The original Mr Bean, Joe Mafela, had 'it' in abundance

Behind the image of Joe Mafela the jester lay hard work, sweat and tears, writes Fred Khumalo

One of these days you must try a Mr Bean impersonation. Or better still, a reprise of Charlie Chaplin. Not in front of your mirror but in full view of a group of unsympathetic strangers - and feel the drops of sweat borne of embarrassment gather under your armpits.

Not many people can do these impersonations without seeming downright ridiculous. Yet Joe Mafela did a combination of both without seeming to raise a sweat. In front of millions. Every week. For years.

To give credit where it is due, Mafela did Mr Bean long before Rowan Atkinson blessed the world with that character.

When the self-trained thespian first appeared as S'dumo in the sitcom Sgudi Snaysi in 1986, I laughed until my stomach hurt.

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The first episode over, I began to sober up and thought to myself: this guy has bitten off more than he can chew. He cannot sustain this level of hilarity for the entire series. He is going to drop the ball at some stage.

Yes, I had seen him in earlier productions, including uDeliwe, the first all-black movie in South Africa which was released in 1975. The movie, which started as a radio drama, was later made into a TV series.

In uDeliwe, where he appeared alongside the legendary Simon Mabhunu Sabela and Cynthia Shange (mother of TV personality Nonhle Thema), Mafela played Peter Pleasure, a bumbling but affable Malawian Casanova wannabe.

It was a humorous role, no doubt, but the allure of the character he played in that movie was in his pitch-perfect "African foreigner" accent.

But now, on Sgudi Snaysi, he was going to be with us for at least a year playing S'dumo, the tenant from hell.

An incorrigible gambler who is forever in trouble with the local mashonisa, S'dumo is a miser who will use one teabag for at least a week.

Every time he finishes his tea, he takes the teabag and hangs it on a clothesline at the back of the house: "There's still a lot of tea in this teabag!"

Weeks rolled by, S'dumo grew on me.

Just a subtle raise of an eyebrow made the viewer break into paroxysms of laughter.

This was all before he even spoke.

The viewer literally rolled on the floor when he finally began to speak: "Bangibiza ngembungulu layikhaya, mara ngibhatala irent, grand-grand, ngesikhathi futhi [The people in this house call me a blood-sucking bedbug, yet I am never late with my rent.]"

It's either you have it, or you don't. In a career dating back to 1964 when he featured alongside Michael Caine and Stanley Baker in Zulu, about the Battle of Rorke's Drift, and up to contemporary Generations: The Legacy, where he starred alongside actors young enough to be his grandchildren, Mafela proved he had it in abundance.

But what is "it"? It's not talent - everyone has talent but not many are visionary enough to unearth it. It's not luck - everyone has luck, but not everyone works hard enough at recognising it. Is "it" tenacity?

Perhaps it's a combination of all, and more.

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Especially if your conception of "luck" is of the "The harder I work, the luckier I get" variety.

That's what Mafela told me when I interviewed him back in 1997, when I was still editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.

"Ai, my friend, I do not have umuthi wenhlanhla [a magic potion], I just work, work, work. Some of the things I do succeed, others fail. You people only get to see the success. Not the sweat, the tears in the background," he said in the interview.

Born in Sibasa, in what was then the Northern Transvaal, on June 26 1942, Joseph Daw Mafela was brought up first in Kliptown, Soweto, and later Tshiawelo, which in terms of apartheid planning had been set aside for South Africans of Venda and Shangaan ethnicity.

Having made his acting debut in a play called Real News, he made his big-screen debut in Zulu. In the movie, which also starred Mangosuthu Buthelezi (playing King Cetshwayo, his real-life great-grandfather), Mafela also featured as assistant director.

There followed other, smaller, roles and his next prominent project was in uDeliwe in 1975.

In 1976, he was in Shout at the Devil, based on the novel by Wilbur Smith, directed by Peter R Hunt, a veteran of the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

With the long-overdue advent of TV in South Africa in 1976 - the government had delayed the inevitable, saying the small box would warp the country's moral code! - Mafela started getting a lot of jobs in numerous productions.

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His big break was Sgudi Snaysi (Is Good, Is Nice) in which he appeared alongside Thembi Mtshali, Daphney Hlomuka and Israel Thabethe, among other big-hitters.

The production, which ran for five years and 78 episodes on SABC, led to roles in other series, often produced by Penguin Films, in which Mafela was a partner.

Other memorable productions were Going Up (alongside Sechaba Morojele), Madam and Eve, based on the cartoon strip of the same name, and the long-running sitcom Stokvel (2002-2012).

The success of Sgudi Snaysi also opened doors into the world of advertising, as Mafela started working as creative director of black communications at BBDO South Africa and, since 1992, as a director of Scharrer Advertising.

Conceptualising and starring in early Chicken Licken TV commercials, Mafela also authored the chicken franchise's memorable "It's good, good, good, it's good it's nice" jingle.

Unstoppable like a tsunami by this time, he became a much-in-demand MC at A-list parties and social occasions.

He released a music album called Shebeleza Fela's in 1996. His song Shebeleza was such a hit it was used as a theme song during the Africa Cup of Nations that year.

But he was getting bitter as he eased into old age.

In 2012 he complained that it was getting increasingly difficult to get acting work. He was dismissed as being "old and cold".

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He made a return to the screen with a role in Generations: The Legacy which, as it turned out, was to be his last.

The team at Generations had to change its weekly shooting schedule after the news broke that he had died in a car crash last Saturday.

In 2015 he received the Comics Choice Lifetime Achiever Award, and last month was invited by the Living Legends Legacy Project where he was to be honoured, an offer he politely declined, in deference to Sam Mhangwani, his late mentor whom he wanted honoured instead.

At his memorial service at the Joburg Theatre on Thursday, Shange, who had known him for 43 years, made a blistering attack on the entertainment industry and how it treated its mature actors.

She said actors were never granted permanent contracts but were considered freelancers.

Mafela, who will be buried in Johannesburg on Wednesday, is survived by his wife, four children and six grandchildren.

• Fred Khumalo is the author of 'Dancing the Death Drill', available at bookstores