Africans To Dance Bare-Breasted

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30879, 12 October 1965, Page 1

Africans To Dance Bare-Breasted

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, October 11. The girls of a group of 20 African dancers who arrived in Auckland last night will dance bare-breasted when their show opens at a city theatre on Wednesday. The group, the Africa Dances Ballet Company, arrived from a tour in Australia.

Last month the Minister of Immigration (Mr Shand) approved permits for the dancers to enter New Zealand.

A similar group, in London for the Commonwealth Arts Festival, recently featured in a controversy when they were barred from appear-

ing bare-breasted in Trafalgar square. After Mr Shand had issued permits for the dancers to enter the country, the National Council of Churches said it had made no decision whether to protest on the matter. Earlier, Colonel N. E. Bicknell, field secretary of the Salvation Army in Wellington, said he presumed there would be objections if the group proposed to dance barebreasted in New Zealand. So far there have been no protests about the group. Protest Only Mr B. C. Kakoma, a Zambian student at Auckland University, has protested against the “colonialist and racialist attitudes” reflected in the advertisements of the African dance troupe. Phrases such as “uninhibited children” “leaping alive out of Africa’s jungle” were, in spite of their commercial purpose, a great insult to the African people, he said in a letter to newspapers. “The language overlooks completely the wind of change which is blowing over our continent,” he wrote.

Mr Kakoma said that every human roeiety had to have its own arts and cultural identity and it would be short-sighted to say that Scottish country dances or Maori action songs were “primitive” or “barbaric.”