We did not have TV at home until 1986.

So my early television experience consists of stolen moments when I and my friends would troop to the Thabethes, one of the more affluent families in our street, who allowed us to watch the wonder box - through the window of their lounge, sometimes with the sound off.

Which is why I treasure those stolen moments so much that when I close my eyes, I can remember all the major shows of the time - and the one that always looms large is The Cosby Show.

This for a number of reasons.

Dr Huxtable, the patriarch of the middle class black American family, became to many of us an inspiration. For the first time in our TV and movie watching experience, we had a black lead who was not a criminal, a pimp, a wife beater or any of the stereotypes that we had been fed about black people.

Huxtable was a loving husband, an inspirational father, a hard-working, witty, considerate black man. We fell in love with him.

In our heart of hearts, as young black South Africans, we nursed dreams of growing up to be fathers of stable, exemplary families - just like the Huxtables.

Yes, I know, Huxtable was a fictional character. The rationale behind him was to explore ways and means to foster positive family values in black America, to undermine black radicalism that was seen, by the mainstream, as a threat.

It was for this reason that politically astute local blacks were not happy with the show. It encouraged individualism at the expense of collectivism.

But another way of looking at the show was that in the face of hardship, through hard work and education, some black people were breaking through the ceiling imposed upon them by the system.

Perhaps the show did stretch the "hard work is a panacea for all ills" message a bit too far.

But that is the nature of aspirational shows - they are built on idealism.

Ambition and idealism are the hammer and anvil through which a resilient populace is fashioned.

What made Huxtable not only admirable but also believable was that the man who created him and played him, Bill Cosby, was himself a self-made man.

Born and raised in Philadelphia of working-class parents, he worked as a supermarket packer, among other things, to put himself through university.

He later achieved a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

From his early days as a stand-up comedian in the 1960s, Cosby was a custodian of "clean" comedy - no swear words, no controversial material. This up to the point when people wondered why he wasn't using his power and influence to address the elephant in the room: race relations in America.

Defending his approach, he argued: "A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, 'Yeah, that's the way I see it too.' OK. He's white. I'm Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right?' So I figure this way I'm doing as much for good race relations as the next guy."

With the rise of rap in the 1990s, replete with swearwords and rappers wearing their pants so low they showed us the cracks of their buttocks, Cosby the social commentator railed against this social phenomenon.

We loved him. He railed against black Americans for speaking Ebonics, the ungrammatical English of the black neighbourhoods.

So I am disappointed but at the same time relieved at the revelations that all these years when Cosby was playing the good father and loving husband - not as Huxtable now, but as Cosby himself - he was drugging women before raping them.

I am disappointed because the effort at engendering positive black role models has been dealt a huge blow. But relieved because we now know that he is just like the rest of us - fallible.

The problem with us is we take people in the limelight and make role models out of them.

Yes, let us admire them for their achievements. But our role models should be people we are in everyday contact with - our parents, our teachers, our priests, ordinary people trying to make a change, in whatever small ways, in our own neighbourhoods.

People whose daily struggles we can relate to; people who make mistakes we can avoid because we were there, watching, when they committed these mistakes.

Let us not conflate celebrities with role models. Yes, if you want to be a musician, by all means take lessons from an R Kelly, a Beyonce - even a Rihanna. But it is not their personal values that you should embrace.

These people are not who you think they are. To them, the world is a stage. They are performing. You will be devastated when the curtain falls and the lights come on and their true selves are revealed.

So-called role models who are on TV and in newspapers are generally a sham, a mirage.

All that glitters is not gold.

lComments: fredkhumalo@post.harvard