Ballroom dance floor brews ‘true love’

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 11:09:32 +0000

By Philip Chirwa

The girl knew that the Boer officer was being terribly racist and she decided to treat him accordingly. “So what?” she snapped. “How does that bother you?”

The officer-in-charge warned the girl to mind her language. “My question is simple and straight forward,” he insisted. “Is it true that you are in love with a black kaffir from Northern Rhodesia and that you intend to marry him? Yes or no!”

When she gave a “yes” for an answer, the overweight police  chief  raised his eyebrows in apparent disbelief and shouted: “You must be crazy! How could you fall in love with a kaffir, eh?” To which the girl replied: “And can you tell me, sir, how you fell in love with your own wife? The way it happened to you is how it happened to me.”

The officer felt like slapping the girl for being so impudent towards him and asked his subordinates to take her back to her home, to be picked up later for more interrogations, which unfortunately for him yielded nothing; for the young lady was determined to marry the man she loved, the so-called black kaffir from Northern Rhodesia, regardless of the consequences.

The girl’s name was Kay Chandabhai (not real name), born of an Indian father and a Scottish mother and she had fallen madly in love with a migrant worker from Northern Rhodesia (which was to become Zambia at independence), Tradewell Lusungu(not real name), a prize-winning ballroom dancer/coach then working for a local dry cleaning company.

By the close of the year, the two sweethearts had become husband and wife after marrying under the English law. But as the couple was to admit later, the road to the altar was long and difficult as the South African laws specifically discouraged marriages across the race bar.

For even after they married they had to face a lot of racial prejudices to the extent that eventually they thought “enough is enough” and decided to come to Zambia after the country attained independence.

Eventually settled in Lusaka’s George Compound, where they owned a beautiful house which they built out of their savings, the Lusungus were subsequently blessed with seven children, comprising five daughters and two sons and several grandchildren.

Lusungu was born in 1916 at a village in Senior Chief Mwase’s area of Lundazi district. He left his village for South Africa in 1939 together with two other men and as the situation was at the time, the journey was undertaken mostly  on foot.

According to Lusungu, the journey from Lundazi to South Africa, although mostly  done on foot, was an uneventful one since they did not encounter any serious problems on the way. They had enough food provisions from their village and when these ran out, they were replenished by the people in the villagers they passed through on their way.

“Each time we came to a village, we would report ourselves to the village headman and explain our mission. Food would be prepared for us throughout the period we would rest at that village. On leaving, the villagers would give us more food to eat  on the way. They were so kind, those people,  and yet we were total strangers to them,” he told this columnist in an interview.

Meanwhile, in 1945, after he had established himself  at Port Elizabeth, Lusungu joined a local ballroom dancing club where he was trained as a dancer, rising to the position of the club coach. It was called Village Ballroom  Dancing Club and it was only open to Coloured and black boys and girls. Whites had their own ballroom dancing club.

Like any other ballroom dancing club, Lusungu had to have a partner to dance with  and one of the partners he picked on in 1963 was a beautiful Indian Coloured girl called Kay Chandabhai, a trained nurse-cum-midwife.

“It does not always happen that a dance partner becomes your spouse but in my case I thought Kay would make a good wife. So as days went by, I proposed to her and happily for me she agreed,” he recollected.

Kay also admitted that she admired her future husband so much the moment she set her eyes on him. “He was such an experienced ballroom dancer,” she recalled. “We nicknamed him Mr Commando because of the way he danced.”

But the two were soon to discover that planning to marry was one thing but making that agreement become a reality was quite another since they belonged  to different races.

They realized that for their marriage to ever take place, they had to write to the country’s capital, Pretoria, applying for permission to marry. Once permission was granted, albeit after a long struggle, the marriage was formalized and the two once ballroom dance partners became husband and wife.

But that did not mark the end of their woes; for once they got married, a problem arose as to where they were going to live! Before the wedding, Mrs. Lusungu lived with her parents in a Coloured township called Schoulder while her husband lived in one of the sprawling black townships.

