Dancing in the streets: from Soweto to the Waterfront

By Riaan de Villiers

On the afternoon of 16 December — Reconciliation Day — I took some youngsters to the Waterfront, just to be in a place where some people were gathered.

We walked down the long central atrium through the Waterfront Shopping Centre – a sort of latter-day cathedral in our commercial age. It was thronged with happy shoppers, people of all hues and origins carrying branded shopping bags.

Then I heard people singing. We found them when we exited the shopping centre on the basin side. Next to the amphitheatre and a huge Christmas tree, a busker was singing and playing on an amplified guitar. Around him, a crowd of people had built up who were singing along and dancing. More people — locals, tourists — had gathered around them, and were recording the scene on their celphones. It was an unusual, joyful scene which was good to see.

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Driving back, the phrase ‘dancing in the streets’ began to spool through my mind, and eventually triggered a deep memory.

A long time ago now – in the early 1980s – my beloved friend, the late and legendary photographer Mike McCann, held an exhibition at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg. A real, old-school veteran, he had started his career in Rhodesia before moving to South Africa, and was working for the Rand Daily Mail at the time.

The exhibition included a blurred photograph of people dancing in a street. (McCann might well have shot it with his battered Leica from under his arm, which he did quite often.) But this did not detract from its significance – it turned out to be a photograph of people dancing in a street in Soweto on the day that Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated, some 15 years previously.

I don’t have a print, and have not seen it reproduced – or referred to – ever since. Still, this terrible, ominous and largely unknown image is one of the most significant photographs about South Africa I know of, which again drifted up in my memory.

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Some more words began to resonate in my mind …  ‘My land, my dor, verlate land: / iets wens olywe groei in jou: dat alles klein, Latyns, gaan word  / en kalk-wit kerkies bou …’

It’s an extract from a poem by N.P. Van Wyk Louw. Titled H. PETRUS, the whole poem reads:

‘n Jakkals grawe in die sneeu 

hy’s rooi en spikkel teen die wit 

en skrik en luister stywe-oor 

na êrens-op-die-werf se spit. 

 

My land, my dor, verlate land: 

iets wens olywe groei in jou: 

dat alles klein, Latyns, gaan word 

en kalk-wit kerkies bou. 

 

Die jakkals grawe in die son, 

hy skop ‘n bietjie nugter wit 

rondom sy agterboudjies uit.

En Dowe-Peet hou aan met spit.

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Published in the volume Tristia in 1962 — four years before Verwoerd was killed — it was and remains profoundly enigmatic. Why was the land so parched and desolate? (An echo of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, itself a reference to the legend of the Fisher King?)

Who was Dowe Peet (Deaf Pete), who failed to take notice of the little fox and its digging? The established churches? Probably. But maybe the Afrikaner political establishment as well? And who was the little fox – frightened, and listened to Dowe Peet’s digging, but digging up its own clumps of snow all the same?

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Reconciliation Day triggered the usual flurry of conversations among our chattering classes about this perennial (some would say hoary) national goal. It sure seems to be elusive.

This year, they included a conversation between Prof William Gumede and Adv Thuli Madonsela, broadcast on the radio station Power 98.7, on how South Africa’s reconciliation process could be rebooted. The following edited version of Prof Gumede’s comments has appeared in my Facebook feed. Prof Gumede is fast becoming one of my favourite public intellectuals, and amid the usual ocean of platitudes, this strikes me as profound. I’ve taken the liberty of italicising some passages that seem particularly meaningful.

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Prof William Gumede. Source: Facebook.

How can we reinvigorate South Africa’s reconciliation process?

South Africa, after its long period of colonialism, apartheid and communal conflict, needs to foster reconciliation at multiple levels.

The first, and very obvious, is reconciliation between previously advantaged communities, the white community and previously disadvantaged communities.

The second layer of reconciliation is among and within previously disadvantaged communities themselves. Many disadvantaged communities were in deadly conflict with each other.

The third layer of reconciliation is between the non-state key institutions of colonialism and apartheid – the enforcers, whether business, agriculture, schools, sport or professional organisations.

But fourthly, previously disadvantaged communities must also reconcile with themselves at the collective and individual levels. This means the necessity of a mass healing process at the individual and collective level to break the cycles of generational trauma left in the psyche, bodies and thinking of previously oppressed communities by apartheid and colonialism.

But white South Africans will also have to undergo their own processes of healing at the individual and collective level, not as guilt-tripping, but to understand the deep legacy of colonialism and apartheid which is still shaping present-day racial relations.

Effective reconciliation cannot take place without a constitutional framework, rule of law, non-violence, acceptance of our differences, and honesty.

Sadly, the Constitution, has been repeatedly, deliberately and ignorantly been undermined, including by elected and public officials.

Another key requirement for reconciliation, that all South Africans embrace diversity as a fundamental element of our national identity, has also been rejected by many political groups.

An effective state to deliver quality public services to all communities is critical to reconciliation, because delivering and redistribution public services to previously excluded communities is critical to reconciliation.

However, the ANC’s cadre deployment policy of only appointed its own cadres, without relevant skills; the ANC’s tolerance of corruption in the public service, state-owned enterprises and public procurement, and insistence on outdated ideologically policies, have knocked public services, jettisoned equitable economic development, undermined the creation of mass employment and opportunities for previously disadvantaged communities.

The astonishingly high levels of corruption in the ANC and the state has deeply undermined reconciliation. The high levels of ANC corruption has been seen by many previously advantaged communities as a moral leveller in relation to apartheid, the wrong argument that because the current ‘black’ government has been so corrupt, it cleansed the moral wrong of apartheid.

Reconciliation cannot take place without the rule of law. However, the ANC has allowed the rule of law to collapse.

The ANC’s version of black economic empowerment has enriched a few politically connected individuals, companies and trusts, white companies who have partnered with them, and predominantly white financial deal-makers. This has caused resentment among many black and white South Africans – and has undermined reconciliation efforts.

For reconciliation, at whatever level, victims do not necessary require forgiving perpetrators, neither is it a requirement for victims to secure an apology from perpetrators, for reconciliation.

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All of this has lived with me for days. Call me naive, or sentimental, but the people dancing in the Waterfront has made be feel that, despite our travails, there is still something healthy and joyous at the roots of our society, rekindling hope that we are capable of healing our ailing land.

We’ve come a long way since people danced in the streets because the prime minister had been killed.

So, maybe, we’ve managed to plant some olive groves after all, and our land is a bit less parched. All we need now is for those latterday Deaf Petes among us to turn up their hearings aids and start listening.

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FEATURED IMAGE: Singing and dancing in the V&A Waterfront, Reconciliation Day, 16 December 2025. (Riaan de Villiers)