Excerpt About Ingoma From A 1929-1930 Research Paper Written by Veit Erlmann

Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part III in a four part series on the South African dance forms Indoma and Indlamu. Part III provides an excerpt of a research article by Veit Erlmann on Zulu dancing.

Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2015/12/real-information-about-south-african_19.html for Part I of this series. Part I provides excerpts about the traditional and the contemporary meanings of Ingoma in South Africa from Vusabantu Ngema's 2007 University of Zululand Masters of Arts dissertation "Symbolism and Implications in the Zulu dance forms: Notions of composition, performance and appreciation of dance among the Zulu".

Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2015/12/real-information-about-south-african.html for Part II of this series. Part II provides excerpts about the traditional and the contemporary meanings of Ingoma in South Africa from Vusabantu Ngema's 2007 University of Zululand Masters of Arts dissertation "Symbolism and Implications in the Zulu dance forms: Notions of composition, performance and appreciation of dance among the Zulu". Particular attention in these excerpts is given to description of indlamu dances and, in particular to the dance style called "Isizingili".

Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2015/12/five-videos-of-south-african-indlamu.html for Part IV of this series. Part IV provides videos of Indlamu dancing.

The content of this post is presented for folkloric, historical, cultural, and aesthetic purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Veit Erlmann for the information about Zulu culture that is shared online in this research article.

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EXCERPT OF VEIT ERLMANN'S RESEARCH ARTICLE ON INGOMA
From http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2631268">http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2631268 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2631268 ‘Horses in the race course’: the domestication of ingoma dancing in South Africa, 1929–39
"On a Saturday night of January 1930 several thousand African men clad in loin cloths and the calico uniforms of domestic servants thronged a concert in the Workers' Hall of the Durban branch of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) in Prince Edward Street. To the pounding sounds of hundreds of sticks, successive teams of dancers, some of them trained by Union officials from the rural hinterland, rushed to the stage performing the virile, stamping ingoma dance. The Zulu term ingoma (lit. ‘song’) covers a broad range of male group dances like isikhuze, isicathulo, ukukomika, isiZulu, isiBhaca, umzansi and isishameni.

The kinesic patterns of ingoma are inseparably linked to choral songs in call-and-response structure and, as such, constitute a complex statement of the unity of dance and song in Zulu performance culture. The peak of Zulu-speaking migrants' dance culture, ingoma evolved out of the profound transformation of traditional rural Zulu culture through impoverishment, dispossession and labour migration around the first World War. But on that night of January 1930, at the climax of the spectacle, the ingoma dancers struck a particularly defiant note:

Who has taken our country from us?
Who has taken it?
Come out! Let us fight!
The land was ours. Now it is taken.
We have no more freedom left in it.
Come out and fight!
The land is ours, now it is taken.
Fight! Fight!
Shame on the man who is burnt in his hut!
Come out and fight! (Perham 1974, p. 196)"
-snip-
I reformatted this brief excerpt to enhance its readability.
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This concludes Part III of this series.

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