Northeastern professor Francesca Inglese did fieldwork in South Africa, meeting members of a Cape Town social music club and participating in parades, rehearsals and community music classes the club taught.
Given South Africa’s history, it would be easy to assume that the people who live in the country on the southernmost tip of Africa are either Black or white.
But South Africa is home to many so-called “Coloured” people of mixed descent — mostly European, African and Asian — an uneasy designation in a racially binary society,
Nearly half of greater Cape Town’s residents are mixed-race, yet despite a rich creole culture, these residents have historically been described as having no culture of their own, says Northeastern University music professor Francesca Inglese.
While the term “coloured” has been considered derogatory historically, according to Inglese, and some South Africans reject the word, within the context of a community musical group called a klopse people often use the word with pride. She recently published research on how Coloured South Africans use klopse to build their cultural identity.
Annual klopse parades in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival feature the single-headed goema barrel drum and songs with roots in African American music, and even an interpretation of blackface minstrelsy. In the research, Inglese writes that klopse is often perceived as synonymous with “Coloured,” but exists on the margins of Cape Town culture.
“This minstrel carnival is ongoing and wildly popular within a certain sector of the population,” Inglese says about her early interest in the events. “How does minstrelsy live in sound? What does it feel like to be in the parade?”
Her curiosity led to several years of fieldwork, visiting a Cape Town neighborhood where she met members of a social music club called the Fabulous Woodstock Starlites. Over the course of five years, Inglese participated in parades, rehearsals and community music classes the club taught.
Cape Townians have their own vast network of social music clubs, or Kaapse klopse (clubs of the Cape), Inglese writes in her research. Each club has its own performing troupe, like the Fabulous Woodstock Starlites, which parade and compete. The biggest parade is on Jan. 2, a holiday in South Africa known as Tweede Nuwe Jaar — the one day of the year when enslaved people were not required to work before slavery was legally abolished in 1834.
Featured prominently in troupe performances is the goema drum and the syncopated beat players create with it. Participants also sing, often American pop songs but mostly “golden oldies,” including so-called “sentimentals” — covers of popular love songs and ballads sung along to backing tracks like karaoke.
Songs made popular by Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Doris Day are beloved by troupe members, who compete in adult and junior categories before thousands of other troupes and fans. Michael Jackson’s first No. 1 single, “Ben,” was performed by multiple competitors at events Inglese attended.
Fans and troupe members alike told Inglese that it is the emotion that these songs evoke that makes them popular, not their American origins. This is important, Inglese says, because klopse performances, and Coloured South African culture in general, is often belittled as merely copying other cultures with nothing of its own to celebrate.
By sharing music together in groups, she writes, Coloured Cape Townians participate in an authentic culture they have made for themselves, separate from other commercialized Black South African parades that are popular with tourists. Far from having no culture of their own, klopse participants “find value in sentimentals through communal listening experiences,” she says.
Competitions, Inglese says, are attended mostly by other Coloured South Africans.
“They were very internal community spaces where participants were celebrating the values that they shared,” she says. “They weren’t putting themselves on display for outsiders.”
Similarly, she says, Coloured Cape Townians have developed their own interpretation of a practice long-abandoned in the United States and elsewhere in the world: blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy became popular in the British colonies of South Africa in the mid-19th century and was absorbed into many local performance practices, she says.
While performing some songs, performers sometimes put on blackface makeup and wear white gloves and a top hat — the costume often worn by minstrels. Other performers have changed the costume by wearing colorful face makeup and bright, colorful clothes.
“For the most part minstrelsy has been very transformed, at least in terms of the makeup,” Inglese says, “and a lot of participants don’t know the history of blackface minstrelsy. It doesn’t necessarily have any meaning to them.”
Music in Cape Town’s Coloured townships have been left out of the city’s broader efforts to attract tourists to parades and events, Inglese says.
“It’s very clear that Coloured people did not appear to Western tourists as ‘African’ enough,” she says. “They are racially mixed, urbanized people who speak Kaaps and sing Frank Sinatra.”
This complexity has made the klopse opaque and hard to monetize, she says, which has in many ways protected the practice as an authentic cultural expression.
“There are people who want to develop it for tourists and others who participate for the community and the love of it,” she says.
In her forthcoming book, “Remixing Race After Apartheid: Kaapse Klopse in South Africa,” Inglese digs deeper into how the klopse tradition is challenging racial narratives.
“There has been a general sense amongst participants that this practice has been undervalued in South Africa and kind of erased from the, you know, historiographies of South Africa,” she says, “that it has not been appreciated within the context of the country.”