The Birth of BeBe Zahara Benet

BeBe Zahara Benet is one of the biggest drag stars to come out of Minneapolis. But behind it all, Marshall Kudi Ngwa is a Minnesota homebody on a trajectory he never saw coming.

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It was a cold November night in Minneapolis when Africa’s most important drag queen was born, whole and entire, right on Hennepin Avenue.

The year? 2000. The place? Where else? The sprawling complex then and still called the Gay 90’s. Once just a dinner-nightclub, it, too, was born on Hennepin Avenue, swallowing its neighbor, and then another neighbor, then another, in Minneapolis’s gay-after-dark district, becoming the biggest gay bar between the coasts, with half a dozen venues attached by jerry-rigged hallways.

Fresh out of Cameroon, skinny as a sapling, 18-year-old Marshall Kudi Ngwa stepped into this new-to-him but long-to-Minneapolis world. He climbed the staircase to the upstairs show lounge beside his friend Cathy and took a chair.

“I’d never heard of drag in my life!” says Kudi, who is now better known as BeBe Zahara Benet, international star of stage and screen. “But it was in me; it was in me.” With that, he puts his fingers together and places them at his heart, then draws them out.

Like Athena from the head of Zeus, enter BeBe! Hourglass figure, hair regal as a lion’s mane and four times bigger, the glamour of Diana Ross riveted like rhinestones onto the fierceness of Grace Jones. A star was born.

•••••

I meet Marshall Kudi Ngwa on the rooftop deck of his apartment building just steps from the Stone Arch Bridge. It’s a late-summer day, and across the river, downtown Minneapolis looks like a rocky cliff face, the various buildings made one by the bright sun’s glare, the heavy humid air, and the ever-present smoke this year.

We have a lot to talk about, including the documentary of his life, Being BeBe, which will have its Minneapolis premiere in November, following up its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June of 2021 and, later that month, a triumphant run at the Provincetown Film Festival (where it was crowned with the audience award for best documentary). I also want to learn about his role anchoring the new performance spot Roxy’s Cabaret, opening in the former Ichiban on Nicollet Mall, and his growing presence as an  interior designer and event planner through his company The Lavish Lab.

Did you know BeBe has been choosing chandeliers and layering animal prints in select local living rooms? “If a Minnetonka girl wants to live out loud, it is not always easy to find support in her community,” says Kudi with a nod. “So she finds me. BeBe understands a Minnetonka girl only has one life, too, and she wants to seize it!”

“Minnetonka girls” are one of the lesser-known parts of Kudi’s life he’s now willing to talk about.

You see, BeBe Zahara Benet/Marshall Kudi Ngwa is known for using bold elements—African music, fabrics, patterns—onstage. In fact, BeBe’s fans in the seats yell Cameroon!—not like it’s a home country but like they’re yelling Amen! Or maybe: Free Bird! At first Kudi thought this was bizarre, like yelling Canada at Justin Bieber, but now he slightly enjoys it, receiving his Cameroons as an expression of faintly odd but nonetheless well-meant love.

Despite Kudi’s country of origin and BeBe’s global stage, the character BeBe Zahara Benet is Minnesota born and bred, as Minnesotan a character as Viktor the Viking (of the NFL), Nick Carraway (of The Great Gatsby), or Charlie Brown. BeBe Zahara Benet is just like them: More real in our imaginations and revelatory of the human experience than many real people, commercial but artistic, made in Minnesota in various significant ways but also made elsewhere in other various significant ways.

Kudi often brings up Tyler Perry’s character Madea as the way to think about his character BeBe Zahara Benet. Neither Madea nor BeBe is small and personal; they are global in every sense: globally famous and marketable, globally relevant as illuminations of the human condition. “I say BeBe is a global girl. Not everyone is one thing from one place anymore, and BeBe certainly isn’t.” Also, Tyler Perry uses “he” pronouns; so does Marshall Kudi Ngwa, though he doesn’t object when people use “she” or “they,” which can seem more natural, especially when you’re talking about what BeBe Zahara Benet is up to.

Whatever pronoun is used, one thing Kudi does not like is the tendency among some writers to see drag as the inevitable outward manifestation of born inner sexuality—what Kudi does is art and work, and no less work than that done by a doctor or lawyer. He wants his drag performance acknowledged as the combination of his relentless work and well-honed talent, which he intentionally fuses into moneymaking art. Every wig takes hours and days and money. Every dress requires the same. Every lip-synced song involves dozens or hundreds of hours of preparation and lots of talent. And then there are BeBe’s original songs—those take even more. (BeBe is taking a swing at a breakout pop hit. The biggest original song, “Jungle Kitty,” has a million plays on YouTube, though for my money last year’s original “Banjo” is the banger.) All of BeBe takes work, time, talent. Makeup, photo planning, photo styling. Hours and connections and talent.

And magic. As BeBe says in one scene in the TLC TV series Dragnificent!: “We queens, we always have tricks—under our sleeves and under our skirts!”

One trick BeBe is ready to reveal is that there’s a serious Minnesota homebody behind one of the most riveting beauties on Instagram. Here’s what Kudi does when BeBe’s not onstage: He cooks, he sews, he plays with nieces and nephews, he rehearses, he meditates.

