Remembering a long dance to freedom
Cape Town, South Africa
I got the chance to visit Cape Town last week, where I met up with an old friend from Scotland. Sonwabo Masepe taught me African Gumboot dancing many moons ago when he lived in Edinburgh and worked at Dance Base, Scotland’s National Centre for Dance.
Over a salad in the cafe at the top of the huge Zeitz Museum of African Contemporary Art in a converted grain silo at Cape Town’s Waterfront district, I confessed that I remembered very little about the class except that we laughed a lot and it was great fun.
Sonwabo explained that this is the core mission of African Gumboot - it celebrates connection through rhythm and is not about getting the steps exactly right or being a specific body shape. It was developed by enslaved diamond miners from all parts of Africa and beyond. They invented a language too, Fanakalo, a mix of Portuguese, African languages and Afrikaans, and its rhythmic words are part of the Gumboot lexicon. Everyone should learn it - it is a powerful lesson in the resilience of the human spirit.
Wellies were a weapon in the culture war
Sonwabo worked with the culture committee of the ANC during the transition from apartheid in the early 1990s, and he saw at first-hand how African Gumboot and other dance forms like Toyi-Toyi played a part in building a mass movement for change.
Music, movement, books and art helped bring South Africa through those difficult days as one country. It was in some senses a literal culture war. Much of the resistance to apartheid was non-violent.
There was violence - 20,000 people were the victims of gross human rights violations, including murder between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the end of apartheid in 1994. But South Africa avoided civil war - an amazing feat.
Trump and Musk are verbally attacking South Africa
South Africa is not getting much credit at the moment for its success in holding together a divided country. Donald Trump and Elon Musk appear to be doing their best to wake sleeping dogs.
Donald Trump offered refugee status in the US to Afrikaners earlier this month, claiming that legislation passed by Parliament allowing compulsory land purchase discriminates against them.
Elon Musk, who was famously raised here (1), has told South Africa that its law requiring a proportion of new businesses to be black-owned is racist, and demanded it be changed before he offers Starlink satellite services here.
In a ludicrous echo of the boycott that was part of international efforts to undermine apartheid, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio boycotted a G20 meeting of finance leaders in Cape Town last week.
The US leaders’ divisive rhetoric does not acknowledge the historic injustice that underpins Parliament’s efforts at rebalancing society. Progress has been slow - South Africa remains a country of huge racial inequality.
This was visible in Cape Town’s swanky harbour area where I met Sonwabo - black Africans we saw there were mainly working, not enjoying themselves. These jobs are valuable - South Africa has huge unemployment levels - the Cape has the lowest unemployment levels of the country but they are still 24%. “We are glad of the jobs but we want to participate,” Sonwabo said.
The Zeitz museum is named after Jochen Zeitz, CEO of Harley-Davidson
Wandering around the Museum of Contemporary African Art however is an uplifting reminder of the depth and resilience of South African culture.
The museum is named after its founder Jochen Zeitz, CEO of Harley Davidson, art collector and nature conservationist. It houses the biggest collection of 21st-century African Art in the world, in a grand building that dominates the skyline.
This place is playing a central role in elevating the profile of African contemporary artists. Its director Koyo Kouoh has been appointed art director of the 2026 Venice Biennale, the first African woman to run the prestigious art fair.
When we visited, the crowd was mainly, though not entirely, white - we did see one school group. The entrance fee, about £10, is more than the minimum daily wage - but like other attractions it is free to South African citizens on their birthdays.
Inside, linen-clad tourists from France and Florida pondered Nolan Oswald Dennis’s “Black Liberation Zodiac”. Europeans tend to describe the night sky above South Africa as an upside-down version of the stars we know. But in this work, the constellations get their own shapes and stories, pumped fists, ANC signs. The constellation of Cancer which we draw as a crab is rendered as a pair of peace doves.
We were fortunate to meet an artist-in-residence who happened to be in actual residence, Berni Searle’s series “Sugar Girls” is loosely inspired by the back story of Cape Town’s docklands, now gentrified beyond all recognition. Many of the people who used to live and work in the area have been pushed out. Searle is a a petite woman whose huge self-portraits say: “I am not going to disappear or shrink into a corner. I claim my space. “
When democracy is stolen
Sonwabo’s favourite piece was “Landscape” by Michele Mathison, a white South African raised in Zimbabwe. The installation is a room of burnt tree stumps, which refers to the cycles of agricultural growth and destruction. The note on the wall said: “Mathison extends this into a metaphor for the upheavals of Southern Africa’s colonial past and potential for new growth after catastrophe’.
