#gumboot

Meet boy in a boot! I started out trying to draw a cactus so I definitely nailed it. This is the best thing I’ve ever drawn and I will never reach these heights again. I hope you love him. 

Stepping originates from the mines of South Africa in the 1880’s. Then referred to as the ‘gumboot dance’, South African miners would use their bodies as instruments making both rhythm and dance. During the time of apartheid in South Africa, South Africans faced many restrictions on their agency as people, forced into cataloged segregated communities in homeland ghettos, and various other consequences of settler colonialism. The Dutch occupation of South Africa lead to many new means of navigating life, including communication and entertainment. Miners used their bodies in place of the drums they would be penalized for having, and resisted through their dance. They built community with their dance. Found joy with their dance.

Many, many years later in the 1920’s this dance would carry on. Across the Atlantic Ocean in Washington D.C at Howard University, the Gumboot dance of South African miners would be called stepping. Stepping was utilized by Black college students that were members of what were developing greek letter organizations. Black sororities and fraternities used stepping as a part of their identities, each organization coming up with ‘steps’ amongst their members and performing these steps. The 1920’s, like 1880’s South Africa, was also a time of segregation in the United States. Black people were (are) systemically disenfranchised and give alternate liberties as opposed to their white counterparts. Howard University itself, the site of the gumboot turn step, is a product of this history and Black Americans creating their own academic spaces in society. While in South Africa the gumboot carried with it secret, knowledge, and community as means of survival and forced silence. U.S Black college greek organizations made secret a choice, protecting their history and making exclusive their community; while simultaneously not being silenced but very actively loud. Loud through their service and loud through their step. The spets in both contexts hold the weight of Black resistance and ingenuity.

In the gumboot and step, culture is cultivated. These dances, chants, and performances are of separate lands and far away people. However, the colonial and white supremacist systems that produced the conditions of antiBlackness for both communities to resist are not so far apart. These conditions imposed on Black people and the response of resistance, survival, and joy can be seen demonstrated in and contributing to many circulations of Blackness.

Sources:

http://www.artofstepping.com/about-a-o-s/history-of-art-of-stepping/

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