MaBlerh returns to host Real Housewives of Durban reunion for third time — promises ‘no stone will be left unturned'
Broadcaster MaBlerh was announced as the host of this year's The Real Housewives of Durban reunion for the third year in a row. Picture: Supplied
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, they say.
Broadcaster MaBlerh was announced as the host of this year's The Real Housewives of Durban reunion for the third year in a row.
'This year, I'm making sure that no stone is left unturned,' MaBlerh said.
The reunion is from the fifth season of the popular reality show, which broke the internet and became the number-one trending topic in South Africa, with several cast members sitting atop the trend list.
MaBlerh says he's been closely tracking viewers' tweets and comments, and plans to bring their questions and concerns to the reunion.
'I'm there to represent the viewers. I've seen the tweets, I've read the comments and concerns – and trust me, everything will be addressed,' he shared.
'People have been asking the same questions week after week. I hear them. And I'm going to ask those same questions in that reunion chair.'
Real name Mthokozisi Cele, MaBlerh is the first African to host multiple reunions in The Real Housewives franchise, including The Real Housewives of Gqeberha (Season 1) and The Real Housewives of Johannesburg (Season 3).
'Being back for the third time is an honour I don't take lightly. It's a big job that requires sensitivity, because these ladies are opening up and sharing their lives with us, so some of the topics are deeply personal.'
ALSO READ: 'I'd love to see them find common ground' — The Mommy Club reunion host Ntombee Ngcobo-Mzolo
Accountability
The Kaya FM on-air personality said he would prioritise accountability and not push for dramatic scenes in the reunion.
'Accountability is key. This is not just about drama for the sake of entertainment, it's about honesty, clarity, and sometimes even healing.'
'Everyone needs to be held accountable for what they've said and done, so we can reach real resolution.' The Season 5 finale of The Real Housewives of Durban dropped on 13 June 2025.
After an eventful and dramatic season, the ladies had their final dinner during their trip to Mauritius, where they sat down and addressed some of the unresolved tensions between them.
ALSO READ: 'My divorce was a turning point in discovering my true identity': Nonku Williams gets candid
Nonku's anonymous letter
From old wounds to fresh betrayals, it was an emotionally charged evening that had everyone talking.
The dinner took a turn when someone handed Nonku an anonymous letter, prompting her to leave the table, which left viewers with plenty of unanswered questions.
The contents of the letter have not been revealed, and fans have been speculating ever since about who wrote it and what their intentions were.
The fallout was immediate, and tensions escalated as the episode came to a close, setting the stage for a reunion that promises to deliver serious confrontation and, hopefully, some closure.
'The show has a lot of loyal viewers, and I intend to step in and represent all of their views. They have burning questions that need answers,' said MaBlerh.
Showmax will air the reunion in two parts, on 4 July and 11 July 2025.
NOW READ: Ofentse Tsipa: The 'global mama' on being a South African on Kenya's The Mommy Club
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Daily Maverick
7 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Breakfast With Mugabe — laying a ghost to rest, awakening a monster
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Slippery, full of machinations, used to getting her way, she struts around the furniture, bending the ear of a white psychiatrist and tobacco farm owner named Peric (Craig Jackson), who has been summoned and is waiting to conduct his initial consultation with the Zimbabwean leader. Grace Mugabe's initial niceties – offering Peric a beverage as she talks him through the president's disturbing visitations by an ngozi, the malevolent spirit of a fallen comrade – unsubtly hints at her own ever-burgeoning self-interest. Along with expensive taste in clothes, she has an instinct for survival and every chance she gets unabashedly tries to persuade the doctor to see her point of view – she needs her husband cured of whatever affliction ails him. Peric, who has treated other Zimbabweans afflicted by unwelcome spirits, is reverential, respectful, polite. Whether or not he recognises his hostess for the viper she is, is unclear. When Mugabe finally enters, you're left with little doubt that this is both a man assailed by some unnatural force – and a tyrant to be feared. 