The Coons of Cape Town
The Minstrel Carnival in South Africa
by Matthew Mercier :: 05/10/2006
To the American ear, a “minstrel show” sounds dreadful—a rotten chestnut from our shameful past, a past we’d just as soon forget.
However, here in Cape Town, South Africa, on Jan. 2 the past lives, and it’s dressed to impress, or at least to draw attention to itself. The day marks a public holiday known as “Tweede Nuwe Jaar,” or Second New Year. A mass of bodies—hundreds of revelers from the coloured community of Cape Town—parade by me, wearing ruby-red pants, sunflower-yellow suit-coats and ocean-blue hats. Above their heads, one segment of the parade spins striped parasols; the other marches in formation, blaring trumpets, trombones and clarinets. And some, although very few that I can see, sing through painted faces—lips, noses and foreheads covered over in whiteface.
It’s the whiteface, of course, that arrests your attention, and it’s the whiteface that gives the festival its juice, its meaning, its controversy.
These are the Cape Town Minstrels, and they’re here to stay.
The Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, formally known as the “Coon Festival,” has a past of its own, which is quite different then the degrading practices of its American counterpart. Historically, Jan. 2 was the only day of the year when slaves were allowed off from work, and through the decades, the day has persisted as a holiday, a street festival and, most importantly, a big fat excuse to dance, drink and cut loose.
The roots of the festival lie in the intermingling of Muslim slaves, indigenous African groups, European settlers and other peoples from a variety of backgrounds. Freed slaves organized their own traditions of festivals and holidays, and when American minstrels arrived at the Cape in the mid-19th century, the styles and sounds of vaudeville were incorporated into local celebrations. In a major reversal, whiteface replaced blackface, and the slaves mocked their white owners rather then themselves. They named the festival “Coon Carnival,” borrowing the slur, “coon,” but ignoring its pejorative and racial connotations so that it came to refer to a member of a minstrel troupe. (During apartheid, “coon” was used as derogatory term to describe blacks.)
“I’m a proud American from South Africa,” proclaims John America (he will not give his real surname), a born-and-raised Cape Town resident and participant in the 2006 carnival. “I’m a member of the underworld,” he says. “A gangster. Prison gang number 26. A Mississippian. An American.”
His declaration begs translation. John America, dressed in dark blue pants and a tangerine orange jacket, sporting wraparound sunglasses and a white hat, is part of the “Americans,” a 700-plus group of men, women and children that compete in the minstrel show for awards such as “Best Dressed,” “Best Song” and “Best Dancing.” Within the Americans, John is a Mississippian, and within the Mississippians, he’s part of Prison Gang 26.
John America, as he insists on being called, tells me in fleeting half-finished sentences that during apartheid he was a member of a prison gang. Political or criminal he does not say, but when asked where the prison was, he gestures behind him.
“Out there. Way out. Outside Cape Town,” he says. “Lots of us. I was in Prison Gang 26. We had 27, 28. And now, I’m still in the Prison Gang. For the festival. My group is Prison Gang 26. You get it?”
He pulls his shirt mid-way up to his chest. Tattooed on his abdomen, in charcoal gray letters, is the word, “America.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Do you love America?”
“Yes,” he says, tilting his head and grinning. “Very much.” His smile holds the glint of metal from numerous fillings. If I could see his eyes, I’m sure he’d wink. “I’m a proud American,” he repeats, “from South Africa.”
John’s wife, Candice, joins the conversation. A whistle hangs around her neck and she wears baggy sweatpants that billow in the high winds.
“Are you the coach?” I ask her.
“The executive director,” she says, then leans in and speaks directly to me, pointing at my notepad. “Listen, today is our day,” she insists. “That’s important. The day we celebrate freedom.”
By “our” and “we,” Candice does not mean the whole of South Africa; rather, she is referring specifically to the coloured community of Cape Town—those of mixed background, neither white nor black. The festival is organized by the coloured community and participants are, by and large, coloured as well. (In 2005, a white American graduate student from Yale participated in the event when asked by his friends to join them.) All are welcome to attend of course, but members of the other communities tend to stay away. On the day I visited, I encountered an elderly couple from Germany, a few curious backpackers and some local students. The security team, it’s worth noting, was mostly black.
Mr. K, Candice’s father, wanders over to talk to me. He tells me that during apartheid, the festival was very different.
“People were afraid,” he says. “They could not do much. Too much fear. Only our people came. Most people didn’t come. Not like they do now.”
