Contextualizing Reflective Nostalgia

Nostalgia was once regarded as a medical condition and a psychiatric disorder. Introduced by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer (1669–1752) in his 1688 text Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe, as a neologism of the two Greek words nostos, meaning return to one’s homeland, and algos, meaning distress, pain, or grief. Hofer used the term to describe a condition he observed in Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad in France and Italy, who experienced a range of emotional and physical symptoms, such as obsessive thoughts of home, loss of appetite, insomnia, and even suicidal ideation. As the medical perspective on nostalgia waned, its usage shifted to highlight a sense of longing or homesickness as the result of temporal (as opposed to geographic) distance. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym historicized nostalgia as a feeling no longer considered a curable affliction of the body but a psychological state in which a person does not long for a geographically far-off place but rather for the past or a lost time. Renato Rosaldo (Reference Rosaldo1989) also noted this shift towards temporal distance, a longing for the past that is of the mind, rather than of the body.Footnote ⁶ Kathleen Stewart described nostalgia as a “form of memory distinct in its longing to return to an imagined and reconstructed past that may have never existed.” Stewart describes nostalgia as “a cultural practice”Footnote ⁷ at both the individual and social registers. She writes, “In positing a ‘once was’ in relation to a ‘now’ [nostalgia] creates a frame for meaning, a means of dramatizing aspects of an increasingly fluid and unnamed social life.”Footnote ⁸ Nostalgia can be both individual and collective, for a past that was and a fantastical past that never was.

Introducing a critical distinction between two kinds of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym coined the terms “restorative nostalgia” and “reflective nostalgia.” For Boym, restorative nostalgia is a form of nostalgia that seeks to revive an idealized past without acknowledging that this idealization never existed. It seeks truth and tradition. It is uncritical, turning towards the past to seek refuge from the present. On the other hand, reflective nostalgia is a form of critical nostalgia that is self-aware of its own idealization of the past and draws on the past as a way to critique and remake the present. It can be ambivalent, ironic, and playful, and, some have argued, might even “enable radical critiques of the existing order.”Footnote ⁹ In this way, reflective nostalgia is thus ultimately not really about the past at all, but about the present—“about present anxieties refracted through the prism of the past.”Footnote ¹⁰

Nostalgia(s) in Postapartheid South Africa

Interventions by Kathleen Stewart and Svetlana Boym that describe the cultural work of nostalgia to those in the present are central to the way I conceptualize its affective presence in postapartheid South African klopse contexts. Its manifestation in a range of post-repressive contexts like South Africa, however, adds a layer of complexity: How, some have questioned, can people yearn for a time when they were oppressed? Scholarship on nostalgia in post-Soviet and post-socialist countries has provided a rich source through which to understand and analyze experiences of nostalgia in South Africa, another country that underwent a rapid transition from authoritarianism to democracy and neoliberalism. Frances Pine, in writing about nostalgia in post-Soviet Warsaw, Poland, critically reminds us that rather than simply a “collective amnesia,” nostalgia is:

Seeking to contextualize nostalgia specifically in relation to postcolonial identity, Debbora Battaglia similarly disconnects nostalgia from a mere backward “sentimental attitude,”Footnote ¹² arguing that it “may in fact be a vehicle of knowledge,” a form of “attachment of appropriate feelings toward their own histories, products, and capabilities, and on the other hand, their detachment from—and active resistance to—disempowering conditions of postcolonial life.”Footnote ¹³ She conceptualizes this mode as “practical nostalgia”: “transformative action with a connective purpose.”Footnote ¹⁴ In this rendering, nostalgia is not necessarily a conservative impulse, but might even be considered a form of resistance, particularly if it leads to active transformation in the present.Footnote ¹⁵

Like other societies that have undergone profound political, economic, and social shifts, yearning for social order, a sense of emplacement, solidarity, and community offers South Africans a way to manage the precarity of the present.Footnote ¹⁶ The end of apartheid in 1994 brought the end of formalized racial discrimination and the promise of equality, but the turn toward neoliberal capitalism relegated all but a few South Africans to economic precarity.Footnote ¹⁷ South Africa has the highest level of income inequality in the world (measured by the Gini coefficient, which in 2014 was 63.0)Footnote ¹⁸ and while middle-class Black families enjoyed increased opportunities for improved housing, education, and jobs, conditions for most poor Black families stagnated. Many klopse participants expressed that unemployment caused a range of social issues in the townships, including gang activity, crime and violence, alcohol and drug misuse, and a domestic violence epidemic. Land reform has been staggeringly slow (a minority of white South Africans still own the vast majority of land in the country), and a lack of access to basic resources has led many to question the ANC slogan, “A better life for all!”Footnote ¹⁹ Describing the mid-2000s moment, the socialist shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo referred to it as a state of “UnFreedom,” a liminal space between apartheid and postapartheid.Footnote ²⁰ After the “miracle” of democracy, the unfulfilled business of liberation has left most in this liminal state—struggling, as Gavin Steingo put it, “not for freedom, but with freedom, in freedom, or perhaps against freedom.”Footnote ²¹

