TOTAL SIEMENS 5 25 1

Descriptions of the sound of boeremusiek as mournful or melancholic, even though the music evidently accompanies dancing and having fun, have become a stock theme of boeremusiek discourse. Elsewhere I refer to it as the “tears of joy” trope.26 This trope is usually understood as emanating from white experiences of heroic hardship – whether during the Great Trek or the struggle against British Imperialism. The fact that references to boeremusiek embodying mourning can be found as early as Leviseur’s description (which dates from 1924 but describes events 50 years earlier), implies alternative readings for this distinctive boeremusiek trope.

A sketch by Heinrich Egersdörfer (Figure 8) was re-published in 1960 with the following caption:

“Emancipation Day” now means nothing at the Cape, but in the 1880’s the liberation of the slaves only fifty years earlier was still celebrated. Outside the house of some dignified Malays in the Oriental quarter stands a group of Coloured people, who have brought along two “guys”, one male and one female, in whose honour they play on a variety of quaint instruments ...27

25

Sophie Leviseur, Ouma Looks Back (Port Elizabeth: Unie-Volkspers, 1944), 25.

26

See Minors III for some examples of this trope.

27

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The “quaint” instruments include a violin, drum and, notably, a concertina. Denis-Constant Martin has pointed to the link that has existed between celebrations in the Cape of Guy Fawkes Day (5 November), Emancipation Day (1 December) and New Year (1-2 January) since the end of the nineteenth century – a connection that is evident in the caption above.28 He argues that Guy Fawkes Day marked the beginning of a season of celebrations for the end of slavery that culminated in the Coon Carnival on New Year. Seen this way, the white “guys” in this etching, rather than alluding to the original “gunpowder plot”, allude to the end of (one cycle of) white oppression.

Such celebrations, centred on experiences of slavery, would have been occasions characterised by “tears of joy”, as accounts of the first celebration of Emancipation Day suggested:

On 1 December 1934, large numbers of men, women, boys and girls who until that day had been slaves

“promenaded the streets” of Cape Town, “many of them attended by a band of amateur musicians”. They had paraded before, to celebrate the New Year, a day on which they had been “permitted to enjoy the day with their own friends; on which occasion they dress in all their best clothes”, and perhaps followed bands round the streets. On this day, though, matters were different – joyous, not drunken, but tinged with sadness for those who had not lived to see their freedom, and whose tears, at least according to later tradition, caused it to rain, unseasonably, on Emancipation Day.29

28

Martin, Coon Carnival, 31-34.

29

My emphasis. Robert Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 146.

61 “Joyous, not drunken, but tinged with sadness” is a description that might easily be applied to boeremusiek. In terms of instrumentation the Egersdörfer etching shows clear similarities with “coloured” celebrations of emancipation. But there are also other indications that the music of slaves and their descendents in the Cape could have served as musical and emotional antecedents to boeremusiek. Vincent Colbe, in a description of the slaves’ limited leisure activities, noted that

[w]hen the slaves were brought here, there was an obvious element of melancholy among them. So on Sunday afternoons they’d go down to the beach to discord themselves – and beat on the goema drum. ... The mish-mash of “coon” dance steps has also been drawn from and influenced by slaves imitating dances of their British rulers – the lances, the squares, the quadrilles. The klopse passies is in itself a derivative and variant of the French “pas” as in “pas de deux”.30

What Kolbe describes above was the process of creolisation, which, according to Martin, “implied an exchange of cultural traits between members of the dominated groups, in particular among slaves, and the production of syncretic features which were then transmitted to the new generations”. This process also resulted from “a different type of interaction between masters and slaves, in which each became acculturated to the other”. For Martin creolisation means, on the one hand, that slaves could invent a world of their own distinct from that of their masters, but on the other, that the musical world of the slave “was never cut off from the dominant culture, but, on the contrary, kept interacting with it – influencing it and being influenced by it”.31

The musical intimacy between master and servant after the Great Trek implies a similar syncretism. In fact, it is hard to distinguish where the music of the servant ended and where that of the Boer began, with coloured bands routinely providing the entertainment at white parties, the concertina featuring in both traditions, the same instrument changing hands, similar musical abandonment at celebrations of New Year, and the fact that musical gestures, like the “mournful wail” of the guitarist in Leviseur’s description, could be translated from an experiential context of slavery to one of a boere birthday party. I am positing here that boeremusiek is imbued with the “tears of joy” associated with experiences of slavery.

30

Yazeed Fakier, “Renewed Interest in Goema Music in Cape”, Cape Times, December 17, 1988, based on an interview with Mr. Vincent Kolbe, in Denis-Constant Martin, ed., “Chronicles of the Kaapse Klopse”, 2007, 2,

http://132.204.113.176/upload/U7d3zo_DCM_Chronicles.pdf.

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