The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu
WHILE she is now celebrated as one of Zimbabwe’s greatest upcoming small screen talents, life was not always so glamorous for Bulawayo’s Mbo Mahocs, who recalls the time she spent away from cameras and microphones while at school as the most agonising in her life.
Mahocs made her debut on e-TV’s soapie Scandal in the past few weeks to much praise, with arts practitioners tipping their hats to an actress who seems to have defied the odds and penetrated the dog eat dog world of South African television.
For those that saw her take baby steps on the Bulawayo arts scene, Mbo was just another talented and ambitious girl in the City of Kings trying to juggle school and the arts.
In an interview on Capitalk this week however, Mbo revealed that she dreaded her time at school, particularly her first few weeks.
“I wasn’t up for it in the beginning. I hated it. Sitting in the classroom, I felt so out of place. I remember people around me would say ‘you don’t belong here’. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the way that I used to dress because I had a very quirky dress sense. Maybe it was because I was naturally creative or I was rebelling because sometimes you rebel and it comes out in little things that you don’t realise yourself,” she said.
Mahocs, who studied architecture at the Bulawayo Polytechnic College, revealed that this was not her passion to begin with initially.
“After I completed my high school, I knew that I wanted to study something towards dramatic arts. That’s when I actually moved from home. This was around 2008 after my A-levels. I went to South Africa and I was trying to study but the fees were too expensive.
“So I think I stayed there for something like four years then I returned home because my dad felt that things weren’t working out for me so he suggested that I just come home and we try something else. So I went back home and when I was home, because my father is in that field, he just suggested that I try and study architecture,” she said.
According to the multi-talented actress, she had to be forced to enrol at Bulawayo Polytechnic by her father.
“I went to register at Bulawayo Polytechnic. Someone actually had to drag me there. My dad had to organise one of my cousin brothers to actually drive me there because I didn’t feel like it. After my first year, I did well in my subjects, I felt hey, maybe I could do this and that’s when I went on to my second year. I think I stuck around for three -four years and that’s when I moved to SA,” she said.
