Dance of Betrayal in Kenya
By: Camille Cusumano
Tags: Travel, Kenya, Africa, Nairobi Kenya

Dance of Betrayal in Kenya

Tango’s strongest root is pure Afro-Argentine; its very genetic material traces a clear line to blacks.

Watch a video of these mzungu-loving little guys trying out tango for the first time.

February, 2014, Nairobi, Kenya

For more than a month I’ll stare at “The Last Supper” and not think I have anything in common with that Christ, the one allegedly betrayed by Judas. The heroic-sized mural covers the back wall of St. Peter Claver Roman Catholic Church in Nairobi where I’m teaching tango to poor Kenyan youth. It lends color and brightness to the hall, an unmaintained structure with crumbling stone floor, stained walls, and leaking metal roof.

Just beyond the church’s walled yard, on hot packed Racecourse Road, which feels more like India with its human density, pickpockets, purse snatchers, and shell-gamers do the betraying. Each morning, I shoulder through the hustle, pass nodding security guards, and enter St. Peter’s refuge.

Nairobi tango students in front of St. Peter’s Last Supper mural

Inside the decaying hall, I feel more than safe. I feel exuberant, spiritually and physically uplifted, as if that Christ who I’m told died for my sins, did not do so in vain. Look at how we are keeping his beloved children, otherwise idle teens, out of trouble. And doing so by having them embrace each other in a venerable art form. I thrill to watching the smiling, entranced faces of my students.

Tango is leavening the gravity of their lives — ninety-five percent of Nairobians are squeezed onto five percent of the land. Tango elevates their pulses and their hopes. It provides an energy boost, a healthy alternative to the nasty substances that infest slums everywhere. One of my older students, Liliane, says of the tango, “I can’t think of anything else. This is so healthy. It brings peace this way.”

So why will two of my partners in this worthy endeavor betray me?

Despite faulty footwear, crumbling floor, they mastered the tango quickly.

Juliet and Dan are Kenyans, fluent in English and their native Swahili needed to round up the fifty students. I room with Juliet in her — let’s call it “humble” — abode in Buruburu, the eastern part of Nairobi, where the colonials herded the Africans away from the interlopers’ own lavish estates. The Christian colonizers did their job well. Each morning Juliet delays us as she reads Matthew 25 in the Bible, parables about virgins, goats, and sheep. I feel deep affection for Juliet and nickname her Juju even as they laugh, reminding me that “juju” is a West African word for black magic. Dan forever invokes God and insists on prayers before and after class. A civic lesson breaks up the tango class, during which they teach youth how to take responsibility for their lives. That will prove the greatest irony of all.

And here I am, the tango missionary, with Mungai, my Kenyan-American partner in this humanitarian effort. I stand in front of the class and preach my favorite sermon, “you learn tango from the feet up and dance it from the heart down.” I might have noticed early on that Juliet’s dancing never rises above foot level. That she can’t get the levity and feather lightness that true heart connection affords. I might have noticed that Dan’s flabby body is soft and flaccid, that he feels like a boneless hulk as he tries to lead a dance he begrudgingly agreed to do. But Juliet and Dan are true believers, though now I know, not in tango.

I’m too distracted and delirious with joy watching the likes of Newton and Rachel, or Samuel and Winnie. Newton, flashes a gleaming smile as he strides forward and embraces me so he can show me the leg wrap he’s figured out. He and others progress notably fast, learning tricks just by watching Mungai and me. They are gifted this way and seem to intuit the elasticity and pleasant tension of connection in the dance that takes two.

Sam, Newton, Allen, fabulous tangueros

In that austere hall, Newton demonstrates the hydraulic lead that allows my left leg to gracefully wrap his right hip. For a fleeting moment we are acting out traditional roles in a primal dance. Then we pivot together out of the move like two carousel ponies. An innate intelligence infuses Newton’s lanky six-foot-four frame to such a high degree I want to ask him, “Which of Kenya’s forty-two tribes lend you their blood — Masaai? Kamba? Kikuyu? Luo?” If I were a Kenyan that would be a loaded question, given that much of Kenya’s corruption, violence, and shady politics stem from rampant tribalism. I just hug Newton and offer the global sign of unity, slapping his palm in a high-five.

