Glenda Kemp: From controversial stripper to devout Christian

At a time when many South Africans were being persecuted for opposing apartheid in the 1970s, a young white Afrikaner woman was also being harassed, arrested and intimidated. She was targeted not for her political views but because she took her clothes off in public.

In her own way, Glenda Kemp was a trailblazer who gave the middle finger to a right-wing, conservative government. She became one of the biggest newsmakers of the '70s, famous for her devil-may-care attitude and her provocative dance routines, performed with a succession of pythons called Oupa.

At 70, Kemp is bubbly and demure as she welcomes us to her home on the Bluff in Durban. Wearing jeans, a tracksuit top and no makeup, she cuts a modest, unassuming figure. She gives the impression of being a woman at ease with herself. Her house has views of the ocean she loves and she spends many hours on the beach with her dogs, Easter and Curtis. It's a long way from the life she once led.

Kemp (her married name is Harper but she will always be known by the name that made her famous) says she became a stripper somewhat by accident, when she was a student and danced part-time.

"There was no moment when it first happened. It was so gradual and came so naturally that there was no time when I thought, 'Oh no, I have just taken all my clothes off.' I don't know when the first time was," she says.

"My first dancing job was at a restaurant called the Westerwald in Johannesburg. Here a lot of my acts developed. Because the law said you were not allowed to leave the stage wearing less than when you arrived, I simply started with a G-string and nipple caps and built a whole story around getting dressed. I worked there for at least a year and started being invited to dance at birthday and bachelor parties."

RENT-A-PYTHON

Her snaky dance partner became Kemp's signature early in her career. There was more than one Oupa. At one stage Kemp had three pythons: Oupa 1, 2 and 3. They had the same name partly because she had a permit for only one snake and partly because she did not see them as pets.

Cabinet ministers accused her of being responsible for the drought and she was arrested for public indecency more times than she cares to remember

"I decided to use a python in my act because they have no poison," she says. "It was a logo, a brand, something that made me stand out from the rest. I wasn't attached to Oupa. A snake is not like a dog or a cat. It doesn't even know you. It's not going to come and say hello."

Her pythons lived in her home, in a customised heated wall unit with glass sliding doors. The shelves had holes cut into them so that the snakes could slither from one shelf to the next. She fed them live chickens: "A very traumatic business if you are 24 and can't bear to kill an ant. The regular thing to do was to put the chicken in the unit and put myself in a cinema, far away from the chicken's sorrow and the snake's delight."

Later the snakes were sent to live with the reptile dealer who had supplied them and Kemp rented an Oupa whenever she had a show.

"That way I had no feeding to do and my snake shelves could hold books. I didn't always get one of the Oupas - I once ended up with a snake so big I had to drag it in a sleeping bag to the show."

The last Oupa went with Kemp to London but did not return with her. "The manager of Raymond's Revue Bar took the snake away from me and did whatever he did with it. It could have gone to some nature snake resort, I hope. It was out of my hands. The snake never did say a word."

GOOD COP, BAD COP

As her fame in SA grew, famous patrons flocked to book her. Theatre royals Des and Dawn Lindberg got her to perform at their house for a gathering of celebrities. Former Miss World Anneline Kriel was a guest at another private performance.

"She told me afterwards that she thought I had an athletic, but not a sexy body," says Kemp.

She put on cabaret acts at restaurants and appeared regularly at a venue in Bapsfontein, Ekurhuleni, on Sunday afternoons. This, she says, was "family entertainment, where I danced in a bikini with the snake and did fire dancing. I also did many shows in Maseru and Swaziland. Was there a place I did not perform?"

Fame had other consequences, too. The fanatical brigade protested vigorously at her shows and policemen often sat in the front row. Once, in Durban, she was arrested as she walked onto the stage.

"I hadn't even stripped yet, but they arrested me. I asked if I could just go to the loo, and they went to the loo first to see if I could get out the window. The whole vice squad was there. They were ridiculous."

Cabinet ministers accused her of being responsible for the drought and she was arrested for public indecency more times than she cares to remember. Her worst fear was that she'd have to serve time in jail. On one occasion, a court ordered her to be held overnight and appear again the next day. She was rescued by a kind-hearted cop.

"He didn't see me as a stripper," Kemp says. "I was just a little girl doing this act. He said he could not bear to put me in a cell and so he sneaked me out. He took me to his flat and his wife gave me Milo and put me in a clean bed and let me sleep there. In the morning he sneaked me back into court as if nothing had happened."

