08 May 2016

Mmina Gaebonwe started modeling at the age of 16 and became the first winner of Gemstones Model Search competition at 18. Through modeling, she won her ticket to New York where she worked with bigger agencies among them Wilhelmina Model Agency. However she has now added another dimension to her impressive profile by becoming an actress.

“I tried my hand in acting last year and I auditioned for a couple of roles which I did not get. I started taking acting classes for six weeks in London to improve my acting skills,” she said, adding that she went back to South Africa to give it a shot.

She said she recently got her big break when she appeared on a TV series on SABC 1 called Ngempela.

“The series tells different stories every week so in every episode I have a different character. At one point I was playing the girlfriend to a guy who was very arrogant and unattached to his culture and suffered a lot because of that. The last episode I was a wife to an architect who lost his mind when he started gaining a lot of power and money,” said Mmina.

She said the prospects of getting an opportunity with SABC as a presenter were looking positive adding that her goal was to do as many TV series and movies as a way to bigger and better things.

Gaebonwe also added that so far the response regarding  her acting has been good. She is currently signed to Boss Models, Johannesburg and before then she was with Outlaws Model Agency in Cape Town.

Speaking on other projects she has been involved with, the young model who also juggles as an actress said she has decided to give back to her country by nurturing and growing the industry that has brought her joy and some type of fulfillment.

“Earlier last year at a Monique Lhuillier runway show, only two out of around 20 models were non-white,” she starts off, indicating that this status quo is what made her develop a concept that will help her fellow Africans create their own opportunities by promoting modeling as a career that can generate wealth for the youth.

Gaebonwesaid as a result, this led to the birth of a concept, the model and creative workshop which was held last year in Gaborone. She said the event organised through her company EmIvy Model and Talent Management mentored upcoming models how to walk on the runway while fashion designers got the chance to showcase their designs.

Going forward, she said governments across the world were increasingly recognising the importance of creative sectors as a generator of jobs, wealth and cultural engagement.

“At the heart of the creative economy are the cultural and creative industries that lie at the crossroads of arts, culture, business and technology and what unifies these activities is the fact that they all trade with creative assets in the form of intellectual property ; the framework through which creativity translates into economic value,” she said.

She further said Botswana had the potential to build a successful creative economy as well as take a leading role in developing it.

She said from her experience in the United Kingdom, they had defined the creative industries as those industries that were based on individual creativity, skill and talent with the potential to create wealth and jobs through developing intellectual property.

She went on to add that these creative industries had been divided into 13 sectors to include advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software (i.e. video games), music, the performing arts, publishing, software, and television and radio.

Mmina noted that Botswana could learn from the UK’s model to build an economy where the youth could generate wealth from their talents. ENDS