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How Thembsie met her father

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PHOTO: Onkgopotsi Koloti

AWARD-WINNING actress, Thembsie Matu, is undoubtedly funny and has everyone in stitches when she plays her character, Petronella, on Mzansi Magic’s The Queen. Even though she’s been in the industry since Gibson Kente’s era, she has managed to keep her personal life out of the spotlight that shines on her talent.

FORCED TO LOOK FOR HER FATHER

However, in a recent TV interview, the motherof-two opened up about the impact of having an absent father. Thembsie, who is usually cagey about sharing her personal life, detailed the circumstances that forced her to meet her father. When Move! contacted her for an interview to delve deeper into her story, a distraught Thembsie was reluctant to go back there. “I don’t want to retell this story because it’s painful. I would like to move forward with my life,” she says. Trouble started when the 53-year-old had to go and look for her father after her grandmother’s passing. “I had to find him so that I could register at school,” she says. Her situation was so dire that she couldn’t go to a school that she desired and had to opt for the one closest to her home. Since she had good grades, she was accepted at the school but she had no money to pay the school fees. “I sat down and wondered what I was going to do. I remembered my cousins showing me a house saying that it’s my home,” she says about the place where her father apparently lived.

MEETING HIM FOR THE FIRST TIME

Thembsie gathered the courage to go to that house. When he finally met her father, James, she asked him if he knew her. “I said, ‘I’m Thembsie, so what am I to you?’ He said, ‘You’re Matazana’s kid’. I said to him, ‘What am I?’ He said, ‘You are my child’,” she recalls. When he admitted that she was his child, the actress asked him when her birthday is and he responded with the correct date. Thembsie didn't waste time in asking him to help her with the school fees. He agreed and explained why he was not there for her in the past. “He said my uncle didn’t want him in my life and even stabbed him with an ice-cream spoon,” she says. To her shock, she learnt that her father watched her grow from the sidelines. The experience still leaves her with a heavy heart.

PUTTING HER KIDS FIRST

The proud mother of two explains that her job also got in the way of her having a good relationship with her children. “It was sore when I left my kids at home with their father and leave to tour for three months to a point where my kids didn’t know how to ask me for food,” she says. However, that is the thing of the past and she says firstly she’s a mother, wife and actress.

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