South Africa’s entry in this atlas begins in Cape Town, where each January thousands of minstrels in glittering uniforms march to the ghoema beat — a celebration that grew out of the one day off given to enslaved people at New Year, and survived apartheid’s bans.
Photo: Olga Ernst, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Cape Town Minstrel Carnival is one of the city’s oldest living traditions. It is rooted in Tweede Nuwe Jaar, the “Second New Year” on 2 January, when enslaved people at the Cape were given a day to celebrate in their own way, and its music mixes influences brought by people from Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and Madagascar with Dutch songs, British marching bands and African American minstrelsy.
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In the first days of January, some 20,000 minstrels in glittering matching uniforms, with parasols, banjos, trumpets and ghoema drums, march through Green Point in troupe after troupe — Cape Town’s “Second New Year”, rooted in the one day of freedom once given to enslaved people.
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