Cape Town (South Africa), festivals, music, ‘identities’, politics

About

By Denis-Constant Martin

For more than twenty years (from 1992 till 2015) I did research on the New Year Festivals which are organized at the beginning of every year in Cape Town (South Africa). These festivals include three series of competitions: between carnival troupes named Klopse (from the English clubs), between male choirs called Singkoore or Malay Choirs and between Christian brass bands known as Christmas Choirs or Christmas Bands. In the course of this research, I conducted a great number of interviews, videoed and photographed the festivals and their preparations, collected many printed documents on which I based several articles, book chapters and books (in English and in French); I also recorded a CD with a local choir singing for the Klopse as well as for the Singkoore and produced a video documentary on the 1994 edition of the festival (https://images.cnrs.fr/video/1504).
In “A Research Itinerary from Fieldwork to Archives: Cape Town (South Africa), Festivals, Music, ‘Identities,’ Politics” (Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies, no. 3, 2021: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/SOURCES/halshs-03418789), I explain the conditions in which I conducted this research, underlining the importance of the partnership I entered into with major actors of the festivals, and signal the implications of such partnerships. I also discuss the conditions in which my documentation was assembled and why most of it was deposited with a South African musical archive.

Foreword

The documents and photos presented in this collection are just a part of the documentation collected during my research. Regarding the press articles and photos, I selected material that seemed to be the most representative, and which, in chronological order, might reflect the evolution of the New Year festivities in Cape Town and their social, or even political, meanings. I obviously have kept the rest of the documentation. Under the title Chronicles of the Kaapse Klopse, I selected extracts from texts (published in the press, or in books) relating to the history of the music genres and festivals in Cape Town (Document 1). 

All the press clippings are accessible at the South African Library in Cape Town. You can find many more photos on the internet and in some books (in particular, the superb: John Edwin Mason, One Love, Ghoema Beat, Inside the Cape Town Carnival, Cape Town, Struik Travel & Heritage, 2010). The printed materials are diverse and do not constitute coherent collections; here again, I selected those which seemed to be the most relevant for understanding the life of the actors in the New Year festivities (revellers, leaders of troupes and choirs, organizers of
carnivals and competitions). Therefore, among these are documents internal to the organizing boards, the klopse, the Malay Choirs, and the Christmas Choirs, as well as documents recalling the importance of the MAPP (Music Action for People’s Power) association in the cultural and musical struggle against apartheid.
However, I have chosen not to include recordings or transcripts of interviews. These were collected with the interlocutors’ oral consent; they had previously been informed of the purpose of my work and the framework in which it was carried out, but had not signed any authorization form. They were therefore based on the agreement that I would use their content for my research and its printed outcomes, but were never intended to be disseminated more widely. Significant extracts can be found in the three books that I have devoted to Cape Town festivals and music genres. All the recordings and transcripts of
these interviews have been deposited with DOMUS where they can be read on site. This caution, which might seem excessive, is motivated by the fact that New Year festivities have long been the subject of disputes regarding the behaviour of klopse members (especially since they were, at one time or another, called ‘coons’ or ‘minstrels’). People raised with class
prejudices and a Victorian idea of decency have misinterpreted them, ignoring the universality of the rituals of renewal, of the costumes, and of the music and the languages of the body that are also found in other carnivals around the world. I have myself been criticized for treating them seriously.