'I have been informed that I will not live forever,' he tells Peric. It's a joke delivered deadpan, but it's also possible to detect in Themba Ndaba, who plays the titular despot, a menacingly unironic desire to rule forever. Also on stage is Zimbabwean-born Farai Chigudu as the bodyguard/secret policeman, Gabriel, who like some well-attired bouncer seems to be forever lurking on stage. His role? Well, he's a bit like 'Chekhov's gun' – if you introduce a musclebound thug in the first scene, there should be thuggish violence somewhere down the line. The production is Breakfast With Mugabe, first directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Sir Antony Sher in 2005. It's now playing at the Market Theatre after a brief debut at Makhanda's National Arts Festival. Directed by Calvin Ratladi, this year's Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, it was penned by the Cambridge-based playwright Fraser Grace, who came across a 2001 newspaper report about the Zimbabwean president receiving treatment from a white psychiatrist. While reports suggested he was being treated for depression, the play imagines that Mugabe was in fact battling a malevolent spirit. The playwright, after watching a performance of Ratladi's production, wrote in the UK's Guardian newspaper that he'd been interested in what might have been at the root of Mugabe's transition from revolutionary hero to dictatorial monster. The play is wordy, dense and fraught with the strangest sort of tension. And, despite the title, breakfast never comes. Cue, instead, a succession of lengthy conversations unpacking not only what might have led to this supernatural stalking, but an unravelling of history with some of the unwritten bits coloured in. While it leaves little doubt as to the rot of paranoia and corruption that's infected Mugabe's regime, it's also a reminder of the colonial context from which that regime emerged. Rather than a one-sided condemnation, the dialogue also digs into Mugabe's bitter memories – such as being refused permission by Ian Smith, in the course of his 11-year imprisonment, to bury his young son. Ratladi, who is 34, was born in Limpopo and grew up in Witbank, the son of a miner, says that 'over the years, as I have been finding myself as an artist, what seems to recur in my work and which I found them paralleled in the play are issues of land, and issues of memory and power'. Those issues are deeply mired in the dialogue, but they are also conveyed in the design. For one thing, Ratladi's own past is right there on the stage, represented by the shattered landscape. 'I grew up in the mines,' he says, 'so what you see is the landscape of my childhood.' Indeed, the representation of the land, this violated earth, in Ratladi's rendition of the play is of something forlorn, quite sombre. Never mind the various people and factions involved, it is the silent earth that has been witness to everything we have done to it in its name: acquiring it, fighting over it, digging it up, drilling into it, taking from it, burying our secrets and the bodies of the dead in it. 'The ground also has its own vibrations,' Ratladi says. 'But there's also violence that's being done on this thing called land. For me, it's a kind of penetration, a violation. And the question arises: how deep into the earth does the system in fact go?' Ratladi says he was drawn to the play by themes close to his heart, fascinated with the idea that 'what this figure of Robert Mugabe was actually grappling with might in fact have been a spiritual issue'. He also wanted to reveal the human side of its characters who are larger-than-life historic figures. He says he had wanted – as a director – to be able to enter into a dialogue with the work and with its author. 'Deciding on this play was a matter of discovering what sits in the body as important knowledge and figuring out how to work collaboratively with someone else's writing – to have a conversation with the work and also include the interests and embodied experiences of the performers.' The play does not pander, nor does it give any easy answers. 'I'm trying to open a conversation,' Ratladi says. 'As much as we can discuss Mugabe's passionate rhetoric about the land and his insistence on taking things back, this is the same man who earned seven degrees while in prison, and who embraced Western ways of thinking. And there's the fact that he sought medical help in Europe, rather than in the people around him.' And so questions as to Mugabe's true beliefs – and his motivations – remain. 'When I look into the story, I think there was a spiritual awakening, perhaps a calling, that wasn't fully embraced,' says Ratladi. 'And it caused a lot of suffering.' Like several Shakespearean antiheroes, most notably Macbeth, evidence of Mugabe's autocratic self-delusion is everywhere in this play. He possesses an ability to terrify that he wields with frightening calm. When he initially meets Peric, his first test is to demand that the psychiatrist puts on a different necktie, an act of supplication for which the white doctor has a lengthy, feasible excuse. Peric's apparent bolshiness – psychiatric professionalism tinged by thinly disguised colonial patronage – is something Mugabe seems to let slide. First it's the refusal of a necktie that would render him a member of Mugabe's staff, and then it's the manner in which Peric lays down the ground rules for the therapy sessions as though he were talking to just another patient. What's perhaps most frustrating about Peric is his blind refusal to recognise just how dangerous the man he's treating is. At various points, you might suspect it's naiveté, perhaps pompousness. Through a certain lens, it's evidence of deeply rooted colonialism, an assumption of some unstated privilege so engrained he's not even aware it exists. Peric, despite his relative position on the social rung, refuses to bend to Mugabe's small tests, and it's no accident that Grace Mugabe tells him that he and her husband are 'so much alike'. The two men lock horns in a weirdly convivial manner. Theirs is an unspoken conflict that drives the play's underlying tension, unease and menace, a feeling that anything can – and is likely to – happen. Whatever its cause, the audience senses the friction and feels the under-the-surface power struggle implicitly. 