Tweede Nuew Jaar

January second means more to many Capetonians than the first of the year does, primarily because it is a day that has long been set aside for a series of festivals and parades that take over downtown Cape Town. It's called Tweede Nuew Jaar, or Second New Year. Katie and I went with our friend Nicole, who was in town, to soak up some of the color.

The festivities of the day are the pride of the working-class people who were relocated under apartheid to live just outside Cape Town proper, to an area known as the Cape Flats. On one day a year, the whole city stops and turns its attention to their festival, which centers around a parade. Each Cape Flats neighborhood puts together a troupe of musicians and singers, and spends months practicing their routines and sewing their costumes. Each troupe follows the next as they march through the streets, and there is a competition for the best songs, the best costumes, and the best marionette.

One version of the festival’s origins traces it back to minstrels who arrived on an American ship in the mid-nineteenth century, and were a big hit around town while the ship was in port.

To understand the significance of the festival, I should mention on this site yet again the odd South African racial categories that is a holdover of the apartheid days. There are black and white people in South Africa, of course, but in Cape Town, the majority of people fall into a racial category known as “coloured.” Though they were lumped together by the apartheid government, they come from a wide variety of backgrounds. They are descended from former slaves that were imported from across Asia and other parts of Africa, they have some roots with the indigenous tribe of people who were in the Cape when the Dutch arrived, and they also are the products of more recent interracial marriage (or interracial unions, at least) between whites and blacks.

And though there are coloured people across South Africa, they are the majority only here in Cape Town, and their unique culture is concentrated in those poor suburbs in the Cape Flats

Anthropologists have studied the Coon Carnival music, the lyrics of the songs, the dance steps and the decorations on the costumes, and have found elements of a staggeringly large number of different cultures represented in this unique tradition. There’s Arabic percussion, for example, mixed together with Madagascan choral music. It is truly unlike anything you can find anywhere else in the world, and a product of a mixing of cultures that has happened nowhere else in the world to this degree.

Some of the people who participate in the festival know about these findings, and have embraced them. They are proud to be the only repositories for so many of the cultural influences on Cape culture. When apartheid tried to stamp out the facts about the creolized past of the Cape Colony, they kept that past alive.

But seeing the thing in person was a lesson in another Cape Town tradition: the lack of punctuality. The three of us saw about four groups go by in the hour or so we were strolling along the parade route. The rest of the time we sampled the street food and drank soda, and then we went home.

To see a few pictures from the event, click here.