South Africa, you
don't think you're oppressed. You don't know until you get out of the country.
They don't show what's happening on TV."
Sarafina! delighted
audiences in South Africa. The show also enjoyed a two-year run on Broadway,
for which Khumalo was nominated for a Best Actress Tony Award in 1988.
Following that Broadway stint, the show embarked on a worldwide tour that met
with raves all over the globe. In 1987 Khumalo was honored by the NAACP with an
Image Award for Best Stage Actress.
Sarafina! came
to Hollywood in 1991, with Khumalo reprising her title role alongside costar
Whoopi Goldberg in a production directed by Darrell James Roodt. The movie was
distributed all over the world, and become the biggest movie ever released in
Africa. Goldberg, who plays a revolutionary teacher in the movie, gave Khumalo
high marks for her budding acting skills. "She's extraordinary,"
Goldberg was quoted as saying in Premiere. "The camera
loves her. I loved her, too."
Throughout the 1990s, Khumalo appeared in a
number of Ngema's productions, including Magic at 4 A.M. in
1993, Mama in 1996, and the 1997 sequel Sarafina 2. Her
movie and television roles started coming in rapid succession as well. She was
featured in, among other things, Roodt's 1995 film adaptation of the Alan Paton
novelCry, the Beloved County along with Richard Harris and James
Earl Jones, and she appeared in the television series The African
Skies. Meanwhile, she was also discovering new outlets for her
powerful singing voice. In 1993 she release her first album of music, Leleti
and Sarafina.
Khumalo also remained very active on the South
African stage. She received favorable notice for her performance in the
Ngema-directed The Zulu, a 1999 show about the Anglo-Zulu War.
In 2003 she stared in Stimela SasaZola, a musical extravaganza
that enjoyed a successful run at Johannesburg's African Bank Market Theatre.
Khumalo's international profile rose to new
heights in the mid-2000s with roles in a several widely seen films and
television shows. In 2004 she starred in Yesterday, a powerful
movie about the social aspects of the AIDS crisis in Africa. Khumalo's
character, named Yesterday (because her father believed everything was better
yesterday), is a South African woman who is ostracized by her community after
being diagnosed with AIDS. Yesterday is thought to be the
first move to be made in the Zulu language for wide release. "I hope it
can be an eye-opener about the effects of AIDS, especially on women,"
Khumalo was quoted as saying in an interview with the Toronto Star.
Yesterday was
received enthusiastically by audiences in several countries. It became the
first South African film ever to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign
Language Film category. Khumalo followed up that success with a role in the
movie Hotel Rwanda, a true story about a hotel manager, Paul
Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), who harbors more than 1,000 people during the 1994
genocide in Rwanda, which saw the slaughter of nearly one million members of
the Tutsi minority by the Hutus. In Hotel Rwanda, which was
shot primarily in Johannesburg and also features actor Nick Nolte, Khumalo
plays Cheadle's sister. It was not a huge role, but the film received numerous
honors and awards, including the People's Choice Award at the Toronto
International Film Festival and Best Feature Film at the AFI (American Film
Institute) Festival in Los Angeles. It was nominated for three Oscars, but came
up empty when the envelopes were opened.
In 2005 Khumalo announced that she was taking on
the small screen. That year, she joined the cast of Generations, a
popular South African soap opera. She signed on to play the role of Busiswe
Dlomo, the sister of a power-hungry businessman. While television presented an
intriguing new challenge for Khumalo, she indicated that she did not intend to
make TV acting a long-term habit.
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| Leleti Khumalo and her Husband Mbongeni Ngema |
Soap opera acting is a big change indeed for an
actress whose career has focused mainly on big issues like AIDS and apartheid.
But this is the kind of versatility that allows young actresses to successfully
navigate the transition to not-so-young actress. Watching Leleti Khumalo grow
into new kinds of roles is an exciting prospect indeed for her many fans all
over the world.
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