Toyi-Toyi: The Travelling Dance of Refusal

Atlas Lantz Studio is opening the research phase of a project rooted in KwaZulu-Natal, with Durban at its center. The brief is to look past the colonial retelling of South Africa's history — and Durban's in particular — toward the legacies, cultures, and movements as they have been told, lived, and carried by the people who shaped them: the richer record held in body, voice, mythology, and ground rather than archive alone. This post on the toyi-toyi is where that research begins.

A Body That Will Not Stay Still

The image is canonical now: a column of people moving in tight formation down a street, knees lifting in a punched, alternating rhythm, fists rising, voices braided into a call-and-response that seems to carry the crowd forward more than the feet do. Sometimes it advances slowly, almost ceremoniously; sometimes it surges into a charging run. A leader steps out, shouts a phrase, and the line answers with one voice. The dust kicks up. The line keeps moving. This is the toyi-toyi.

To call it a "dance" is already to argue with it. For the veterans of southern Africa's liberation armies who first practised it, the toyi-toyi was a military drill — a hardening regimen, a way of building lungs and legs and a single corporate body able to move at speed under fire. To the township youth of the 1980s, who absorbed it as the soundtrack of confrontation with apartheid security forces, it was a tactic, a weapon, and a public declaration of unbowed presence. To the contemporary South African choreographer, it is a citation: a movement signature that any audience reads immediately as politics in the body. And to the trade unionist on a picket line, the student outside a vice-chancellor's office, or the resident demanding a working tap, it is still a usable form — battered, contested, but unmistakably alive.

From Algeria to the Veld: A Drill That Travelled

The toyi-toyi's most authoritative historical account is The Travelling Toyi-Toyi: Soldiers and the Politics of Drill, the 2020 article by historians Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor in the Journal of Southern African Studies. Working from oral histories with veterans of the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) and their counterparts in the African National Congress's Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), Alexander and McGregor establish a genealogy much longer, and much more geographically dispersed, than the South African township scenes that made the toyi-toyi famous.

The form, they argue, did not begin in Soweto or Sharpeville. It began in the 1960s in liberation-movement training camps in Algeria, where southern African cadres were learning the techniques of guerrilla warfare from instructors connected to the Algerian and Egyptian armies. The phrase "toyi-toyi" itself appears to have circulated in those camps as part of a vocabulary of drills, songs, and chants, possibly with Arabic resonances. From Algeria, the practice moved southward — into camps in Tanzania and Zambia — and at each stop it adapted: Arabic-flavoured slogans were replaced with lyrics in the languages of the moving fighters, and the chants began to articulate loyalty to particular parties and leaders.

For ZIPRA fighters in particular, the toyi-toyi was not aesthetic. It was, in Alexander and McGregor's framing, the bodily medium through which an army was forged. Hours of high-kneed running in difficult terrain, carrying packs and weapons, structured by chant — this was how the toughness needed to survive bush warfare was produced. Drill was discipline, and drill was also ideology: the same bodies that learned to advance under simulated fire learned to vocalise the slogans of the movement.

The toyi-toyi crossed into South Africa through several routes, but the most consequential was the return of MK combatants. Many had trained in Angola, Tanzania, and the Soviet Union; some had been imprisoned on Robben Island after capture, and on their release they brought the drill home with them, where it met the township defiance campaigns of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The 1976 Soweto Uprising had already shifted the temperature of South African public space; the toyi-toyi, arriving in the years just after, supplied a form that could turn a crowd into a corps.

The Etymology Question

The word itself is contested. The Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest attested use of toyi-toyi as a verb in 1987, in the South African newspaper New Nation, and traces the form to a southern African origin without committing to a single source language. Several proposals circulate. Some commentators connect toyi-toyi to Shona ideophones such as tori tori (describing the hopping motion of an insect or the staggering of an exhausted runner). Others, including the Zimbabwean writer Mkhululi Dliwayo, gloss the word from Ndebele as something like "moving forward while remaining in one place" — a description that fits the form's paradox of stationary running. Still others, including the Algerian-camp veterans Alexander and McGregor interviewed, recall the word as drawn from Arabic chants in the early training environments.

