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CHAPTER 1
TURNING TO BE KISSEDPraise, Flirtation, and the Work of Men
25 December 2002, esiPongweni
Early morning, little Fikisile rushes into her grandmother's room squealing, "It's Christmas! Today" — a breathy flutter of anticipation — "we'll go to ngoma and see malume, Uncle Mbusiseni, dancing!"
27 December 2007, esiPongweni
Reviewing my video, Mbusiseni advises me on filming ngoma. "Shoot all the dancers," says the twenty-something-year-old. "When one falls, turn to shoot the next. When there is choreography, get all the dancers in the shot. You need a microphone: the drum is too soft. When we sing, shoot the spectators. Choose the most beautiful ones. We dancers want to see them on the video. The amatshitshi, amaqhikiza, and the owelile: zoom them."
Zoom in on the young girls wearing a cloth around their waists, slit at the side on the thigh. Zoom in on the teenagers who layer towels around their waists, drape blue cloaks from their shoulders, and hang decorated sashes down their backs. Also film the Christian girls dressed in town fashion. We dancers want to see them (watching us).
The Gendered Expression of Team Song
25 December 1999, esiPongweni
Family and friends clustering under their gleaming umbrellas ring the barren arena. Neighbors and visitors squeeze into the shade of skinny thorn trees. Men gather for a view from the boulders. Mingling on this Christmas afternoon, they wait.
In dance-marches a line of forty singing men. After skirting the inner circumference in salutation, they perform the ifolo. Coordinating their stick work and footwork (a centipede, more than a line of individuals), they launch a cycle of thunderous kicks and stamps to a slow, thudding beat. Power lies in their steady collective action. Ululations glisten. Next drummers and dancers ratchet up the energy with a faster-paced line dance till they shuffle into a cluster, sit on the ground in the arena's center back, and sing.
"We saw, we saw the star," calls Siyazi, in the role of igoso (captain), beginning with an old song about dancers from Germiston, an industrial town near Johannesburg. The song derides this famous team, whose emblem was a star.
"We saw the star — we saw the little boys from Germiston. My heart is white, so white [pure]!" respond his men in melody.
Having barely set the groove, Siyazi switches gears. Improvising, he builds the narrative flow of this subsection of the set while introducing variation in his references, weaving a story about men's experiences of the world over aconsistent beat. In this textual fragment, the team asks young girls for directions in a rural area. Local knowledge says that, in deference, young girls will reply honestly to a stranger's request. Men unknown to you, on the other hand, might be deceptive. (Italics represent the chorus here and subsequently.)
I hear, I hear there
Ngoma's narratives arise from a male perspective. Snatched from longer songs and strung together, of significance is each song's story and how they are combined, presenting a multifaceted image of masculine experience. What that image draws from the worlds of men while at once making men's experience through aesthetic engagement is my focus here. This articulation of ngoma's manliness in a changing world involves the dialogics of performing and performativity, as it does the two-way tracking of narration and feeling, producing the sense of being an ngoma man always also in a state of becoming. Next Siyazi leads this team into the world of humor and idiom, commenting on homestead construction, a central concern of responsible men. They sing a whole lyric text straight through, once.
Hey, hammerhead bird,
Siyazi begins again:
Hey, hammerhead bird, hey hammerhead Hey, hammerhead
But after the first line, he diverts the team to matters of love and propriety, and to men's prerogative over women.
There is a girl I won't tell anyone [the people] about.
They sing through the days of the week until the boy can at last meet the beautiful girl, for oh, he is sure she is the one for him. Siyazi cuts the song before its punch line, leaving unspoken the fathers', brothers', friends', and teammates' warning to men from other areas not to meddle with the new girlfriend of one of their youths:
Don't trouble yourself, for we have taken her
From singing about courting practices, Siyazi shifts to taunt those who think they can beat them at ngoma dancing. (Sweetness and hard-hitting poetics animate each other.) They boastfully invite strangers inside, for they are not afraid of challengers. The dancers repeat Siyazi's lines:
Help yourself, my child, help yourself [Do your own style]
Leading the team through these songs, Siyazi builds drama in preparation for the individual virtuosity of competitive one-on-one dancing, framing the awaited moment with lyrics pertaining to manhood. In the process of drawing narratives from the worlds through which dancers move, their performance comes to act upon that world.
