🤍

[lola @l0laxyz]

huge fan of my mom btw, she’s too beautiful

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

@msresii 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

@oyama_gxl 😭😭😭😭😭😭

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

As a married couple<<<

[polyannaa @Pollyannaa0]

Pazar günleri sevişmek, uyumak, yemek ve tekrar sevişmek için olmalı.

[Mr Ngezana🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️ @Makaziwe_N]

❤️❤️❤️

[Sahil Ebrahim @sahil_e_]

Not only did we defeat Egypt in their back yard, but we did it despite having to face the usual bullying and b*tching from the North Africans. 🚮🟥

How this is not a red card is beyond me.🤦‍♂️

[DeeDee🌟 @DiianaD___]

That beautiful woman that carried you for 9 months, may she live long!

[🧚 @inathinjee]

Imnandi ke le shandis. Worse mawuthi hlafa i mayonnaise ne hot sauce 😭

[Biri♛ @numeroun0_]

darkskin women be so tea ugh 😍

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

@Khutso_A @saints_chango “A beautiful slow lady”😭😭😭😭

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

😂😂😂😂😂

[N’wa Mucanyi 🫶🏾 @KhananiShingan1]

😭😭😭😭😭bafazi, yall don’t want marriage anymore neh

[Monarchive @__sugarvenom]

Saw 🧁’s wife at the mall and forgot to sing “Indoda yakho uZero” to her💔

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

Yoh. Futshek hle Ausi?💀

[Chief of Staff ZA 🇿🇦 @chiefofstaffZA]

South Africa has allowed Jessica Nkosi to get away with something for far too long.

She married Ntokozo Dlamini, settled into her beautiful private life with him, and somehow the rest of us were expected to simply behave normally after that.

I have tried.

I really have.

But every now and then somebody posts an old clip of Mastermind from Uzalo and all the maturity I have collected over the years disappears immediately.

Jessica, my sister, this man used to be our television crush.

Please understand the seriousness of the matter.

Those were different days.

There was no scrolling through twenty clips whenever you felt like seeing somebody. You waited for the programme. You knew what time Uzalo was coming on. You organised yourself. You made sure nobody suddenly sent you to the shop at the wrong moment.

Then Mastermind would walk onto the screen.

Finished.

My attention was secured.

I am old enough now to admit that on certain evenings I was not following every detail of the storyline with the dedication of a television critic.

Sometimes I was simply waiting for Ntokozo TK Dlamini to appear.

That is my truth.

Mastermind had that annoying kind of confidence that looked completely natural on him. He didn't seem to be begging a scene to notice him. He would arrive, say what he needed to say, carry himself like he knew exactly who he was, and somehow your eyes followed him.

Even the walk had attitude.

The jackets were doing their job.

The face was doing its job.

The confidence was doing overtime.

Some of us were suffering quietly.

Then the years started moving.

Uzalo moved forward. Careers changed. People grew up.

And Jessica Nkosi entered the situation permanently.

Now look at us.

She gets the husband.

We get old Mastermind clips.

I have checked the arrangement several times and the mathematics still refuses to favour me.

To make matters worse, Jessica and TK are not even the type of couple who give the public their whole marriage every morning before breakfast.

They can disappear into their real lives.

No daily performance.

No constant proving.

No need to upload every family moment so strangers can inspect whether everybody is still happy.

That has made my completely unserious complaint even worse because, Jessica, you cannot take one of our finest television crushes and then also practise privacy.

Pick a struggle.

I am joking, of course.

And that joke is actually where my deeper appreciation for these two begins.

The older I become, the more I understand how rare it is for public people to build a life that does not seem to require an audience every minute.

We met Jessica and TK through entertainment.

We became familiar with their faces because of characters.

Jessica had Qondi.

TK had Mastermind.

Those characters entered people's homes so regularly that viewers naturally developed an attachment to the actors behind them.

But the real Jessica and the real Ntokozo still had lives to build after the cameras stopped.

That part matters.

Jessica was already Jessica Nkosi long before becoming Mrs Dlamini.

That must never be confused.

Her talent had already carried her far.

Isibaya gave people Qondi, and Jessica made that character hers. She later showed a completely different side of herself through other roles and television work. She built relationships with major brands. She became one of those South African personalities whose name could comfortably exist in acting, presenting, fashion and commercial work.

Marriage did not hand her a career.

She arrived in that marriage carrying one.

That distinction is important to me because successful women are too often discussed as if everything that happens after marriage belongs to the husband.

Jessica earned her own place.

What marriage and motherhood seem to have done is introduce another rhythm into the life she had already built.

That part of her journey has become more interesting to me with age.

There was a younger Jessica chasing the work, building the name and establishing herself.

Then came a woman who had a husband, children and a household that mattered to her just as much as a camera did.

Instead of acting as though nothing had changed, she allowed her priorities to change with her life.

She stepped away from acting for a period.

She was present for the ordinary things that fame cannot replace.

School runs.

Children growing.

Being at home.

Being a wife.

Having days that were not controlled by a call sheet.

And yet her career did not collapse because she was no longer appearing in a drama every week.

That is the part I find beautiful.

She had already built herself strongly enough to have options.

Brand work continued.

Her public profile remained alive.

Then, when television called her back into a space that suited this chapter of her life, she returned.

Not as Qondi.

Not as Thando.

Not trying to recreate who she had been ten years earlier.

She came back as a grown woman fronting Make Life Good, carrying a completely different energy.

That is growth to me.

Sometimes we measure people's careers only by how loudly they are moving.

We see somebody every night and assume they are winning.

Then somebody becomes selective, steps away for family, works differently, protects their peace and suddenly people start asking what happened to their career.

Nothing necessarily happened.

Life happened.

Priorities expanded.

That is a very different thing.

