Love Lives Here

Rhythm City star Mduduzi Mabaso and his wife, Fatima, share the secret to their 10-year love story, and what they admire about each other.

- Khosi Biyela

ON SCREEN he’s a no nonsense kind of guy, but at home he’s the total opposite. While getting to know the real Mduduzi Mabaso, we discover that he’s just a normal, loving and caring family man.

Unlike his character, Suffocate, in e.tv’s Rhythm City, the 41-year-old award winning actor has only one wife. And she calls him the “smooth operator”.

When we meet up with Mduduzi and his better half, Fatima Metsileng (35), at their house in Ridgeway, south of Johan nesburg, they tell us this year marks their 10th anniversary as a couple and six years of being traditionally married.

“I am not good at remembering these things,” the TV star laughs. “I even forget my own birthday.”

However, he does recall how he met Fatima on the set of SABC1’s Zone 14 back in 2007, and that he proposed and started lobola negotiations in 2010. But his wife wasn’t sure of his affection at first.

“He used to say: ‘I will marry you one day’, and I would laugh and say: ‘We will see’,” Fatima reveals.

THE COUPLE, who owns Mats and Mabs Productions, tells us their affair was not love at first sight – at least not for Fatima.