It’s scorching hot in Soweto.
Vilakazi street is abuzz with tourists and the school bells ring in periodic intervals.
In true kasi style, one wouldn’t walk the streets in daylight and not utter a warm greeting whenever they pass a group of people.
While men sat on beer crates under trees with beverage jugs, women hang dripping laundry on washing lines.
This is after they ensured that yards are either raked up with lines still visible, swept neatly or stoeps brightly polished.
For Motsoaledi Setumo, this feels like home.
Walking into the yard of brick-layered corner house, she expresses concern over everyone else walking on the red stoep out of fear that shoe marks will make it dirty because, at some point in her life, she was the one who would spend hours on her knees, polishing her grandmother’s stoep every morning.
“I stopped polishing the stoep when I got money and extended my grandmother’s house. My grandmother’s house was a four-roomed house in Kagiso, we had a stoep and I spent most of my childhood there. But because of my mother’s accident, my aunt had to take me so then I also moved to the suburbs for my high school when I was around 14,” she says nostalgically.
Being the respectful young lady that she is, she goes around the house to enter through the kitchen door where she also gave a warm greeting to the old woman of the house.
Read More | A Soweto Love Story comes to Netflix screens
Jokingly, Lunga Shabalala gushes over how nice it would be to have Motsoaledi cleaning the stoep again in her adulthood to prove that she is a Ngubeni makoti (bride) as a continuation of Netflix’s A Soweto Love Story’s storyline.
For him, the veranda did not launch a trip down memory lane as it would have Sandile (his character on the Valentine’s film) because he moved to the suburbs of Pietermaritzburg at the age of seven years and even his grandparents’ township house was big enough to stand out as a landmark.
“I even look at my baby pictures and admit that my family was different. At my dad’s house, I remember having chickens in the yard, mielies at the back of the yard and an orange tree. I think that’s when I started enjoying money because I used to charge 20 cents per orange.”
First love experiences
For many who grew up in the townships, the sight of a boy and a girl at a street corner just before dusk or right after school is nothing rare.
If anything, that’s where many kasi love stories started.
Neighbours go from threatening to tell on you as you try to hide yourself with the street light pole to admiring your consistent walks around the block and paying testament to the love as you grow older together.
But for Motsoaledi, that’s not where it started.
She tells Drum that her first boyfriend had a car and although that would be shunned upon out of suspicion that it would be an older man behind the steering wheel, she assures that her first lover was as young as her but so happened to be from a fairly wealthy family.
“My first boyfriend would pick me up from my house. He came from a well-off family in the hood, so he had a car at a very young age, [that’s] my very first experience of love and heartbreak. The experience was horrible. Because it was my first time being in love and being heartbroken, it was the worst. It took me years to get over that guy.”
Teasing her on the passenger seat not having been hers alone, Lunga says he’s the type to appreciate walks with his lover.
“We are walking everywhere together and what people actually would never believe about me is that I actually wasn't comfortable around females for a very long time and most girls had a crush on me, but I never did anything about it, especially because I went to an all-boys school as well. So, my life was very much around sports and studies. The social interactions with females from the sister schools were very limited. The only time we had was on weekends when we were playing sports, and the girls would come through to cheer for us stuff.”
“I remember the first girl that I wanted to have as my girlfriend, her name was Sibongile. My dad would pick me up after school so I had to come up with a different lie everyday so that he can come a bit later and then I'd walk to her school, buy her ice cream and walk back to my school for my dad’s pick-up.”
When the relationship was nearing its end date, it was around the era of CDs, and he remembers putting together a playlist which he sent to her via Mxit to apologise.
For him, this was the first of many heartbreaks.
Motsoaledi jumps in to says that she would never publicly name her first heartbreak the way Lunga did. In his defence, he says that’s his way of giving her credit for who he turned out to be in the following relationships.
Navigating the dating world
With all the ups and downs that followed after their introduction to the romantic world, the two actors found themselves not only growing but needing to face certain fears on the way.
As cliché as it may sound, relationships bring a lesson or two to learn. Even in its blindness, love opens one’s eyes to truths and perspectives.
With Lunga, the third level of life brought him to accept himself for who he is.
“The one thing that I've learned in my thirties was accepting myself as good enough. There's a currency in love and in the dynamics, especially between a man and a woman whereas as a man, you have to be of a standard that’s worthy of being loved or that's the belief that your life must be put together. You must be the one coming with the safety. You must be the one coming with protection. You must be the one to be the pillar of this relationship and her job is to lean on you when she needs you.
“I had to navigate the feelings of understanding that I am actually good enough and, in my moments, where I do feel that if I need someone to lean on and be vulnerable with, that it's okay to be there in that space and give her the chance to also be my pillar in moments because that's what they’re there for. The person in your life is supposed to support to walk this journey with you and you're not always going to be strong and it's very hard for a man to open up and to let a woman see the side of them because we have the fear that one day, she will use it against you.”
