adminElliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
When the burden is too heavy, both on the physical body and the soul, sometimes dancing it all away in the dust may be worthwhile.
The world may be uncompromising, intolerant and suffocating, particularly to women; but the panacea may well be within reach: dancing.
Well, that is how Kagiso Lesego Molope sees it.
In “Dancing in the Dust” (2002), published by Oxford University Press Southern Africa Private Limited, Molope highlights the many brawls that women endure in a world that appears to draw excitement from trauma.
Seen through the eyes of a first person singular narrator, the story captures the fears of a 13-year-old girl, Tihelo.
The narrator’s only defence against the vagaries of human folly is her zeal for life, regardless of the many hurdles that are strewn her path.
Like scores of others of her elk, her quest is to realise her dreams, which, however, are locked in apartheid South Africa of the 1980s.
Black people’s hopes are scuttled, and their dreams are drowned in a brutal maze devoid of feeling and restraint.
In all this madness women and children carry the heaviest burdens.
“Dancing in the Dust”, a bildungsroman in style, unravels the darkness of Man’s heart through the eyes of a child, whose dream to become a journalist wobbles to the horizon each sunset. Nonetheless, her resilience soars with the rising sun.
The heroine sees hardships, death and pain all around her as the white man’s oppressive machinery takes aim at the black man’s abode.
Tihelo’s mother, Kgomotso and sister, Keitumetse are her only family. Like other women, they are burdened by their sex.
Along with scores of others, Tihelo’s mother, a domestic worker, wakes up every morning to catch the 5:30am train that would take them to whites- only suburbs where they would toil the entire day for them to fend for their families.
Most of the women are either widowed, or abandoned in one way or the other. This may not be blamed entirely on their husbands, but largely on lack of bankable opportunities for Africans.
Tihelo laments: “They were all illegal immigrants in their own country. Every morning they would travel about an hour away to be in a different country, on a different territory, and would have to carry the right papers to show that they were not illegally crossing borders, looking for work in what another man had declared his own land.”
The land they toil on as immigrants ironically belongs to them. It is their birthright, yet alien gangsters from the West claim it as theirs by might.
Given to menial jobs available to them in the mines and white suburbs, blacks are robbed of time with their families.
Going for long periods in the mines, men would occasionally come back to their families. Thus, the familial fabric expected to mould the national consciousness is shred.
Sadly, many of them die because of the dangers that are always prowling in the mines and other occupational fronts available to Africans.
As a result, they leave behind abattoirs of bleeding hearts and strangled hopes.
This is the situation that Tihelo’s mother, Kgomotso, finds herself in.
She has to single-handedly fend for her two daughters after her husband’s disappearance into the mire and soot of the colonial holocaust.
Through her analyses of single parenthood, and how society chides it, the narrator becomes alive to the burdensome nature of womanhood from an early age.
She debunks the notion that a household without a male voice spells doom on the children, particularly girls.
Drawing lessons from Ausi Martha, who is abandoned by her husband for another woman, but remains hooked to the dream that he would come back, Tihelo resolves that a woman’s aspirations should not be tied to her sex.
A woman should not be apologetic to the same societal caprices that shame her, the narrator decides.
She says: “We grow up watching our mothers slide through distress, and that is how we are able to face it ourselves.
“When I was a little girl I would cry from physical pain because my mother would never cry from her own physical pain, and because she would easily take care of mine . . . I could never have faced my fear and humiliation if I had allowed myself to watch my mother be consumed by her own.”
Tihelo reasons that opportunities for herself and her people are in emancipation through education, with its colonial intonations, hence the need to pursue it becomes pertinent.
Persistent questions remain though, on whether the educational system is not skewed against blacks; and who should decide on what should be considered good for Africans.
The protagonist decides that as long as it opens doors for her as a journalist, she will be able to tell the world the story of her people’s travails.
At the same time it would release her from the restrictions of township existence, which her lot is condemned to. However, Tihelo is aware that the history she learns at school obliterates her people’s collective memory.
With apartheid taking root and relegating blacks to the shores where they eke out non-existent lives on crumbs off the tables of imperialists, the music in the black townships does not ebb.
Instead, it rises to a crescendo that resonates with resilience and unity of purpose, as the oppressed Africans dance joyously in the dusty streets of their slums.
For morale and physical support, the oppressed blacks avail whatever may be at their disposal to each other in their struggles against a common enemy that gnaws at their stomachs and usurp their dreams.
Like all children born on the wrong side of the colour bar, Tihelo is weighed down by an array of challenges.
Firstly, her childhood friends, Thato and Tshepo are consumed by the raging tornado of segregatory laws, albeit in different ways.
Because of their middle class status, Thato’s parents are on a better pedestal. Her mother is a nurse and her father owns a small shop up the hill.
Unlike the narrator, Thato is poised for escape from the slums through her parents. They can afford to send her to a once “Whites only” high school, which has been opened up to other races with the means to sustain the exorbitant fees. Hence, as their dreams are hoist on different wavelengths, so does their friendship wane.
Despite his tender age, the 14-year-old Tshepo is consumed in the politics that shape the African’s destiny. Inspired by his brother Mohau, a student leader and revolutionary, Tshepo joins the comrades.
Secondly, the heroine is burdened by her sister’s pregnancy and how she feels it would condemn her to the slums of their birth.
Thirdly, she worries about her skin tone: unlike her mother, sister and other children in her community, she is light skinned.
As events play out, Tihelo, now 14, joins the ANC student movement, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO). Police vans and hippos intimidatingly patrol the townships.
Feeling hard done by closures of schools, learners are inspired by their fear to take the police head on.
They demand the release of their fellow comrades, and an end to political atrocities.
Reminiscent of the 1976 massacre of students and the Sharpeville bloodbath of 1960, the police callously open fire into the protesting students in yet another gory stunner.
Tihelo’s SASO comrades Thabang, Dikeledi, Peter and scores of others are massacred.
The resultant police roundup, nets among others, the protagonist, her mother and sister, who is still recovering from a near fatal abortion at the behest of her young sister (Tihelo).
She got a concoction from a classmate, Lebo, to help her “regain her periods”.
Women are searched in their nudity and raped.
Dehumanised, they carry their silent shame back to their communities, where the wounds are opened anew as the society shares their humiliation, and the oppressive apparatus remains in place.
Meanwhile, Mohau and Tshepo are in exile, Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu are imprisoned and Steve Biko is assassinated.
Tihelo smartly escapes rape, but is detained for six months.
Because of the trauma and torture she goes through at the hands of the police, the narrator is hospitalised.
The puzzle of her light skin is solved through Mma Kleintjie and Ausi Martha.
Now 15, Tihelo learns that she is coloured; that her mother Diana, a white woman was barred by the law to marry a black man; that her father Setshiro died in prison for falling in love across the bar; and that her Mama is her father’s sister, who raised her as her daughter along with Keitumetse, since she was a day old, because her white grandparents disowned her.
With her Mama’s blessings, she writes Diana, her biological mother, who now lives in Canada, a letter, which she hopes to post.
Such is the burden that women carry as they fight running battles internally and externally, and dance it all away in the dust to remain sane in a world increasingly becoming more insane.
Online Reporter