When the couple decided to live in Schoulder Township, the Coloureds there told Mr Lusungu that he was unwelcome; and when they tried to shift to the black township, Mrs Lusungu found it difficult to live there because blacks shunned her.

Said Mrs Lusungu: “I am glad that apartheid has gone in South Africa; for it was a very stupid racial system. Here we were, married as husband and wife, but failing to find a place where to live, not because there were no houses around but because we belonged to different races.

“I asked those white people ‘Where do you want us to live? Up there in the sky?’ and they told us that was none of their business. However, we made it quite clear to them that if their intention was to separate us, then they would fail.

“There was no way I was going to divorce my husband and my husband was adamant that any separation between us was out of the question. We were determined to defeat the system by keeping ourselves together during this trying period.”

As a compromise, the couple was allowed to live in what was called a mixed area- that is, a township reserved for those married across the race bar. But even there, Lusungu said, the situation was far from satisfactory.

Now and then his wife would be called to the local police station for the purpose of urging her to drop him as a husband. Despite the fact that the government had allowed the consummation of their marriage, it appeared that the racist police were not happy with that.

“They kept harassing my wife that she had been foolish to marry a kaffir, especially that I was not a South African,”  Lusungu recalled. “But where love is concerned no amount of pressure from outside was sufficient to make us divorce. We just told them to go to hell.”

By 1968, the Lusungus had four children. In fact, the fourth child, a son, was born that year on the 18th of April. Meanwhile, there was more and more pressure on Mrs. Lusungu to divorce her husband but she refused.

It was then that the couple thought “enough is enough” and decided to come to Zambia which had by then attained its independence. Thus on June 10, 1968, the family jumped on a train to Zambia which Mr. Lusungu had not seen for close to 29 years.

But if the Lusungus thought their problems were over then they were gravely mistaken; for an unexpected problem was soon to crop up on their way home.

They had stopped over at Mafeking inside South Africa so that Mrs. Lusungu and the four children could get their yellow fever vaccinations.

When the white officers at the railway station saw a black man with an Indian Coloured wife, they looked surprised and told him to his face that he had no right to take the children and the wife to Zambia with him.

“They told me to jump on the next train and go back to Zambia, saying my wife and the children were South Africans and would not be permitted to leave the country. I told them I would not move an inch unless I was accompanied by my family.

“They also tried to dissuade my wife from accompanying me, telling her childish lies that Zambians were cannibals who ate fellow human beings. But she warned them that she would create big trouble for them unless they allowed her to accompany me to Zambia. So we won the battle.”

As luck would have it, before leaving Zambia in 1939, Lusungu had a son with another woman. When he and his South African-born wife arrived in Lusaka in June, 1968, they were kept for a while at this  son’s house in George Compound.

Thereafter, the couple moved to their own house within the same compound. Eventually they bought a plot where they built their own house.

Shortly after their arrival in Zambia, Lusungu worked for a now defunct dry cleaning company for a while before he joined the then Zambia Breweries. He was there up to 1980 when he joined Self-Help Development(SHD), a non-profit making organisation running community-based projects in rural areas.

Lusungu retired from SHD in 1993. In the case of his wife, following their arrival in Zambia, she joined a charity organisation which ran a mobile clinic and a women’s sewing club in George Compound.

Mrs. Lusungu, who was third in a family of eight children, served as a trained nurse and midwife and as a tailoring instructor since she used to do a lot of her own sewing back home in South Africa.

Asked what had been the happiest moments of their lives, the Lusungus  were unanimous that their ballroom dance days in South Africa were their most memorable ones. And who would dispute that?

The author is a Lusaka-based media consultant who also worked in the Foreign Service as a diplomat in South Africa and Botswana. For comments, sms 0977425827/0967146485 or email:phcirwa2009@yahoo.com.