South African television was 50 years old in January. For almost two-thirds of that lifespan, one format has dominated the national imagination: the soap opera. And for more than half of that time, one show in particular – Generations – anchored the evening routine of millions.
Last week, Generations (and its reboot, Generations: The Legacy) turned 32. It has outlived governments, hairstyles, megalomaniac public-broadcast bosses and most of the assumptions about what television is “supposed” to do.
In a country that only switched on its first television signal in 1976, soaps didn’t merely entertain. They taught South Africans how to watch television, and, in many cases, how to imagine themselves within it.
Coming late to the party, largely because of the apartheid government’s suspicion of the medium, meant television didn’t evolve gradually alongside South African society. It arrived fully formed and powerful, and daily serials quickly became both habit and reference point.
Soaps slipped into the rhythms of domestic life, existing, as University of Cape Town Centre for Film and Media Studies senior lecturer Alexia Smit puts it, “alongside our lives as the status quo”. Which is precisely why they mattered so much.
As Smit reminds, us, soap operas rarely announce themselves as “events”. They don’t carry the ceremonial weight of a Rugby World Cup final or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing. Instead, their characters live alongside us – night after night, year after year – building meaning through repetition rather than spectacle. In South Africa’s compressed television history, that “dailiness” carried enormous cultural force.
Like sands through the hourglass
Before local soaps showed South African lives in serial form, viewers were already fluent in the language of cliffhangers. American soaps were the training ground.
Santa Barbara, The Bold and the Beautiful and Days of Our Lives taught audiences how to follow long arcs, forgive implausible plot twists (Bobby Ewing returning from the dead, Marlena possessed) and remain loyal to characters for decades.
Prime-time behemoths like Dallas and Dynasty offered wealth, power and moral ambiguity to viewers living under political and cultural constraint.
These shows normalised the idea that television could be something with which you developed a relationship. By the time local soaps arrived in the early 1990s, audiences had already been primed on a steady diet of the Forresters, Aldens and Capwells.
South Africa soap operas: a dress rehearsal
Soap operas proved particularly potent in South Africa because they became sites of social learning. Television, Smit notes, is where most people learn about other people – how they live, work, love and fight.
Few understand that machinery better than Lesley Cowling, a research associate at the Wits Centre for Journalism and a former writer, script editor and storyliner on Isidingo from the late 1990s into the 2000s.
Looking back, she says the genre carried unusual weight in the early democratic years.
“Isidingo was mapping an aspirational growth, but also real social change – moving from working class and rural to middle class and urban, and modelling those relationships across race,” Cowling explains.
Isidingo also staged power, labour and consequence against the backdrop of a mine. Egoli: Place of Gold offered a fantasy of urban capitalism complete with boardrooms and Randlord mansions. 7de Laan presented everyday familiarity in Melville, nogal.
Together, they normalised the idea that South African lives – aspirational, compromised, ordinary, multicultural and multiracial – were worthy of ongoing attention.
And there was nothing haphazard about the melodrama.
“In those early years, the genre was used to drive public service storytelling as well as aspiration,” says Cowling. Storylines tackled HIV and Aids, racism, labour disputes and cultural mourning practices. Sometimes public funding enabled specific arcs. A lot of research underpinned them and they were always embedded in character, not delivered as lectures.
Cowling describes the concept clearly: “Research around soap opera shows a modelling effect. People see things in soaps and then model aspects of their own behaviour on what they’ve watched.” This was social learning delivered via plot twist.
The Generations effect
When Generations premiered in 1994, on the cusp of democracy, it arrived with particular intent. Its creator, Mfundi Vundla, has been clear that the show was never accidental.
In the excellent interview 30 Winds of Change: Mfundi Vundla (well worth watching in full) Vundla says, “It was a product of our democracy. And then I was able to hit the spot with the audience who wanted to see themselves and how they wanted to see themselves. So, it was a black gaze on a black populace.”
His vision was rooted in a very particular world. Vundla speaks about drawing inspiration from the first wave of black-owned advertising agencies emerging in the early 1990s – including the agency run by his brother – where professionalism, ambition and confidence were central. That environment became the narrative backbone of Generations.
