Hallucinating in a hospital in Johannesburg after contracting malaria is what led Rebel Wilson to become an actress.
The Australian-born Wilson wrote this in her recently-published memoir, Rebel Rising, which depicts her unconventional journey to Hollywood success.
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Wilson devoted several chapters to her time spent in southern Africa, specifically living in South Africa in 1998, thinking her experience would be similar to Disney’s The Lion King.
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‘Turns out it was nothing like The Lion King,’ she wrote in the thirteenth chapter. She says the city had the ‘highest rape and murder rate in the world’, adding, ‘But oh no, here’s me thinking I’m going to be singing in the bush with Pumbaa.’
After witnessing a crime and helping the police, she was told to apply for the Rotary Youth Ambassador programme, a global network of community volunteers which sponsors youth service clubs.
She contracted malaria after camping in Mozambique and symptoms started flaring up while she was in Johannesburg. In an interview with This Morning, Wilson said this event led to her becoming an actress.
‘I had this hallucination that I was an actress when I was in hospital and that changed the whole trajectory of my life. To me, it’s a bit of a “voodoo disease” in that you kind of feel like you’re out of your body.’
Although she ‘knew that malaria was an issue’ and that she would frequent danger zones, Wilson wrote that she refused to take anti-malaria tablets because they made her feel nauseous.
As reported by News24, she attended Transvalia High School in Vanderbijlpark. There, she discovered Leon Schuster’s work in the library.
‘I’d watch those Leon Schuster videos in the school library and just laugh so hard,’ she wrote, adding that she thought Schuster was a ‘comedy genius’ who was ahead of his time like Sacha Baron Cohen and Johnny Knoxville.
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She also wrote about her experience visiting Robben Island, Table Mountain and Kimberley’s Big Hole with the other ambassadors in her programme, describing her visit to Kruger National Park as a ‘magical’ experience.
Wilson also recounts instances of violence that she witnessed while in South Africa: visiting Planet Hollywood a week after it was bombed on 25 August 1998, killing one person and injuring 27.
She wrote about almost getting caught in a shooting in KwaZulu-Natal, mentioned taxi wars, and ‘seeing dead bodies on the sides of roads’.
In the book, Wilson writes about a group of armed men who stopped her group’s truck during their return trip to South Africa from Mozambique. The men reportedly transported them into another truck and to a second location.
There, they took their passports. She wrote that she was terrified that they were being kidnapped. Luckily, the men let them go and they returned to South Africa. Years later, she wrote that she saw a documentary about the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) which depicted the smuggling of illegal materials into South Africa, and wondered whether her group was used to smuggle materials in their truck.
Wilson also did karate during her time in South Africa and shared a story about a tournament during which she represented her dojo in Johannesburg. Although she won a gold medal in the solo section, she later lost to a girl from Soweto.
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Picture: @rebelwilson / Instagram