Tango — in Africa? It gives people pause. But the fact is that tango’s very genetic material traces a clear line to blacks. “As soon as one starts digging into the origins of the tango, its black creole roots emerge,” writes Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson in his book, Tango, an Art History of Love. He notes, “Tango culture and tango humanism . . . emerged from the encounter of dance concepts from Kongo with [Buenos Aires’s] cultural and social situation, involving African-born blacks, blacks born in Argentina.” I stop short of attributing my students’ skillful grasp of this difficult dance to their race, but as Thompson observes, tango’s “strongest root is pure Afro-Argentine, a development of Kongo-style dancing, as elaborated in black dancing groups called candombes.”

Zippy & Dennis master the embrace.

I often forget I’m the only white — or mzungu, as I’m called — in the hall unless we count The Last Supper’s Christ and disciples whose flesh is as pink as flesh comes. I might compare that icon’s Passion of Christ to the passion of tango. The century-old dance’s origins are intimately tied up with the suffering of impoverished immigrants, penniless gauchos, former slaves, and other disenfranchised groups. The tango music that fills the rundown space still reflects that melancholy, loss, and longing.

Amid the richness of tango-induced endorphins and camaraderie, I never forget that many of my students come from crippling poverty. Still I’m startled when young Zippy or Winnie refer to their babies at home. Nairobi slums number about 200. They breed teen pregnancy, addiction, and crime, the result of high unemployment and unfinished education. Beyond training them to dance tango, our goal is to have the kids go on to teach others as a means of income, to become self-sustaining.

That strikes some as a pipe dream for a dance that Argentines say takes a lifetime and a half to learn. But, call it a fishes-and-loaves–style miracle. Our kids, after six intensive weeks of classes, expand exponentially in tango. The impossible dream is so near when I slowly, painfully, come to understand that Dan and Juliet have purloined most of the $4,000 I raised and deposited with their “nonprofit.” Not to be defeated in this labor of love, I kick in my own funds to prolong the project for another four months.

I wish I could say I take the revelation like the Guy in the mural. Not one to wear a crown of thorns, I unleash epithets and my emails drip with venom that threatens to derail my own eternal optimism. Dan stonewalls my anger and never returns to the classes, while Juliet tries in earnest to rationalize the padded expenses, bald-faced lies, the cheating of their own youth.

I call Dan every name in the book, from coward to slime ball to bastard to thief, to liar, criminal. His final ironic words to me in an email are “Thank-you angel.” Even after I discover the ruse, Juliet is supposed to return some of the money to us, but she falls into Dan’s slippery ways, making long-winded excuses for not doing so reminiscent of the shell-gamers.

Grace & Charles, dedicated tangueros

To chill out I go with friends on a day’s drive to Amboseli National Park. Despite what I know to be the case, the savanna, from the safety of a pop-top van, epitomizes a peaceable kingdom. Through the grasses float giraffes so tall they might chew on tufts of low-hung clouds. Elephants spew cooling sand over their bodies or gather around to protect their young when our van nears. Baboons nurse their palm-sized young and stare calmly at us. There are warthogs, gazelles, wildebeests, ostriches, an Egyptian goose, crane, and numerous birds at watering holes going about their business.

Even after a brief blinding dust storm, it’s a deeply satisfying day away from the festering inner city. It affords a much needed broad perspective on the chain of life, magnificently calibrated by ancient instincts, the ebb and flow of seasons and light. I get to thinking about how Juliet and Dan have never ventured to visit this part of their country, how they’ve been gorged on creation myths that mean more to them than the stunning fact that here along Earth’s equatorial belt lies the archaeological site of our earliest known hominid ancestors.

Away from the city strife, I think of what a friend had described as “the poison, poverty, and promise of Africa.” I have seen it all, the jigsaw puzzle that is Africa. The continent is not only the birthplace of our human ancestor, but also a place of abundant natural resources with some of the poorest people on earth.

I never see Dan again. I ask Juliet a dozen times Why, why, did he lie? Where is the money for the youth? She goes into a circumspect soliloquy of denial — invoking the will of “the church elders” — until with pity I give up on her. I will never learn what they did with the money.

Mali author Tidiane Diakite has written, “the slave trade and colonial subjugation of Africa’s people diverted the continent from its original historical trajectory and turned the African identity into that of an ‘outcast’.” Yes, I believe that diversion has been problematic to put it mildly. Part of me wants to forgive Juliet and Dan based on historical injustices. But it feels like the patronizing route.

One morning after the my visit to the savanna, I’m equally smug and indifferent in the knowledge that we’re all moving according to nature’s evolutionary clock. I take my place back in St. Peter’s drab hall, preach, and teach tango to eager youth.