Michael Madyira
Kaizer Chiefs and Bafana Bafana legend Doctor Khumalo has opened his front door to the cameras for a four-part docuseries about the player’s life.
Titled 16V Doctor Khumalo: Untold, the first episode was aired on DStv’s Mzansi Magic last Sunday.
The docuseries offers intimate details about the life of one of the greatest talents to ever grace this continent’s football pitches. This very fact is acknowledged by Barcelona and Cameroon legend Samuel Eto’o in the first episode.
It is a celebration of a football genius whose life’s testimony is backed by family members, childhood friends, politicians, football legends, coaches, commentators as well as various other celebrities.
In the dusty streets of Dube Village in Soweto where he was born in 1967 and bred, Dube initially tried his hand at boxing.
But a black eye sustained during a sparring session discouraged him and he channelled all his attention towards football.
As a teenager, Doctor Khumalo prophesied his own destiny when he was mugged and lost his football kit on his way home from training in Rockville.
“Hey you, one day you’ll come and watch me play at Orlando Stadium and you will pay,” he told his 10 tormentors before speeding off.
In 1986, he again predicted his future, telling childhood friend and Orlando Pirates legend Tebogo Moloi that one day he would entertain people at Ellis Park.
It only needed a year for that to become a reality.
His debut was, interestingly, against Orlando Pirates, surprisingly thrust into the starting line-up by the late Ted Dumitru.
Doctor Khumalo was then an unknown schoolboy seated in the Ellis Park dressing room “amongst the best of the best players of Kaizer Chiefs” like Ace Ntsoelengoe, Teenage Dladla, and Chippa Molatedi.
But he had second thoughts as soon as they stepped onto the pitch and Ntsoelengoe blocked him from returning to the dressing room.
“If I had got to the dressing room, I was going to take off the kit, give them their strip, put on my tracksuit and catch a taxi to the township by Commissioner Street and leave everything behind,” he says.
He became part of the inaugural Bafana Bafana team that played their first international match following readmission into Fifa in 1992.
