From Intore to Batman

Yesterday I came across the announcement of the death of Adam West, the actor of Batman in the original TV-Show. One article included a link to a rather strange video, in which Batman danced the “Batusi dance”.

This dance; I read on another website was the adaption of a very popular dance style of the 1960s: the Wahtusi or Watusi. As the name indicates, the dance style has some connections to interlacustrine Africa, but I am not sure which one. The band The Orlons started the dance hype with their hit “The Wah-Watusi” in 1962. The song was quickly adopted by other musicians like Chubby  Checker , Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and others.

Wikipedia claims that the dance was probably inspired by the following scene for the movie picture “Kings Solomon Mines”

The Tutsi indeed gained some popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, when Belgians were trying to enhance the image of their colonies in the eyes of the world's public opinion. Already in the late 1940s, Belgian advertisements used the picture of Tutsi intore dancers to promote their airline Sabena and Rwanda as a tourist hotspot.

The movie King Solomon Mines was only one in a series of Hollywood movies in which Rwanda’s intore dancers played their part as embodiments of Western views on Africa’s history and culture. In this they only were matched by the legendary Massai, who served in a similar way as a cliché of what Europeans liked to regard as “African”. While the “Massai”, whoever or whatever they are in this context , still fulfill this role, the ”Tutsi” lost their prominent place in Western  imaginations of the “savage”. This is probably due to the checkered history of post-colonial Rwanda. Already in the late 1950s first pogroms against Tutsi happened and they culminated in the infamous genocide of 1994.