From Pain to Power: The Legacy of Afro-Latin Dancing in South Africa’s Suburbs
- EPOCH
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Emmanuel Adeyemi-Abere | Lancaster University
Try this on for size, sir: one black shirt partly buttoned up, black trousers, black ballroom shoes. It is not my normal Sunday suit-up… but that thought fades when I’m on the floor flowing with the music. Power, poise, and passion pulse through my steps and the subconscious sends me to another realm.
What can constitute the political? To many, the dimensions of this discipline are bounded by written word and holed up in the four walls of whitewashed institutions. But politics is perceived, communicated and conducted through people. The personal is political, and an examination of our bodies begins to break down the veil concealing the unspoken rules of our social order.
In Cape Town, one form of bodily interaction is an insight into shifting notions of power, identity and difference. The city was the old legislative capital of South Africa, a nation where contrasting social realities have been bounded tightly together and divisively divided in the last 80 years.
In 1948, the National Party assumed authority over the country through a general election. Two years later, Prime Minister D.F. Malan made the decision to enforce the Group Areas Act, which formalised spatial segregation through forcible relocation of Blacks, Coloured, and Asians.
The white minority in the nation now became majority stakeholders of urban residentials, displacing 3.5 million people to rural neighbourhoods between 1960 and 1983 alone. In Cape Town, around 150,000 people moved to townships in the Cape Flats, an uninhabited, low-lying area of land outside the city centre, by the 1960s, forced to establish a new life for themselves.
But the communities carried a capacity for resilience. Jazz dancing, or ‘jazzing’ emerged in the 1960s as a pastime for those from the townships in the Cape Flats. Although this ‘coloured’ tradition was recent, jazz is frequently discussed with a sense of timelessness that does not bind the artform to the apartheid era. If the world of politics were only traceable through power plays and practical policies, a scholar may say that this discourse is a form of strategic essentialism.
In one sense, Black South African communities had chosen to create origin stories out of a complex cultural milieu that mark their territory as an ethnic identity to generate collective solidarity in resistance to the state. But what if this ‘timelessness’ could be traced through the Black body?
For the longest time, South African economic development was built upon the disposability of the Black body. The early economic exploitation from the British Empire at the start of the nineteenth century had relied on migrant labour from neighbouring Botswana and Lesotho to toil in the mines, while rural labourers were restricted from partaking in any industrial development.
To the extent that ‘time’ could be related to the lives of Black labourers, it was only ever as spare parts in the ideological and imperial machinery of the West. Wages, the determinant of the value of bodily investment into labour, were disproportionately allocated to white workers, and apartheid allowed capitalists to enforce this disparity without compromising on profits.
To be Black meant to be in a liminal state: never capable of controlling ‘time’ or moving forward in ‘time’, passing from one rung of socioeconomic status to the next. To be Black meant to relive and iterate experiences of alienation from time without the reassurance of progressive separation from the past to the present. In this sense, experiencing Blackness is ‘timeless.’
But with that timelessness came an appreciation for the knowledge embedded within the material body, expressed through space and time, not bound to a fixed moment. Newly formed Black neighbourhoods were situated in a liminal state between the ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’: no longer autonomous from Western authority, and not yet freely thriving social actors. What remained with these communities were rhythms and sounds that signalled self-expression.
The sounds of Southern Africa were rooted in communal traditions. Precolonial music was made mainly through vocalising rather than percussion instruments, but it still was distinctively ‘Sub-Saharan African’ music. Overlapping voices would not start or stop at the same time, creating a complex layering of independent melodies that were played in different rhythms.
The trick was to learn how to imitate, repeat and phrase parts of these melodies so that they would interact with each other, infusing this sound with a sense of structure. This art of ‘call-and-response’ was passed down through oral tradition and did not rely on the systematic written notation of musical sheets present in the West. Colonialism came as a test to this culture.
The modernising mandate of Christian missionaries meant ‘heathen’ practices were under scrutiny, and the collective, improvisational manner of traditional African music was an affront to the West. Emerging migrant communities attempting to integrate into the new cash economy splintered spaces for public engagement, and urban townships became their new home.
Circumstances did not allow for traditional practices of communal music making, but the beginning of the twentieth century marked a moment of experimentation for Black creatives in South Africa.
Different forms of instrumentation were trialled to mimic melodies of vocal choruses and the ability to perform notes with multiple rhythms at the same time. That task relied on the skill of traditional musicians to detect the different properties of instruments, gravitating to drums, percussion and piano, as well as the ability to tune the sounds of the instruments they used.
Traditions evolved, but the essence of South African music was not lost. Indeed, the marabi, a popular predecessor of jazz music, also aptly refers to social occasions in Black neighbourhoods. New, syncretic forms of musical expression came to capture the grassroots shift that took place when Black South Africans adapted organically to the cultural constraints of empire.
