ABSTRACT
Sophie Ndaba came to the attention of the public as a much-loved single woman in the popular South African soap opera Generations. This chapter draws on a case study of the South African celebrity, Sophie Ndaba, to explore how African women celebrities interrogate the space of global celebrity humanitarianism by their own work with branding of proximity and distance. It provides an interpretive analysis of the public life of a popular South African soap opera star, read through an historical understanding of South Africa with particular attention to consumption and celebrity humanitarianism. Women's empowerment as an exercise in increasing women's agency and access to resources has generally been easily incorporated into development discourses under the assumptions of both consumption and domesticity as a natural realm of Self work for women. The chapter argues that Sophie Ndaba performs a similarly dangerous project within the divided society of contemporary South Africa.
