Gumboot dance

The gumboot dance (or Isicathulo) is a South African dance that is performed by dancers wearing Wellington boots. In South Africa these are more commonly called gumboots. The boots may be embellished with bells, so that they ring as the dancers stamp on the ground. This sound would be a code or a different calling to say something to another person a short distance away. This was used to communicate in the mines as there was strictly no talking otherwise there would be severe, drastic punishments at the discretion of their superior. The mines were very noisy workplaces, with pneumatic drills at work most of the time; in those days (until the mid 1970s) ear-defenders did not exist in South African mines.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Gumboot dance”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Gumboot dance is African dance, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