In the 2000s, expressions of nostalgia—and the critical analysis of nostalgia—abounded in the popular press, in poetry and literature, in popular music and its criticism, and, to a lesser extent, in academic scholarship in South Africa. News articles revealed that as the promises contained in the shift to democracy slowly faded into the past, individuals across all sectors of the South African population articulated nostalgia for the recent past—an unexpected result. Nostalgia among sectors of South Africa’s white population, as connected to forms of Afrikaner nationalism and ethnicization, was perhaps the most easily understood, with some even referring to a generalized “nostalgic turn” amongst white Afrikaners in the immediate postapartheid period.Footnote ²² It was a moment, Kees van der Waal and Steven Robins wrote, “ripe for a nostalgic celebration of a revamped but less party-political Afrikaans ethnic identity…[among] Afrikaners who perceived themselves to be under threat from the ANC government.”Footnote ²³

But instances of nostalgic expression amongst the country’s Black population also permeated the news. Newspaper articles relayed quotations from individuals who critiqued contemporary failures of the state to provide for its poorest citizens in education, health, and housing, and sometimes compared the democratic dispensation unfavorably to the “order and discipline” of the past.Footnote ²⁴ Published studies and polls showed that in the early 2000s, nostalgia was growing with increased dissatisfaction with the present expressed in positive references to the past.Footnote ²⁵

Published in 2009, Jacob Dlamini’s award-winning Native Nostalgia described in compelling prose his apartheid-era childhood in the urban Black township of Katlehong. He wrote of the “ordinariness” of family and community life under apartheid and reminisced about the past: listening to Radio Zulu, speaking Afrikaans, and engaging in township family life.Footnote ²⁶ That anyone other than white South Africans should speak nostalgically about the past, or relay any apartheid-era experiences other than trauma and hardship, seemed astonishing and even dangerous to some.Footnote ²⁷ Although Dlamini’s text in no way celebrated state-sanctioned racial oppression, his nostalgic recollections of a childhood that included joy, kindness, and community in the everyday texture of life, reflected a past in which Black South Africans were individualized with varied identities and experiences of apartheid, not faceless victims.Footnote ²⁸

Qualitative and ethnographically grounded studies, including Amber R. Reed’s Nostalgia After Apartheid: Disillusionment, Youth, and Democracy in South Africa (2020), have also revealed that nostalgic reminiscing is not the sole purview of any one social group in South Africa and lend ethnographic weight to Marcel Paret’s (2018) rendering of the existence of multiple “nostalgias” that can serve varying functions beyond a longing to restore one’s position of privilege.Footnote ²⁹ According to Paret, these can include memorializing the anti-apartheid struggle,Footnote ³⁰ coping with past traumas,Footnote ³¹ or longing for more stabilizing experiences of community and culture,Footnote ³² to name but a few. To put this another way, expressions of nostalgia make sense amongst the full range of the population in South Africa, a country having undergone tremendous political and social upheaval, with stark economic, political, and social inequalities persisting in the present, and with an opportunity to reconfigure identity, community, and belonging for the future. It is possible then to experience nostalgia, as Reed’s title signals, after apartheid, a critical distinction that makes space for experiences of loss and dissatisfaction in the present while not longing for a return to apartheid. As Paret reminds us, “Nostalgic longings [are] less about an actual return to the apartheid past and more about piecing together a promising future.”Footnote ³³

Performing Musical Nostalgia(s) in South Africa

Nostalgias are routinely expressed in performance and rendered possible through performance in contemporary South Africa. A rich body of scholarship in the field of theatre and performance studies shares a focus on how cultural memory persists through embodied practices in ways that sometimes run counter to the official documented “archive.”Footnote ³⁴ Joseph Roach’s concept of “surrogation” describes how cultures replace lost elements through imperfect bodily substitutions,Footnote ³⁵ while Diana Taylor’s “repertoire”Footnote ³⁶ emphasizes knowledge transmitted through live performance, and Marvin Carlson explores the way theater is inherently “haunted” by its own past through multiple layers of recycling and repetition.Footnote ³⁷ In this way, performances operate as complex temporalities where past, present, and future coexist in performance, making live embodied practices crucial sites for understanding how cultures remember, transform themselves, and imagine the future.

