A small footnote to the increasingly incensed rantings of my old friend (since three weeks ago) Ronald Suresh Roberts. He wishes to share with the world the fact that I, like my forbears, am someone who simply likes to keep on dancing. (”Matshikiza”, by the way, means, among other things, ”the dancer”. How could I be expected to avoid the ancestral trap? But he is not to know this — since he doesn’t bother to do his background research.)
I am sure the noble RSR wishes us to understand that when he accuses certain people who are beneath his dignity of merely ”dancing” through life (”singing for his supper”, he calls it) he actually means ”jiving”, as in ”jiving around” — or fiddling while Rome burns. Or something like that. But once again, I am sure that we will never be enlightened as to his obscure (but highly regarded, in some eminent quarters), superbly intellectual way of seeing the world as he sees it, and sashays expensively through it.
Anyway, this ”jiving” thing brings to mind many moments of what some dubbed ”jiving for liberation”. The various forms of cultural activity that we celebrated and proudly indulged in included dance, music, poetry and all the other written arts, painting, sculpture, photography, filmmaking, creating murals and tapestries, talking witty garbage to a serious end, engaging in other people’s cultures, and just generally using culture as a tool for liberation.
There came a time when there was serious debate within the liberation movement about whether we should call ourselves ”artists” or ”cultural activists”. This doesn’t matter anymore — although a lot of people got themselves into trouble for being on the politically incorrect side of the debate from time to time.
My father (to whom RSR owes an apology or two, by the way) coined the term ”jove” as a past tense of the process of jiving. The jiving he was talking about was what rough-and-ever-ready white policemen forced naked black men to do for their entertainment in the holding cells of, among others, the Fort Prison in Johannesburg. The black men ”jove”, cut off from life and their families, because the white authorities thought it was funny that black people like to jive so much.
So much for jive.
When, inside the country or in exile, we sang a mounting chorus of freedom songs, it was difficult not to jive. Moving in rhythm was part of the process. Whether it was jazz, mbaqanga, or ”Dubula nge mbayi-mbayi [let us shoot back at them with guns of our own]” it was necessary to move in step and feel the thumping, collective rhythm moving upwards from your feet through your legs and into your head. The word could not be separated from the dancing deed; nor from the need to dance.
And toyi-toying, of course, fell in step behind this.
In the mid-1970s, somewhere thereabouts, a black security policeman knocked on the door of my grandmother’s house in Soweto. He wanted to trap her into confessing that she was a terrorist sympathiser. He pulled an envelope from under his arm and flourished from it a black-and-white photograph taken surreptitiously in London or Amsterdam, and asked her if she could identify any of the participants taking part in stamping freedom songs during an anti-apartheid protest.
She looked at the picture as she sat at her kitchen table, and then her face lit up as she recognised me, her grandson, who she had not seen for almost a decade.
”Kyk hoe mooi dance John [Look how well John’s dancing],” she smiled. The security policeman was nonplussed that she had not tried to hide her knowledge of or pride in me, and withdrew into the confusion of the black Soweto night. Back to filing out his report at John Vorster Square.
Fine. We have moved on.
My grandmother is dead. I was not allowed into the country to bury her, as was required and desired by our feelings, our traditions and our history. Those were the times.
We dance on. Moments in this silent recapturing of unrecorded history breathe all too infrequently down the backs of our necks. We dance on.
From the early 1970s there was a lot of jiving to serious purpose being indulged in in the Dutch capital city of Amsterdam. A lot of this was spontaneous, as happens when a whole multitude of post-colonial races descends on one of the great economic and cultural centres of the developed world. There were, and are, nightclubs, juke joints, vast dance halls, theatres and ballet companies all over the place. Dance, like life, was, and is, both formal and experimental in that highly insomniac city.
It was a stroke of genius that the Anti-Apartheid Movement of the Netherlands decided to exploit the obvious attractions and unifying qualities of the many forms of culture as a key part of what was to become a highly successful mobilising strategy.
Serious conferences and boycott campaigns were always accompanied by vigorous and invigorating cultural manifestations. More than in any of the other campaigning anti-apartheid centres of the northern world, culture became a central motif of what was to become more than solidarity work. Through culture in particular, the movement’s work became a process of total immersion, profound engagement.
Fortunately for us, these political/cultural manifestations were filmed over about 20 years by a combination of South African and Dutch filmmakers. With truly Dutch meticulousness, these videos were carefully logged and stored away, and finally, after liberation had become a reality, digitised and catalogued for posterity.
This vast archive will now be handed over to South Africa’s National Film and Video Archives on Heritage Day, September 24, in an act of formal closure after years of intense collaboration in the struggle for liberation.
It is a rare archive that should prove an invaluable resource for students and researchers of the struggle period — or even just the plain curious.
Jazz, dance and heavyweight politics come together on one vast canvas. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — and somehow, yes, we danced through it all.