'When I direct, I always tell my actors that if someone deaf were to watch, they'd still follow the story,' Ratladi says. 'So, if you were to watch my show with earplugs, you would still 'hear' the production. If you are blind, you would still follow. That's how I approach the work: with a desire to cater for more 'other' audiences.' This idea of widening the audience is a metaphor, too, for Ratladi's belief that 'the South African conversation needs to be far more inclusive, to welcome to the table a wider range of people'. 'Right now, as theatre-makers, we're not listening enough,' he says. 'Theatre made during apartheid had a clear 'state of advocacy'. These days, we're all over the place. Under apartheid, the status quo that needed to be defeated was very clear. But what is our status quo today? What are we currently critiquing? What are we challenging? I think we're all over the place. 'After the centuries of coloniality, we should as a nation be asking ourselves more fundamental questions: 'Where are we as the people?' and 'Where do we go from here?' I think those are the stories we, as theatre-makers, should be telling, the ones that pose questions, stories that dare to ask, 'Where in actual fact we are as a nation?'' These are not questions that are answered in Breakfast With Mugabe. The play does not try to patch up the past by offering a theory about the future. Ratladi's hope, though, is that it will perhaps help you to recognise that your perceived reality is a kind of acquiescence to the status quo; if you let it wash through you, it might just wake you up, encourage you to get involved in a consequential conversation that desperately needs to happen. DM Breakfast With Mugabe is a co-production of the National Arts Festival, The Market Theatre and Festival Enterprise Catalyst, in association with the Calvin Ratladi Foundation, with contributing funding from Standard Bank South Africa. It is playing at the Market Theatre until 10 August.
IOL News
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- IOL News
From Times Square to the Vegas Strip: Nunurai Mudarikwa's unmissable US escapade
The Mommy Club's former cast mate, Nunurai Mudarikwa, in down town New York. Image: Instagram Nunurai Mudarikwa, a former cast member of the reality series "The Mommy Club", has delighted fans and followers by documenting her epic journey through some of America's most vibrant cities. Taking to TikTok, the talented florist shared glimpses of her travels, which included a thrilling stint in New York City before heading to Las Vegas for the grand finale of Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' tour. The tour, which showcased Beyoncé's much-anticipated eighth studio album, culminated in Las Vegas, drawing a star-studded crowd that featured the likes of Kerry Washington, Maya Rudolph, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Daniel Kaluuya. However, before joining the festivities of one of the entertainment capitals of the world, Mudarikwa soaked up the quintessential New York experience. Beginning her adventure, the former reality star checked into The Westin and made her way to Times Square, where the bright lights and bustling energy encapsulated the city's spirit. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad loading Among her highlights was a visit to Madame Tussauds, where she indulged in some delightful photo opportunities. 'I stopped by Ichiran Noodles for the best ramen ever. I also stopped at Dunkin' to have my favourite drink, and after that, I went for a little Broadway show,' Mudarikwa enthusiastically shared. Her Broadway experience included attending the spectacular production of 'The Lion King,' which captivated her with its stunning visuals and powerful storytelling. Mudarikwa further explored New York's rich culinary landscape with a visit to Little Italy, sampling authentic Italian cuisine. She also reflected on a poignant visit to the 9/11 Memorial and embarked on a serene cruise to Staten Island, where she was treated to iconic views of the Statue of Liberty. The Las Vegas leg of her adventure primarily revolved around the 'Cowboy Carter' tour, solidifying Mudarikwa's whirlwind journey across two dynamic cities. As for Mudarikwa's future, she decided to step away from her reality TV commitments after two successful seasons, revealing that her decision was not made lightly. 'For me, 'The Mommy Club' was a great platform, but I gave it my all,' she explained. 'When the opportunity for another season came, I felt like I didn't align with their plans.'
The Citizen
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- The Citizen
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