In the same breath, the actor, TV presenter and model says he also acknowledges that some women might eventually use it against their partners but also adds that those who are in the relationship for the long haul would take the opportunity to grow together.
Similarly, Motsoaledi got to be the bottom of her patterns of dating.
“Only now at my big age do I realise that every decision that I was making in the men that I was choosing was because of the father wound that I have, and I wasn't aware of it until I recently started building a relationship with him and kind of getting to know him as a person. All along, I was looking for a father figure in these men and they were treating me the way my father would – they were there physically but the emotional side of things, they were never there, and I would always attract that.
“So as painful as it is, I met a better place now to know that I don't have to overstretch myself and go the extra mile. When somebody really loves you and just appreciates you, they'll meet you halfway.”
Meeting Sandile and Sentebaleng (their characters) on paper
To both of their surprise, their realities of love presented themselves bare on their scripts as they played Netflix’s Valentine’s couple goals.
Indeed, art imitated life.
For the first time, Motsoaledi was forced to handle the heat of love in order to do justice to Sentebaleng’s story.
In asking herself why the storyline felt too close to home, she came to terms with the fact that “God was using it as a way to heal me” because she has been in a similar situation Sentebaleng.
Unlike Sentebaleng though, she would never stay six years waiting on a man to do right by her.
Read More | ‘Friendship love is the best’ – Soweto Love story cast
Initially, the thought of working alongside Lunga was daunting because she thought that he’d be arrogant and difficult but eventually finding him kind, respectful and in love with his work made it much easier than expected.
Despite Motsoaledi’s intimidating poker face, Lunga allowed himself to lean on her during the time that they were shooting the film as a lot was happening in his personal life.
Lucky for him, she became his source of strength and support on set.
After thanking her for being who she is, he says Sandile’s story is a classic one.
“You know that you’re in love and you think you’re giving love. You need to understand how someone wants to receive love so that they understand that you do love them. His assumption is that ‘everything’s good because he’s present and isn’t cheating so that must be good enough. I know girls want me but I don’t reciprocate that so you must be happy with that.’ [Meanwhile] Sente (short for Sentebaleng) wants that progression of a partner leading her because she can’t exactly propose to herself. The biggest mistake we (men) make is that we don’t listen to the other side as to how they want to receive love. Comfort in relationships kills it. I’ve made the made that mistake many times, I’ve lost love because of that.”
Since it was her first romantic comedy production, Motsoaledi admits that the film did more for her in reality than it did for her character.
“I was adding on another layer to who I am as an artist. A Soweto Love Story really did more for Motsoaledi than it did for my character because at a time where I needed that kind of healing, that love wound, God gave me the opportunity to kind of heal through art because he's the one who truly blessed me with this Talent. So, what I took out from the film obviously is self-love.
“Also, when what you want and when you know how you want to be loved it makes your decisions in love so much easier and it saves you from trauma because then I would have stepped out of a lot of relationships sooner if I just knew who I am, how I want to be loved and what I'm willing to tolerate. so that's what I took out of it. You have to love me differently now, wherever you are,” she says.
When Lunga watched himself play Sandile, he tells Drum that he couldn’t help but smile alone.
“I was just amazed; I was smiling. It's been a while since I watched something and I'm just enjoying it. The dynamics fit together so well; those chemistry tests were worth it.”
Closing off the conversation, Lunga points out that enjoying an ice lolly with your partner as you walk around the block, talking for hours must be what’s special about township love.
“It’s in the simplest things,” he says.
And what makes it even more beautiful is the adoration from everyone else who knows how inseparable you are.
Mjolo playlist
With all relationship’s ups and downs, music has carried them like soundtracks in real life.
Lunga’s low mjolo song is Akon’s Lonely.
“I think it was my second breakup. I lost my mind. I used to walk to the shop to go buy something only to realise when I got there that I hadn’t even taken the money. When I got love back and she was just going through my playlist, she could see how many times I had played the song and she believed that I really missed her.”
His ultimate love-high song, though, is Luther Vandross’s Buy Me a Rose.
“That's a song that I loved with the girl I was seeing. We used to dance to it every of the Sunday morning in bed after a night out. I'm a breakfast person and she'd like to make pancakes and syrup and we would just dance in the patio.”
Motsoaledi, on the other hand, has Jesse Powell’s You, Quincy Jones and Tamia’s You Put a Move on My Heart as her mjolo-high songs.
As she sings through them, she also lists Baby Face’s Let It Flow, Des’ree’s I’m Kissing You from the Romeo and Juliet film as well as Mary J Blige’s Not Gon’ Cry.
