“Madiba,” is the new BET miniseries that rolls out in three two-hour blocks on Wednesdays, starting February 1st. “Madiba” is the Xhosa clan name often still used to refer to the late Nelson Mandela, the first post-apartheid President of South Africa, who had a law practice with Tambo. Laurence Fishburne plays Mandela in “Madiba,” which also stars David Harewood as fellow anti-apartheid activist Walter Sisulu and Orlando Jones as African National Congress (ANC) president Oliver Tambo. The cast and producers attended a panel at The Television Critics Winter Press Tour to talk about the project.
In preparing for the role, Fishburne recalled hearing Mandela speak during the leader’s visit to the United States back in 1990.
“I actually saw Nelson Mandela speak in Atlanta when he did his American tour after he was released from prison,” Fishburne told television critics during a TCA panel to promote the miniseries. “I got some nosebleed seats, you know. I wanted to say that I had seen him. And then when we got ready to do [Madiba], I left from Atlanta, and I went to a school, called the Ron Clark Academy. And Ron Clark and his partner had been taking children to South Africa for a number
of years now, and they were preparing for their trip. They gave me this great blessing because as they were preparing, they were practicing the national anthem of South Africa. So they sang this to me, and that was where it really started. That was like a huge blessing for me to go. And, of course, I spent about two weeks there, in November, of 2015.
The Academy Award-winning actor was lucky enough to meet several people in Mandela’s life as well, which helped greatly in preparing to play the role. “[I] met with people, like Zelda, his personal secretary, for the last 20 years of his life. I met with Ahmed Kathrada, who, Ahmed spent time in jail with him. And, again, because we were in [Johannesburg] and we were shooting in a lot of locations where all of this history really happened, and because the history is so recent, it’s only 20-something years since apartheid has been dismantled, you could feel sort of the energy of what transpired in that country. It’s still very fresh, so it was kind of all around us.”
The miniseries director, Kevin Hooks, wanted to make sure that the movie not only highlighted Mandela and his journey but also wanted to get the message across to what the movement was really about.
“The six hours really gave us an opportunity to explore what the movement was about,” Hooks said. “Obviously, Nelson was at the center of that, but I really saw it and approached the material as a love story. Nelson, who obviously has the love of his country and the people in South Africa, and his relationship with women, which we all know about. But I think the thing that we don’t know about, and the thing that we explored in this piece, and people will really get to know, is the sort of love affair – the relationship that Nelson had with the people around him. Oliver Tambo, wonderfully played by Orlando, and Walter Sisulu, who was also part of that triumvirate that David Harewood plays beautifully as well. And I think that was something that we sort of looked at as an opportunity for us to expand upon and tell the story of some of the lesser-known people, like Ruth First, and some of the others that were involved in the movie.”
Part 1 of the series entitled, “Troublemaker and Defiance,” the premiere episode shows Nelson after his father’s death and him backing out of an arranged marriage. Nelson flees his village and heads to Johannesburg, where he continues his work as an underground revolutionary.
Catch “Madiba,” airing Wednesdays, February 1st, February 8th and concluding on February 15th on BET.
