The South African choir that performed for Queen Victoria

GETTY IMAGESImage caption,

Albert Jonas and John Xiniwe appeared to be enjoying themselves with the photographer in a London studio in 1891

Overall, the trip was difficult.

They often had to travel from town to town to perform, and dislikes and conflicts between each other emerged.

There was also a personal tragedy. One of the women became pregnant – and no-one else knew until the body of her stillborn baby was found in her trunk.

The choir was not paid the money they had been promised – and in the end the singers were abandoned by the managers and left penniless in a London hotel.

They were able to return to South Africa because a missionary society raised funds for them.

Their story of homesickness, discrimination – but also defiance, determination and dignity – is also a much broader story.

“Broken Chord kind of morphed from being just the story of the choir. It became about the resonance to the now, to what we are navigating today – around race, around migration, around intolerance, around the things that we are always struggling about,”Maqoma says.

Maqoma embraced dance because of those kinds of struggles – specifically the traumatic oppression of South Africa’s apartheid system, which legalised racial discrimination.

He was “surrounded by dust and smoke and police sirens” during the 1980s.

He grew up close to a hostel that housed migrant workers from different parts of South Africa who worked in factories and mines.

At weekends, they would hold traditional dance competitions – and Maqoma would be there among the cheering onlookers.

“I was fascinated by just the sheer beauty of movement. How it made me forget about the conditions that I was living in, the heaviness of what the country was going through.”

Maqoma also recalls seeing Michael Jackson on a small black-and-white television in his Soweto home – awed by the power he commanded by the small gesture of slowly removing his signature glove.

In 1990, when still a teenager, Maqoma got his first big break and he went on to dance to huge acclaim all over the world.

He also founded Vuyani Dance Theatre – Vuyani, which means joy, being his middle name.

Some 132 years later Maqoma has followed in the footsteps of the African Choir – coming to London to perform Broken Chord at one of the city’s oldest theatres, Sadlers’ Wells, in what is his last dancing tour, which also takes in Paris, Amsterdam and some cities in the US.

BBC