How a Zimbabwean accountant, a Johannesburg café, and one dangerously charming man created Netflix’s latest global obsession

By dailydispatch.co.za

The first sign that something extraordinary has happened doesn’t come from Netflix’s global Top 10 rankings or the millions of viewing hours on the streaming channel. It comes served on a blustery Wednesday morning with our cappuccinos.

At the Woolworths Café in Neighbourhood Square Shopping Centre in Linksfield, the staff are trying very hard to remain professional. They’re failing spectacularly.

A waitress spots Sue Nyathi first. Then another. The chefs emerge from the kitchen. Someone calls another colleague over. Phones appear. Smiles broaden. Before long, the entire team has gathered around the softly spoken Zimbabwean-born author for a group photograph.

Not one of them asks her about writing. Every one of them wants to talk about The Polygamist.

“I’ve watched every episode.”

“I couldn’t stop.”

“Jonasi! Yoh…”

This is what success looks like in 2026. Not literary prizes. Not bestseller stickers. Not reviews. It’s being recognised in the middle of an interview over a dirty chai, because ordinary people feel they know the people Nyathi invented.

The irony is as dirty as the chai. Fourteen years ago, Nyathi self-published The Polygamist after publishers turned it down. Today it’s become one of Netflix’s biggest African success stories, debuting at No. 4 on the streamer’s Global Top 10 Non-English Television Chart with 2-million views and more than 19-million viewing hours in its opening week. It also entered the Top 10 in multiple countries, proving that betrayal is fluent in all languages.

One of the first things Nyathi points out to me is that The Polygamist isn’t really about polygamy. “It’s about cheating,” she says. Or, as she once put it: “Infidelity sanitised as marriage.”

The series follows charismatic businessman Jonasi Gomora, played with charisma and magnetism by S’dumo Mtshali, whose carefully curated empire begins collapsing under the weight of the women whose lives he’s woven together through deception.

It’s glossy, addictive, melodramatic — though some critics say it’s full of stereotypes but is impossible not to skip to the next episode when the credits threaten to roll. Netflix has labelled it a “supernovela”. The Woolworths staff in Linksfield call it binge-worthy.

But reducing The Polygamist to another soap about infidelity in the vein of The Bold and the Beautiful misses why audiences in Johannesburg and much further afield have been streaming the show.

Many of them — and Nyathi admits that the viewership is mostly female — are watching because they empathise with the heartbroken.

Long before Netflix approached her to buy the book rights, women had been writing to Nyathi, ‘You told my story.’ ‘I married a Jonasi.’ ‘I dated a Jonasi.’

“My direct messages just exploded,” she tells me. “Women were saying they’re getting together with their sisters to discuss all the Jonasis in their lives.”

Jonasi, philanderer-in-chief of the book and series, has become shorthand for narcissist, charming manipulator, cheater, player — the man who somehow always seems to convince each of the four women in his orbit that each is the only one.

“When I wrote the novel,” says Nyathi, “I didn’t even know the term narcissist. But we all know the type — and we all love seeing our experiences played out in other people’s lives,” she says.

Most of the stories we relate to are built around familiar people in familiar situations. Whether you’re in Harare, Johannesburg, Paris or Houston, every culture and society has its Jonasis.

“Even the American audience has taken to it,” Nyathi says. “It’s the deception that people everywhere recognise.”

One of my favourite novels is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. On the surface, Kundera wrote about adultery, love and sex in communist Czechoslovakia. Beneath that, he was asking timeless questions about freedom, fidelity and whether desire inevitably collides with commitment.

The Polygamist operates in a very different register — less philosophy, more emotional rollercoaster — but it succeeds for many of the same reasons. Neither book is really about cheating. Both are about what cheating reveals about the human condition.

Nyathi never intended Jonasi to dominate the narrative. In fact, in the original novel he barely speaks, she tells me. “The women tell the story,” she says. “Jonasi only ever has one chapter, after he died. It was always meant to centre the women who are affected by him.”

That decision may be the novel’s greatest strength. Too often stories about charismatic men become stories that celebrate them. Nyathi doesn’t fall into that trap.

Though the author resists picking a favourite character when I ask her, she does admit that Joyce, the first wife in the book, is her emotional anchor.

“I always root for the first wives,” she says. “They’re the ones who entered the relationship with hope.” Empathy sits at the heart of everything she writes.

“When I wrote Joyce, I became Joyce. When I wrote Lindani, I became Lindani. That’s why I can write each character without judgement and perhaps that’s why readers can see themselves in the various characters.”

Nyathi’s own story is also compelling. She always wanted to be a writer. As a child growing up in Zimbabwe, she assigned personalities to spoons and knives, turning household objects into characters. Later, she studied finance because, as many parents point out, a way with words and a fascination with characters isn’t always the road to financial security.

She spent 15 years working in finance after moving to South Africa in 2008, during which time she wrote on weekends and late at night — whenever her other commitments allowed.

At first, for years, publishers rejected her and she self-published The Polygamist in 2012. “It really only started gaining traction around 2017,” she says. “You have to be thick-skinned in this writing game and really back yourself.”

Today she speaks about what she calls the four Ps: “Passion, perseverance, persistence and providence,” she says, looking up at the sky, admitting that she’s a committed Christian who believes that resisting the temptations that ruin families takes discipline — that’s all! She adds that she knows of some pastors who’ve used extracts from her book in their sermons.

There’s another layer to Nyathi’s story that feels especially relevant now. Born in Zimbabwe but living in South Africa since 2008, she’s spent much of her adult life inhabiting two identities. When I ask about the current wave of xenophobic sentiment, she answers thoughtfully rather than emotionally.

Illegal migration, she says, is a genuine global challenge that requires leadership rather than anger directed at individuals.

“I think it’s a problem that needs to be addressed nationally,” she says.

“Trying to tackle the person on the street will not change the narrative.” It’s a measured response, characteristic of someone more interested in conversations than slogans and memes.

It’s a personal quality that keeps coming up during our conversation. “I’ve always wanted my books to be conversation starters,” she says. “And thankfully they are,” as confirmed by the waiting staff at Woolies.

The Polygamist has become exactly that. Scroll through social media and you’ll find debates about marriage, masculinity, religion, patriarchy, narcissism, power, and female resilience, all inspired by her book.

Some viewers love the story, others dismiss it as scandal wrapped in expensive production costs.

Nyathi says she doesn’t mind. “There’ll always be negative reviews,” she says. “The series isn’t for everyone.” Thankfully, no piece of art or culture ever is.

As our conversation ends, the café staff who’ve been waiting patiently for a photograph with the author ask if I’ll take a few with their phones. This appreciative gesture is the measure of Nyathi’s success.

Not the critics who analyse structure, the academics who debate gender politics or the algorithms that count viewing hours, but the people in the café who’ve abandoned their coffee orders because they need to tell an author that her fictional characters became part of their lives.

A little girl who once imagined personalities for kitchen utensils has grown up to create characters who occupy millions of living rooms around the world. For sure, tonight, a viewer, somewhere in the world will lean towards the television, shake their head at Jonasi and say the same thing everyone’s been saying since Nyathi first put him on the page: “I know a man exactly like that.”