Under apartheid, the Coon Carnival endured segregation, forced removals and discrimination, all of which made the troupes and their performances more difficult to organize. The government often placed the best stadiums off-limits to the coloured community, and in the places where the carnival was able to perform, it had to do so in front of segregated audiences. Now, in the “New South Africa,” the government is lending its support to the carnival, which many find controversial. Why, some ask, should the Coons get handouts from the government? Why give a bunch of drunken workers—as the Coons are sometimes labeled by outsiders—more money to make even greater fools of themselves? And why continue the tradition at all? Don’t we now live in a free society that no longer needs such festivals?
Mr. K shakes his head at the mention of such questions. “I don’t agree with that. They don’t understand the tradition.”
The philosophical debate about the relevance of the festival is perhaps more out in the open in the new South Africa. Zane Ibrahim, writing in the Cape Argus, a newspaper published in Cape Town, claimed the festival was part of Muslim tradition. This prompted angry letters in the next days’ paper, denouncing the festival as detracting from Islam.
Mr. K has a most democratic response: “You don’t like it, don’t come.”
The debate on the use of public funds to help the festival is also quite loud, with Coon advocates claiming that the minstrels deserve government help since the very same government denied them so much in the past. Yet letters in the Cape Argus the week of the festival recall a time “when troupes saved all year for their uniforms and did not expect government hand-outs,” and “troupes were sponsored by large companies in exchange for bearing the sponsor’s name.”
All of this, Mr. K agrees, is important, but the bottom line is survival.
“We need to remember,” he says. “We can’t just forget. The tradition needs to be handed down.”
The tradition that I witnessed appeared quite joyful and community-oriented. Groups had clearly labored on their singing and dancing, and continued practicing right up until performance time. Inside the stadium, collections of minstrels gathered in circles to warm up their voices. One group of kids exploded into a well-choreographed break-dance routine. In every nook and cranny, one could find musicians tooting their horns and strumming their guitars. Families retreated to the higher seats of the stadium to escape the sun and chow down on refreshments.
It’s clear that the community needs the tradition and wants the tradition. I suspect it’s strong enough to last another hundred years, with or without public support.
As for John America and Candice, there is no questioning their enthusiasm for the festival. Both agree it brings their family together.
“I’ve been doing this for 13 years,” John says. “I will do it every year. Prison Gang 26. Gangster. The underworld. Remember that.”
Matthew Mercier lives and writes in New York, where he is studying in the MFA program at Hunter College. He recently traveled to Cape Town, South Africa with Hunter’s study abroad program. He works at a homeless center on the Bowery in downtown New York and can be reached at mwmercier@hotmail.com.
"Henry!" shouts a coloured woman wearing a press badge. "There you are!" She gives him a hug and motions to a cameraman, who starts filming. Mr. Trotter strikes a pose and is immediately surrounded by camera-happy comrades from his troupe, most in blackface or in some version thereof, who flash toothless grins and victory signs. Then the troupe's band rumbles past and Mr. Trotter falls into formation with the rest of the minstrels, who gaily shimmy and shuffle their way into the stadium to the rhythm of drums and the flutter of tambourines.
Mr. Trotter, a graduate student in Yale University's African Studies program, first came to Cape Town in 1997, at the end of extensive travels in the eastern and southern regions of the continent. "I was curious about the coloured community here, because it's quite different than what I'd seen in the rest of Africa. Here you have a community basically predicated on the idea that they're mixed, that they're not 'pure' whites or Africans. And even though you have, of course, mixed people everywhere else, you don't find any [mixed] communities necessarily...and you would never find a majority mixed community. But here in Cape Town, you have that. So I wanted to look into it, and see what it was all about."
Three years after his first visit, Mr. Trotter has returned to Cape Town, this time not as just a traveler but as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar working on an M.A. thesis. He took up residence in the coloured township of Bonteheuwel (bon-teh-HEE-vel) on the Cape Flats and decided to study the ways in which the coloured community remembers the forced removals of the apartheid era. While conducting interviews throughout Cape Town's coloured townships, he began to learn more about the Coon Carnival and was eventually invited to observe a troupe rehearsing. Soon, he found himself becoming more than just an observer.
"They said, 'Well, why don't you just run with us?'" he recalls. Mr. Trotter could not play or sing the Kaapse songs in the troupe's repertoire, but he found a role as a "runner"--one of the dancers who marches behind the band and the main chorus. So after attending a few rehearsals and paying 250 Rand (about $35) for his outfit, Mr. Trotter was officially a member of the Lentegeur Entertainers, named after the Cape Flats neighborhood where most of its members live.
