Strictly’s Oti and Motsi Mabuse’s ‘secret’ sister who shunned fame to become engineer

Strictly Come Dancing stars Motsi and Oti Mabuse have a little-known middle sister called Phemelo – and they say she is actually the best dancer of the three, but has chosen a totally different career path

Strictly Come Dancing sisters Motsi and Oti Mabuse have proved dancing talent runs in their blood.

They are both ballroom champions, with older sister Motsi now working as a judge on the Strictly panel while her sister is a professional, winning the Glitterball trophy last year with Bill Bailey.

When it was revealed Motsi would be joining the judging panel, replacing Darcey Bussell, there was an outcry as fans were convinced she would be biased in favour of her family.

But Motsi insisted she would be a fair judge and never give her sister an easy ride – plus, she added, she was judging the celebrity contestant and not the professional.

“We have to speak about Oti doing her journey and if she gets to a point where she has a chance to win this and she feels I only want it because my sister is there, then it wouldn’t be such a big thing for her to celebrate. I wouldn’t want to take that away from her,” she said.

“I really need to be fair and she’ll get what everybody else is getting. We’re on different paths and it’s important. I don’t think anybody should be bigger than the show and it’s important that everybody is very professional.”

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It wasn’t even the first time Motsi had judged Oti – she also worked on the panel for Let’s Dance, the German version of Strictly, in 2015, on which Oti was a pro dancer.

“We did go through it. The main point is that I’m not judging Oti. We’re never judging the pro dancers. They are brilliant, they are beautiful and they’ve done what they need to do to get there,” Motsi continued.

“But then again she’s used to me saying something about her dancing because I’ve taught her from the minute she could walk. I’ve always been by her side.”

The sisters grew up South Africa during apartheid, and Motsi called their childhood “very sad”.

“I’m so thankful for the world of dance because if I had grown up with just the South African bitterness of the very hard childhood we had, and I’d never experienced the love of the dance world, then I probably would have been a very sad person,” she told The Mirror.

“The world of dance is where I felt accepted as a human being.”

She also said on Loose Women, while looking at a childhood photo of herself: “We were in the middle of apartheid and racism and we had to learn to fight so if you look at that little girl, she had to learn to fight from the onset – this is going to be a tough life she’s going to live.”

Motsi, 40, and Oti, 31, stuck together and they both ended up moving to Germany when they were older before relocating to the UK for Strictly.

But what a lot of their fans don’t know is it was never just the two of them – there is actually a third sister, Phemelo Mabuse, who shuns the limelight – though she briefly appeared with her sisters on Celebrity Gogglebox in 2019.

And surprisingly, Phemelo is said to be the best dancer out of the three, though she has chosen a drastically different career path.

Brainy Phemelo is 35 and an MBA graduate who works as a mechanical engineer, building windmills in their native South Africa.

Oti revealed to Jonathan Ross: “To be honest, we have another sister, middle sister, she was the better dancer.

“She’s a mechanical engineer. She designs windmills which create electricity through wind in South Africa.”

But Phemelo has not completely left the world of dance behind – she won coveted trophies in Latin American & Ballroom in the Juvenile, Junior and Youth categories and also represented South Africa four times at the World Dance Sport Championships.

She teaches dance in South Africa’s Pretoria and Johannesburg, and describes herself on Instagram as ‘MTB [motorbike] rider, swimmer, hiker, fitness enthusiast, ambitious’.

But Phemelo wasn’t the only sister who initially pursued an academic career.

Motsi studied law at the University of Pretoria and was set to join the family law firm before she decided to swap her legal studies for dance.

And Oti studied civil engineering for four years because she “liked maths and science,” but admitted she missed dancing too much and went back to performing.

They might live in different countries, but the lookalike sisters still gush over each other on social media, proving their bond is intact.

Oti posted a snap of the three of them together on Instagram, remarking they all shared the “same nose”.

Phemelo posted a photo of Motsi and Oti, writing alongside it: “I love how my sisters embrace their natural state, it makes them sooo beautiful to me @motsimabuse @otimabuse.”

Oti responded: “You mean no makeup?

“You’re beautiful the most when you’re happy @phemelom.”

Motsi also posted sharing some touching advice that her mother gave her when she was little.

“Be nice to your sisters,” she recalled her mum saying.

“Your friends will come and go, but you will always have your sisters. And I promise that someday they will be your best friends.”

She went on to call Oti and Phemelo her “support,” her “allies,” her “audience and critics” and her “best friends”.

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