Dancing in the dust

The burden of womanhood
in ‘Dancing in the Dust’
January 4, 2016 Elliot Ziwira - At the
Bookstore, Features, Opinion & Analysis
Elliot Ziwira @ The Book Store
Men go for long periods in the mines, occasionally
coming back to their families which shreds the
familial fabric expected to mould the communal
and national consciousness.
“Dancing in the Dust” (2002) by Kagiso Lesego
Molope, published by Oxford University Press
Southern Africa (Pvt) Limited, purveys among a
plethora of thematic concerns, the struggles that
women endure in an oppressive, uncompromising
and intolerant world, which derives excitement
from the squalid and mundane.
Told in the first person singular narrative voice,
the story captures the fears of a 13-year-old girl,
Tihelo, whose only defence against the vagaries
of human folly is her zeal for life, regardless of
the many hurdles that are strewn her path in an
attempt to scupper her people’s aspirations in
apartheid South Africa of the 1980s.
Hope for the people of colour is scuttled, and
dreams are set ablaze in a brutal maze devoid of
feeling and restraint; and in this madness women
and children suffer the most. As a bildungsroman,
the book 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, yet her resilience soars with the rising
sun.
All around her, Tihelo sees suffering, death and
pain as the White man’s oppressive machinery
takes aim at the Black man’s abode.
Her mother, Kgomotso and sister, Keitumetse are
her only family, who like others of the fairer sex,
are burdened by their sex. As a domestic worker,
her mother wakes up every morning to catch,
along with scores of others, the 5.30am train that
will take them to White suburbs where they will
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, not that it
may be blamed entirely on their husbands, but
largely on lack of bankable opportunities for
Africans.
The heroine pines: “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.”
Ironically, the land they now work on as
immigrants is theirs by birth, yet another man, an
alien gangster from where the sun sets, believes
it to be his by might. He beats them to a pulp if
he feels like it.
The menial jobs available to the people of colour
in mines and White suburbs rob them of quality
time with their families.
Men go for long periods in the mines, occasionally
coming back to their families which shreds the
familial fabric expected to mould the communal
and national consciousness. Because of the
dangers that always lurk in the mines and other
occupational fronts available to Africans, many a
man perish, leaving behind abattoirs of bleeding
hearts and strangled hope, as is also the case
with the narrator’s mother, who has to single-
handedly fend for her two daughters after her
husband’s disappearance into the mire and soot
of the colonial holocaust.
At 13, the heroine realises the burdensome nature
of womanhood, through her analyses of single
parenthood, and the way society chides at it. She
debunks the notion that a household without a
male voice spells doom on the children, especially
so if they are girls.
Through Ausi Martha, who is abandoned by her
husband for another woman, yet remaining etched
on to the dream that he would come back, Tihelo
resolves that a woman’s aspirations should not
be tied to her sex; and that she should not be
apologetic to the same societal whims that
shame her.
She intimates thus: “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.”
Opportunities for herself and her people, the
protagonist reasons, lay in emancipation through
the White man’s education, hence the need to
pursue it become pertinent.
But is the same educational system not skewed
against the people of colour? Who decides what
is good for the African, the White man?
She 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, and at the
same time release herself from the claustrophobia
of township existence which her lot is condemned
to, even though she is aware that the history she
learns at school expunges her people’s.
Tihelo, like all children born on the wrong side of
the colour bar, 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.
Thato’s parents are on a better pedestal because
of their middle class status; 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 because her parents 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.
The 14-year-old Tshepo, on the other hand,
notwithstanding his tender age, is consumed in
the politics that shape the African’s destiny.
Inspired by his brother Mohau, who is 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 frets about her skin colour; she is
light-skinned unlike her mother, sister and other
children in her community.
As events play out, Tihelo at 14 joins the ANC
student movement, the South African Students’
Organisation (SASO). With the police vans and
hippos intimidatingly patrolling the townships,
students who feel hard done by the unfolding
closures of schools, 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 round-up, 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) who got a
concoction from a classmate, Lebo, to help her
“regain her periods”.
The women are dehumanised through body
searches in their nudity, and rape. 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 incarcerated and
Steve Biko is assassinated. Tihelo who shrewdly
escapes rape, but is detained for six months, is
hospitalised because of the trauma and torture
she goes through at the hands of the police.
Subsequently, the puzzle of her glaringly light skin
is unlocked through Mma Kleintjie and Ausi
Martha. Now 15, she 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
who now lives in Canada, a letter, which she
hopes to post. Such is the burden that women
carry as they fight running battles from within
and without.