Music scholarship has also attended to its complex temporal relationships, simultaneously existing in the present moment while invoking past experiences and future possibilities. This temporal layering makes it particularly effective for cultural memory work. Music, and its repetitions, can induce feelings of nostalgia,Footnote ³⁸ as made clear through the robust case studies in this journal’s special issue. Furthermore, studies on the psychological and social impacts of music listening support that these music-inflected nostalgic states are beneficial to listeners, serving as reminders of past experiences that hold value and meaning.Footnote ³⁹ Additional scholarship has evidenced that listening to music from one’s past is often positively associated with experiences of social connectedness (belonging, support, acceptance), self-esteem and optimism, and a sense of meaning, and in the process can work to “cushion psychological discomfort.”Footnote ⁴⁰

In South Africa, musical nostalgias—of various kinds and serving various purposes—are present in many spaces and across many genres, generations, and sectors of the population. This is evident in Afrikaner popular music, perhaps best exemplified by the 2007 Bok van Blerk hit song “De la Rey,” a song about a general of the Anglo-Boer War that achieved enormous commercial success,Footnote ⁴¹ and in the boeremusiek (predominantly white folk music) contexts described by Willemien Froneman.Footnote ⁴² It is also present in music listening practices amongst youth in the country revealed by the data on streaming, which shows that hip hop and R&B tracks from the 1990s and 2000s continue to dominate on steady repeat. It is present in the practice of sampling, exemplified by popular songs such as DJ Cleo’s 2010 “Hip Hip Hooray” which samples Mahlathini & Mahotella Queen’s 1988 song “Kazet” or in much amapiano music, for example, Kabza De Small x DJ Maphorisa (known as the Scorpion Kings) who routinely sample 90s kwaito hits.Footnote ⁴³ And it is present in the spaces of social dancing, called langarm, described by Glenn HoltzmanFootnote ⁴⁴ and in the ongoing popularity of many Cape Town cover acts, like The Great Pretenders, whose Cape Town performances are promoted as a “trip down memory lane” in which the singers “revive nostalgia for District Six” (an urban neighborhood from which nonwhite subjects were forcibly removed by the apartheid regime under the Group Areas Act, beginning in 1950).Footnote ⁴⁵ Musical nostalgia, then, is not a unique aspect of Kaapse klopse practice, but as I show in the next section, klopse’s reliance on U.S. American popular music—including Blackface minstrelsy—and the music’s particular cultural work within the social spaces of klopse competitions render its pastness significant.

Kaapse Klopse Practice and “Coon Songs” in Competition Settings

Kaapse klopse (“Clubs of the Cape”) are multigenerational social music groups, similar to the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs in New Orleans or the samba schools of Rio’s Carnaval. These groups are gender inclusive and are made up of Christians and Muslims. They feature large ensembles that include brass instruments, drums, banjos, and goema drums, alongside choirs, dancing drum majors (known as voorlopers), cross-dressed men or trans women (called moffies), and other performers. In Cape Town, approximately sixty troupes exist, some with as many as a thousand members, while others are smaller, with only a few hundred participants. Klopse is particularly renowned for its annual Cape Town Minstrel Carnival, or Tweede Nuwe Jaar parade, which is held on January 2nd in the city center to commemorate the historical slave holiday. In January 2025, around 20,000 paraders took part in this yearly celebration in which participants overtake the city center and make it sound.Footnote ⁴⁶ In addition to the main parade, troupes also regularly perform in informal parades through Cape Town’s numerous townships and compete in formal competitions across seventeen categories, held in sports stadiums throughout January and February.Footnote ⁴⁷

Sonically, klopse music is an eclectic blend of sounds and styles, incorporating a variety of influences, including blackface minstrel repertoires from the U.S. American and British troupes, local creolized traditions called goema (named after the single-headed barrel drum that plays a central role in the music), and a continuous stream of repurposed globally circulating popular tunes in cover song performances as well as remixed in playful comedic songs called moppies.

