Twerking my foot!

                          Photo: Courtesy

By Oyunga Pala

I recently found that ‘twerking’ was one of a new word added to the Oxford dictionary. Nobody in my circles ever says twerking.

We have no reference. To twerk is a type of dance where the dancer jiggles their buttocks in up and down bouncing motion. The dancer is usually female and the word has become associated with raunchy white girls dancing like black women in rap videos. I watched an online video on how to twerk.

There is even an app that allows you to learn on the go. Twerking is essentially to gyrate the bottom and it is now the coolest dance style ever. New dance moves must always be considered in generational context. In our day, we had the running man dance style , which must have seemed ridiculous to my dad.  Twerking is familiar and the connotations are racially loaded.

Black women have been depicted doing the exact same thing in hip-hop videos for more than  a decade and they were mostly condemned as lewd and sexually provocative. There was no trouble taken to define the style until secrets admirers in a separate racial demographic started mimicking the style.  The underlying impression given is that white girls who can twerk are somewhat showing a streak of defiance by rebelling against the conservative norm and acting ‘ghetto’.

Twerking is essentially an old dance move enjoying a new contemporary swag. Ever since the Congolese introduced ndombolo, gyration has been part of the getting down movement. When the show girls came onto the stage, we expected them to twirl their waistlines in such rhythmical manner, their hips seemed independent from the rest of the body.

That is why in certain haunts in this city, the moment the DJ says, ‘kamata position’ and every reveler knows, how it goes down next.