must feel like freedom to a child. Sweet Khanyi also offered to buy her mother a house of their own, because she knew her mother wanted to move into her own place. Lynette was a smart, independant career woman and living with her parents did not fit in with her plans.
Lynette took her daughter to a toy store in Eastgate Mall. It was to be Khanyi’s first shopping spree – the first of many. She bought four Barbies, four Kens, a doll’s house and a stove, plates, a mini TV and hi-fi system, plus a bomber jacket with orange lining. She was in consumer heaven.
But after she had done all her shopping, Lynette popped the balloon of fun and turned the jaunt into an important lesson. It was the first and last time she was allowed to blow money like that. From then on she was expected to save every cent. In her teenage years, when tragedy hit the family and they battled financially, Khanyi’s modest savings would help to pull her and her family through.
Being a child star and a responsible scholar is not easy. It has to be a well-coordinated juggling act between professional commitments and studies. It takes discipline. The lure of the cameras always trumped school for Khanyi. Being on TV was way more fun than algebra. She was often chased out of her class at Milpark Primary for being unruly. Khanyi remembers listening to the thick Cockney accent of Mrs Patta, her English teacher, which put her to sleep like a tranquiliser.
At least there was the refuge of Mr Stevens’ drawing and pottery class. Khanyi loved making collages. Images smashed together. She was devastated when he died of cancer in 1994.
It also didn’t help that she had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder at age seven. She only took medication for it for a short while, because her grandmother didn’t believe it to be effective. She was therefore easily distracted and bored in class, counting the minutes until she could escape from Milpark Primary at 1.30pm and rush over to the nearby SABC studios for taping. The experience proved she wasn’t like the other kids. She had talent. It was her name in the credits.
School could never compete with all that attention. As Khanyi puts it, looking back at that exciting time and the first flush of success: “I knew that millionaires were not in school. Teachers are not millionaires. My father would castigate me. He told me to take my school work seriously but I knew I was meant for bigger things. School simply was not for me. I was passionate when I said this to my father. I believed it – I knew my destiny.”
As she grew older one thing did get her attention: Grant Solomons, the fastest runner in school. He was the “it” boy. Well built with broad shoulders, thunder thighs and the cut calf muscles of a committed athlete, he was Khanyi’s first genuine crush. Even better, he liked her too.
Ever proactive, Khanyi bought him a rose and sent him a love letter on Valentine’s Day of 1997 in which she declared her undying love and everything that had to do with the birds and the bees. But her mother wouldn’t allow her to attend the Valentine’s Day dance with Grant, so he didn’t get to put the special chain he’d bought for her around her neck that night. Finally they shared their first kiss a while after Valentine’s Day. Grant was to be her first boyfriend, but not her last.
Her sudden fame was a mixed blessing at school. There was inevitably a lot of jealousy when Khanyi became the school’s “celebrity” but even then she was good at owning it. Khanyi didn’t make a big deal out of her fame. She seemed to wear it well, as if it was a natural event – something she had deserved all her life.
So when students said mean things about her, she held her head high. She knew they would trade places with her in a heartbeat. It was early training in managing envy. Khanyi was always good at looking like she was meant to be the one getting all the attention. It was effortless to her. The fame was a good way to notice who was worth getting to know. If other students couldn’t handle it, then they really weren’t meant to be in her life.
Not that Khanyi’s grandmother Gladys took much notice of her granddaughter’s “fame”. The Mbau household remained as strict as ever. Despite being on TV in the lounge, Khanyi was still expected to clean it. She wasn’t excused a single chore. Gladys carried on as if nothing had changed and Khanyi was furious but eventually came to depend on that normality. She would always be a kid in her grandmother’s home and that was comforting in the crazy times to come.
That early validation remains a huge emotional resource for Khanyi. It drives her. She used the fact that she wasn’t like the other kids in a positive way. It became a source of strength and self-esteem – the basis of her sense of entitlement. “I’ve never felt inferior,” she says,“despite all the snide remarks, bullying and mean stares. I had it in my head that I stand out. I grew up with that mentality.”
When Khanyi turned nine she moved in with her mother, who had bought an apartment at Dudley Heights in Hillbrow. Khanyi said goodbye to her beloved grandparents and left ekasi for the big city.
Her mother’s social circle and lifestyle was very much of the era. Mandela was free, the ANC was unbanned and the country would never be the same. It was the eve of the watershed 1994 non-racial elections. Black people would soon be going places fast. Rising up in business and enjoying new opportunities. Khanyi was surrounded and influenced by her mother’s friends, who were ambitious, well-educated, independent women. This was the new South Africa.
You only had to look at Lynette and her sister Nikiwe’s nails to know they meant business. They were always shiny and immaculately manicured. They were up on the latest fashion trends. They partied with the celebrites of the day – popular actor and radio presenter Treasure Tshabalala and Metro FM DJs like Lawrence Dube and Stan Katz. Khanyi was exposed to the social life of celebrity early on.
“I was tossed around in that world as a little girl,” she says. “They’d carry me around on their shoulders to the music of Sankomota and I’d sing the words to the songs. They were the happening professionals on the block and I was running around at their parties.”
Lynette was glamorous and knew how to play the hostess. “At their soirees, my mom would change four times. She arrived in a dress, then a change of costume for dinner, a little number for drinks and then an after-party look. My mother was my Barbie doll. She had the most amazingly beautiful figure and she spoke so well. Growing up in that world and given what I saw on TV, I knew I wanted to be rich and famous.”
Khanyi was growing up and she needed a father more than ever. Moving towards her emotional teens she felt his absence in her life and longed to have a real bond with him. She envied her white classmates who spoke lovingly of their dads. She even colluded with her father to have her removed from Milpark Primary to a school closer to him. She became a school hopper and moved to Meredale Primary in the south of Joburg in Grade 7.
Khanyi had triumphed over the teasing at Milpark thanks to her outgoing personality, and her TV fame meant she was very much the queen of the cool clique at Milpark. At Meredale she had to start all over again. She had hoped her half-sister Thandeka, who was already there, could take care of her and introduce her to her circle of friends. But Khanyi was younger and new and Thandeka could only do so much. The TV star ended up feeling like an outsider.
But she had bigger problems. A tug of war was developing between her parents who had both married other people around the same time. The secret wish that her parents would get back together was gone. To make matters worse, her mother had a baby. Khanyi had been the only child, the centre of attention, for 10 years until this little creature with the button nose called Buhle appeared.
“It was a tough year for me,” she says. “My mother had a child and I didn’t think my father loved me that much. I moved schools and my TV work ended – I felt betrayed.”
Her new baby sister was a