There is not much sign of the green shoots of recovery in the charred tree stumps though - as some might say of Zimbabwe. At the turn of the century, the people grew impatient for change, and there was a land grab of white-owned farmland where many died - mostly black farm workers. Some of the seized land subsequently became country estates for the oligarchy. Black farmers who did get land have struggled to access the finance required for a modern agricultural enterprise - Zimbabwe has been locked out of global finance.
Long-time leader Robert Mugabe was deposed in 2017 by a Putin-style despot, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is busy enriching himself and his henchmen, rigs elections and throws brave dissidents in jail.
The example of Zimbabwe is being used to stir up fear among Afrikaner farmers. Writing in the Daily Maverick, black farmer Subisiso Ngalwa explained how this was happening in his local farmers’ WhatsApp group. He was able to counter it in this widely read newspaper, but not every piece of misinformation gets that treatment.
But it doesn’t help just to dismiss these fears - Zimbabwe raises real questions. How can ordinary people defend democracy and prevent elections from being turned into performative charades as they are in Russia? I don’t know the answer but surely the history of South Africa shows that culture is part of it.
“There’s something I must tell you”
At the other side of town in South Africa’s National Art Gallery, a low white colonial-era building in the Company Gardens, a retrospective of artist Sue Williamson powerfully memorialises the many women leaders of the struggle against apartheid and the sacrifices they made - jailed, put under house arrest, often for years, losing loved ones.
One room holds portraits of them, in photography and silkscreen. A chair commemorates trade unionist and anti-apartheid campaigner Ray Alexander. the first white woman to be accepted into the ANC. The quote on the wall reads:
“Comrade Ray is a very busy woman. She spent her life fighting for the rights of workers. But she is never too busy to sit down and listen to other people’s troubles.”
Art (3), music, poetry, theatre, movies, literature, movies all helped to build global support for the anti-Apartheid movement. Anyone of my vintage from the UK or Africa would probably be able to sing a few lines of “Free Nelson Mandela”, or Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” (about Streve Biko) or songs by High Masakela, Stevie Wonder, Miriam Makeba and many more. `
“We didn’t have guns - we danced”
In those days, Sonwabo remembered. “We didn’t have guns, we didn’t have bullets. We danced.” It was not anger at injustice alone but the beat, the singing, the movement that helped people to bond together, to overcome fear and to keep on coming out on the streets in such numbers that the regime knew the momentum could not be stopped. People were shot and died, and there was sadness and pain, but, Sonwabo recalls: “at the funerals, we danced. We danced harder.”
There are challenges, but today South Africa is a democracy and its citizens, of many different ethnicities and languages, love their country. Its power should not be underestimated.
On the evening I was writing this, the TV in my hotel room showed part of one of the first funerals of 14 South African National Defence Force troops who were killed on a peacekeeping mission to Congo. Lance Corporal Pieter Strydom, an Afrikaaner chef, was laid to rest, mourned by his family, his friends and his compatriots What do Trump and his ilk know of such sacrifice?
(1) The story of the Afrikaners in South Africa is explored - warts and all - in a compelling new book ‘Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa’ by Cato Pedder, who is the great-granddaughter of former SA PM Jan Smuts. I recommend it.
(2) The Sue Williamson retrospective powerfully interrogates South African history from the 19th century through the Anglo-Boer War to the Aids era. I loved it. It opened last week and runs until Septemeber 2025.
(3) An artist was jailed - but the painting got out
The painting that played the biggest active role in the struggle was probably Black Christ by Ronald Harrison, which was created soon after the Sharpeville Massacre. It showed anti-Apartheid activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Chief Luthuli as Christ on the cross while the leading proponents of apartheid were portrayed as Roman centurions.
Harrison was arrested, interrogated and tortured by the regime. Luthuli was killed in suspicious circumstances. But the painting itself was smuggled out of the country where it toured Europe, building awareness of what was going on in South Africa and raising funds. Luthuli’s widow continued to campaign for peaceful change and her portrait is part of Williamson’s “All Of Our Mothers” series. (2)
I edited this slightly to make it easier to read by putting the aside about the Black Christ in a footnote.
Loved that. Is gumboot an African word, or a contraction of gum boot (North American for wellie)?