Plastic Princess: Open Letter to Khanyi Mbau on the Publication of Her Memoirs
By Lin Sampson for the Sunday Times:
Let me be straight: two months ago I had never heard of you. But I like wild girls, girls who wallow in the swill of society, girls who make mistakes and are as headstrong as a South Easter.
Girls who leave bullet-holes of bad behaviour.
Your biography is about to be published. Written by Lesley Mofokeng, it strains to make you sound vulnerable, talented and misunderstood.
Marilyn Monroe?
Lesley Mofokeng deserves the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He certainly can write and he wove a well wrought web of fantasy, including some hard truths.
We made a date for an interview to publicise your book. It was agreed that the Sunday Times would fly you down to Cape Town for the day. Economy class. You enthused: “We can lunch at Grand Beach.”
After that, everything went into a mush of misunderstanding. You could be called Miss Communication. Phone calls, e-mails, SMSs floated in the ether. I was so dying to meet you.
Now recalling our conversation, I hear the fatal words: economy class.
That splintered your ego, didn’t it Khanyi?
And you dreaming of being Queen of England and all.
“I never stopped believing I was a somebody. I thought I was going to marry into royalty. In my dreams I could see myself being the first black member of the British monarchy. Prince William was going to be mine and we’d give Queen Elizabeth brown great-grandchildren.”
Okay, our interview was never going to be easy. I am an ancient woman who reads books, an apostrophe activist who knows Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by heart.
You are a self-styled socialite with a very big mouth and a brain like a blown egg. Despite educational opportunities your peers would have given their eyeteeth for, you had to repeat Grade 7. On your first movie break, in 10 takes, you could not memorise the words, “It’s right”.
You are a girl who knows nothing of the beauty of a rhyming couplet, or the dream of a perfect equation; the excitement of investigating the F minor key or reading The Great Gatsby for the first time.
A girl whose hero is a man called Jimmy Choo, a name that doesn’t resonate with struggle cognoscenti.
Mofokeng talks about your “work ethic”. “They [black women her age],” he writes, “respect her willpower and her success.”
Pardon?
You lost your job in Muvhango by taking off on a trip to the Middle East in the middle of filming.
You had a child whom your mother looks after. You married an old, rich man and fed the tabloids with your public fights. Your nude photographs were put on the web in a mean gesture by a married man you had a very public and sordid affair with. You had physical fights in public in which you lost your wig.
Actually Khanyi, I love rich and grand people who have their newspapers ironed, wash their sheets in Jo Malone and run a string of polo ponies.
But the trouble with you, Khanyi, is that you never really knew what really rich and really grand was because you lived in the world of second-hand Hollywood soaps. You thought a Lamborghini was über-chic when everyone knows that only drug dealers and tenderpreneurs with a police record would be seen in one.
You married a man who thought it was stylish to have a Versace belt in different colours to match his leather jackets and rubbed snail mucus at R600 a tub onto his face. Did you really think this was smart? How did you get it so wrong? Your bags are too glittery, your shoes too high, your fights too porny. Your utterances too inane.
You thought the apogee of good food was a food-chain takeout when the rest of the world was tilting into confit de canard. Your favourite was blue cheese and croissants, which you said you would happily eat in front of the poor. I mean, Khanyi, you’ve simply got to do better. Not even the dirt-poor want to tuck into such a passé repast.
When it comes to smart things, you are as dated as a spittoon.
If you’re going to be a role model, charging people R35000 just for the pleasure of sitting next to you, you need to up your game.
Private things stay private. A line like “Mandla loved anal sex. I remember breaking nails clutching the headboard in pain.” Not smart.
You need to ratchet up, girlie. You said you were extravagant on purpose so you could make your husband broke. “I did my calculations. I bought things and sent the bill to Mandla.” Shame, if you had known about real class you could have sent him into a credit-card coma in a nanosecond.
I mean Versace? Who he?
There’s no doubt your swag needs serious attention. It’s time to stop looking like a footballer’s wife and take up residence in Richistan. Forget about even trying to work – well, that at least won’t be hard – and Melrose Arch, puhleez, you need Place Vendôme at least and a villa in Tuscany, all outfitted with climate-appropriate wardrobes.
Jimmy Choo is made for lap dancers; get handmade Italian Franc Maestri. As for food-chain takeaways as the apogee of culinary fare, phone Fortnum’s in London and have your food couriered overnight like all the inhabitants of Richistan.
And that car – a sunshine-yellow Lambo – should be donated to the Fast and the Furious.
Do you remember that story about your rant and scream when someone, thinking you were a waitress, asked you to get him a glass of water. “I carried on ranting until he knew I was someone.”
You see, Khanyi, someone with class would never have done that. Humbleness is the most desirous trait of the rich and famous, which is why they send their children to expensive schools where they have to take cold baths and get whipped.