First, manhood is subject to scrutiny and celebration via ngoma, for dancing is a display around which courting and flirtation take place. Adult women ululate, whether in exhortation, agreement, competition, proclamation, encouragement, anticipation, or praise, at once sharing in a mature women's world and marking their relationships to others. Teenagers flock to watch. When dancers mingle with the crowd during breaks and after the event, the admired and the admiring, the flirtatious and the shy have a socially sanctioned opportunity to interact. Girlfriends send their sisters and best friends to present gifts to men they are courting. They string sashes and towels decorated with cigarettes, candy, and matches around the necks and waists of those they admire. Fafa's brother receives a gift from Fafa's girlfriend's sisters, for his wife has run away.
Expert dancers enjoy high prestige among women. Looking pretty is not enough; you need to persuade through your dancing action, Siyazi says. A mother must exclaim, "I wish that one were my son," as he executes an improvisatory turn; "the ladies" watch before they say, "I want that insizwa [young man]!" Through the expressive, bodily work of the dancer-artist and the craft of immersion, many generate seductive power. "I'm leaving you, my husband!" teases a woman loudly, admiring the dancing in progress. "We'll see you before you sleep!" calls another, praising their moves.
Through evaluation, ngoma masculinity is drawn out of its theatrical performance frame into the everyday. As an opportunity for gendered play, ngoma performance is also a site of invitation into that frame. With the license afforded her by her age, Ma Soshangani Zulu, Mboneni's granny, hobble-dances with her walking stick, weaving around the dancers and ululating. She continues all afternoon. "Zize kubani? Ezakwabani? [Who are the girls coming to see (visit)? From where are they coming?]" she inserts rhythmically between her trills and over the ngoma singing. She plays with phrases conventionally asked of girls coming to represent their courting sister at a boy's homestead. Here she draws on a ritual practice to enact an objective of the ngoma event: affirmative social exchanges about courting and social reproduction of the homestead.
Later Siyazi spots a girl checking out the dancers as he leads the team. "Girl, choose your boyfriend please. The room is full of boys. Girl, where is your boyfriend?" he inserts into the stream of his narrative, improvising in song.
Ngoma opens up public space for flirtation. Men and women, young and old, dancers and audience members alike engage the process. The dance event is framed by additional opportunities to self-present in parade and to interact.
It is 24 December, a sweltering afternoon for the annual promenade along the tar road at Keates Drift. Mbusiseni, his father Siyazi, their male friends, and fellow acquaintances are home for Christmas. Everyone is home, almost. Even Mbusiseni's suburban uncle might arrive with his Jack Daniels and canvas camping chair. Young women who work in the cities and towns will come home too, and urban relatives will visit. Everyone arrives, less because it is Christmas than because it is leave time, time to knock off from work. The construction industry closes mid-December till the New Year. Businesses shut. Schools are out. The sun shines. The roads out of Johannesburg down to the coast clog with speeding vehicles hitched with bicycles and boats, and with minivan taxis loaded with people body to body, heading for home in KwaZulu.
On 24 December, everyone mingles along the tar road cutting through Keates Drift. Men, mostly, mill around the bottle (liquor) stores; women sell tomatoes, cling peaches, and decorative aprons along the road; taxis zoom in from Johannesburg in the north and Durban in the south, and spill out their passengers home at last. Jubilations, whistles. Bags and packets tumble out; crates are shoved and lifted. Youths saunter. Girls parade. Such finery. A tinsel spray sparkles in her hair. Friends home from the city find one another. Women visit together. Overloaded bakkies (trucks) transport shoppers up and down the hill. Kids move in bands. A drunkard creates a ruckus. Music blares from a shiny car. "Be off with you!" shouts a mother, wielding her furled umbrella as she charges toward the bevy of boys enclosing her teenage daughter.
The twenty-fourth of December is a public courting day. Down the way, dancer age-mates Mbusiseni, Philani, and Oli cluster their umbrellas tightly, shading their proceedings with the girl Philani is wooing. Mbusiseni moves in to hold the handle of her old FM radio, her parading prop. Of course she won't let her radio go. The youths sweet talk her. Surrounded, she turns her face away from her suitor. (If only she would turn as if to be kissed!) He wants just one string of her beads, wrested from her neck, a sign of consent to his flirtations. Ha!
Age-mates dressed in new matching outfits parade as a team, checking out the scene in their rayon leopard skin trousers. Girls, sisters and friends, cloaked in Msinga blue, checkered long socks overlaid with beads, rubber canning rings, and shiny watch straps ringing their calves all the way up to their knees. Hairstyles. Headdresses. Young feminine hips and buttocks filled out further with towels wrapped under knee-length skirts, backs of knees to be glimpsed. Christian girls decked out in fitting town dresses. A dude in sunglasses. Girls eye youths.
