'Dance is me. I am dance,' says Soweto's dauntless Nomsa Manaka

Strips of white underlay and wood chips are all that remain of the Nomsa Manaka Dance Studio in Walter Sisulu Square in Kliptown, Johannesburg. 

Outside the studio, a bedraggled woman smokes. Children are flying a makeshift plastic kite. A cool breeze gives both their township toy and the stench from the green portable toilets impetus.

 A year ago these kids would have been learning the difference between third and second arabesque, along with kiba, ingoma, tshigombela and pantsula — the traditional dance styles that choreographer and dancer Nomsa Manaka has mastered over the years. Today the dance studio is bolted closed, an eyesore with rubbish strewn around it. It was vandalised beyond repair in December. Costumes, equipment and even taps were stolen. 

 “The Kliptown studio was my pride ... but unfortunately, nothing is taken care of in that area. We had a beautiful dance floor, beautiful ballet barres, mirrors, change rooms, a sound system ... I know the children used to call it their place of happiness. It was my place of happiness as well,” says Manaka with a smile.

Born in Soweto in 1962, Manaka is a classically trained ballet dancer. After returning home from studying dance in the US, she taught at the Funda Arts Centre in the 1980s. In the late '80s she played a lead role in Caiphus Semenya’s Buwa, which was performed in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Senegal and Burkina Faso. 

She also performed in Goree, a musical by her late husband, poet and playwright Matsemela Manaka. Goree is about a young South African dancer, played by Manaka. On a quest to learn about African dance, her journey leads to her own self-discovery.  

We meet at the Funda Arts Centre in Diepkloof, Soweto, her new dance home. It’s just days before she’s scheduled to return to hospital to begin her second battle against ovarian cancer. Walking through a barren dance hall, Manaka almost loses her step on the worn, grey-carpeted stage.

“This recurring of cancer has hurt me deeply, it has saddened me, I thought I was done. And here it is. It has come back ... when I was told I was so devastated, I was crying. I went home and I had to tell my children the truth. I could see it devastated them. But then I had to put that strong face on again. But in my room, I cry.”

Her eyes begin to tear up and the hall is suddenly deadly quiet. She discovered this devastating news at a  routine check-up in June.

Manaka was first diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in 2016, a year after she founded the Nomsa Manaka Dance Studio in Kliptown.

Through her rounds of “rigorous” chemotherapy she’s kept herself distracted with fundraising  and plans for the opening of the new Nomsa Manaka Dance Studio in Diepkloof this month. 

Having founded the vandalised Kliptown studio at a time when she was at her lowest, Manaka says it was a happy place not just for the students but for her too. She remembers groups of children sitting outside the studio. Three boys and a girl asked her what she was doing there.  She invited them to join her dance class. “Will there be food?” they asked.

“As I went into the studio, when I turned  back, they were already smoking glue. Seeing the little girl pained me, she was about 11 and the boys were also around that age,” Manaka says.

She remembers a young boy telling her that  his friends were on drugs and asking if he could bring some of them to the studio.

“For some the studio was like rehab. Others didn't survive, but I know there’s one who actually even went back to school and she just couldn't stop talking about the studio. There were so many kids that came into that space. It gave me a sense of fulfilment at night that I was making a difference in the community.”

Another highlight of her career was choreographing for the Brazil Carnival. But for every career high, there was a devastating private low that she had to deal with. In 1998 her husband died in a car crash. A decade later, in 2008, her brother Prince Kupi Manaka also died in a crash. It was the same year her beloved granny died. Her mother succumbed to cancer in October 2009.

She wipes away tears as she reminisces about her brother, who was also her best friend. He was a musician, and after his fatal accident Manaka stopped listening to music and stopped dancing.

“There was too much death ... I didn't want anything to do with anything. I refused to watch dance on TV. Actually, I hated dance until I founded the studio in Kliptown. It brought me back to life. For the first time I woke up looking forward to dancing,” Manaka says. 

