ABSTRACT
The story of Martha in Modikwe Dikobe’s The Marabi Dance (1973) takes us back to the Johannesburg of the 1930s and 1940s, where black people come to look for wealth and opportunity, together with the hordes of others who have been drawn like a magnet to the Golden City. Doornfontein, the urban space in which the novel opens, is a section of Johannesburg, characterized by broken families, fatherless children and squalid, overcrowded dwellings.
