Dancing for surviving

Africa: an ethnic group that is not lost

Have you ever thought what would happen if multiculturalism was taken away in cities like New York, Paris or Cancun? Imagine all people being separated depending on their culture, where would you be placed? What would happen if you are forced to do things you don’t want to, without even having the chance to give your opinion, only because you are considered “not good enough”? Don’t you think there is a reason why everyone is different? and it is in the difference of cultures where we find richness, isn’t it?

Is richness about money or culture? Is it a mix of both?… Many questions come into my mind when I think about gumboot, and no, I’m not only speaking of boots made of gum, It goes further, it was an African subsistence way. What did Africans mean by subsistence? For them it meant not to stop dancing, to let rhythms rewrite the story!

Here is when a magic story begins, full of pain and bravery, a story about a culture able to adapt anywhere and to face everything, because they were not born to give up!

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, in an age where holocaust seemed to have appeared in a different continent, in a region called Apartheid, where sunlight arose, peeping out in little holes of people’s houses, warming up the ground and the air, telling a group of South Africans, it was a new day to work, to live silently and to keep the strong South African culture to the limit, but never to the disappearance limit.

A culture of risk

Farewell time had arrived, next months South Africans had to live isolated, but with their minds on the people they loved. Not even the tough 80 degrees Fahrenheit, were able to avoid the unavoidable. They were forced to work at the gold mines, however not for making themselves rich, but for making themselves poor. Although never poor in creativity, and that is something their owners never imagined. The South Africans were forbidden to talk, they were chained, their freedom was taken away, as well as their way of dressing, since then, they had to be uniformed and if it wasn’t because of a pair of gumboots, they would have died.

It was not a life vest, they were water boots

South Africans worked all day long at the mines; at night they had to stay in flooded dark caves that exposed them to illnesses. They felt water on their feet all the time; not water of their glorious rivers, but dirty stagnant water, that their bosses had not drained. Death suddenly arose, taking many of South Africans lives, forcing their bosses to find a cheap solution to stop the numerous deaths: gumboots.

Taking steps towards freedom

How did Africans resist not being able to talk, the attempt of erasing their culture, all the humiliations and the rough conditions? It was because of dancing, because of the moves they carried in their veins. They took the little they had and created magic scenes, that documented what they were living, allowing them to communicate, without even saying a word, beating their boots against the floor and shaking their chains, they replicated their music rhythms with their bodies. That is how gumboot dance was born.

Stepping strong

Their owners realized South Africans were more intelligent than what they thought. This ethnic group exteriorized what they were repressing through their artistic language, they sang for telling, they danced for being free. They made fun of their oppressors, by beating rhythmically, keeping their culture alive, expanding gumboot dance as an entertainment way and spreading it out to United States. A new rhythm was getting strong, known as stepping. Nowadays at the Johannesburg theatre we can see gumboot shows; this African dance inspired David Bruce for the Carnegie Hall.

Learn more about African culture and their dance steps in our StepFlix African fusion beginners class: “breaking barriers”, a dance step designed make us free!