BeBe is ready to show this homebody and Minnesota-made side now, particularly in light of the collective trauma and international infamy Minneapolis earned following the murder of George Floyd. BeBe Zahara Benet/Marshall Kudi Ngwa wants the world to know that his is a face of Minneapolis, too.

The day we talk, Kudi is on the eve of a departure for a U.K. tour (London loves BeBe). As he looks over the Mississippi toward the haze-fused dreamscape of Minneapolis, he explains how critical this city is to both how BeBe was born—and where he’s going.

Looking back on that fateful night in 2000, please keep in mind that Kudi had not come here to be fabulous. He was here to live in Minnetonka with family and take classes at MCTC so that he might one day bring the stable glory that only a child with a solid middle-class career can bring to a West African family. He was not the first in his family to move here and join the small but church- and profession-oriented community of Cameroon expats in the Twin Cities. MINCAM, an organization of Minnesotans from Cameroon, puts the current local Cameroonian population at 5,000. Marshall Kudi Ngwa most certainly did not come here to become one of the biggest drag stars to ever come out of Minnesota.

Yet, in this television age, BeBe Zahara Benet has certainly become just that. BeBe’s international reputation rests primarily on having won the first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It was the hardest season, because BeBe had to invent the whole genre as she went! To the RuPaul generation, BeBe Zahara Benet is Marilyn Monroe, or maybe actually Jean Harlow, the star who made the shape in the sky the other stars must match. BeBe is also revered for returning as one of RuPaul’s All Stars and for going on as one of the leads in the 2020 TLC series Dragnificent!—a makeover show like Queer Eye but with a big Oprah-style meaning-and-spirit anchor. In one memorable scene from Dragnificent!, BeBe, wearing a giant turban with a peacock feather arching regally over one ear, officiates a wedding ceremony, and you instantly feel the foundation of the church in her life. (Through her company The Lavish Lab, BeBe taps her church roots to officiate weddings in real life, too.)

Church choir and choir solos were where young Marshall Kudi Ngwa first seized the microphone. “Growing up in Yaoundé, we did not know drag. But it was in me,” says Kudi as he thinks about his childhood. Drag was in him at his parents’ house, where he’d dabble in his mom’s makeup. It was in him as he watched the popular Cameroonian band Zangalewa toy with Monty Python–style burlesque comic characters on stage. If he had even thought about men dressing as women back then, which he didn’t, he says he’d have taken it as a fairly ordinary part of Cameroonian life, because it was part of Elizabethan theater and Greek theater, and why make a scandal out of what was obviously a well-wrought path of human endeavor?

And yet there was the news this very summer out of Cameroon of the government arresting and sentencing two men to five years in prison for sitting at a restaurant dressed as women. The crime charged? “Attempted homosexuality.” “No, my parents did not send me to Minnesota to keep me safe,” Kudi tells me on his Minneapolis rooftop. “They sent me for the West African dream—every West African parent wants their child to become a lawyer, a doctor. I am the proof a child can be as successful as a lawyer but not be a lawyer.”

Sent to Minnesota to go to church and be a lawyer or a doctor, Marshall Kudi Ngwa got a job at the Galleria and enrolled at MCTC. That’s where he met his friend Cathy, who said, “You have to see a drag show at the 90’s.”

•••••

Kudi seems to look off through his thick-framed Buddy Holly glasses into a rich memory as he recalls that night in 2000. “The curtains parted, and Roxy Marquis, may she rest in peace, entered. The most beautiful woman, glamorous, glamorous—gorgeous. My face, if you could have seen it, was the face that saw a ghost. At that moment, I felt validated for all the thoughts I had as a child—what I was doing in Cameroon was never valid, never important. The puzzle all came together in one night. Oh my God, this is it! Performance, illusion, fantasy—all of this made sense to me, coming together in one art form. That’s where the birth of BeBe really happened. And why Minneapolis will always be a very, very special part of me.”

He woke up the day after this revelatory night and went to his job helping brides trying on wedding gowns and others shopping for prom dresses at the Jessica McClintock store at the Galleria. Simultaneously, he began learning from the show lounge stars of the 90’s, who inspired him to become an international phenomenon. (Of course, I ask the obvious question about his clientele at the Galleria, and Kudi says that Edina mothers of the bride at the Galleria are indeed fiercer than Hollywood agents—and good training for anyone heading into showbiz. “I call them my Minnetonka girls, and they have always been some of my biggest supporters. And if you think Minnetonka girls don’t understand the importance of illusion? Think again.”)

In the early 2000s, drag beauty pageants were an important step for Kudi on the road to building up a reputation, gaining name recognition, and scoring a spot on a drag tour. It just so happened that one of BeBe’s backup dancers for a Texas pageant had a sister, Emily Branham, who was a budding filmmaker and who was fascinated by the drag world. Branham was so charmed and intrigued by BeBe at that pageant 15 years ago, she began filming this character over the years and, in the process, ended up capturing facets of young BeBe well before the Drag Race triumph.

