Cape Minstrel Carnival
CAPE MINSTREL CARNIVAL (Revised ESAT entry — plain text, MediaWiki markup retained for direct pasting. Existing ESAT text preserved; new material added from Davids (2013), with Davids's own sources credited where she quotes or cites them.)
The Cape Minstrel Carnival is the current name of the longest existing carnival in South Africa, taking place annually in Cape Town on the 2nd of January (both the date and the carnival itself are often referred to in Afrikaans as Tweede Nuwejaar i.e. "Second New Year").
Though both are called the Cape Carnival on occasion, the Cape Minstrel Carnival is not to be confused with the much more recent Cape Town Carnival (2010-), which, while also employing the usual carnival elements, takes place at a different time of the year, was inspired by a recent event, and is basically a public relations exercise with a totally different origin and set of aims, convenes a broader based participating group and eyes another target audience.
For information on minstrelsy in South Africa, see the entry on Minstrels and for more on the concept of carnival and the carnivalesque in South Africa and the various carnivals in the country, see the general entry on Carnival
Contents
On the name
The event was originally referred to as the Coon Carnival in English, but also known as the Cape Coon Carnival or The Cape Coons (In Afrikaans: die Kaapse Klopse or simply Die Klopse).
Performers in the carnival were long referred to as Coons in English and Klopse in Afrikaans.
Today the use of the denigrating term Coon has fallen away, though Klopse, which does not carry the baggage of the English term, has remained in use. Participants themselves have seldom used the English word, preferring the Afrikaans patois Kaapse Klopse — "Kaapse" meaning "Cape" and "Klopse" referring to the definitive rhythm beaten out on the goema drum (Davids, 2013: 94).
There is a strong affiliation with the notion and elements of Mardi Gras in the Cape Town Coon Carnival.
The origins
The Carnival's origins are generally traced to (and often conflated with) the Emancipation Day processions of 1 December held in the mid- to late 1800s, which marked the abolition of slavery at the Cape in 1834 and the end of the apprenticeship system of indentured former slaves in 1838 (Davids, 2013: 87). Contemporary newspaper accounts record these processions in some detail: the South African Commercial Advertiser of December 1834 described large numbers of "Apprentices" of all ages parading the streets by day and night, accompanied by amateur musicians and behaving in an orderly manner (quoted in Martin, 1999: 33; cited in Davids, 2013: 87). An 1886 report in the Cape Times painted a more exuberant picture of fantastically dressed groups led by wind and string players (quoted in Bickford-Smith, [1995] 2003: 298; cited in Davids, 2013: 87), while an 1885 Cape Times piece complained irritably about the noise of the anniversary processions, illustrating the frictions between the ex-slave and settler populations (quoted in Bickford-Smith, 1994: 298; cited in Davids, 2013: 87-88). A Swedish visitor of 1856 noted that former slaves and their descendants treated the day as a public holiday celebrated with lively, week-long festivities, while the white population carried on its daily business with indifference (quoted in Worden, van Heyningen and Bickford-Smith, 2004: 108; cited in Davids, 2013: 88).
These celebratory processions must themselves be understood against a long history of the legal regulation of public space at the Cape. Under the Tulbagh Code of 1753 slaves were subject to curfews and pass requirements, were forbidden to sing or whistle in public during the day or to make any sound at night, and were prohibited from congregating in the streets (Shell, 1994; cited in Davids, 2013: 95). Even after the Emancipation Act of 1834, the Cape Town municipality drew up new regulations against "loitering", noise and street games, and by 1875 the police could arrest anyone for loud or unseemly noise in any public thoroughfare (Bickford-Smith, 1998/1999: 120; cited in Davids, 2013: 95). Seen in this context, the Emancipation Day processions — and the later Carnival — constituted a creative refusal of enforced invisibility and a forceful claiming of urban territory (Davids, 2013: 95). Davids reads the Tana Baru Cemetery Riot of 1886, when some 3,000 Muslims processed through the colonial city to the closed burial ground on Signal Hill, as part of the same tradition of processional defiance (Davids, 2013: 95; see also Jonker, 2005).