These accounts are not necessarily incompatible. The toyi-toyi appears to be exactly the kind of cultural form that gathers etymological accretions as it travels — a Shona ideophone available to be reattached, an Ndebele gloss that captures a movement quality, an Arabic chant that gave the practice its early rhythm. What is clear is that by the time the dance entered South African public life, the word had become its own anchor: indelibly southern African, indelibly a name for a particular kind of moving, singing, refusing body.

Into the Townships: The 1980s

Chitja Twala and Q. Koetaan, writing in the South African Journal of Cultural History, situate the toyi-toyi within the cultural politics of the 1980s as both a "liberating" and "unifying" force. Their account aligns with Alexander and McGregor's dating for the form's domestic emergence: a rudimentary version appears at the 1979 launch of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), and through the mid-1980s the toyi-toyi becomes the embodied signature of mass defiance under the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the End Conscription Campaign.

The form did several kinds of political work simultaneously. It was intimidating — security forces sometimes retreated before disciplined toyi-toyi columns, especially when those columns absorbed the chants of Amandla! (power) and Awethu! (to us) into their forward motion. It was unifying — it produced, on the spot, the choreographic experience of being one body, which is also a political experience of being one people. It was legitimating — to participate was to enrol oneself, publicly and unambiguously, in the struggle. And it was pedagogical — for many young people, the toyi-toyi was the form in which the songs, slogans, and martyrs of the movement were first encountered and learned by heart.

It was also, importantly, often a funeral form. Political funerals in the 1980s were among the few mass gatherings the state could not always suppress, and they became settings in which the toyi-toyi reached its fullest expression: a way of grieving that did not subside into private mourning but pushed grief outward, into collective forward motion.

Anatomy of a Toyi-Toying Body

What does the toyi-toyi do to a body, kinesthetically? Sarahleigh Castelyn's Contemporary Dance in South Africa: The Toyi-Toying Body (2023) is the most sustained scholarly attempt to think the form as choreography rather than only as event. Castelyn draws on the dance critic Adrienne Sichel's argument that South African contemporary dance has functioned, to a large extent, as a political act of defiance — and extends Sichel's claim into a close reading of what the toyi-toying body actually does.

A few features recur across accounts. The fundamental action is a high, alternating knee-lift, often nearer to running-in-place than to walking, with the weight distributed forward over the ball of the foot and the upper body leaning slightly into the next step. The arms move counter-rhythmically; the dominant hand is often raised in a fist, sometimes punching the air on the downbeat. The breath is audible — the chant is exhaled rather than sung lightly, and the diaphragmatic engagement of the chanting body is part of what produces the form's characteristic stamina.

Crucially, the toyi-toyi is contagious. Once a leader establishes the cadence, peripheral bodies entrain to it almost involuntarily, in a way that movement scholars increasingly understand as a basic feature of human collective motion. Castelyn argues, with Sörgel and others, that this is where the form's politics resides: not only in the slogans it carries but in the corporeal experience of being momentarily indistinguishable from a larger body.

The toyi-toyi is also a gendered form. While its iconography has been heavily masculinised — the most reproduced photographs show young men advancing on police lines — the form has always been practised by women and gender-nonconforming bodies, and contemporary choreographers have used it to interrogate which bodies have been allowed to make political claims in public space.

Voice and Verse: The Sonic Architecture

The toyi-toyi is inseparable from the freedom-song tradition into which it inserts the body. Shirli Gilbert's Singing Against Apartheid (2007) traces how the ANC's cultural ensembles — Mayibuye in London, Amandla in the camps and on tour — built an international protest repertoire whose songs and chants were already in circulation when the toyi-toyi reached the townships. Anne Schumann, in The Beat That Beat Apartheid (2008), reads this corpus as a counter-public sphere built out of sound, in which singing did political work the censored press could not.