And TK's journey deserves the same fairness.

I joke about Jessica hiding him because I miss seeing the man regularly.

I will continue with that complaint because I have rights as a former Mastermind sufferer.

But Ntokozo did not vanish.

He grew beyond the version of him some of us froze in our memories.

That is probably where viewers like me sometimes become unfair to actors.

We meet them during one special period and secretly expect them to remain there forever.

In my head, TK can still walk around KwaMashu tomorrow wearing one good jacket, looking slightly dangerous, and Mastermind will continue exactly where he stopped.

Meanwhile the actual man grew older.

He became a husband.

A father.

He took other roles.

He played Bafana in DiepCity.

He later appeared as Gadla in Ithonga.

And the part that really made me sit up was discovering that his involvement with Ithonga went beyond appearing in front of the camera.

He also carried a consulting producer credit.

Now that changes the picture.

Because while some of us were sitting here complaining that our crush was not on television enough, Ntokozo was apparently becoming involved in another part of television altogether.

That is the kind of growth audiences do not always see.

Acting is the visible part.

Production is a different room.

It means beginning to understand the machinery that puts the programme on screen in the first place.

And perhaps that should not surprise us too much.

TK has spoken about business ambitions going back years, and he studied International Marketing Management before the entertainment industry became the place most people knew him from.

So maybe the businessman and producer were never sudden additions.

Maybe television audiences simply met the actor first.

I actually like that possibility.

I want more South African actors to think beyond waiting for the next casting call.

I want people who have spent years learning this industry from the inside to eventually understand production, development and ownership as well.

Being the face everybody recognises is beautiful.

Having enough knowledge to create work for other people one day is another kind of achievement.

That is also why I no longer look at TK's quieter periods in exactly the same way.

Do I still want him back in a powerful acting role.

Absolutely.

That crush did not go through all those years of Uzalo for nothing.

But I don't want another Mastermind.

We already had Mastermind.

Leave that young man in his era.

Give me the Ntokozo Dlamini who exists now.

Give him a proper grown man role.

A husband carrying a family while hiding the pressure he is under.

A father struggling to communicate with a son who reminds him too much of himself.

A respectable businessman whose past starts catching up with him.

A man who walks into a room appearing completely in control while his personal life is quietly coming apart.

Give him something that uses the years he has lived instead of asking him to imitate the young actor we remember.

That is what makes watching actors grow satisfying.

Life adds things to a performer that no acting class can manufacture.

Marriage adds experiences.

Parenthood adds experiences.

Responsibility adds experiences.

Disappointment adds experiences.

Building a home with another human being adds experiences.

Age changes the way a person understands silence, anger, fear, love and loss.

I would love to see what today's TK can do with material that demands all of that from him.

And strangely, this brings me straight back to Jessica.

Because underneath all my jokes about her stealing our crush, I actually enjoy the bond they appear to have built.

Not because I know what happens inside their marriage.

I don't.

None of us sitting outside their home knows.

And that is exactly how it should be.

I enjoy what they have chosen to show by not showing everything.

Their relationship does not appear to need public attendance every day.

Jessica has openly spoken about enjoying being a wife and mother while still having her own work.

TK has continued building his own path.

They occasionally allow us to see pieces of their life, then they go back to being themselves.

That balance feels grown.

The younger version of me only looked at two attractive actors.

The older me looks at two people who seem to understand that a career is important, marriage is important, children are important, privacy is important and none of those things has to completely swallow the others.

That is why I cannot say marriage made Jessica successful.

She was already successful.

I can say the woman we see now appears to carry success differently.

She seems less pressured to prove that being visible every week is the only definition of relevance.

She can leave a television set, raise her children, work with brands, return through presenting and still have people interested in what she does next.

That is not a career disappearing.

That is a woman discovering that her career can fit into her life instead of forcing her entire life to fit around her career.

I love that for her.

Unfortunately, I still have unfinished business with the husband.

Ntokozo, my brother, please understand that some of us remember.

We remember Mastermind.

We remember that confidence.

We remember exactly why the television suddenly became interesting when you appeared.

Marriage has not erased those memories.

Fatherhood has not erased them.

Production credits have not erased them.

Age has definitely not erased them.

Jessica may have won the real life competition without even knowing some of us had entered, but history is history.

My crush was valid.

My commitment was serious.

There were television schedules involved.

That kind of dedication deserves recognition.

So Jessica, enjoy your husband peacefully.

Build your home.

Raise your family.

Continue protecting the parts of your marriage that belong only to the two of you.

Continue building the version of your career that makes sense for the woman you are today.

I withdraw every charge against you except one.

You still have far better access to Ntokozo Dlamini than the rest of us, and I will never consider that arrangement completely fair.

As for TK, keep producing, keep building, keep being a husband and father, and keep growing beyond the character that introduced so many of us to you.

Just don't forget that acting thing completely.

Some of us survived the Mastermind era.

The least you can do is give our grown-up selves one more excellent character to obsess over.

Respectfully, of course.

We have homes now.

[Tumeigh @simplytumeigh]

A man admitting his feelings is so damn attractive 🧎‍♀️

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

@_Hybreed_ 😭😭😭😭😭😭

[D’IOR 𐙚˚ @One_Of_One1111]

I hate a colorist. Cuz a pretty girl is a pretty girl regardless of her complexion.

[Mbekezeli @MbekezeliMB]

I just saw a TikTok confirming that @SpurRestaurant has printed a Braille menu for blind and visually impaired people. ☺️ What a progressive step to include all customers!

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

@uMthigo_ 😭😭😭😭❤️

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

@DaniellaMakoro 😭😭😭😭😭😭

[🤍 @wineoenophile]

@ChalynRugby I also don’t understand, I couldn’t spot him yesterday 😭