These varied musical strands reflect the multifaceted heritage of the Cape Colony’s multiethnic slave population, brought to the region by Dutch colonists between 1652 and 1808 from across the Indian Ocean world, who intermingled with Indigenous KhoiSan, Bantu Africans, other Asians, and Europeans. After the emancipation of enslaved people at the Cape in 1834, this emergent, assimilated group of colonial Black people at the Cape would eventually be classified as “Coloured” by the British in the nineteenth century, a label used to assert dominance over non-European populations. The term was hardened in the mid-century by the apartheid regime (under the Population Registration Act of 1950) as a label assigned to those perceived to be at the interstices of the supposedly fixed categories of “Black” and “white”—an unstable racial categorization and force of destabilization in a regime fixated on order. Coloured South Africans were thus in-between subjects, defined entirely by what they were not: “neither ‘Bantu’ nor ‘White’.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Today, the majority of participants in Kaapse klopse practice identify—or sometimes disidentify—with the term “Coloured.”

In the nineteenth century, U.S. American blackface minstrelsy circulated the globe and took hold at the Cape as a tool of racialization.Footnote ⁴⁹ Throughout the Anglophone imperial world, blackface served as a technology shaping transnational imaginations of Blackness and attitudes toward Otherness (particularly toward nonwhite subjects) locally, working to support colonial projects and construct and imagine an Anglophone modernity throughout the British Empire, and making white supremacy “common sense” on a global scale.Footnote ⁵⁰ In South Africa, minstrelsy became wildly popular from the moment it arrived in the British settler colonies in the nineteenth century. British colonists in Cape Town especially loved blackface minstrelsy because it provided a shared cultural heritage to connect English settlers of all classes and genders in the colony to the metropole—a connection that Chinua Thelwell notes was made possible “through and against the bodies of black men and women.”Footnote ⁵¹ Groups of local colonists formed their own troupes as early as 1848, and in the years after the Christy’s Minstrels tour in 1862, blackface took hold. It would find its way into a range of globally recognized South African musical practices, including the Carnival, isicathamiya, gumboot dance, and boeremusiek.

By the early 1900s, the Cape’s New Year’s paraders and performances included minstrel repertoires as integral parts of the performance practice. When the first formal Kaapse klopse competition was held in 1907, it included seven troupes that featured string bands with banjos and “cake walk” and “buck and wing dancing” as several of its “UNIQUE Spectacular Effects” with troupes with names like the “Dahomey Coons” and the “Darktown Brigade Coon Troupe.”Footnote ⁵² The following year, seventeen troupes participated, including the “Victoria Demons Masquerading Coons,” the “Dandy Coloured Coons,” and the “Baltimore Lawn Tennis Coons,” to name but a few.Footnote ⁵³ By the time of the earliest competition in 1907, blackface makeup had become such a critical part of early Carnival that “points were stricken from the scorecards of troupes who failed to follow tradition” by not “blacking up.”Footnote ⁵⁴

When I moved to Cape Town in 2011, many aspects of blackface minstrelsy had been transformed in the century between. Troupe names had changed, blackface makeup had been stricken from the public Carnival parades, costumes had become colorful, women could now participate, amongst many other transformations. But, a century later, some visual, sonic, and embodied repertoires of minstrelsy still remained, rendered visible or audible in moments, and then returning into the mix, unseen and unheard. The “coon song” performance category in competitions, which once had been filled with early twentieth-century “coon songs,” was replaced by Al Jolson numbers in the 1930s, who had rejuvenated the figure of the “coon” in South Africa after his popular films were shown, and then replaced again by Frank Sinatra hits in the 1950s, a long string of acts of surrogation of racially infused American performance.Footnote ⁵⁵

A “Coon Song” Performance

In 2014, my friend and fellow Fabulous Woodstock Starlites (FWS) member Poppie and I were seated in the front of the stadium stands, with some rowdy observers standing in front of us. A group of young children climbed over the stands, some perching occasionally on my lap, smiling and wanting me to take photos of them. It was the early hours of the morning after a day and a night of competition performances. The little ones got cold, slept, and ate sour figs, Gatsbys, and candy.Footnote ⁵⁶ We took turns heading to the food stalls at the edge of the stadium to buy hot tea with milk and sugar to keep us awake. A commotion in the stands below us erupted. People screamed and grabbed their children. Fellow troupe member Sharieka grabbed 2-year-old Mikal and ran to where we were sitting. Some fifty police officers armed with semi-automatic weapons appeared from nowhere. They stood lined up along the edge of the stands to keep the peace. Two people had been in a fight—maybe gang-related, we later learned. Someone had been stabbed—or “poked,” as Melvyn always put it—and taken away in an emergency vehicle. A young girl had been injured. No one in our troupe quite knew what had happened.

