telling double life on stage

By Lesego Masike (BTM Reporter)

ENTERTAINMENT – November 1, 2007: Thuli Simelane is not a secretive person if one could observe that. But, in fact, she kept a ten years old love triangle as secret between herself, a priest she got married to and her girlfriend.

Simelane’s play, My Cousin, My Wife, is a true reflection of such life when she was in the closet. The play – that she concedes is her true life – starts on 15 November this year at the Safari Internatinal Hotel in Berea, Johannesburg.

The Soweto-born raised in Meadowlands has now three boys and a girl. She introduced her girlfriend – Nthabiseng Simelane* – to her husband as a long-lost cousin who needed shelter.

Thuli, who turned 31 years old, says; “We all lived in my house in Braamfischer and when my husband was not home I would be a wife to Nthabiseng.”

The priest – Pastor Mbokodo – found out after ten years when he caught up the two in bed, which is one of the features in My Cousin, My Wife.

The play attempts to highlight pressure towards most homosexual people when their families discover their sexual orientation.

When she was young, Thuli’s family discovered her sexual orientation and dismissed it in hope that in time she would change, but she rebelled by running away from home.

By then Thuli was already involved with another woman, Nthabiseng.

“My mother fetched me with police and instructed them to beat me and force me back home”, yelled Thuli.

On her return home she started behaving as a woman, and was later forced to start dating men.

Then she fell pregnant with a first child whom the father passed away before the child was born. After meeting another man, she fell pregnant again with a second child.

After giving birth to her fourth child, Thuli was forced to attend the family’s church, which was Zion Christian Church (ZCC), and she met the priest husband and got married.

All along she was maintaining her relationship with Nthabiseng, and was able to keep her secrets.

“I normally went to see Nthabiseng at her place and she knew nothing of my life even when we moved in together until she walked in on me and my husband”, Thuli explained.

According to Thuli, it’s after many years after separated from the husband that she decided to share her story with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community.

* Not her real name