Toyitoyi on ice: My Antarctic first

A story I love to tell, which sounds outrageous but is technically true, is that I am the holder of a word first: I am the first person to have toyitoyi’d in the Antarctic.

It did start as a method to kick the snow off my inappropriate running shoes before I went inside at the Sanae (SA National Antarctic Expedition) base on the ice-shelf.

As I added chants similar to the ones I’d heard in protests, I got witnesses to concur this was the first time anyone had performed the protest dance this far south.

In those days – early 1995 – very few Africans had been to Sanae and if they did, were not ANC hotheads… so I’m safe on that claim.

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The frozen continent trip

These days, many more ordinary people (OK – rich tourists) are able to visit the frozen continent, as cruise liners ply the southern waters regularly.

When I went with the SA Navy and SA Air Force to cover the swopping of helicopter crews attached to Sanae, it took 10 days to get there and nine to get back… just to spend 36 hours on the ice.

Some people still think I’m mad to have done that – especially considering it entailed going through the roughest seas on the planet (the Roaring 40s and the Furious 50s… stormy zones at those latitudes South).

I’d do it again… in heartbeat. There is an ethereal beauty about the Antarctic. You find out odd things – like snow has very little water content per volume measure.

The people at Sanae told me it would take a 44-gallon drum of snow to make enough water to fill a tea kettle. And that, behind the beauty, death lurks. After my visit, a military member went outside to the loo in a blizzard.

The hole was covered by a tent, but linked to the building by a rope, so that no-one would wander off. He missed the rope and was found days later, having wandered the wrong way and frozen to death.

Then the admin people placed a ban on the traditional naked “streak”, performed on the shortest, midwinter day – after a participant almost died of frostbite. Of all the places I have travelled over the years, this was unlike anywhere else.

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