Minutes after the incident, Glenn (pseudonym) took to the stage to perform his “coon song.” It was the second-to-last event of the competition. We were exhausted, but Fabulous Woodstock Starlites’ (FWS) performances always perked us up. The group chorus stood behind Glenn. He was tall with delicate features. His outfit had been expertly handmade by Dienie’s wife, Gadija, who served as the troupe’s seamstress. Unlike the standard oversized suit, Glenn wore a satin tailcoat in the troupe’s purple and yellow colors that year. He had replaced his Panama hat with a black top hat and had added a pair of fresh white gloves. Earlier that day, I had watched him apply a large circle of white face paint around his mouth with the help of a mirror held by another troupe member. The face paint covered the top of his nose, and a thin black ring encircled it to better highlight the white while on stage. His presence was refined, elegant, and calm and stood in stark contrast to the disorder that had occurred in the stadium just minutes before he took the stage.

Glenn’s costume included the typical additions to klopse gear that distinguish the “coon song” from the other performance categories. Although the choir never sings during the “coon song,” they (or sometimes the juvenile choir) are always on stage with the singer, standing behind him as he performs. Sometimes the choir members heighten the visual effect by painting white circles around their mouths too. Today, the juvenile choir had done this, so the stage was filled with children with rings of white around their mouths. The satin tailcoat, top hat, and gloves, as well as the blackface makeup, are all considered throwbacks to mid-twentieth-century klopse practice when that was the standard uniform; thus, in its few details, the costume gives the category a retro, “old school” feel and creates a sense of pastness for audience members. While colorful face paint has largely replaced traditional blackface makeup in the Carnival, blackface continues to be an essential visual signifier in the “coon song” performance category. “Coon song” performances take place in, and help produce, the distinctly intimate space of the competition, which are attended only by klopse participants and their families. In these community spaces—removed from the city center and the gaze of outsiders—such direct visual and sonic links to blackface minstrelsy continue unfettered, in contrast to the Carnival’s increasingly self-conscious mainstreamed display of “appropriate” public culture.Footnote ⁵⁷

The backing track on the sound system started to play, and Glenn’s body shifted. His usual shy and unassuming demeanor transformed into a confident swagger. Audience members smiled when they recognized his chosen song, “Theme from New York, New York.” While it was a song that was performed multiple times each Carnival season, it always resulted in audience cheers. Other “coon song” singers that year had already performed other standard fare: “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “Blueberry Hill,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and “Jeepers Creepers.” Sometimes unexpected songs made their way into the mix, like John Legend’s “All of Me” or Van Morrison’s “Moondance.” By far, the “coon songs” most commonly sung were those made popular by Frank Sinatra: “I Got You Under My Skin,” “Mack the Knife,” “Fly Me To The Moon,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” “Come Fly With Me,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Somewhere Beyond The Sea,” “I’ve Got The World On A String,” and of course, “Theme from New York New York.” All were sung multiple times in the “coon song” category over the course of the 2012, 2013, and 2014 competitions. “Coon songs” are a performance category exclusively reserved for men. Notably, they are reserved for adult men only, unlike another competition category called the “sentimental,” in which there is also a junior category for boys under the age of fourteen.Footnote ⁵⁸ This is worth noting because it aids “coon songs” ability to signal a pastness that necessitates an adult performance.

Like other “coon song” singers, as Glenn sang, he closely imitated the effortless quality of Sinatra’s mid-century singing style and what many have described as Sinatra’s “cool” body language.Footnote ⁵⁹ This was not the “fragile, wispy, boyish crooner” of the young Sinatra, but the “tough, worldly, winning lover with hat cocked, cigarette dangling, and coat thrown over his shoulder” of 1950s Sinatra.Footnote ⁶⁰ Fifties Sinatra had “a brassy, belting, hardedge tone that seemed to reach out aggressively to the audience [to say that] this was the voice of the swinger, the cocky, confident man-of-the-world.”Footnote ⁶¹ Glenn not only duplicated his unique phrasings, his “teasing” of rhythm, and his belting and precise delivery of the words, but on occasion even seemed to affect an American accent. In addition to his vocal stylings, Glenn embodied Sinatra through his use of expressive hand gestures, romantic eye contact with the audience, and a somewhat cocky stance while pacing back and forth across the stage. As a performance seemingly at odds with Glenn’s everyday bodily demeanor, it signaled the particular performance codes of the “coon song” category: cool masculinity, mid-century elegance, unabashed confidence, and brash optimism. Taking Janelle L. Wilson’s rendering of nostalgia as a “sanctuary of meaning” as a jumping-off point, in this next section I explore how “coon songs” create a space, or refuge, for klopse participants to connect to a past that is off limits, express dissatisfaction with the present, and bask in a nostalgia for future possibilities.Footnote ⁶²

