Twelve year career now reclaiming her name and regaining her fame on Jacob’s Cross “To this day, people still call me Lerato!” Abena Ayivor says. It is not surprising that this is so. This is the name of the controversial character she played from 1999 to 2003 in arguably the most popular soap opera in SA – Generations. She graced multiple magazine covers and could probably stake a claim to influencing the show’s good ratings. “Lerato was a drug addicted alcoholic prostitute so she easily stuck in the minds of the millions who followed the programme. Outside of the show, many fans could not distinguish Abena from Lerato. Women would stop me in malls and question my behaviour and men in clubs would whistle at me thinking they could buy me. They all felt like they were dealing with Lerato,” she sighs. “But Generations was a great experience, we were like a family and only when I did the show did people believe that I could make a career out of acting.” Abena’s father had dismissed drama as a career option and instead dispatched his daughter for a BA degree in law at the University of Cape Town. She simply had no interest in the discipline and abandoned it in her third year to enrol at a college in the city that had a two year drama programme. “I decided as a thirteen year old that I wanted to act after my role in Oliver Twist as the rose seller. I was a teenage ‘scene stealer’, doing more of my share in the play. It felt good and to this day I love being able to be someone else, it is something I
would do for free and don’t regret for a single minute choosing this as a career.” Abena was born in 1975 in Zambia to a Ghanaian father and Zambian mother, and grew up in a big family of eight children in the Eastern Cape. She had a rebellious streak to her, to the extent of being expelled from primary school for beating up other girls. Even when she had found her passion in drama school, she would often skip class. But her first year drama lecturer Liese Bokkelman would not give up on her and insisted that she take her talent seriously. She passed away as Abena was going to her second year and to this day she believes that Liese is her “guardian angel”. On completion of the course in 1999, she auditioned for Boesman and Lena starring Angela Bassett and Danny Glover. She would stand in for Bassett during technical set up and recalls that the Hollywood actress was just as shy and reserved as she (Abena) is. It was after this stint that she joined Generations for four years, leaving in 2004 as she wanted to do something new. “Only when I left Generations did I realise that being a free-lance actor could be difficult. I had a support role in a Pieter Toerien produced play called Honour but after that I had a whole year of no work. I had just turned 30 and thought that my career as an actor was over.” This turned out to be just a dry spell. After a short period working for her friend Isaac Chokwe’s production
company, Abena was cast in the drama series Jozi H which is currently being screened for a second time on SABC 3. It is a hospital based production which is particularly memorable for the actress because the story had an interesting twist to it that touched on her own life. “When I read the script, I discovered that I was to play the mother of a son called Kwame with congenital heart disease. The shocking thing was that the script
writers knew nothing about my past...my younger brother is called Kwame and he suffered from this very disease as a boy and needed surgery from Christiaan Barnard, the doctor who is famous for having performed the world’s first heart transplant. It was quite a fascinating coincidence and quite a big story. A number of magazines at the time heard about it and featured both Kwame and I in articles about how real life imitates art.” After Jozi H, Abena had a small part in The Royal, a British series playing a woman in the Nigerian Biafran war whose daughter moves
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