Two features of the toyi-toyi's sound deserve attention. The first is call-and-response. A leader calls a phrase — Amandla! — and the column answers — Awethu! — completing the formula of "power to the people." Variants multiply: PAC formations historically answered with the harsher One Settler, One Bullet, a chant whose afterlife in post-apartheid politics remains contested. The structure is participatory by design: it allows new participants to join without rehearsal, simply by entering the response.

The second feature is improvisation. Toyi-toyi songs are not static texts. The leader can change a line, name a current opponent, substitute a fresh grievance, and the column follows. The form is a kind of oral journalism — a way of producing, in real time, a shared interpretation of the political moment, set to a melody that nearly everyone present already knows. Omotayo Jolaosho argues that this aesthetic embodiment is precisely what makes the songs politically efficacious: they don't only transmit content, they produce a particular kind of feeling-together that other media cannot.

After 1994: An Inheritance That Argues With Itself

The transition to democracy in 1994 did not retire the toyi-toyi. It complicated its address. Jolaosho's African Studies Review article is partly an attempt to read what it means that the form continues to mobilise people against the very government that came to power on its back.

The post-apartheid record is full of toyi-toyi. Service delivery protests — the wave of community-led actions over water, electricity, sanitation, and housing that has rolled across South Africa since the early 2000s — routinely use the form. The 2012 Marikana strike, in which 34 mineworkers were killed by police outside a Lonmin platinum mine, was organised in part by workers toyi-toyiing past the recognised mineworkers' union toward an independent bargaining position; the form held them together as a body that the state and the union both struggled to absorb. The 2015 #RhodesMustFall and 2015–16 #FeesMustFall student movements used the toyi-toyi as their default crowd-form, often layered with new hashtags, new songs, and new genders of leadership — and often, pointedly, performed in front of administrative offices whose occupants had once toyi-toyied themselves.

The form is therefore now, unavoidably, a citation as well as a tactic. To toyi-toyi in front of an ANC premier in 2020 is to make a claim — that the unfinished work of liberation falls on the same body politic that toyi-toyied in 1985, and that current governance has not honoured the inheritance. This is part of what makes the form interesting for artistic and critical practice: it is not nostalgia, but a live argument over who counts as a legitimate political subject in the present.

On the Concert Stage: Choreographic Citation

The toyi-toyi has also moved from the street into the proscenium. Castelyn's central scholarly contribution is to take seriously the way contemporary South African choreographers — Gregory Maqoma, Robyn Orlin, Mamela Nyamza, and others — quote, fracture, slow down, and recontextualise the toyi-toyi within concert dance. Sabine Sörgel's Contemporary African Dance Theatre situates that work within a wider phenomenology of post-apartheid performance, attending especially to how white South African choreographers like Orlin position themselves in relation to a form that emerged from Black struggle.

For a studio practice, this is the most interesting layer. The toyi-toyi on stage is rarely a literal reproduction. It is most powerful when it appears as a fragment — a sudden quotation of the knee-lift, a moment of call-and-response that erupts and is then absorbed back into other material — because the audience's recognition of the citation does the political work. The form is a shared cultural reference; the choreographer's task is to ask what it can still do, and to what end, in the present.

A Closing Note for Studio Practice

To work with the toyi-toyi as a contemporary artist — to research, cite, restage, or move alongside it — is to take on three layered responsibilities. The first is historical: the form is the inheritance of specific liberation armies, specific funerals, specific bodies, and it cannot be flattened into a generic image of "African protest." The second is kinesthetic: the toyi-toyi is a technique with its own discipline, breath, and entrainment, and it rewards study as a movement form, not only as a symbol. The third is political: the form is still in use, still doing live work, and any citation of it carries an implicit position on the unfinished democratic project that produced it.

The richness of the scholarship gathered here — from Alexander and McGregor's military genealogy through Castelyn's choreographic reading to Jolaosho's ethnography of post-1994 song — is that it lets a practitioner enter the form without choosing only one of those registers. The toyi-toyi has always been all of them at once: drill, dance, music, mourning, and argument. That simultaneity is, finally, what makes it endure.