The five-year period between 2008 and 2013  wasn’t the first time Manaka had serious reservations about her career.  

In 1986 she won a scholarship to attend the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York. While there she went to a festival in Atlanta, and when people found out she was South African they were excited at the prospect that she could teach them a traditional dance.

“I used to look at traditional dance as something very savage,” she says. What offended her was the bastardisation of traditional dance with scantily clad or half-naked performers, blaxploitation epitomised by the 1970s musical Ipi Tombi.

But while working in London in 1987 she learnt an authentic traditional dance, the Ghanaian war dance called atsiagbekor. Later, while performing in different parts of Africa, she took the time to learn the traditional dances of the country she was in.

This part of the conversation awakens the dancer in her and she begins to demonstrate these dances. Like most choreographers she hums or makes the sounds that the music makes. Her “pa pa dam, tsta tsa da” echo through the hall.

Manaka’s face has lit up. She laughs as she says: “I came back home and taught those dances ... nobody had ever seen those dances. I was the It-girl. You want West African dances?

"I was the expert. And then I got bored and I realised I'm not learning kiba, I am not learning  tshigombela. That’s when I started travelling the country learning our dances.”

In 1994, at the height of her career, a wall fell on her son, leaving him with a spinal injury.

He was playing soccer with friends when a driver reversed and hit a wall that came crashing down on him. Doctors said he would never walk again.

Manaka had to turn down a job at London’s West End; making sure her son would walk again became her full-time job.

She admits to sacrificing her career but has no regrets as today he is not wheelchair-bound. Like any mother she takes a moment to gush about her son, award-winning poet and writer Mak Manaka.  

Now at the Funda Arts Centre,  Manaka is hoping to recreate a place of happiness for her students — and for herself — as she gears up for chemotherapy and surgery. The centre was founded in the mid-1980s to provide arts education to black students who were not attending school as a result of the student uprising in 1976. 

Her dance career has come full circle. She remembers how her career started at the centre, how she met her best friend, Sibongile Khumalo, who was the music teacher at Funda, and how parents of dancers once filled the empty hall we’re sitting in.

The centre's CEO, Motsumi Makhene, walks in to greet Manaka and the two joke about how she’s going to “make Funda famous again”.

As a young girl, fame was all Manaka wanted. She started dancing at the age of five  when Diana Ross’s Someday We’ll Be Together inspired her dancing dreams.

“Since that day I never stopped and when people asked me, 'So what do you want to do when you grow up?' I said I want to go to New York and I want to be famous. I said to my children everything else was a bonus. I was famous. I did go to New York. So the rest is a bonus. I'm living my life,” Manaka laughs.  

Now she will living her best “second life” as she calls it, and she hopes dance will be her defibrillator. 

As we leave the hall, she does one last shuffle. 

“Dance gave me life and it’s going to give me life again. Because that's the thing that woke me up from that cancer bed. And with this cancer now, dance is going to wake me up again. Dance is me. I am dance,” Manaka says.

DANCE LIKE A WARRIOR

KIBA

Kiba le Dinaka is a traditional Sepedi dance performed at ceremonies or ritual events known as meletlo. Kiba is a northern Sotho dance and is still practised in Limpopo, Mpumalanga and parts of Gauteng and North West. Men dress in kilts and women wear traditional Sepedi dresses called di ele, tuku or tukwane with a head wrap and beads around their necks. This dance is believed to originate from the baPedi military, performed by warriors after a successful return from hunting, raids and battles.

TSHIGOMBELA 

Dance plays an important role in Venda culture, where it’s taught to children from an early age. One of these dances is tshigombela, which is performed by women. It’s specifically performed by married women to relay messages of what is happening in communities.

ATSIAGBEKOR

One of the oldest traditional dances of the Ewe-speaking people of southern Ghana, Benin and Togo, atsiagbekor is originally a war dance that was performed when warriors returned to their villages after battle.