Silenced Steps, Unbroken Spirits: Dance as Archive of Colonial Violence and Decolonial Resurgence

Abstract

A twist of the torso or a raise of an arm can be more than just artistic expression; it can bear the weight of history, identity, and resistance. As a dancer, I have come to understand how each movement becomes a language of its own, one that remembers trauma and helps reclaim one's voice. However, when we turn our gaze to Indigenous dance in Africa, movement itself has been a battleground for cultural survival against colonial erasure and imposed silences. British colonizers in the 19th to 20th centuries viewed dance through a lens of suspicion, eroticism, and heresy, targeting it as a threat to the civilizing mission and social and political order. This paper examines how colonial authorities deployed different tactics to regulate, erase, and change Indigenous dances of the colonised peoples, and in response, how these dances became vehicles of resistance, adaptation, and resurgence. It argues that the regulation of dance was a deliberate act aimed at reinforcing political domination, economic exploitation, cultural imperialism, and religious superiority. Thus, the fundamental tension of 19^th- and 20th-century colonialism crystallized in dance, and as the empire sought to silence, communities choreographed a resurgence.

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