Siyabonga Ricky Mayola is a South African actor born on the 10th of May 1988 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. His mother was a nurse and late father was a teacher. Siyabonga Mayola was raised in Port Elizabeth where he attended primary school at Victoria Park Grey . It is there where he first got on the stage where his class performed in front of the school. He was to play the role of a teacher but was later changed to play as the class trouble-maker and prankster. He switched schools and went to Sundridge Park primary for a year where he also was involved in a theatre play which was the about the birth of baby Jesus and he was one of the three kings. In high school, he showed some interest in going into drama but with his mother's disapproval, he didn't take the subject. After matriculating at Alexander Road High School he decided to take a year to pursue his acting dream and attended Stage World Theatre School in Port Elizabeth. Soon After his mom saw one of the theatre plays he was in, she encouraged him to move to a bigger institution and moved to Cape Town where he attended AFDA film school. He was there for four years achieving his honours in performance. In 2011, Mayola made his film debut in the American independent movie" 419" which was filmed in Cape Town as the character Baby Face. 419 Follows a New York City actor who loses everything to an internet scam based in South Africa and his two best friends take him to Cape Town to track down the mastermind of the scam. In 2012 Mayola was one of the main cast in "Faces Of Betrayal", a workshopped play, directed by Dr.Christopher John and Caroline Duck. Faces of Betrayal explores the lives of young people living in Cape Town through a series of events involving moments of betrayal. That was AFDA Cape Town's first theatre production which went on to be performed at the Grahamstown Festival and in Cape town. That same year, he received the Award for Best Supporting Actor at the annual AFDA awards for his performance as a South African Policemen in the short film "The Brave Unseen" directed by Duan Myburg. The Brave Unseen won Best SA Short film at the Durban film festival and was the opening screened film at Out in Africa SA program. At the end of 2012 Mayola went on to film a documentary in Antartica for two and a half months. Early 2013 Mayola appeared in "Blacks Sails", an upcoming television drama series created by Jon Steinberg and Robert Levine for Starz which is set to debut in January, 2014. He was cast as a Young Slave where he had to learn how to speak Yoruba, a Niger-Congo language spoken in West Africa. In late 2013, Mayola appeared in a leading role in the short-lived SABC 1 13 part drama series, Amaza which had 7.5 million viewership when it aired in 2014, playing the part of a young artist Bongani Mapanga.