You said: “I am like Paris Hilton. I am famous for being famous.”
Nah, baby, Paris Hilton is rich, you are a poor girl from a township with a beautiful face like a slightly flawed walnut, a girl who can be found any day of the week fisticuffing a human wallet, an aspirational nudist who lives off rich men and wears outfits as flimsy as the sun in Scotland, a catastrophist with a carbonated hairdo.
Your speech has a formless loquacity and nobody is going to fall about because of the forked lightning of your wit.
I know you have suffered endless narcissistic injuries having your naked body all over the internet, but finally the value of your life isn’t worth spit because as all the really rich and famous know – the Motsepes, the Oppenheimers, the Gettys – the characteristics most valued among the R&F are courage and good manners.
You say in the book you’ve changed. I hope you have, because I think you are a brave girl who likes to state the truth, who tells it as it is, and you have suffered for that, but you really need to overcome the old unreliable, doesn’t-pitch persona.
And you know, Khanyi, you could be so great, all it would take is a little real care about other people and their feelings.
Perhaps there is just one little word you need to learn: no. If you had said at the beginning that you couldn’t come to Cape Town, it all would have been a lot easier.
Yours sincerely,
Lin Sampson
By Shanthini Naidoo for the Sunday Times:
- 15 October 1985 Khanyisile Mbau is born in a Hillbrow hospital. Grows up with her single mom and grandparents in Mofolo, Soweto.
- 2004 Cast as Doobsie in the SABC2 soapie Muvhango. Allegedly fired a year later for going awol.
- 2005 Cast as Mbali in the SABC1 soapie Mzansi, but fired after jetting off to NYC for a party.
- 2005 Linked to Mandla Mthembu, 50, a businessman who successfully sued Transnet for R80-million over a tender.
- 2006 Despite public spats, he buys her a Porsche in March and she marries him in July, four months pregnant. Princess is born on December 24.
- April 2007 The pair announce they are living apart after her alleged cheating.
- June 2007 Launches an album but is booed off stage several times for sub-standard performances.
- August 2007 Reconciles with Mthembu on condition he buys her a Lamborghini and that they live in a R100000-a-month Michelangelo apartment.
- February 2008 Mthembu buys her breast implants.
- April 2008 She is fired from her lead role in a local movie, Kabelo’s Fortune, for not showing up on set.
- June 2008 Has to pay R50000 to stop the bank repossessing her and Mthembu’s matching Lamborghinis.
- December 2008 Responding to a question about recessionary Christmas shopping, she says: “That [the economic crisis] doesn’t affect us much. My personal budget [for Christmas] is R2.5-million.”
- March 2009 Admits she lied when she said US R&B star Chris Brown sexually molested her during a 2008 visit to SA. “I’ve never met him but it was a way to get more attention.”
- May 2009 The Lamborghini is repossessed and her split from Mthembu is confirmed.
- August 2009 Her second breast enlargement is sponsored by a new mystery partner.
- October 2009 Admits to a relationship with married Theunis Crous, who buys her a BMW Z4 and admits to paying for her breast implants.
- November 2009 Wins Drama Queen of the Year and Fag Hag of the Year at Feather Awards.
- January 2010 Crous ends the relationship, taking back his Z4 and R10000 a month Sandton flat.
- January 2010 Mthembu says she won’t let him see Princess.
- February 2010 Crous calls her “gorgeous”. She calls him “a stray dog I let in”.
- March 2010 Public brawl with the wife of her manager, Malcolm X, also an alleged partner.
- March 2010 More public fights with Crous, who accuses her of using muti to get him back.
- July 2010 Hospitalised after a suspected nervous breakdown.
- October 2010 Flashes intimate body parts at her 25th birthday bash.
- November/December 2010 Regularly appears at ANCYL parties, with Julius Malema.
- May 2011 Claims to have bounced back with her own money from a construction company.
- June 2011 Nominated for the post of ANCYL national treasurer.
- September 2011 Nude photos of Crous and Mbau appear online.
- October 2011 Lacklustre 26th birthday, attended by Julius Malema.
- January 2012 More nude pictures appear online.
- April 2012 Lobola allegedly paid by Tebogo Lerole of musical outfit Kwela Tebza.
- August 2012 She is playing the lead in a show about musician Lebo Mathosa, who died in a car crash in 2006. Drama Queen opened on Thursday at the State Theatre in Pretoria.
- Bitch, Please! I’m Khanyi Mbau is published by Tafelberg, an imprint of NB
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Book details
- Bitch, Please! I’m Khanyi Mbau by Lesley Mofokeng
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EAN: 9780624054283
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- Bitch, Please! I’m Khanyi Mbau (Limited Hardcover Edition) by Lesley Mofokeng
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EAN: 9780624056140
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