Nostalgia as a Sanctuary of Meaning

As Glenn wrapped up his song, Poppie commented on how “smart” (stylish and elegant) he looked on stage. “Those were the days,” she winked at me.Footnote ⁶³ After Glenn’s performance, I walked through the stadium and talked with people in the stands. One middle-aged woman, Shamilla, stood next to me at the railing of the stadium’s upper floor. She had come from Swaziland to Cape Town for a visit. She was born in Cape Town but had left during apartheid when she fell in love with a white man. They fled to the neighboring country in hopes of living freely, she told me. She was back that day with her two adult children to show them the beaches, but most importantly, to introduce them to klopse, of which she had fond childhood memories. “I remember them singing these songs, like ‘New York,’ it takes me back, oh it takes me way back!” Later that day, I found Glenn. We talked about his performance.Footnote ⁶⁴ “The backing track was not loud enough,” he bemoaned, but he also spoke about why—all these years later—he chose to sing “Theme from New York, New York.” “I’ve never been to New York, you know, but it’s like all that excitement for the future, for like travelling, I relate to that…. Everybody loves Sinatra.”

While Glenn rendered “New York” in performance, protests about land and housing access, water and electricity delivery, and educational access were occurring, including the 2015–16 #FeesMustFall student-led protest movement at the University of Cape Town. Ongoing activism against colonialism’s legacy of white supremacy included the #RhodesMustFall protest against a University of Cape Town statue that commemorated Cecil Rhodes. These interconnected movements challenged both the material barriers to education and the symbolic violence of colonial monuments, demanding not only free higher education but also the decolonization of academic spaces and curricula.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 2000s South Africa, orthodox discourses of non-racialism only obfuscated the entrenched structural racism caused by colonialism and apartheid. This disconnect between what many imagined postapartheid life would include—stability and safety, economic opportunity, a sense of belonging, citizenship, and freedom—and the realities of an ever-increasing wealth gap and the corporatization of essential services had led many to view the past as a site of potential refuge. In the following section, I articulate the nostalgic space created through the performances of Frank Sinatra covers to show that rather than being naively reactionary or amnesiac, these practices facilitate temporal engagement that bridges past experiences, present critiques, and future aspirations. The communal act of listening becomes a space where nostalgic sentiment crystallizes through repetition and reperformance.

Connecting to the Past

At competitions, klopse participants use songs to surrogate individuals lost and as springboards for sharing memories. Particular songs evoke memories of individuals, like parents, grandparents, or particularly talented performers, who sang or enjoyed listening to particular songs. Glenn, for example, recalled his particular connections to “Theme from New York, New York,” and other observers often made connections to particular songs: “My dad loved that song,” or “I used to hear that at the bioscope (movie theater).” Memories of songs fed memories of individuals but also of community spaces: the street corner, the club, the movie theater, and neighborhoods, in particular the urban neighborhood of District Six, the cultural “heart” of Cape Town’s Coloured population considered the “home” of klopse practice.Footnote ⁶⁶

A multiracial inner-city neighborhood in Cape Town, District Six (Distrik Ses) was where many older klopse participants were born and where their families had lived. At the turn of the century, it had become a lively urban space with formerly enslaved residents, artisans, merchants, and many newly arrived immigrants, including thousands of Jewish migrants alongside Coloured, Xhosa, Indians, and white English speakers.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1948, the apartheid state no longer tolerated multiracial residential neighborhoods and began a long and brutal process of enforced segregation and forced removals of Black residents from the city center. Between 1957 and 1985, the apartheid regime evicted more than 150,000 residents from their homes as part of the Group Areas Act. In 1966, the government initiated the systematic destruction of District Six and evicted 60,000 residents from their homes. Homes were bulldozed to the ground, and the land was declared whites only and renamed Zonnebloem (Sunflower) in 1970. The racially mixed, dense cosmopolitan area, a neighborhood that had been considered Carnival’s “home” and a space rich with musical history and the spirit of kanala (care; literally “if you please” in Cape Malay), became an empty lot, and residents were forcibly relocated to racially and ethnically homogenous townships on the outskirts of the city.