The fact that she used a serpent - long associated with evil seductresses who lure unsuspecting men to a grim fate - made her act even more unspeakable to puritans.

"Religious women formed barricades with their bodies to prevent me and my snake from reaching the premises," Kemp says. "But courts and high courts and suspended sentences could not stop me and my snake. I turned a conservative country upside down. I made a country sit up and take notice."

As her good friend, journalist Herman Lategan, puts it: "In an era of Calvinism and suffocating conservatism in our country, she unashamedly flaunted her femininity. Because of patriarchy, men in grey shoes and pinched mouths tried to silence her and tell her what to do with her body."

But there were lighter moments, too. Once, on the beach at Port Elizabeth - "using the sun and sea to pass the time before my next performance" - Kemp received "the strangest invitation ever".

DATE NIGHT

"There was this young man who must have done something right because I normally had a way of making it clear that I wanted to be alone. He picked up the courage to ask me out on a date. Would I accompany him to the Glenda Kemp show?

"I must have changed colour and lost my voice. He read this as embarrassment, which it was, but not in the way he thought. He then went on to apologise profusely as he realised that I was not the kind of girl to go to that type of performance. He was sorry to have insulted me. We parted company with only one of us knowing the truth. I often wonder if he recognised me when he watched Glenda Kemp perform that night."

On another occasion, she was booked to perform at a bachelor party but found the guests had all passed out by the time she arrived.

I stood my ground. I just kept on dancing, doing what I love

"I did my show anyway, and the next day they wanted to know if I was really there. The driver was my witness as he had remained sober. He was a real gentleman."

Her sunny demeanour masks a difficult start in life. Born in Bellville, Cape Town, Kemp moved as a young girl with her mother, stepfather and younger brother to La Rochelle in Johannesburg. Her two older siblings were in an orphanage in Potchefstroom, where she was later sent too.

She was molested by her stepfather, a memory that causes her sparkling green eyes to lose their brightness. Later, she was adopted by "Tannie and Oom" Baumbach, and taken into their home in the small farming town of Swartruggens in what is now the North West.

In 1969 she began studying to be a teacher, first in Potchefstroom, then at Goudstad Teachers Training College in Johannesburg. The city offered more opportunities to nurture her love for dancing and she began performing in "go-go" clubs.

She met her first husband, Karl Koczwara, at a discotheque at the President Hotel in Joburg. She needed a lift back to her student hostel or she'd miss the 8pm curfew.

"I just grabbed the first guy and said: 'Please take me to the college, I am late.' He became my boyfriend and was with me throughout my dancing years," says Kemp.

They moved to London where Kemp continued dancing without the constant threats of arrest. In the mid-1980s she returned to SA and resumed her teacher's training studies. She and Koczwara married in 1982 but divorced in 1991.

Their split was the most painful thing that ever happened to her, says Kemp, although they remain friends and have a daughter, Kim, 36, who works as a speech therapist in London but is moving back to SA to spend more time with her mother.

"She is so proud of my achievements," says Kemp of her daughter, "and she is a role model for me too."

'IN THE PAPERS'

In 1999, Kemp married Peter Harper, who died just over a year ago. Her second husband was spared the spotlight era - the days when she'd wake up on a Sunday morning and see herself all over the papers.

Kemp smiles at the memory: "You know, that was amazing. Somebody would phone me and say, 'You're in the papers'. Often it would be about something that happened behind the scenes. I would see headlines like, 'Wife stabs husband after Glenda Kemp show'."

She has no regrets about her career. "I was accused of being a really bad person, but I knew I wasn't. That mattered to me; I didn't need other people's opinions. Today I must say it's nice to hear 'She's a legend, she meant so much to me', or 'I saw her show and it was so good'."

This was not always the case. At one point she tried to scrub out the past by getting rid of her scrapbooks.

"I didn't know if people would come and talk to me again. It was over, and I'm the sort of person who moves on. I don't dwell on the past. I can talk about it all now because I have victory over the past. I'm not carrying it as baggage."

Today she is a devout Christian who extols the virtues of reading the Bible and has no fear of death. "You know, it's like, if I go now I have had a good life. So if I get sick I always say, 'Don't you pray for me to get better; I know where I am going'."

Given the choice of starting a career today, she says she would "probably be a missionary or something" but she reluctantly agrees that as a stripper she was a pathfinder and inspiration to many.

"Yes, I was. Not deliberately, but it did turn out like that. I stood my ground. I just kept on dancing, doing what I love."