The Carnival's defining minstrel motif arrived later. American blackface minstrelsy was introduced to the Cape by touring groups in the mid- to late 1800s, and Denis-Constant Martin credits the 1862 visit of the Christy's Minstrels with revolutionising the Cape carnival, introducing new forms of dancing, singing and music-making (Martin, 1999: 79-80; cited in Davids, 2013: 97). Significantly, blackface became part of the Emancipation procession only many years after slavery had ended (Martin, 1999; cited in Davids, 2013: 89).
Origins of the Coons or Klopse
The community that created the Carnival was itself the product of creolisation. The Dutch East India Company's slave system drew people from East Africa, the Mascarene Islands, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the southern Philippines, Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa into enforced proximity at the Cape (Vink, 2003; cited in Davids, 2013: 90, note 6). Andrew Bank has shown that locally born slaves comprised over 70 per cent of the slave population of Cape Town and the Cape District between 1816 and 1834, a demographic shift that transformed the predominantly Eastern-based slave culture of the late eighteenth century into a creolised and far more vibrant underclass culture in the early nineteenth century (Bank, 1994: 90; cited in Davids, 2013: 97).
The Carnival functioned as a bonding ritual for this ex-slave community: Vivian Bickford-Smith suggests that its incorporation of both Christian and Muslim Capetonians indicates a broader social consciousness made possible by a shared slave past, with religious and cultural differences not flattened but reimagined in an act of cultural merging that established newly shared rituals for displaced peoples (cited in Davids, 2013: 92).
The adoption of the American blackface minstrel figure is explained by Davids and the scholars she draws on as an act of identification and aspiration rather than of racist caricature. Martin positions the appropriation as emerging from excitement and hope at the notion of another black community creating an alternative, non-white modernity (Martin, 1999: 177; cited in Davids, 2013: 97). David Coplan suggests that to Black South Africans the United States was emblematic of social freedom, sustained by the incorrect belief that African Americans enjoyed full democratic rights and upward mobility — a belief reiterated by newspapers such as the Cape Standard, which had a predominantly coloured readership (Coplan, 1985; Martin, 1999: 176-77; both cited in Davids, 2013: 97). Davids concludes that the initial absorption of the blackface minstrel into the Cape carnival was a bid for freedom, and possibly also an expression of imagined kinship with another ex-slave community (Davids, 2013: 97).
Coons and Coon troupes
Coon troupes (Afrikaans Klopse-troepe, Klopse troepe or simply Troepe) are the organisational units of the Carnival. Troupes spend the year rehearsing songs, choreographing dances and planning costumes in the klopse kamers (club rooms), the headquarters or rehearsal rooms of the minstrel troupes, today scattered throughout the Cape Flats (Davids, 2013: 86; Martin, 1999).
Each troupe is led from the front by the voorlooper (front-walker), who wears the troupe's colour scheme but sports a tasselled jacket and military headgear plumed with a dyed ostrich feather, possibly a remnant of military parades. Another distinctive figure is the moffie, a Cape Afrikaans term for a cross-dressed performer tasked with garnering attention for the troupe, encouraging the dancers and drawing the audience into participation; the moffie has no official role in the formal competitions and occupies a space of peripheral involvement (Davids, 2013: 93, note 12).
Former District Six residents and carnival musicians Willie Jales, Robert Sithole and Mac Mackenzie recalled that the processions of the 1950s and 1960s included a much wider range of characters than the minstrel alone: the mohawked, tomahawk-wielding "Atja American"; the Devil, in horns with a red and black face; and the Bits and Pieces Group, whose costumes represented identities from medical nurses to figures of myth (interviews recorded in Davids's field notes, 2002-2003; Davids, 2013: 93). With the forced removals the event narrowed from a racially inclusive occasion full of individual expression into what Shamil Jeppie has called a largely coloured affair (Jeppie, 1990: 10; cited in Davids, 2013: 93).