As older klopse watched “coon song” singers take to the stage in competition contexts, they circulated these memories, speaking longingly of a pre-Group-Areas-Act musical past in District Six. “The best singers came out of District Six,” Neisha, a retired professional singer told me, “On the street corners you could see group singing, there were always guys singing in groups. Show business was like an everyday thing when I grew up. Even in the bioscope when they had a movie, they first used to have a little show…We even had shows in the morning. Morning shows were housewife shows.”Footnote ⁶⁸ “[Impersonators of] Doris Day, Carmen Miranda. We had a Bing Crosby too. We had an Al Jolson, a Nat King Cole,” Edward Matthews reported. “And everybody loved them, everybody.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Through these memories, “coon song” singers like Glenn and audience members like Neisha and Edward shared nostalgically about the past. The past that they referenced was one in which popular music was part of everyday life and was a force of social cohesion amongst a diverse group of people who were intimately connected in the urban space of District Six. It was this diversity and cohesion that participants recalled as they spoke nostalgically of the past joys of popular musicking. In the process, they overlooked other forms of structural violence attendant on life under colonialism and apartheid—an important omission in the complex work of cultural memory.

Expressing Dissatisfaction with the Present

“Coon song” performances opened up a space for sharing memories of individuals and places of community significance, but they also created a platform for audience members to comment on the present. Poppie’s comment that I shared earlier, “those were the days,” instigated a conversation about contemporary culture, in particular changing codes of masculinity. Referencing the “smart dress” (fashionable and clean style) of Glenn as he took to the stage to sing “New York,” she shared the way men, such as her father, had always worn a suit despite his economic circumstances and had always taken care of the people around him. While this was a passing conversation, it created a direct link between Glenn’s performance and Poppie’s assessment of contemporary culture (in this case, codes and expectations of masculinity).

On another occasion, I spoke with my neighbor, Hardy Dollie, at length about “coon songs” in klopse. Hardy was a singer and the owner of a local troupe called the V&A Minstrels. In our conversation, he bemoaned the pressure from the city to stop using the term “coon” in klopse, not only in the Carnival’s name, which had once been referred to as the “Coon Carnival” and was officially redesignated the “Cape Town Minstrel Carnival” by the city. Hardy commented:

Hardy’s comments, which were not uncommon amongst older troupe members that I spoke with, signaled a frustration with the present. While some outsiders assumed that klopse participants retained the word “coon” out of recidivism and ignorance, some participants argued that the term exposed the broken promises of the postapartheid era. Participants like Hardy expressed a sense of resentment over the city’s renaming of the “Coon Carnival” and even anger that the term “coon” now appeared off-limits because of its racist roots, which, for them, were not operative in contemporary klopse. In Kaapse klopse, the term “coon” is used to refer to a troupe participant regardless of their identity. While the term stems from the U.S. American racist slur for African Americans that was circulated to Cape Town via blackface minstrelsy; in Cape Town, it would come to take on quite different meanings among troupe members themselves and continues to be used colloquially to signal someone who participates in Carnival.

As Boeta Dienie, the owner of the Fabulous Woodstock Starlites (FWS), told me, “Coon, they don’t want us to use that term anymore.” Dienie’s use of “them” and “us” signaled an insider/outsider relationship with the term’s meanings, as well as multiple levels of feeling loss for the past and frustration with the present. His frustration did not come from a lack of understanding of the term’s racist U.S. American roots. Instead, he was frustrated with the city’s disregard for the emic meanings of “coon” to klopse participants themselves—a disregard that signaled a lack of desire to understand klopse practice and a misrepresentation of Coloured identity writ large. To him, the renaming represented one of the many ways the city was attempting to control this community practice. And he was frustrated that it was yet another move by the city to make klopse legible for tourists—a move that placed the tradition under threat because it eroded community ownership. In other words, Dienie’s desire to hold steadfast to “coon” in the face of outside pressure was symbolic of the broader ways many klopse participants hold onto the past—even those elements entwined with racism.Footnote ⁷¹

In klopse, nostalgic sentiment revealed itself in many moments, from the frustrations of troupe members like Boeta Dienie and Hardy Dollie to the ways participants spoke longingly of a pre-Group-Areas-Act musical past in multiracial communities like District Six. But nostalgia also made its presence known sonically through the music in competitions that created a critical avenue to hold space for nostalgia without even having to name it. “Coon songs” offered a space for performers and their audiences to experience nostalgia, functioning as a safe way of connecting to a past considered off limits.

