SMag Women of the Year issue | Lerato Kganyago won’t slow down

Greatness can’t be rushed and dreams come with no expiration date, of this Lerato Kganyago is living proof. Now in her 40s, she is energetic and on top of her game — and she doesn’t have to choose between love and career.

A day before her cover photoshoot, she calls with a last-minute request — she can’t do a four-hour shoot, as initially arranged, but she can do three hours and come with her makeup already done. Deal. Her diary is packed and she has to hurry to another set. When I sulk and pout about lack of sleep owing to my busy calendar, she tells me to toughen up, pointing out that, on top of her weekly Metro FM show with Proverb and Melanie Bala, she has also been shooting two TV shows, one of them being the Miss SA reality-competition show Crown Chasers.

The shoot runs smoothly a day before the weekend of the Durban July. The following day she has a morning flight to Durban where she has lined up a number of appearances and DJing gigs. Rushing out of her shoot, we arrange to meet in Durban for her cover interview.

Fast-forward to Monday, that plan has bombed over our failure to coordinate diaries — too much partying. After a number of failed attempts and both of us almost giving her poor assistant Vanessa Mazabane heart palpitations, our virtual coffee date happens. It’s worth the wait, however, as she doesn’t hold back and gives one of her most personal interviews yet, opening up about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

“Since some artists plateau or reach the ceiling at this age, in the beginning I thought the same would happen to me. But I realised that society makes you feel that way,” she says. “The world has evolved so much — women are not sitting in the kitchen, baking. Now they are making their dreams come true at any age; whether 40 or 50. My life is unfolding again in my 40s.”

Kganyago’s career, spanning over 20 years, started in beauty pageantry when she was crowned Miss Jam Alley in 2001 and then Miss Soweto in 2005. Soweto TV would later launch her TV career, first with Open Door Policy and then the popular The LKG Show. Until this day, The LKG Show still has a special place in her heart and she hopes to revive it eventually.

“When I did the Julius Malema interview, that’s when people started taking notice of me. He was then the president of the ANC Youth League and there was a lot of drama around him. People got to see the human side of him,” she remembers.

She went on to host Project Runway SA, The Link, Live Amp and Moments South Africa. She even had a stint on SABC Sports.

“I was engaged to a footballer [Katlego Mashego],” she laughs. “He got me to fall in love with football. I remember there was a time I stood in for Minnie Dlamini on SoccerZone and people were blown away by the amount of knowledge I had.”

When I remind her about her turn as soap-opera diva Masebotsane in daily drama Muvhango, she screams and laughs until she starts choking up. While she will most likely never act again, the offers keep coming. “I respect actors because I thought it was going to be easy, but it required a lot of time, attention, and commitment. I remember thinking when my contract ended after six months, ‘Acting is not my thing,’” she says.

Kganyago admits she has endured a lot of bullying over the years, especially on social media. She has often been compared to others, particularly Bonang Matheba, although she doesn’t mention her by name.

“I remember there was a deal that I was going to get with a beauty brand two years ago — this is how much this thing has followed me,” she says. “They had approached me and proposed a campaign to me. I agreed — it was good money — but then they came back with that excuse and I was so disappointed that people still did that. That broke my heart because I thought we had moved on. It would affect me a lot of times, but right now I’m not bothered by it. It affected me because I was always trying to prove that I’m not that person.”

Digging up more skeletons, I remind her of the drama when Matheba abruptly departed Metro FM in 2017 after an on-air-personality reshuffle at the station. Kganyago was scheduled to co-host Front Row with Matheba, but she left the station instead. Kganyago doesn’t shy away from addressing it head-on.

"It is what it is, let bygones be bygones,” she says. “I was offered an opportunity that I don’t think any of us would have declined. I love radio and TV — if a great opportunity is given to me, there is no way I would say no to it.”

Next, I read Kganyago a quote she gave to me in 2018 after she had won a South African Film and Television Award (Santa). It reads: “One lesson I’ve learned in this industry is that every man is for themselves and not everyone will love you. The higher you go, the [lonelier] it gets. It's cold in here.”

Is it still cold at the top?

“I wouldn’t say cold, because I’m now married… the higher you go, the colder it gets, I still stand by it,” she replies.

Kganyago married Thami Ndlala in 2020, a month after they first met. She calls it the biggest highlight of her life.

“I thought I would never get married. That was the last thing on my mind. All I wanted to do was to chase money and be successful. My career peaked late in my life — in my late 30s — so I was playing catch-up,” she says.

“It was nerve-wrecking in the beginning. A lot of negative things were said about my marriage, which affected both of us. He didn’t understand the media and found himself having to explain himself a lot. Until it got to a point that we made our marriage about us. Every marriage has challenges and right now we are having the time of our lives because we have become each other’s friend. Now we just wait for our baby.”

His romantic gestures have left social media shook. On Valentine’s Day in 2021 he booked out FNB Stadium with songbird Zonke serenading Kganyago over a candlelight dinner.

“I like simple things in life. His love language is completely different and I had to learn,” she says. “His love language is doing big, dramatic things. When that happened, I was shocked. I told him the other day that he had embarrassed me with that. He wants the world to know that he loves me, and I’m starting to learn that I don’t have to be discreet. It goes to my previous relationships where I constantly had to hide.”

Close to Kganyago’s heart is educating the public on fertility struggles and minimising period poverty.

“I want to document my life and my surrogacy journey. I want to document and teach South Africans about adopting, surrogacy, and IVF [in-vitro fertilisation] — the different options that we have, especially those who have struggled with fertility,” she says. “I want to be a mom. As Black women we have been taught that we can’t have children after a certain age, but I want to teach both women and men that we have other options.”