Apartheid in the ring
Mike Marqusee cheers Dancing Shoes Is Dead: A Tale of Fighting Men in South Africa by Gavin Evans, a hard-hitting memoir of South African boxing
The Guardian, 9 February 2002
Ever since the ringside cry of “Don’t let the nigger win!” went up at the epic 1810 bout between the black American ex-slave Molineux and the English champ Cribb, the theatre of boxing has been infused with the politics of race. Not surprisingly, in the South Africa of the 1980s and early 1990s, the drama acquired a special piquancy. Gavin Evans was there, as spectator and actor. In this idiosyncratic memoir, he guides readers through a darkly fascinating world little known in Britain even to fight fans, though of interest to a much wider audience.
As a boxing journalist, Evans enjoyed an informed and intimate view of the action in and around the ring. He was also a deeply engaged political activist, a member of the ANC underground and of the South African Communist party, and the target of assassination plots by security forces. In addition, he was, through all this, a young man in search of love and sex, inspired by drugs and music.
Dancing Shoes Is Dead boasts some of the most gripping and intelligent writing on the sport I’ve read, combining knowledge of the ring and appreciation of its finer points with a complex political and personal hinterland. Evans paints a vivid picture of a deeply distressed but somehow resilient sporting sub-culture, with its aspirant township battlers, its perpetual search for white hopes, its murky internal rivalries and ever-mounting external pressures. In apartheid South Africa, the cruelty and injustice endemic in boxing acquired heightened intensity. The toll is fearful: boxers cheated or killed in the ring, or falling victim to the country’s peculiar plagues (reckless drivers, armed criminals, Aids) as well as the boxer’s universal nemeses (promoters, alcohol, drugs, divorce, madness). And all this terrible human waste flowing out of and back into the turbulent, polluted river of a violently racist society.
Evans excels in his accounts of a generation of black fighters, many barely known to readers of British sports pages: the magnificent comrade-champion, Arthur Mayisela, the elegant but fickle Sugarboy Malinga, the faded “Rose of Soweto”, Dingaan Thobela, and (better known in Britain) Baby Jake Matlala, whose diminutive, stick-insect frame housed more willpower and ringcraft than much bigger fighters displayed.
There’s the eponymous tale of Jacob “Dancing Shoes” Morake, a skinny Sowetan whose upper body was covered in burn scars. Morake worked as an insurance clerk by day, but like many others relied on the ring to support his extended family. In 1984, he died after being knocked out by a popular white fighter in the 12th round in a bout in Sun City, the resort targeted in the apartheid era by the international boycott. In the final rounds, Morake was clearly unable to defend himself, but the referee – a white South African cop – allowed the fight to continue.
Evans does full justice to the outrage of Morake’s death, but also to the complex career of the fighter whose punches sealed his fate, Brian Mitchell. In general, his portraits of white South African males are wry and full of surprises. One of the best depicts the most well-known white hope of the era, the heavyweight Gerrie Coetzee: “one of the strangest creatures I’ve ever encountered… kind, cruel, clever, dumb, gentle, vicious, considerate, gullible, sophisticated, simple, manipulating”.
Evans highlights the vagaries of boxing partisanship, where loyalties are shaped and reshaped by a shifting array of racial, national and provincial identities, symbolic gestures, character traits, financial investments and personal whims. He reminds us that boxing is often a brutal circus, and that its relation to malign aggression is perpetually uneasy. He empathises with boxers, but does not romanticise them.
Ironically, when he turns to the explicitly political and personal, he is less nuanced, less generous, and therefore less convincing. His swashbuckling journalese, peppered with deadpan asides, serves him well in the boxing narratives, but comes under strain when he ventures further afield. Evans himself offers a partial explanation of the contrast. In politics, “the scale of injustice and cruelty was so vast that I had to separate it from the realm of perpetual outrage”. Tactics and strategy had to come before emotion or self-expression. “Boxing allowed an outlet that was more contained and less restrained.”
But the problem is also that Evans has written back into his past exploits his subsequent political disillusionment; and tales of disillusionment that fail to convey the erstwhile romance of the illusion, whatever it may have been, tend to fall flat. If you strip political activism of the ideas and aspirations that motivate it, it will seem little more than masochistic drudgery. Among other things, this book is a major addition to the literature of activist burn-out. As Evans is aware, he has a tendency to jaded cynicism, and when the wise-guy flippancy takes over he sells both himself and the liberation movement short.
He never seems to have recovered from the discovery that among his “struggle heroes” were many who were “liars and backstabbers… too much like me, and I know I can be a bit of a shit”. To which one is tempted to respond: if movements for social justice are to be carried forward only by saints, they will not be carried forward at all. Evans is especially aggrieved over his long entanglement with Marxism; at times, the memoir threatens to become another recrimination against “the god that failed”, but in the end it is closer in spirit to Bob Dylan’s mid-1960s repudiation of political protest: “‘Equality’, I spoke the word / As if a wedding vow / Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.”
In his ambivalence towards both the heroic years of struggle and the compromised realities of post-apartheid South Africa, Evans is not alone among veterans of the movement. There is much pain in this book: friends imprisoned, tortured, murdered; lives broken by apartheid’s multi-pronged violence; the tortuous labyrinth of personal and political betrayal; Evans’s anguish over his own motives; and the ever-present pain of boxing, which serves as an echo chamber for all the rest. Despite an attempt to achieve “closure” in the final pages, it is clear that many wounds are still unstaunched. Perhaps it is mere sentimentality to expect anything else.
At 450 pages, the book sprawls. The sequence of events is sometimes hard to follow, and the structure is in danger of collapsing into a vast scree of anecdotes – though it must be admitted that many of these are irresistible. My favourite involves a grinning secret policeman belting out Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as he escorts Evans to an interrogation session at the notorious Johannesburg Prison.
Despite his best efforts, Evans emerges from these pages as a generous and resourceful individual. Somehow I doubt he will ever really become the mellow hippy he aspires to be, or finally “grow out of” either his anger at injustice or his romance with the ring.
