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Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

Michael Kahn
By Michael Kahn
5 Aug 2024
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In the French legend of the Danse Macabre, Death arrives at midnight on Halloween and his fiddle awakes the skeletons who dance for him until daybreak. The ANC, gnu-in-chief, is full of skeletons, though not on the scale of the MK party that masquerades as the official opposition.

This is the tenth and last in a series of columns on “What 10 words best describe our South Africa?” Today’s word is Dance. Read the first nine parts of the series here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

And so it is time to write the Opinionista piece for word number 10. My choice is “dance” rather than the one I had in mind when I started this series, namely “sport”. Thing is that “sport” has appeared in a number of the items, and truth be told I reckoned that some type of summary word might be required. Yu Hua’s final chapter was entitled “bamboozle”, a practice that he felt was endemic to the New China. I’ve chosen dance. Daily Maverick readers might be somewhat perplexed as to why.

Ah, dance, that expression of freedom and pleasure, available to young and old, corpulent and slender, a generally silent bodily movement, rhythmic, sensuous, enticing, enthralling, performed by toddlers and dodderers. Dance, performed by animals, birds and sea creatures.

My Octopus Teacher


Remember Kevin Costner dancing and chanting in the movie adaptation of Michael Blake’s Dances with Wolves? We marvelled at the dancing in our very own skilfully edited My Octopus Teacher. Look out your window at the dance of the gulls, sacred ibis, and flamingos. If you have the chance to go bush, find the migrating gnu, hartebeest or zebras in their thousands. Do they dance and frolic?

For humans dance is intimately connected to theatre, drama, the telling of tales. Here’s Romeo to Mercutio: “You have dancing shoes/With nimble soles; I have a soul of lead/So stakes me to the ground I cannot move.” It is Mercutio who falls victim to the Montague-Capulet feud, dying as he cries “a plague on both your houses”.  Romeo dances toward his own grave.

Do we dance! Marabi, King Kong, the Cape Minstrels, the Reed Dance, matric dances (coming soon to a venue near you). Dance, and partying, that which held the exiles a-throbbing, the activity primus inter pares that kept the diaspora fires burning even as the boys (and some girls) were deployed to fight other people’s wars.

Alongside shuffling to cries of amandla awethu was the truism that the ANC knows how to party. And so it came to pass that for three years from the winter of 1982 Gaborone was a liberated zone where one could sing and dance with Bra Hugh, Jonas Gwangwa, Steve Dyer and Tony Cedras. The brass, keyboards and guitar riffs drew the crowd from across the region.

Pretoria was pissed off and launched Operation Plecksy to put an end to the free zone – 14 June 1985 was the day the music (and dance) died. On the surface things became quiet; below was the dance of negotiation, of give and take, a feint here, a retreat there, the parties now intent on mating, but pretending otherwise. The result – we gained two dancing presidents.

Dancing to different tunes


Dancing to different tunes for sure. Nelson Mandela, tall and somewhat stiff, doing his own shuffle, standing erect, arms close to his chest, forever remembered as he danced off the stage after the ANC’s electoral triumph. Madiba dances, content in himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUgFG97uGos

Jacob Zuma in contrast, he the traditionalist, throws himself into any opportunity to sing and dance, shakes his fists, leaps and strides, mocking his advanced years. Give the man a stick, a spear, or an AK-47 and he moves the crowd. For Zuma dance is an art form through which he reaches his people.

Different tunes. Mandela the royal constitutionalist; Zuma the would-be chieftain. Mandela dancing to the tune of reason and the rule of law. Zuma, he of State Capture, dancing with hyenas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzu3UdXJyEo

This is what it comes down to. Do leaders tell the truth, or do they dance rings around us, playing a song of deceit as they persuade us to shuffle toward the precipice? What prevents, limits the tissue of lies? The songwriters of course, individual commentators, journalists, legal eagles, activists and scholars. Call them the Fourth Estate Plus.  

It is Sol Plaatje declaring “awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth”.

Cry the Beloved Country


It is Doris Lessing teaching that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and Alan Paton lamenting “Cry the Beloved Country” even as Govan Mbeki was writing “The Peasants’ Revolt.”

We acknowledge the journalists: (murdered?) George Heard, Donald Woods, the staff of the Weekly Mail and Vrye Weekblad, Marianne Thamm, Pauli van Wyk, and Karyn Maughan. Writers such as JP Landman, Mark Gevisser, Jonny Steinberg, Moeletsi Mbeki, Robert Renwick and Ronnie Kasrils care enough to give us a word map. Their choreographed words dance with creativity, with passion. Thank you.

Read more: SA can stop pandemic doom and gloom by extending the research and innovation frontier

We may dance our woes into oblivion, assisted with drink or drugs, dulling ourselves to the realities that the songwriters provide. What cannot be erased is the factual basis of ongoing violence, dispossession, distrust, dissembling, distortion and lies. None may claim we didn’t know.

Ours, like that of others, is a dance of survival in which truth is the first casualty. The oft-mocked Francis Fukuyama teaches that we are essentially social creatures who beget political order. It is political order that mobilises toward the goal of conquest with its attendant slaughter and genocide.

Political order begets armies with their war trumpets, drums and gongs, as the soldiers engage in their war dancing. Shaka’s impis against all; burghers against the VoC and anyone in their path. How did Gaza Province in Mozambique acquire its name? Dhows dancing among the waves brought their civilising mission, leaving genes and place names in their wake.

Dancing to the tune of a single gnu


So here we are, dancing to the tune of a single gnu, our very own Government of National Unity, a strange beast isolated from its herd. Sorry, the government of the day, elected through a free and fair process represents the will of the people. The GNU is supposed to dance to the tune that the electorate scripted. 

But it remains unclear what exactly the electorate wanted. Indeed, if one examines the list of those selected for Parliament, not “elected” but selected through party lists, one might be forgiven for being confused as to the order of the day. Members dance according to the baton of the chief whips; those who danced with Zuma, smallanyana skeletons now dance with Cyril as the former president is commanded to exit stage left.

This is pure Danse Macabre if ever one could dissuade life from imitating art. In the French legend of the Danse Macabre, Death arrives at midnight on Halloween and his fiddle awakes the skeletons who dance for him until daybreak. The ANC, gnu-in-chief, is full of skeletons though not on the scale of the MK party who masquerade as the official opposition.

The little philosophy I know derives from bizarre ideas such as “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” The seventh Parliament is replete with skeletons, some of whom enriched themselves using the necessary PIN to access funds from the looted VBS. Danse Macabre for sure.

But hang on, Cyril promised us a new dawn. That is when the dance comes to an end and the real work begins. No gnu is bad news. DM

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