For some viewers, it offered a first encounter with the idea of a managing director, a corporate office, or whiskies at Back of the Moon after work. For others, it modelled corporate jargon and middle-class codes.
Dubai-based South African journalist Thembalethu Zulu remembers it viscerally.
“Generations was a game changer,” she says. “Culturally it was so important. I would say it was the first time we’d seen a rich, powerful black family on TV. It doesn’t get the credit for what it did for the country – it was didactic in so many important ways.”
Viva the villains
If Generations offered ambition, it also offered complexity.
Characters like Connie Ferguson’s Karabo Moroka and Pamela Nomvete’s Ntsiki Lukhele didn’t exist to be redeemed. They were ambitious and glamorous. Before Instagram and Pinterest, soaps were style education. They showed not only what success looked like, but how to do it yourself in heels and Truworths power suits.
For the millions who tuned in daily, Ntsiki became a tailored, ruthless and scheming icon – much like Isidingo’s celebrated villainess, Cherel de Villiers, played by Michelle Botes.
When Botes passed away in 2025, there was an outpouring of tributes. Many of them focused on Cherel’s plotting and wicked monologues. It spoke volumes about how deeply these characters lodged themselves in the public imagination.
As radio star Anele Mdoda puts it, “When she killed Duncan, her own husband’s son, I knew we had unlocked another level of villain.” But Cherel worked because she wasn’t one-dimensional.
“Michelle Botes was never just one thing,” Cowling says. “She could do villainous acts, but she was equally convincing as the traumatised woman beneath it.”
The economics of the set
Soap dominance was also structural.
“Soap opera is cheaper and more efficient to produce than drama because you’re filming on sets,” Cowling explains. “And that made it viable for South Africa.”
Worlds were built and returned to daily: the mine manager’s office, the boarding house, the shebeen. Storylines unfolded and characters moved through these familiar spaces. The set-based model allowed for scale, repetition and affordability.
In fact both those early years of Generations and Isidingo were filmed in a single building at the SABC studios in Joburg. This enabled daily production – writing, filming and editing almost continuously. The format was efficient, but the impact was enormous.
When fiction spilled into real life
The intimacy of soap opera blurred boundaries. Actors were confronted in supermarkets for fictional crimes. When Isidingo killed off Colin Moss’s character, Stewart Buller, in a mine shaft explosion, viewers were inconsolable.
“Soap opera inspires conversation,” Cowling says. “People would talk about it at work, in homes, even in newspapers.”
That attachment explains why the 2014 Generations cast walkout and strike felt seismic. What Vundla described as a “divorce” was experienced by viewers as a rupture in daily life. Yet the show rebuilt itself despite losing key actors, drawing enormous audiences for its relaunch (around the eight-million mark), before settling once more into the steady work of daily storytelling.
After the shared screen
Today, viewing is fragmented. We scroll through the endless, interchangeable meh of Netflix and Apple TV+. Shared television viewing, once culturally binding, has eroded, replaced by solitary device time.
“What we’ve lost is that shared national viewing – everyone watching at the same time and talking about it the next day,” says Cowling. That simultaneity once stitched together audiences across geography, class and language.
And yet soaps endure.
Decades after watching it as a youngster, when Zulu was editing Sowetan’s S Mag, the team put Connie Ferguson on the cover. The coverline they landed on, “New Horizons”, was a knowing nod to the fictional advertising agency owned by the show’s central family, and to Ferguson’s character as the daughter at its centre. “It was such an honour landing that cover with a true South African icon,” Zulu recalls. “Even though she had since moved on from Generations, she was still Karabo to us – and the weight of her presence was reflected in how nervous we all were throughout our shoot!”
It’s a small moment, but a telling one of the space the show still occupies in popular culture. Today, a new generation of South African television makers – whether working on long-running soaps such as Uzalo and The River, or shorter-form streaming dramas – are telling new stories to different audiences. But they are doing so on these same cultural foundations.
Long after the credits roll, Generations and those early “new South African” soap operas continue to live alongside us, shaping how we imagine success and identity, one bout of amnesia brought on by a tragic boating accident at a time.
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Top image: Rawpixel/Currency collage.
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