Oti Mabuse has spoken of how her mother created her own dance school in the family’s home town in South Africa to provide her daughters with opportunities that she did not have growing up.
Mabuse, 31, has won the South African Latin American championships eight times and is one of the most successful professionals to have appeared on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, which she has won twice.
Mabuse’s older sister, Phemelo, also pursued dance as a child, while her eldest sibling, Motsi, went on to be a professional ballroom dancer and sits on the judging panel of Strictly.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Mabuse said her mother, Dudu, loved ballroom dancing, but as she grew up under apartheid in South Africa did not have the chance to learn.
She said: “The opportunities weren’t there for them; there were no dance schools, there were no dance teachers. It was very segregated as well. And she always loved it, she always wanted to do it, she always wanted to wear those big ballroom dresses and have her hair done.
“But also in those years, black people weren’t allowed to even be in the same room or on the same dancefloor as white people.”
Mabuse said her mother was motivated to start her own dance school as “no one was teaching black kids how to dance” where they lived at the time.
Growing up in this environment, Mabuse said dance was “all she saw” but that her mother maintained a very strict regime for her children which included only school, sport and dance.
Mabuse added: “She just didn’t want us to grow up and feel like we didn’t have opportunities, and she wanted to make sure that we were always busy so that we wouldn’t have been on the streets, we weren’t getting up to any mischief.
“She always fought for us and she taught us to fight for ourselves and not take no for an answer and be as ambitious and dedicated and competitive as we are.”
Mabuse said she gained her competitive streak from her father, who worked as a lawyer assisting those who could not afford to pay for representation when wrongfully arrested.
She said that this determination helped her win Strictly Come Dancing twice, in 2019 with the actor Kelvin Fletcher and in 2020 with the comedian Bill Bailey.
Last month, Mabuse announced that she was departing Strictly after appearing on the show as a professional for seven years. She is now a judge on ITV’s Dancing On Ice and recently announced that she will be embarking on her first UK tour to perform her stage show, I Am Here.
