For summer tourists eager for spectacular views, nothing beats the bus route that travels south from Cape Town’s most famous landmark all the way to Cape Point Nature Reserve, where two oceans meet at the tip of Africa. The bus winds round Chapmans Peak, down to the unspoilt beaches of Noordhoek, and on the way back one can take in the famed penguin colony of Boulders beach.
The bus doesn’t stop at Ocean View, the infamous dumping ground for black residents forcibly removed from Simon’s Town in the 1960s. Nor does it stop at Masiphumelele, a settlement that sprawls along the road between Noordhoek and Kommetjie. Indeed, not only tourists but many of Cape Town’s residents are unaware that this glorious landscape is a microcosm of South Africa’s diverse urban communities and the challenges that face them.
Inspired by the lack of racial integration across these communities, Sam Pearce of Noordhoek, Alvin Castro of Ocean View and Rodney Ndyalvan of Masiphumelele have banded together to form the eMzantsi Carnival, a showcase of the enormous amount of talent found in the ”deep south” of the Cape Peninsula.
Ndyalvan is a high-school teacher and cultural entrepreneur. His spouse, Zuki Mpofu-Ndyalvan, runs a bed-and-breakfast in the informal settlement and together they manage the Ubuhlanti community centre. Drawing tourists on the road to Cape Point into Masiphumelele will make the difference between the success or failure of these and other entrepreneurial activities.
Besides working six days a week as a supervisor at Pick ‘n Pay (which sponsors the event), Castro has been involved in arts and development in the Ocean View community for many years with his Arts Vibration youth group.
Pearce, manager of the Cape Comedy Collective, came up with the idea for the carnival in response to a call from the department of arts and culture for research on intercultural diversity. Together with the University of Cape Town’s intercultural and diversity studies unit of Southern Africa, Pearce has trained local fieldworkers to conduct research into participants’ and residents’ attitudes towards their own and other cultures. Early data shows that events like the eMzantsi Carnival have great potential to change relationships not only between diverse communities but within them.
The first eMzantsi carnival was held last year to an enthusiastic response from all the communities involved. Pantsula dancers jived on the same stage as minstrel choirs and drum majorettes. Gumboot dancers slapped up a storm alongside gender-bending belles on Harley Davidsons.
This year, Pearce says, small businesses are more eager to sponsor materials and assist in other ways. About 1 000 enthusiastic participants took part last year, but Pearce has no idea what to expect this year when the parade begins at 10am outside Masiphumelele and heads in the direction of Ou Kaapse Weg.
For many who live in Cape Town, this time of the year is synonymous with carnivalesque festivities, given that the Klopse Karnival winds through the city streets on Tweede Nuwe Jaar, the second New Year, which takes place on January 2.
While the Cape Town carnival does not rival the glitzy glamour of Brazil or the commercialised mas (the masquerade tradition) of the Trinidad carnival, it is among the world’s most unique processional traditions. It is in many ways the key to understanding the Cape, which for too long has been regarded by the rest of the country as an embarrassing cultural anomaly. The tradition is the product of a long, complex history of mixing of African, Asian, European and North American influences. Like the port cities of the Caribbean, Cape Town is best described as creole — its language is replete with irony and carnivalesque double entendre, and its mixed cultural heritage is best described in terms of routes rather than roots.
Much like newer initiatives such as the eMzantsi Carnival, the Klopse Karnival holds great potential for the social development of the communities that support it. Yet today the tradition is held hostage by many of the same social ills that haunt the city. After a long absence of effective state support and mainstream acknowledgement, gangsterism and drug trafficking have filled the vacuum and now supply an alternative financial infrastructure.
Recently, leading practitioners of the tradition have begun to acknowledge that it is the carnival that holds the key to resolving these social troubles. Many troupes have renewed their focus on teaching music to the youth in their communities. These makeshift music schools, which are dotted around the Cape Flats, give kids an alternative to crime and drugs, and boost self-esteem and respect.
The Two Oceans Brass Band, an almost entirely self-funded troupe that will take part in both the eMzantsi Carnival and the Klopse Karnival, comprises 120 youths playing a variety of instruments and musical styles. Several of these youths had dropped out of school and society, until the opportunity to play music gave them a second chance. There are many, many more troupes doing similar work, but without the formal recognition or funding that would expand the scope and effectiveness of their work.
Besides its obvious development potential, the carnival is also profoundly political. It has become the vehicle for those communities that were forcibly removed from inner-city areas such as District Six and Sea Point to claim back the city, if only for a few days each year. Its history precedes apartheid’s group-areas policy, though, with this year’s roadmarch being the 100th since the Klopse Karnival’s formal inception. Its roots go back even further: after the emancipation of the slaves of the Cape Colony in 1834, freed slaves symbolically took to the street in public processions each festive season.
This year, a more solemn procession will wind its way through Cape Town on the eve of December 1, as a coalition of cultural activists and community groups commemorate the day on which slavery was officially abolished. Starting at 9.30pm at the site of the Slave Tree in Spin Street, the goal is to visit major sites of significance for slave heritage, leaving memorial objects along the route to reactivate these sites and reawaken public memory.
One of the major partners in this December 1 coalition is the Prestwich Place Project Committee, which was established three years ago in response to the rediscovery of widespread slave burial grounds in Cape Town’s central business district. Another partner is the District Six Museum, an internationally recognised site museum that remembers the people of the east city precinct who were subjected to forced removals throughout the 20th century. Both organisations are dedicated to working with memory in a way that enables the city to reimagine its future.
In Western cities, the fashionable artistic practice of ”psychogeography” sees young artists walking their cities to understand and map them in new ways. In Cape Town, masses of people walk along the routes that both connect and fragment their communities, to remap and reinhabit the city.
Julian Jonker is a member of the Western Cape Street Bands Association, which seeks to develop the potential of carnival and indigenous performance traditions in the Western Cape