ISIGI
by
Alan Dale
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I took my little boy
with me to Durban Harbour one Sunday. Where once a bustling
Port played host to a mighty armada of Mail Boats and
tankers and cargo vessels and coasters and freighters diverted
South around the Cape, today was a waste land of rusting cranes and marine paraphernalia, cast aside as if by a giant hand,
mammoth lengths of chain tall as a man, twisted rails, propellers, and lone
black bollards patiently waiting for lines to be cast from phantom ships. |
It was a Bluebottle Day, a gusty North Easter ripping across the savaged ocean
from the Agulhas. We climbed the red rungs of an old landlocked crane and sat
on its platform to watch a flotilla of yachts negotiate the channel to the
heaving sea. 'Look, Dad!' said my son, and there they were, their slick brown
torsos electric in the sun, heaving upward as one, knees raised as they seemed
suspended in their jubilation, then thumping down, their big black boots
thundering in sweet unison, their hands slapping the cadence of their joy...
'What are they, Dad?' 'Gumboot dancers,' I said to him . 'Isigi' I said to
myself.
In the early apartheid eighties I was between jobs, between lives, and a mad
mate called Neville, who did the repro on all my publications, asked me to
manage a motley bunch of itinerants from Umlazi who, hoping for another 'Ipi-Tombi',
had created a song and dance show loosely based on Romeo and Juliet, called 'Isigi',
the 'Sound of the Footsteps'.
Neville, a frustrated thespian and theatrical producer, was financing them.
There is little space here to describe what ensued. Suffice to say that it is
a novel that I should long ago have written, and still will. It was a six
month revelation, an adventure across an ugly, invisible, but malignantly
powerful colour line that had kept all of us in a kind of stillborn ignorance
of each other for lifetimes. But, ultimately, it was the Dance of Life, best
symbolized by the Gumboot Dancers, a troupe that we used to have to collect
from their compound each night that 'Isigi' was performed in the variety of
weird and wonderful venues - school halls, shebeens, even a church - that our
humble venture somehow found.
We were an incredible ragtag ensemble of amateurs venturing where angels
feared to tread. The cast were enchanting, invariably brimming with vibrant
but untutored talent. They all knew each others roles, verbatim, and swopped
parts nightly. We had to obtain special passes to drive then back after each
show to their dark dwellings in Umlazi, uniform as the blocks that were not
even dignified by names, but merely by coded numbers.
The cast had one major flaw in their enthusiasm for the show: on the odd
occasions when the Gumboot Dancers were on night shift, and could not
participate, the performances of the rest of the players suffered. Those men
in the black boots were inspirational to the rest of the troupe.
One Friday we were playing at Kingsburgh High, a school with sophisticated
stage equipment administered by the students themselves. The school, parents,
scholars, teachers, had entered into the spirit of the musical with great
gusto, but the dancers were not scheduled to show, and the mood of the cast
was leaden.
Neville and I took a chance and drove to the compounds near the dry docks, and
miraculously encountered the Gumboot Dancers returning from their shift. They
agreed to return with us to Kingsburgh, and as we arrived at the back stage
door, we had an inspiration. We formed a conga, and with the Foreman blasting
his whistle, and the troupe chanting and stamping as they dragged two crazed
whites in their wake, we danced up the dark stairs and onto the stage in the
midst of the preparations for the first scene! The rest of the cast were
electrified. They attached themselves to the Conga, which as it weaved down
the aisle, was further elongated by delighted school kids, mothers, teachers,
cake ladies, night watchmen, usherettes...we destroyed a specter that night.
In one spontaneous, glorious nova of joy, we danced apartheid away, banished
it for one shining, eternal instant from our sad land.
So now, as I watched from the crane that glittering leap of men, I remembered
the fierce ecstasy of that night in Kingsburgh. I realised what 'The Dance'
must have meant to a people who had had their identity flayed from them.
I understood 'Isigi'.
Alan Dale is a freelance
writer. You can reach him at:
editor-AlumniArdifacts@infomail.co.za
www.alumni.co.za
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