Nostalgia for Future Possibilities

Beyond creating a safe space for nostalgia, the sonic content of the “coon song” category, with its brash optimism, cosmopolitanism, and celebration of mobility, in popular mid-century American songs like “Fly Me To The Moon” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” emphasizes a past that is future-oriented. That Frank Sinatra, the son of immigrants who rose to wealth and global celebrity—a performer who would come to be so closely associated with the U.S. American mid-century ideals of confidence, cosmopolitanism, and mobility—should be particularly popular among Coloured South Africans is significant. From his 1958 travel-themed album Come Fly With Me to his later hits “Fly Me To The Moon” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” all of which are sung in the “coon song” category in klopse, Sinatra came to be associated with movement—with social mobility and geographic mobility, along with their associated values of “progress…freedom…opportunity, and…modernity.”Footnote ⁷²

In mid-twentieth-century South Africa, at a moment when apartheid policies were imposed upon nearly every dimension of life, structured to keep Black South Africans firmly in place socially and physically, to listen to Sinatra meant to listen to possibility. To be psychically free. Ethnomusicologist Gavin Steingo writes that to hear “the international” in the context of apartheid was to hear “beyond apartheid and thus to hear freedom.”Footnote ⁷³ To listen to Sinatra, and then to embody Sinatra in performance, was to inhabit that same mobility, possibility, and freedom. Like the Carnival parade itself that remaps the city and celebrates a freedom of movement in opposition to the limitations of circumscribed township life and daily obstacles to mobility, the celebration of songs so much about cosmopolitan mobility echoes this call.

In a contemporary context, when the barriers to freedom are no longer as evident and the causes of present-day inequality have been obscured, one yearns for the hope embedded in an earlier historical moment. Dlamini writes of nostalgia as the “imagination of alternative futures.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As klopse participants perform and listen to songs like “Fly Me To The Moon,” they nostalgically revive the past but also imagine a future in which hope is alive. These affective acts take place within the social spaces of music making and listening in competitions. As Fred Davis writes, “nostalgia, despite its private, sometimes intensely felt personal character […] derives from and has continuing implications for our lives as social actors.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The competition context supports this particular way of framing the past and critiquing the present but also creates a sanctuary for imagining future possibilities.

Haunted Futures

That the performances described in this article are contained within the historical lineage of the “coon song,” and that performers still render their performances with a visual and sartorial nod to blackface minstrelsy, cannot be overlooked. It is important to note that U.S.-grounded readings of blackface cannot account for the meanings made of its remains by contemporary South Africans. Klopse participants—or at least the hundreds I have spoken with—do not view their performances as supporting racism, nor do they view them as derogatory. “Coon” has come to take on very different meanings to Carnival participants in Cape Town.

And yet the anti-Blackness at the root of global minstrelsy cannot be willed away even when so thoroughly remade or filled with new content. Scholar Nadia Davids notes the way Carnival participants “often claim to neither read nor consciously reiterate the historical implications of racism in their performance of blackface,”Footnote ⁷⁶ something I found consistently true. Instead, participants situated minstrelsy’s visual, sonic, and embodied signifiers in relation to the carnivalesque, freedom, and resistance, and the popularity of U.S. American culture more broadly; or simply expressed no interest in it at all. Klopse participants regularly asserted that “coon songs” have nothing to do with race. And yet, as Christian DuComb posits in relation to paraders’ use of colorful makeup to replace traditional blackface in the annual Philadelphia Mummers Parade, “mummers in dark blue makeup are not in blackface, but they are also not not in blackface” (emphasis mine).Footnote ⁷⁷ To render this sonically and in the context klopse: “Theme from New York, New York” is not a “coon song,” but in Cape Town klopse practice, it is also not not a “coon song.” The affective and social experience of nostalgia in “coon song” performance for klopse participants is valuable and, as I have shown, it is a nostalgia that does not seek to retreat to the past, but to look back to the past as an avenue for imagining future possibilities. But the specter of blackface nonetheless haunts klopse and troubles its participants’ longings for a better future.