“It Is Us” an Exploration of “Race” and Place in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival Nadia Davids

“It is us” An Exploration of “Race” and Place in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival Nadia Davids Performing Presence Between Christmas and New Year’s Day the streets of Cape Town are filled with the music and movement of the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival. It is a weeklong season of performance and celebration, the culmination of a year spent rehearsing songs, choreographing dances, and planning costumes in the klopse kamers1 scattered throughout the outlying Cape Flats. The Carnival’s identity is entangled with the spatial and historical dimensions of urban Cape Town, and it performs again and again the city’s past dislocations and its geographies of loss. If the parameters of the city are determined by the extraordinary beauty of its mountain ranges and coastline, then its center, a bricolage of colonial buildings and statues, occasional skyscrapers, boutique shops, restaurants, street vendors, flower sellers, new and old immigrant communities, 1. Klopse kamers (club rooms) are the headquarters or rehearsal rooms for minstrel troupes (see Martin 1999). TDR: The Drama Review 57:2 (T218) Summer 2013. ©2013 86 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00262 by guest on 27 September 2021 foreign nationals and street dwellers, renders it a place (as Yazir Henri and Heidi Grunebaum put it) “at war with itself” (2005:3). Its old segregations, its calculated long divisions, its historical conflation of “race” and manual labor, and its ability to remain at once “a culturally diverse and divided city” (Field, Meyer, and Swanson 2007:5) all collude to ensure that Black Capetonians’ struggle for visibility, for presence in the city, remains a central one. Julian Jonker reflects on this when he writes that the city’s landscape, its topography, buildings, and racially inscribed cartography, exist in a “wordless conspiracy” that continues to “reflect and effect the racial segregation that until the early 1990’s, was strictly legislated” (2005:187). The Carnival brings these tensions, annually, into focus.2 The celebrations begin on Christmas Eve with performances from brass band Christmas choirs, which are followed on New Year’s Eve by the Malay night choirs (Nagtroepe) who slowly process through the streets of the Bo-Kaap,3 and end with the minstrels’ energized parade through the city center on 2 January. The Carnival’s origins are often conflated with the 1 December processions of the mid- to late 1800s that marked the abolition of slavery in 1834 and the end of the apprenticeship system of indentured former slaves in 1838, and cer- tainly, descriptions of those events echo in the sounds and meanings of the Carnival today. An article in the December 1834 edition of the South African Commercial Advertiser reported that “large bodies of the ‘Apprentices’ of all ages and both sexes, promenaded the streets during the day and the night, many of them attended by a band of amateur musicians; their demeanour was orderly and respectful” (in Martin 1999:33). Five decades later, an 1886 Cape Times article described a more ebullient scene: “frivolous groups of Coloured people [...] dressed most fan- tastically, carrying guys, and headed by blowers of wind and players of string instruments” (in Bickford-Smith [1995] 2003:298). Another Cape Times article written in 1885 illustrates some of the frictions between the ex-slave and settler populations: “Yesterday was the anniversary of 2. Writing about “race” in South Africa is a sensitive, complex, and necessarily political undertaking. I have chosen, (in an amalgam of the practices of many South African researchers, among them Zimitri Erasmus, Gabeba Baderoon and Pumla Dineo Gqola) to (1) use quotation marks around the word “race” as a reminder of its con- struction in the 19th century by pseudoscientists; (2) to not use quotation marks for the terms black, white, and coloured, understanding them as signifiers for social identities that are in a constant state of flux, instability, and re-imagination; and (3) to occasionally capitalize the word “Black” as a means of referring to all citizens not classified as white under apartheid (including those classified as Indian, coloured, Cape Malay). This last act of political punctuation proceeds from the Black Consciousness Movement’s reactionary, productive, and inclusive rhetoric around blackness. Similarly, I use the term “Black Capetonians” to refer to people of color living under colonialism and apartheid. 