• PHENNY
BY JOWIT SALUSEKI –
VERSATILE actress Phenny ‘Dainess’ Walubita says Zambian actors should not be ashamed but be proud to use vernacular language in local television drama.
In an interview with the DStv entertainment, Walubita who boasts to be one of the pioneers of using Nyanja in the popular Kababana soaps which used to air on both Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) and pay television ,says actors should be proud of their local dialects.
“In 2001 I had to convince Mr Lawrence Thomson the producer of Kabanana soaps that I was going to be using Nyanja in a role that I
acted as a maid to the Kabanana family. As artistes in Zambian why should we restrict ourselves to the use of English only when we have a variety of local languages, moreover some artistes are not even fluent at English,” she said.
“Look at our colleagues from South Africa, Botswana and Nigeria, they are very proud of their languages, that is why there are able to mix English and their various languages in most of their films,” she observed.
Dainess says during her days of acting in Kabanana soap, she used to translate the scripts from English to Nyanja, stressing that such a feat requires one to carry out some research.
The former pupil of Senenga and Chelston secondary schools has also featured in drama series such as love games where she acted as Pam Jones and chances and choices where she played the role of Thumba.
She was also the first female member to spearhead the formation of the popular Zambia one comedy in 2004, although at the moment she is no longer part of the comedy group.
The dread locked actress says acting like any other career has its own pitfalls. Walubita recalls that in 1998, she was forced to resign from the then Zanase drama group because of the role that was given to her which was peculiar.
Recently , Dainess was one of the more than 300 Big brother hopefuls who auditioned to represent Zambia in the forth coming season nine of Africa’s biggest reality show which begins next month in South Africa.