Troupe names were often expressly chosen to suggest a link with the United States, and individual performers took on American stage personae. Zarina Rahman's interviewees recalled a drum major from Bonteheuwel named after the American comedian Jerry Lewis and a performer named after the film star Piper Laurie, while interviewee Eddie Matthews joked that his District Six troupe had included Al Jolson and Paul Robeson — "the real ones" (Rahman, 2001: 11; cited in Davids, 2013: 96-97).
The performance styles
The Carnival's repertoire is a sounding archive of creolisation. The ghoemaliedjies (original Creole songs) are a blend of Dutch nederlandsliedjies and Muslim ratiep performances; the ghoema drum that beats out their rhythms has roots in indigenous African (possibly Khoi) cultures and in the drums of Java or Malaysia (Martin, 1999; cited in Davids, 2013: 92); and the lyrics are mostly in Afrikaans, the language Pumla Dineo Gqola describes as having been formed in the mouths of slaves (Gqola, 2010: 130; cited in Davids, 2013: 92). One of the earliest recorded ghoemaliedjies, sung in the Emancipation processions, was a pointed satirical reworking of "Rule Britannia" that mocked Britain as a civiliser that enslaved nations (Bickford-Smith, 1994: 302; cited in Davids, 2013: 95-96). United States musical traditions, from jazz to hip-hop, have over time also been grafted into the repertoire (Davids, 2013: 96).
The music, steps and gestures of the minstrels are demonstrated and learned through emulation throughout the year — a form of transmission that depends on physical illustration rather than verbal explanation, and which Davids, following Diana Taylor's notion of the "repertoire", reads as an embodied cultural archive (Taylor, 2003: 20; Davids, 2013: 92).
Costuming has its own double-coded history. The elaborate nineteenth-century minstrel ensembles, with satin breeches and feathered hats, were designed to mock the white elite, as were the fireman's costumes of the 1870s, which invoked a marker of colonial officialdom in order to undermine it (Bickford-Smith, 1994; cited in Davids, 2013: 93, note 13). Today's troupes parade in brightly coloured two-toned satin suits with umbrellas and brass instruments (Davids, 2013: 93, 96).
The conventions of blackface itself have been thoroughly reimagined. The traditional pattern of smeared black shoe polish with white circles around the eyes is now rarely used; participants instead paint their faces in a multitude of colours to match their outfits, in glittered patterns of stars, lightning bolts, stripes and clown faces, and Martin observes that some participants wear no make-up at all (Martin, 1999: 9; cited in Davids, 2013: 98). The traditional songs are not performed in an imitative or mocking manner: they are the same songs that mark weddings, naming ceremonies and birthdays in the community (Davids, 2013: 98). Carnival leaders have repeatedly de-emphasised race in explaining the painted face: in 2003 Melvin Matthews, CEO of the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, dismissed any necessary connection between blackface and race, while troupe captain Richard Stemmet framed the Carnival as escape from the year's hardships, and troupe leader Moegamat Rushdien Sardien traced the klopse tradition to the single day of release allowed to slaves each year (all quoted in Mackay, 2012; cited in Davids, 2013: 89). Davids notes that these explanations are historically misinformed in their details — blackface entered the procession only after emancipation — but argues that they reveal how the painted face functions for participants as a transformative mask of temporary freedom rather than a racist caricature (Davids, 2013: 89, 98).
The Coon Festival as event
In Cape Town the days of procession, feasting, drinking, dancing and music-making are known as the "Big Days". The annual cycle begins on Christmas Eve with performances by the brass band Christmas choirs; on New Year's Eve the Malay night choirs (Nagtroepe) slowly process through the streets of the Bo-Kaap, moving from house to house, singing and partaking of tafel, the table of refreshments offered by friends and neighbours; and the season culminates in the minstrels' parade through the city centre on 2 January, Tweede Nuwejaar — historically the day on which slaves were permitted to celebrate the New Year (Davids, 2013: 87, 92, 96, note 16).
