At the 19th South African Film and Television Awards in March, iThonga swept the telenovela acting categories. Bonko Khoza won Best Actor — his second SAFTA. Nelisiwe Sibiya won Best Actress. The performances in iThonga have been, by the assessment of the institution that exists to evaluate South African screen work, the finest in the telenovela space across the past eighteen months. And almost nobody outside South Africa has seen them.
This is the recurring problem that RollCallAfrica has been naming in our television coverage: the South African telenovela is one of the most consistently accomplished television traditions on the African continent, and it is almost entirely invisible to the pan-African and international conversation about African screen content. The festivals celebrate African film. The streaming platforms commission African drama in the prestige register. The telenovela — daily, sustained, performed at a level the SAFTAs confirm is genuinely excellent — operates outside all of that attention.
What the Telenovela Performance Demands
There is a specific kind of acting skill that the telenovela requires and that prestige television does not. A prestige drama actor performs a character across eight or ten episodes, with the time and resources to inhabit each moment fully. A telenovela actor performs the same character across hundreds of episodes, shooting at a pace that prestige production would consider impossible, sustaining a coherent and developing performance over years of daily work. Bonko Khoza’s two SAFTA wins are not recognition of a single brilliant performance. They are recognition of sustained excellence across the specific demands of a format that gives its actors no time to find the moment and rewards them only for finding it immediately, every day, for years.
That skill — the ability to deliver a fully realised performance under telenovela production conditions — is among the most demanding in screen acting. South African performers have developed it to a level that the SAFTAs confirm is genuinely world-class. Nelisiwe Sibiya, Bonko Khoza, Zenande Mfenyana (whose first SAFTA after nearly two decades came this year for Inimba) — these are performers whose work, if it appeared in a prestige limited series with international distribution, would generate the kind of acclaim that the telenovela’s commercial register denies them.
Why It Doesn’t Travel — and Why That’s a Failure
The telenovela doesn’t travel for the same structural reasons RollCallAfrica has identified throughout our coverage of African television distribution. It is made for a specific domestic audience, distributed on linear and regional platforms, and measured by metrics that the international streaming and festival apparatus does not track. The Canal+ centralisation of commissioning through Paris, the Netflix geographic conservatism, the absence of pan-African distribution infrastructure — all of it conspires to keep the South African telenovela inside South Africa’s borders.
This is a failure, and naming it as one is the point. The continent has a television tradition producing performances that its own most credible awarding institution rates as excellent, and the infrastructure to share that tradition across African borders does not exist. The demand data says African audiences want African content. The South African telenovela is African content of confirmed quality. The gap between those two facts is the gap that the entire African television industry needs to close. iThonga‘s SAFTA sweep is a reminder that the quality is already there, waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.
— Lerato Dlamini. RollCallAfrica, Johannesburg. 24 May 2026. Sources: NFVF official (SAFTAs 19 results, March 2026), DStv/MultiChoice official, SABC programming data.