3. The Bo-Kaap (“Above the Cape”) is a residential area situated on the slopes of Signal Hill that was settled by freed Muslim slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation. It has remained a largely Muslim neighborhood and is sometimes referred to by its apartheid appellation, the Malay Quarter. It remains a major meeting point for all Cape Town Minstrel Carnival celebrations. Tuan Guru, the founder of Islam at the Cape, is buried in the Bo-Kaap’s cemetery. Figure 1. (facing page) At the Tweede Nuwe Jaar parade in the Bo-Kaap neighborhood of Cape Town, participants wear multicolored painted masks that match their costumes, 2 January 2012. (Photo by Yazeed Kamaldien; courtesy of Yazeed Kamaldien) Cape Town Minstrel Carnival Town Cape Nadia Davids is a South African theatre-maker and scholar. She lecturers at Queen Mary University of London where she writes, researches, and teaches around the intersections between performance, cultural practice, and political intervention. Her articles have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, the Mail and Guardian, the South African Theatre Journal, Safundi, and the Social Dynamics Journal. Her plays have been staged at The Market Theatre (Johannesburg), the Southbank Centre (London), and the Frascati Theatre (Amsterdam). She was a part of the Women’s Project Playwright’s Lab (New York City) for 2008–2010 and was a writer in residence at the Ledig House in 2012. [email protected] 87 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00262 by guest on 27 September 2021 the emancipation of the slaves in this colony in 1834. Some of their descendants expressed their appreciations of the blessings of freedom by all that was exasperating in the way of processions, accompanied with hideous noise” (in Bickford-Smith 1994:298). Later, in 1856, “a Swedish vis- itor [...] described how the day was marked ‘by former slaves and their descendants as a public holiday. It is celebrated with lively parties that often last an entire week. [...] The entire coloured population of the Cape appeared to stream to the country. [...O]nly the white population seemed indifferent engaging in their daily pursuits and cares of acquisition as usual” (in Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith 2004:108). Today the Carnival continues to centralize the narrative of slavery with one key difference: its primary motif, an adoptive response to the touring groups of the mid- to late 1800s, is the American blackface minstrel. The ex-slave population of urban Cape Town was not the only group in South Africa to absorb, reiterate and reformulate American blackface, as shown in Chinua Thelwell’s article in this issue of TDR, “‘The young men must blacken their faces’: The Minstrel Show in Pre-Industrial South Africa.” Thelwell carefully unpacks the way in which white settlers mobilized blackface’s lessons of racism in order to negotiate anxieties around indigenous Xhosa identities and to “preserve the boundaries of racial difference” (2013:67). But while the two communities shared an attraction to blackface, they were attractions shaped by fundamentally different political, historical, and cultural experiences. The Cape Town Minstrel Carnival’s use of blackface does not indicate an explicit investment in questions of settler/indigenous identity formation; rather it exists on a continuum with the lived experience and cultural memory of slavery and its subsequent processes of creolization and “interculturalism” (see Schechner 2004). Which is not to imply that the presence of the blackface minstrel mask within the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival has not been a source of divisive and prolonged local, national, and international debate. It has. The superimposition of this North American theatrical character onto the Capetonian carnival landscape has raised difficult, politically charged questions around the issues of willful racist caricaturing; problematic public enactments of creolized and indigenous identities; processes of trans-Atlantic cultural exchange, appropriation, and ownership; and patterns of interface between performance and cultural memory and its companion, cultural amnesia. These questions and the Carnival that prompts them offer us ways to think about the postcolonial city, the postapartheid city, the many silences within the noise of the procession, and the ways the procession fuses historical and cultural fragments into an uneasy inheritance while insisting on an annual reckoning with the present and the past. Today’s Carnival exists in a vexed entanglement with layers of South African — particularly Capetonian — histories and has become, to borrow a phrase from Derek Walcott, both “an adjunct of tourism” ([1970] 1998:7) and a means of contesting the growing gentrification of the Bo-Kaap. That contentious central image — the minstrel, appropriated, reconceived, and recon- texualized — seems on the surface to be the procession’s richest and most compelling story. The character, replete with the garish painted face, bright satin tailcoats, swaggering steps, and the troubling yet persistent self-description as “coon” is replicated by thousands of participant musicians and performers every year. It is the image that draws spectators’ primary focus and has been known to elicit ethical and intellectual shudders from local and international observ- ers alike. It is often read as an enactment of the participants’ racial anxieties (an anxiety located around belonging to the apparently interstitial racial category of coloured, or as a racist reac- tion to the apparently stable — and therefore threatening — “racial” category of black).

Load more