Being BeBe, the product of that 15 years of filming, is touching in a surprisingly Norman Rockwell and the-value-of-family sort of way, showing Kudi with his Cameroonian family and BeBe with her Minnesota and NYC drag family, both worlds supporting and loving one soul. It’s a very Minnesota story full of local stars, like Kudi’s best friend Brady, who brilliantly does BeBe’s hair and performs himself under the stage name Ana Stasia (on Instagram as @_Anadu_) and Rae Ann Annala of Hopkins, the tape measure–toting old-school seamstress and designer who made a lot of those Drag Race winning outfits. As BeBe tells me: “She makes my costumes a 10; I make them a 20!” (Please know that somewhere in Minneapolis is a warehouse holding the collection of BeBe Zahara Benet gowns, shoes, and wigs—think of it as the Fort Knox of local drag.) You’ll also see Kudi’s sisters and brother, who also live in Minnesota and with whom Kudi spends a lot of his downtime these days, cooking Cameroonian foods for big Minnetonka family dinners.

The film is largely arranged around Cameroon’s anti-gay sentiments, and Kudi’s counter-example. In it, Kudi mentions that it will be very hard for many Cameroonians to live out loud and be themselves because of anti-homosexual norms, laws, and traditions. But you also see one of Kudi’s sisters as she prays over him on the eve of a (brief) move to New York: “Lord, we call upon you. . . . This is a new beginning for him. . . . Fulfill his dreams, amen.” I tear up.

After the trauma of the murder of George Floyd, it’s been hard at times to remember the side of Minneapolis where an African immigrant working as a bridal consultant at the Galleria has a super-supportive family, Black and white, born and chosen, who will love him and work to help him become one of the biggest drag performers in America—and almost certainly the biggest out of Africa. This film shows a good, real, and little-seen side of our beloved hometown.

Releasing this documentary is only one of the big moves Kudi is making this fall. He’s also about to anchor a new creative home in downtown Minneapolis. Roxy’s Cabaret is a brand-new venue scheduled to open by Halloween in the former Ichiban space on the southernmost end of Nicollet Mall. The historic Japanese steak house is being transformed. The blue roof will be replaced by two enclosed rooftop lounges, with a third that can be opened when weather permits. The ground floor will be split between the Nicollet Diner (which is moving from a few blocks over and will continue to be open 24 hours) and a 125-seat state-of-the-art drag theater. Local drag legend Nina DiAngelo is managing the spot. DiAngelo was a mentor to BeBe and is now another of her besties—so Roxy’s will be BeBe’s new home.

“Monica [West], BeBe, and me—when we were the Ladies of LaFemme at the [Gay] 90’s, it was a big deal. Everyone said it was the best drag show between the coasts,” explains DiAngelo, born Jamie Olsen, whom I talk to on the phone while he supervises construction at Roxy’s. “When we left [in 2015], it was a big deal. It wasn’t an amicable split. We had issues with how we were treated. Look, the 90’s is why I am where I am. It’s an institution, and we’re not going to be in competition with them. We’re going to be something else, more Vegas-like, really high production values. When BeBe said we would be her home base, that was it. I knew we would be big, national, tourist destination, all that.”

Whether BeBe will appear at Roxy’s quarterly or weekly when she’s in town, or whether Roxy’s will be to BeBe something like the Paisley Park dance club was to Prince, just a place she might pop into whenever she has the time and feels like it, remains to be seen. But the tradition of great entertainers being associated with venues is not uncommon—like Eartha Kitt reliably at the Carlyle or Dizzy Gillespie popping up unexpectedly at the Blue Note. If all of BeBe’s friends are doing something fun with a nice dressing room and great lighting right near her house, why wouldn’t drag fans make a point of hanging out there just in case?

Speaking of an expanding Minnesota presence, lately Kudi has been thinking he’d like to get married and have two kids. So if you know anyone. . .

“I could film a Dating Game for BeBe here in Minnesota. You know that would be a hit!” Kudi tells me, lifting his black wool porkpie hat briefly off his head to make room for a laugh that needs that much room.

As our time runs out, Kudi suggests that the two of us could throw the most fabulous party, and of course I say we must. A black and white ball; a red ball, like he’s thrown in L.A.; a masquerade ball? Everyone invited. We’d celebrate BeBe’s 20th birthday. We’d celebrate the Minneapolis we all want, the one that’s so beyond fabulous because everyone is invited.

“After everything we’ve been through, I just want people to see how beautiful Minneapolis is in so many ways—I want to bring back the special of Minneapolis,” says Kudi as we leave our interview. When emphasizing “the special,” he uses one hand to circle and pluck a bit of air in front of him, as if pulling a bit of magic out of a crystal ball.

“If you see Minneapolis the way I see Minneapolis, then you see something special. It just needs a little BeBe zhuzh,” he says, using the all-purpose word that means sparkle, vision, and glamorous transformation. “This city allowed me to be me. This is where I was born. Now I am going to do what I can to allow Minneapolis to be the best Minneapolis it can be. Inside, Minneapolis still has its spark, and it can be born again here too.”   

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