The history of clubbing in Jo’burg is less about physical space and fading memories, but about the sheer, frightful necessity of dancing
, even after his death in 2010, immediately became part of the city’s jazz-infused high life. He made friends and socialised with the cosmopolitan intellectuals that staffedIn a 1986 interview, Nadine Gordimer recalled Themba arriving at her home one day with “a rather snooty-looking young man” — Nkosi, who cultivated an indifferent air in Gordimer’s patrician home.“This is not music,” sniffed Nkosi.
One night in 1955 Schadeberg walked into this Sophiatown dancehall with his Rolleiflex camera. He was 24 and had a head full of jazz. Amid the melee of bodies moving around the room that night, he spotted one particular couple dancing. The photograph he took offers a valuable clue about the character of dance and revelry during the formative years of high apartheid.
Photography, more so than written journalism, is important to anyone interested in the history of pleasure, of dance and dance venues in South Africa. Photography offers an important means to visualise, as much as imagine, the topsy-turvy world Nkosi arrived upon in 1956. But, and this is important to recognise, for all the repression and violence that marked the apartheid years there was also music and dance. Pleasure is a makeshift ideology that embraces refusal.
Behind the filigree of pleasure offered by music, dance, alcohol and other more exotic poisons remains the sobriety of a city characterised by exploitation, oppression, alienation, violence and enforced strangeness. Nkosi knew this.
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