The shape of the event was profoundly altered by apartheid-era forced removals. Before the destruction of District Six (declared white in 1966), troupes assembled in its crowded buildings and meandered from Hanover Street through Adderley Street, down Darling Street, round the Slave Lodge and up Wale Street into the Bo-Kaap. Today they rehearse in the klopse kamers of the Cape Flats, gather by the thousands to be bused into the city, and begin the procession on Keizergracht at the edge of the emptied District Six, charting what remains of the old route and retaining the destroyed neighbourhood as their symbolic place of origin (Davids, 2013: 92). Lisa Baxter records that, according to her interviewees, the Carnival was effectively banned from the city centre in 1967, and that with the removals it shifted from an event of spontaneous festive spirit celebrating emancipation into something closer to a lament mourning dispossession (Baxter, 1996: 2; cited in Davids, 2013: 93). Davids likewise observes in the contemporary event a marked fixity — synchronised umbrellas, two-toned satin routine, and steel barricades that separate participant from observer, blunting carnival's characteristic dissolution of the boundary between spectator and performer (Davids, 2013: 93).
The event has long unsettled authority. Don Pinnock memorably described the procession as an annual symbolic storming of the city by the poor — thousands of noisy participants demanding the freedom of the streets, lampooning respectable citizens and insisting on being seen — while lamenting that troupe members got little from it beyond a single day's sense of freedom for which they had waited and worked an entire year (Pinnock, 1984: 422; cited in Davids, 2013: 94). The Carnival has also had an ambiguous relationship with Cape Town's Black intellectual elite, whose discomfort with the minstrel image contributed to the Carnival's omission for many years from the District Six Museum, despite its central place in the memories of former residents (Davids, 2013: 94).
A formal competitive dimension takes place at stadium gatherings, historically at Green Point Stadium. It was here, on 1 January 1996, that President Nelson Mandela appeared before the assembled troupes wearing a sequinned minstrel-style outfit in ANC colours (Martin, 1999: 169; cited in Davids, 2013: 99), declaring the Carnival "as much South African as braaivleis [...] and Zulu dance. [...] It is us" (quoted in Baxter, 1996: iv; cited in Davids, 2013: 99). Davids reads this as a canny political gesture of the rainbow-nation moment, but also as a public affirmation of the Carnival's inherent South Africanness and its right to belong (Davids, 2013: 99-100).
In the post-apartheid city the Carnival has become entangled with both tourism and urban politics. It has been described as a living archive in which Cape Town's spatial histories are articulated and critiqued, one of the few sites in the national cultural landscape that embodies the historically silenced experience of capture, slavery, cultural dislocation and survival (Davids, 2013: 99). It has simultaneously become an adjunct of tourism and a means of contesting the gentrification of the Bo-Kaap: in 2011 Anwar Naghia, chairperson of the Anti-Gentrification Front, framed the Carnival as a defence of the people's claim to a city centre increasingly reserved for the privileged (quoted in Mackay, 2012; cited in Davids, 2013: 88-89). The presence of the blackface minstrel mask has remained the subject of divisive and prolonged local, national and international debate, raising politically charged questions around racist caricature, public enactments of creolised identity, trans-Atlantic cultural appropriation and ownership, and the interplay of cultural memory and cultural amnesia (Davids, 2013: 88).