Uthuli lweZulu's men have organized themselves, en masse, this year, 2011. They gather at the dancing spot outside Zama's house. Forty-eight men have dressed alike, collared striped shirts and tan trousers topping spotless white sneakers. "Beautiful," teenaged Welile said of the men of her place, "all All Stars [sneakers] and Brentwoods [trousers]." Amajita (dudes), they head down the dust road to the tar road. Khetho drives his minivan taxi at a walking pace. From the bridge at the bottom end of the bustle and hubbub of the promenading community, the men split into two files on either side of the road. Khetho drives between the two lines, tooting his taxi horn all the way, holding the road open, while the men parade with the gait of gentlemen in single file. Celebratory commotion erupts. Mothers and wives' ululations ripple up the road like a sound caught on fire. Girls turn to watch. Some call the names of their friends. "Yeyi, Pretty [a dancer's nickname]!" "Weh, son of Mdlalose!" Young amajita step out of the line and into the road for a quick flurry of a dance, a kick, a comic boast, then shoot back to their place in line. At the top of the road, past the grocery, the bottle stores, and the tea room, past the shoe factory outlet that closed, the turnoff to the clinic and St. John's Apostolic Church, past the gas pump, the taxi stand, and the vendors, the men end their parade. Another community's team of immaculate lookalikes arrives to promenade. Stiff competition. Dudes check out dudes. Some greet. More celebratory commotion.
Mpitshongo Zulu is a wizened man. When it is his turn among the elders to address the dancers at the close of the Christmas afternoon set, 1996, he thanks them for their beautiful performance, for making such a nice event. "I'd like everyone from here to get a girlfriend. They must love you in this area. Today I thank you very much. If someone is treating you badly, let me know, so I can remind him that I don't have a child to be hit and I don't have a child to be killed. I've only got men for the ladies, to make love with thegirls, and to be loved by all people. You know, at the bottle store yesterday, I heard people exclaiming, 'Those beautiful amajita! I wonder where they belong?' Even I was caught off guard, for I didn't think I knew amajita as beautiful as they. Then someone recognized a young man from esiPongweni, our community. I myself realized they must be from esiPongweni because they were so much of a unit. Next year, please continue with what I saw this year. Start as soon as you arrive home from Johannesburg."
In his closing appreciation and advisory speech, Mpitshongo echoes the history that ties courting practices to migrant labor, which allowed men through the twentieth century to accumulate the authority, cash, and commodities that enable customary marriage and homesteading. Likewise, his speech connects ngoma camaraderie and migrant labor with courting, love, and domestic reproduction and with the problem of violence. His speech describes the space/time of migrant labor: now, with everyone home, is the prime time for parties, rites of passage, and communal events.
The Work of Ngoma Men
If ngoma narrates a gendered story, it also references the urban life of migrant workers and their endeavors to garner the standing and income that facilitates courting. "The plane I've bought for my darling is coming," sing Umzansi Zulu Dancers. "Darling, you will get all the promises. ... Hurry back [home] in the afternoon, darling. I'm going to get things set up for you / You'll get your stove this afternoon / not a coal one, darling, but an electric one ... the temperature setting will be just right," they joke. While dancers' employment patterns have changed over the last three decades, working to earn for a household remains a core principle of responsible manhood.
Bangindawo Loli Zulu, captain of Uthuli lweZulu's team from 1975 to 1987, spent his whole working life at a single company — Anglo American Mining Corporation — and retired with a pension in 1994. Initially a cleaner, he eventually attained a supervisory position. No one is employed this steadily anymore. Undergirding the generational and biographical shifts is a process of industrial rationalization rooted in South Africa's recession of the mid-1970s. In the decades since, labor has become increasingly casual (Makhulu 2015).
A few mature men have never entered the formal sector. Zanaso Dladla, who danced from 1972 until about 1985, assisted his father in his spaza (shop) inside George Goch hostel, when he arrived in the city in 1969. Soon he embarked on his own enterprise selling booze upstairs. Upon his father's retirement, he took over the spaza, selling necessities like soap, cigarettes, bread, and hot meals. He begins cooking at 4 AM, opens at 5:30 AM to catch the early workers, and closes at 11 PM, seven days a week.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dust of the Zulu"
by .
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