In essence, the conjoined developments of community and creativity embraced the liminality of the Black experience, embodying the resilience of local people in the South African context. Art could come to speak for the subaltern, those who impacted the direction and drive of urban developments in a divided nation without having the license to read and write about it.
That ‘timeless’ task remained relevant to Black communities in South Africa through the decades, and a more contemporary phenomenon has reinforced the significance of their embodied culture.
The 1990s marked the ‘end of history’ in the world of International Relations and the triumph of Western liberalism. Specifically, the agenda of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had proposed the necessity of ‘neoliberalism’ for the Global South, shunning policies of state-led development to promote market-led growth and minimal government intervention.
For those in the arts, this was a critical juncture. Neoliberal notions of individual entrepreneurship, individuality and economic independence encouraged people to engage in acts of self-commodification. Without the support of the state, there was a greater imperative to produce ‘brands’ that were identifiable, marketable and suitable for consumption by the masses.
It was a development that was traceable through the growing visibility of Cape jazz. The site of this music started to shift from small-scale social scenes to community halls and eventually commercial club venues. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more elaborate forms of jazz dance graced the stage of monetized competitions, most notably Set the Night on Fire.
But what about things that cannot be commodified, marketized or mass produced? No matter how complex the choreography, routines rely on dancers using their rhythm, connectivity and bodily control to make meaning out of movements and music along with their partner. That sense of somatic awareness must be nurtured somewhere, and various factions of the Cape Town population had different strategies to settle where and how it should be developed.
In spaces where jazz was becoming more polished and performance-oriented, the body of knowledge to train dancers was extrinsic to the community as classes became common. But for those from township suburbs, learning remained rooted in close-knit familial, interpersonal units.
Since dancing was a popular pastime in many families, people often organically picked up new moves by partaking in various forms of social dances. If moves were ‘taught’, spaces were structured so ‘advanced’ dancers rotated in carousel fashion to help less experienced peers pick up steps.
In this context, ‘timelessness’ should not be understood as choreographies or dances never changing. From partner to partner or generation to generation, the embodiment of jazz has evolved: it is in the very nature of dance that active participation presents the artform in a different light.
But it is the way that dancers position performance that can make meaning more constant. From the first flourishing of marabi to the growth of Cape Jazz, Black people have cultivated embodied knowledge through dance, resourcefully connecting with others in their community. Once jazz moved outside the ‘in-group’, new emotions were evoked and schisms would emerge.
The age of globalisation has brought new opportunities and clashes in local communities. One of the latest dance styles to steal the attention of dancers in the Cape Town region has been salsa.
Salsa music is often underpinned by the rhythmic interplay of two forms of instrumentation: the clave (rhythmically beaten sticks) and conga or bongo drums. This layered, polyphonic structure still bears some elements of African music and is referred to in some quarters as ‘Latin jazz’.
But unlike the loose, swing feel of Cape jazz and neo-traditional African music, the ‘danceability’ of salsa steps is set on the strong ‘on beat’ of the clave. So, these somewhat similar styles can create very different senses of rhythm on the dancefloor and connection between dancers.
Dancers familiar with moving along to the flow and tradition of Cape Jazz dancing were given a jolt. Their traditional spaces of self-expression were now challenged by the transnational appeal of ‘salsa’, stirring up new questions about belonging and identity in contemporary South Africa.
On the one hand, salsa represented a foreign force in the cultural creative presence: songs were sung in Spanish and there was no indigenous Latin community to explain its presence in Cape Town culture. Some jazz dancers felt threatened by the thrill of a new dance craze, and salsa’s attractiveness to those from more affluent localities created negative connotations of class.
But what this position misses is the magic that comes with learning any type of dance move, no matter the style. Mastering new moves requires a dancer to internalise a new repertoire of rhythm and steps, reconstituting the individual by bringing a new ‘self’ into being that was imagined but never before present and opening the door for new possibilities of recognition by others.
The dancer is always both present here within the ‘self’ and actively interacting ‘elsewhere’ with the outside world. An expanding repertoire of movements allowed these dancers to redefine the scope of diasporic African musicality, creating connections to cut across historical divides.
South Africa is still a highly divided nation where socioeconomic inequality invariably aligns with racial difference. However, dance remains a tool that emboldens Black communities to dream of a freer future, bringing it into being through their own interpretations of a creative medium.
At once, I am brought back to my body. My partner spins out of hold. She curtsies and I bow, beaming at our performance. I’m slowly settling into a new world, but this house could soon become a home.
Further Reading:
John Charles Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).
David Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Sunnyside: Jacana Media Ltd., 2007).
Felix Rösch, ‘The Power of Dance: Teaching International Relations Through Contact Improvisation’, International Studies Perspectives, 19.1 (2018), 67-82.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London: Duke University Press, 2003).
Emmanuel Adeyemi-Abere is a Postgraduate Researcher at Lancaster University. His prior research has focused on the politics of race and legacies of colonialism, and he is now embarking on a project to examine those topics within the context of British public policy within the arts and cultural sector.
