Karabo's one smart cookie in cute TV ads

Many little girls dream of being TV stars, but few succeed like Karabo Magongwa, who has become famous on television as the "Oreo girl".

At the age of three she had already told her mother that she would make it to the small screen. Just three years later, Karabo won many viewers' hearts in the advertisement in which she explains to her TV father the intricacies of eating a biscuit. When he asks why she will not share her Oreos, she replies, "It's complicated."

Now she is one of television's most adored faces. "I'm so excited ... It is like a dream. Everybody knows me wherever I go," she said this week.

The advert has been voted the "cutest kid advert ever" by US online site Buzzfeed.com, which has about 60 million users.

"People say to me 'Please do the Oreo advert for us' and I do it," said Karabo.

Karabo, a Grade R pupil at Johannesburg Institutional Primary School, also features in the new Standard Bank app for tablets commercial as a spunky girl who takes a trip to the ATM with her father.

She won the Oreo role after her mother, Patricia, registered her with an agency. Agency head Thuli Masehela said: "When Karabo first walked into our office, I knew right there I had a star in the making."

Karabo may be walking in the footsteps of other TV personalities who began as child stars.

Candice Moodley, 37, best known as the presenter of the SABC2 magazine show Eastern Mosaic, stretched her TV career to 20 years.

She started as a presenter on M-Net's KTV at age 13 and went on to tackle other gigs, among them DStv's Teen Sport show, Eastern Mosaic and cameo roles in the SABC dramas Soul City and Jozi-H.

Former YoTV presenter Byron Taylor started at the age of 13. After seven years on the SABC youth programme and a year travelling, Taylor, 28, now produces his own TV series, Travelling Unplugged,on satellite TV StarSat. He said that without the "right guidance from family" a child star could peak too early.

One of the most notorious falls from fame was that of hip-hop artist Molemo "Jub Jub" Maarohanye, who was convicted of killing a group of schoolboys in a Soweto road accident four years ago.

Maarohanye, who is serving a 20-year jail sentence, captured South Africans' hearts as a little star-struck fan in a Coca-Cola advert with soccer hero Doctor Khumalo.