Routledge

Chapter Notes

Chapter 9 Labor Migration: Gumboot Dance

History of gumboot dancing

  • Gumboot dancing has clear origins in pre-colonial nguni musical practice: call-and-response interaction between leader and team, competitive performance, audience/community support, and comic subject matter (typically drawn from everyday experience).
  • Gumboot dancing emerged in the 1880s among Bhaca migrant workers traveling between KwaZulu Natal and the gold mines in Johannesburg as well as harbor and railway work in the port city of Durban.
  • Two styles: igumboots dance, which is connected to the heavy stamping of traditional Zulu men's dance; and isicathulo, a lighter style of stepping or tapping connected to the civilizing project of the mission station.
  • There is evidence that gumboot dancing emerged in areas where missionaries had banned traditional nguni dancing: emic terminology suggests missionary influence; some of the patterns resemble step- and folk-dances that missionaries offered as a substitute for nguni dancing; and the series of dance patterns commanded by the shouts of a leader are similar to the musical drills missionaries used to instill discipline in children.
  • Minstrel shows from the United States toured South Africa in the late nineteenth century, and one can see their influence in the comical leader who is distinguished from his team by his shabby clothes (sharp outfits are important features of the rest of the team).
  • Gumboot dancing commonly took place in the compounds where miners lived. They often felt a great ambivalence toward mining (they took great pride in the courage necessary to work in the mines but were constantly fearing for their lives; they resented the mines that separated them from the families but depended on them to provide for their families), and they performed this in their dances.
  • Dance served as both relief from stressful, dangerous work and as a medium for commenting satirically on the brutality of their overseers.
  • Mining teams typically had a ‘boss-boy’ who served as the leader and functioned as an intermediary between the black workers and the white overseers. The leader of a Gumboot dance team mimics the boss-boy and satirizes the implements of his control (e.g. the police whistle and the shouted commands).
  • Many of the commands used in the mines are in a pidgin language called fanakalo, which mining companies encouraged and standardized as a lingua franca. Black South Africans typically regard it as a defilement of Xhosa and Zulu and a language of subservience, and the tensions of mine labor and racist social relations embodied in the commands inform the performance and reception of Gumboot dancing.

Gumboot dancing in recent years

  • Gumboot dancing is typically a practice of black male migrant workers employed in the mines, though now they often perform outside of the mining compounds.
  • Performers dance in baseball caps, black trousers with a white handkerchief tied at the knee, ‘cowboy’ shirts, and black rubber Wellington Gumboots (often fitted with bottle-caps or other pieces of metal around the ankle that function as rattles and remind dancers of the chains allegedly placed around miners' ankles).
  • A dance team has a leader who moves first into the performance space, is usually visibly distinguishable from the others by slight differences in dress, and leads the team through a series of rehearsed step patterns by calling out commands.
  • Gumboot dancing draws on a variety of influences: Bhaca tradition; dances of sailors who visited Durban (e.g. Russian folk dance); the heritages of the various Christian missionaries; social dances that accompanied jazz (e.g. the jitterbug) in the 1930s and 1940s; and tap dance, which South African witnessed in the performances of traveling minstrel groups and the films of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelley.
  • Performances also feature ‘singles’: competitive solo performances by individual team members who demonstrate their improvisational skills.
  • Dancers are rewarded with showers of coins and with a meal including meat from a sacrificed animal, other grilled meats, and guests, utshwala (traditional sorghum beer).
  • Musical accompaniment typically consists of a guitarist and a concertina player playing a cyclical riff moving between tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords.
  • Carol Muller and fellow ethnomusicology student Janet Topp Fargion learned Gumboot dancing from Blanket Mkhize and performed with him until 1985 and again in the early 1990s.
  • Since the late 1990s gumboot dancing has had a place in South African schools and in the popular imagination through its use in advertisements.
  • Gumboot dancing has become internationally famous through the Broadway-style touring theatre show Gumboots.