Sources
Bank, Andrew. 1994. "The Erosion of Urban Slavery at the Cape." In Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, eds. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais, 79-98. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Baxter, Lisa. 1996. "History, Identity and Meaning: Cape Town's Coon Carnival in the 1960s and 1970s." MA thesis, University of Cape Town. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Bickford-Smith, Vivian. 1994. "Meanings of Freedom: Social Position and Identity among Ex-Slaves and Their Descendants in Cape Town, 1875-1910." In Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, eds. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais, 290-312. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Bickford-Smith, Vivian. (1995) 2003. Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875-1902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Bickford-Smith, Vivian. 1998/1999. "Leisure and Social Identity in Cape Town, British Cape Colony, 1838-1910." Kronos 25: 103-28. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Coplan, David B. 1985. In Township Tonight!: South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre. London: Longman. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Davids, Nadia. 2013. "'It is us': An Exploration of 'Race' and Place in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival." TDR: The Drama Review 57: 2 (T218), Routes of Blackface: Special Issue (Summer 2013): 86-101.
Eastern Province Herald, December 13, 1956.
Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2010. What Is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Jeppie, Shamil. 1990. "The Class, Colour and Gender of Carnival: Aspects of a Cultural Form in Inner Cape Town, c. 1939-c. 1959." Paper presented at the History Workshop, 6-10 February, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Jonker, Julian David. 2005. "Excavating the Legal Subject: The Unnamed Dead of Prestwich Place, Cape Town." Griffith Law Review 14, 2: 187-211. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Mackay, Kara. 2012. "Tweede Nuwe Jaar a Potent Symbol." The New Age, 16 January. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Martin, Denis-Constant. 1999. Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past to Present. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Pinnock, Don. 1984. Stone's Boys and the Making of the Cape Flats Mafia. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, The History Workshop. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Rahman, Zarina. 2001. "The Coon Carnival in the 1940's: An Expression of Culture within a Changing Political and Economic Environment." BA thesis, University of Cape Town. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Shell, Robert Carl-Heinz. 1994. Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Vink, Markus. 2003. "'The World's Oldest Trade': Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century." Journal of World History 14, 2: 131-77. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
Worden, Nigel, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith. 2004. Cape Town: The Making of a City: An Illustrated Social History. Cape Town: David Philip. (Cited in Davids, 2013.)
http://www.findtripinfo.com/south-africa/cape-town/festivals-cape-town.html#capeminstrels
https://www.nmbt.co.za/events/the_amazing_kaapse_jol_comes_to_port_elizabeth.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaapse_Klopse
https://www.capetownmagazine.com/kaapse-klopse
RETAINED SECTIONS FROM THE EXISTING ENTRY (unchanged except for the correction of two stray "=" characters in headings)
The term "coon"
The term apparently derives from the word raccoon and was used in America to refer to performers in black-face entertainments, hence also a denigrating term for any black man.
A more recent derivative of the term in the USA has been the term "coonery", which refers to matters such as the antics and behaviour displayed by certain individuals (usually African Americans) which may embarrass the rest of the Black community or reinforce and perpetuate commonly held racial stereotypes about their own community.
While it has other meanings, such as a racial slur for a black person as in the American usage, the term Coon is most prominent in South Africa with reference to a performer in the Cape Town Coon Carnival, with its early association with the Christy's Minstrels and other "blackface" performers from America who visited the country and popularized the minstrel tradition in the country.
See for example definitions provided by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon and http://www.thefreedictionary.com/coon
The Coon Carnival in the Cape
Also known as the Cape Coon Carnival or The Cape Coons (In Afrikaans: die Kaapse Klopse or simply Klopse).
Today the use of Coon has fallen away in the name of the carnival, though Klopse has remained.
The Coon Carnival Elsewhere
The Coon Carnival has over the years undertaken tours to The Garden Route, Port Elizabeth, East London and Johannesburg.
The Coon Carnival travelled to Port Elizabeth and was staged as a "Jazz Variety Show" but because of the Apartheid era laws the carnival could not perform before mixed audiences.
December 13, 1956: The carnival was staged for one night before the "Coloured" community at the Crispin Hall.
December 14 & 15, 1956: The carnival was staged for two nights before the "European" community at the Feather Market Hall.
09 August 2014: The Coon Carnival artists performed at The Boardwalk Vodacom Amphitheatre. The production was staged by Cape Town-based Main Events SA.
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