The Y2K advert that set Telkom’s CMO on a different path
Katlego Sekhu
Telkom CMO Gugu Mthembu on curiosity, courage, and the moment on the Cannes stage that showed her just how far an ordinary girl from Umlazi had come.
Gugu Mthembu recently sat down with My Top 10 at 10 with Tbose for an honest conversation about curiosity, ambition, and the moment she realised how far she had come.
“At the core, I think I’m just an ordinary Zulu girl from Umlazi,” she says. A coastal girl who loved investigative books and mathematics, and who has spent her life chasing problems worth solving.
Her path into technology began almost by accident. On her way to register for a medicine degree, she saw an advert from Mangosuthu University of Technology calling for people to help solve the Y2K crisis. She didn’t fully understand what the work involved, only that she wanted to be one of the problem solvers. That decision led to her first ten years in IT, before curiosity pulled her sideways into marketing.
Getting there meant unlearning something she had carried for most of her career.
“I was always waiting for the opportunities to be highlighted to me,” she says. It took a direct conversation with a leader, telling them plainly that she wanted to move into marketing, before that door actually opened.
That instinct to wait for permission, she believes, runs deep in how many African children were raised. “Even when you had opinions, whenever you voice them out, you were always shut down,” she says.
Decades after Umlazi, that same woman walked onto one of advertising’s biggest stages, at Cannes, as jury president for Creative Business Transformation, the first time she had ever held such a position.
“You don’t realise how big it is when you are standing on the podium and you are looking up,” she says. “You see thousands of people looking back at you.”
What stayed with her happened after she left the stage. Delegates from Brazil, Nigeria, and the Caribbean stopped her, one after another, to say the same thing.
“We felt validated as a black community,” she says. “When you walked on stage, we thought it’s an American person.”
That same curiosity is what she brings to Nedbank IMC, Africa’s biggest marketing conference, on 17 September, where she joins a panel unpacking the generational shifts reshaping how brands think. “I feel privileged to be the one that’s going to have the conversation,” she says. “We have to be the generation that opens up the pathways for them. But also for us to learn from them.”
Kaya 959 is an official radio partner of the event, with in-person and virtual tickets available at imcconference.com.
To hear the full interview, listen to the podcast or download it to listen later.
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