Romance Dance Of The Plume

More than a century after the Feather Boom, the mansions and legends it spawned in and around Oudtshoorn are being spruced up as part of an enduring and diverse ostrich industry

- Chris Marais

If you ever found yourself on the party streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, you might be lucky enough to spot a Big Chief Indian in full glorious spate. This wondrous apparition, clad from head to toe in sequins, beads, rhinestones, velvet and constantly wavy ostrich plumes, would be accompanied by his Spyboy, his Flagboy, a bunch of drummers, a street-walking jazz band and a few hundred dancing followers.

Down south in Rio de Janeiro, the annual carnival would also be in progress, with thousands of lovely Samba Girls of the Copacabana dressed in a couple of sequins and very little else besides their beloved ostrich feathers.

Across the sea in Belgium, the small coal-mining town of Binche has its traditional Gilles characters parading on Shrove Tuesday. During what some call ‘the world’s weirdest Mardi Gras’, the Gille is restricted to wearing his elaborate costume, wooden clogs and fancy ostrich-feather headdress within the confines of Binche, and only on this day.

On most nights not too far from here, you might be in the Moulin Rouge theatre in the Montmartre district of Paris, bedazzled by a troupe of leggy performers tantalising the audience behind their brightly dyed ostrich-feather arrangements.

Their transatlantic match is the legendary Las Vegas Showgirl, motionless (legally she had to stand still to appear before you in her birthday suit), bedecked in ostrich plumes and jewels.

But all that marvellous carnival glitz and glamour, all those high-priced gin joints and chorus-line saloons, cannot match the true Romance Dance of the Plume down here in the Karoo, when a male ostrich with blood-red shins begins to court his darling-to-be.