How Nqobile Gamedze shed the anxiety that came with playing Mbali

Nqobile “Nunu” Khumalo (now Gamedze) is a South African actress and model who studied journalism and later built a career in television, film, and modelling. South African audiences first met her as an actor in 2013, when she debuted as Cindy in the first season of the popular Mzansi Magic telenovela Isibaya. Now, she plays the lead role of Mbali Dlamini in the Netflix South African crime drama Umthetho.

Mbali is a sharp, principled young public prosecutor whose carefully built life unravels when she discovers that her older brother Moses (Tony Kgoroge)-whom she was told died in prison years earlier-is alive and leading the ruthless prison syndicate iGaz’lam (“The Brotherhood”). Essentially, their father had lied about Moses’s death to shield the family.

Caught between her duty to the law and fierce loyalty to her family, Mbali is pulled into the dangerous world of the prison gang. She must navigate alliances, moral grey areas, and high-stakes threats-particularly to protect her younger brother Sphelele (Given Stuurman) while operating in dual capacities that blur the lines between justice, survival, and betrayal.

In several interviews about the show, the actor has described Mbali as deeply devoted to family (her strongest anchor), brave, and capable of unconditional love, even when her choices appear extreme. The character begins with a “squeaky clean” moral canvas but evolves into a more complex figure-” a rebel with grace” – as the story forces her into intense, life-altering decisions. It is one of Khumalo’s major leading roles on a Netflix original and forms the emotional and moral core of the series.

Asked what surprised her most about the gap between the justice system as she understood it growing up and as Umthetho portrays it, Gamedze answers with disarming honesty in a recent interview with The Citizen.

“I didn’t know what justice was until I was older. I knew there was a word called justice and it kind of meant that. But justice in its true meaning, I didn’t know what justice meant until probably about 10, 11, 13 years ago.”

She eventually concluded that nothing about the show’s version of the system surprised her, because her own understanding of justice itself only fully formed in adulthood – “and even that’s going to evolve as I experience life.”

Playing a character on the edge – and staying sane doing it

Mbali spends the series walking a tightrope between duty and family loyalty, and Gamedze says that tension was as exhausting to perform as it looks. “When you’re playing a character that is on edge and nervous all the time, you don’t know if you are nervous and on edge or if it’s the character’s nerves,” she says. “I had to reconcile with myself every day when I went home to say: Character Mbali, character Mbali, you’re okay. You’re performing. It’s not real.”

She’s also candid about how hard that separation was to maintain: “It was very challenging for me. I’m not going to lie. It was not easy.”

Nqobile Nunu Gamedze as Mbali Dlamini in Umthetho.

The grace of a rebel

For her closing thought, she turns reflective, addressing a specific kind of viewer directly. “I would like for people to consider the grace of a rebel,” she says. “Can you imagine what your actions in the right direction could achieve if [your energy] has done so much harm on this side? Can you imagine if you took all of that energy and that power and turned it in another direction?”

She ties it back to Mbali’s own hope for the people around her: “She sticks around hoping ‘if I support them long enough, that grace is going to come out.'”