In joining the "coons," Mr. Trotter created a minor sensation throughout this city, which is still deeply divided along racial lines. Few whites, and few blacks for that matter, participate in or attend the Coon Carnival; it is largely a coloured affair. And although a handful of foreign tourists come to watch the troupes parade through the streets, there have been no other foreigners in recent memory who have actually participated. Mr. Trotter also discovered that his participation exposed class divisions within the coloured community itself. Henry's girlfriend, for example, a coloured woman who works for the municipal department of land affairs and aspires to be a lawyer, was mortified when he joined. "She was so against it," laughs Mr. Trotter. "She had never seen the coons in her life. Part of the way to set yourself apart from the working class is to deny interest and participation in the 'coons,' which [are] a celebration of working-class existence, basically. She had a strong aversion to it, and she said, 'it's so local, it's just a bunch of skollies, just a bunch of riff-raff, getting together and jumping up and down."
Mr. Trotter's neighbors in Bonteheuwel, however, and his new friends in the Lentegeur Entertainers, were enthusiastic and encouraging. Of course, the young man had to endure his share of good-natured ribbing. "'Hey, whitey, stay in formation,' they used to say," he recalls with a smile. But his involvement was welcomed and even celebrated by his new friends and neighbors. They were thrilled that someone outside the coloured community had taken an interest in the carnival. The Cape Argus, one of Cape Town's local dailies, was also exultant: "Uncle Sam marches with the minstrels," it declared in a bold headline.
The carnival has its roots in the creole culture that formed at the Cape over hundreds of years from the interaction and intermingling of indigenous African groups, European settlers, Muslim slaves from the Indonesian archipelago, and people from a variety of other backgrounds. Freed slaves in Cape Town developed their own cycle of festivals in December and January, among them the Tweede Nuewe Jaar ("Second New Year"), which is celebrated on January 2nd and is a kind of independence day for the coloured community. When American minstrels arrived at the Cape in the mid-nineteenth century, the styles and sounds of vaudeville were incorporated into local celebrations, and the Coon Carnival was born. The word "coon" was borrowed but its pejorative and racial connotations were ignored, so that it came to refer to a member of a minstrel troupe and nothing more.
Today, the minstrels continue to borrow from a variety of cultural sources. One of this year's favorite troupes, for example, is called the Pennsylvanians; another is known as the Fabulous Mardi Gras. And while the minstrels' repertoire largely consists of folk songs, they also perform Broadway show tunes and dance to hip-hop and Latin tracks as they parade through the streets of the city.
It is perhaps ironic that a festival formed from so many varied and cosmopolitan influences should remain so local in character. Yet this is part of the charm of the Coon Carnival. Each troupe is made up of members from a particular neighborhood of the city, and each is expected to parade and perform for its local community in exchange for booze and tables full of delicious Cape cuisine. Of course, the local character of the carnival also means that the carnival reflects some local problems. Many of the city's gangsters join the minstrel troupes, for instance, and tensions sometimes spill over into violence at the stadium. But rather than exacerbating the problem, the Coon Carnival often provides an opportunity for peace and co-existence within the community. "Look," said one elderly minstrel in the green, yellow, and red of the Elsies River Community Entertainers, waving his arms over a dancing sea of colorful umbrellas. "All the gangsters from the Cape Flats in one place. And no guns. Everybody's happy. It just goes to show you."
Under apartheid, the Coon Carnival faced enormous challenges. Segregation, forced removals, and discrimination made the troupes and their performances more difficult to organize. The government often placed the best stadiums off-limits to the coloured community, and where the carnival was able to perform it had to do so in front of segregated audiences. Now, in the "New South Africa," the government is lending its support to the carnival, and Nelson Mandela himself presided over the carnival's opening in 1996. Academics have begun taking notice as well, with a groundbreaking study of the Coon Carnival being published in 1999 by the French academic Denis-Constant Martin. And with tourism quickly becoming a pillar of the local economy, city officials talk about turning the "Minstrel Carnival" into a celebration that will rival festivals in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro.
As exciting and ambitious as that may sound, some of the minstrels themselves are apprehensive about opening up the festival to the world. There is a widespread fear that organizing the Coon Carnival to appeal to foreign tourists and commercial sponsors would mean taking it away from the local communities that have kept it alive for over a hundred years, in effect reserving the best seats for tourists just as they were once reserved for whites at the segregated stadiums. And there is an enduring ambivalence in Cape Town about coloured identity and whether it is something that can or should be embraced and celebrated. If Capetonians are unsure about how to respond to a parade of blackface minstrels, the feeling goes, how might the rest of the world react?
Mr. Trotter, for one, has made up his mind: the Coon Carnival is a lot of fun, even if wearing blackface might be seen back home as a provocative act. "I think it would be challenging to explain this to Americans, because we have abandoned these things," he says. "But one group's cultural taboos are another's celebration." In Cape Town, as in other creole cities around the world, it seems that pushing cultural boundaries is what the party's all about after all.
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