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ABSTRACT
The paper presents an analysis of how visual and musical aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, as creolization, and ethnically specific ‘heritage’, and how the self-stylization is employed in asserting a linguistic-cultural ‘identity’. This is done through an investigation of the aesthetics and politics of the ‘hip-hopera’ Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three-week run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town, followed by different sets of performance in South Africa and abroad and the documentary by a Cape Town film maker. Dylan Valley’s [2011. Afrikaaps. Directed by Dylan Valley. Amsterdam: Plexus Films/The Glasshouse] film follows this group of local artists creating the stage production as they trace the roots of Afrikaans to KhoiSan and slaves in the Cape.
Acknowledgements
I thank the anonymous reviewers, Birgit Meyer and Emile Boonzaier for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. Thanks are also due to the presenters and participants of the panel, ‘Un/making Difference Through Performance and Mediation in Contemporary Africa’ at the European Conference for African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Special thanks to the panel co-convenor Dorothea Schulz, and the discussants, Karin Barber and Hauke Dorsch.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
† With a contribution by Chanell Oliphant; opening vignette edited from Oliphant 2010: 1–2.
1 ‘Coloureds came from Khoisan knowledge’.
2 Popular fashion stores.
3 The vernacular articulation of the all-South African expression ‘What’s up?’.
4 Click sounds are considered typical for the KhoiSan languages.
5 Klein Karoo National Arts Festival.
6 A note on the use of racial categories in contemporary South Africa: The racial categories, which were legalized by the apartheid regime continue to prevail in common South African usage. Following this, ‘Coloured’ refers to people of mixed descent, who are being defined as a ‘community’, and mostly speak Afrikaans as their first language. In the following, I use categories such as ‘coloured’, ‘white’ or ‘black’ without quotation marks because these socially and politically constructed racial categories continue to be used commonly in the everyday, and even resurge as actually existing groups, re-constituted by post-apartheid politics and bureaucratic practices of redress. While I do not wish to support the apartheid-induced definition and politics, I reference the categories as they are commonly understood and used locally in Cape Town.
7 This has been the dominant post-apartheid narrative until at least most recently, when the new student movements of 2015 questioned it under the banner of ‘decolonization’.
8 An insightful discussion of the legacy of slavery, and its neglect in South African historiography has been provided by Baderoon (Citation2014).
9 Some hip-hop related cultural initiatives even reclaimed the ‘ghetto’ word, for example, the label ‘Ghetto Ruff Records’, which released Brassie Vannie Kaap’s debut album ‘BVK’ in 1997.
10 The origins, trajectory, and the changing music, attire and performance styles of the Cape Town New Year carnival have been presented in a close-up historiographic and ethnographic study by Martin (Citation2000).
11 ‘District Six’ had a seven-months run when it opened in 1987 at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town. My analysis is based on a recording of the original cast (Kramer and Petersen Citation2007).
12 Especially ‘District Six’ (1987) and ‘Kat and the Kings’ (1995).
13 In addition to Afrikaans, relevant cultural productions include musical enterprises such as the now defunct KhoiKonnexion, or the Stories from the Caves’ documentaries by Cape Town film maker Weaam Williams. Even more research is required into the connections between the aesthetics of the performative narrative of the KhoiSan mythical past and contemporary coloured identity and claim-making politics.