GLENDA KEMP’S DEFIANCE

GLENDA Kemp (see yesterday ’ s solutions below), an Afrikaner and a schoolteacher, waged her own kind of war against the repressive laws of the Nationalist Party government in the 1970s, when she decided to further her studies at university. But money was the problem.

She was seductively lithe and had a pet python called Oupa. The arithmetic was simple: Glenda and Oupa equalled stripper and snake dancer.

Glenda the Stripper was an instant hit with her erotic dance and striptease. She even produced a movie, Snake

Dancer, in the mid-1970s, that the Censorship Board banned.

Skande! Scandalous. This was the South Africa of Calvinistic moral rectitude: apartheid, Immorality Act, censorship, no casinos or gambling. Magazines such as Playboy were verboten (forbidden).

Scope, a men’s lifestyle magazine, did not always get away with putting little stars on the nipples of its pin ups.

Lourenço Marques (Maputo), Swaziland and Lesotho gained much-needed foreign currency with striptease shows and uncensored XXX-rated movies as men of all races, professions and religious persuasion spent weekends there, tasting the forbidden fruit.

Hookers across the borders also did a roaring trade. Books and magazines that were banned in South Africa for their political or pornographic content, were also freely available.

But Glenda the Stripper decided to do it right here at home and face the music.

Now in her 60s, looking back, Glenda says: “I burst through like a meteor off course and turned a conservative country upside down ... courts and high courts and suspended sentences could not stop me and the snake.”