Singing of Slavery, Performing the Past: Folk Songs of the Cape Coloured Community as Cultural Memory of the South African Slave Past, 1657-present

Anne Marieke van der Wal

Research output: ThesisDoctoral thesis 1 (Research UU / Graduation UU)

Abstract

The Cape Coloured community, the descendants of the enslaved who were brought to the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) in the seventeenth and eighteenth century from the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean, annually commemorate their past by composing and singing socio-politically explicit folk songs. By studying the lyrics and the performance aspect of this song culture, this dissertation aims to reinvestigate Dutch slave history in the former Cape Colony and the perception of that slave past in post-emancipation and post-apartheid South Africa.
The principle objective of this research is to shed light on issues such as memory strategies as well the functioning of collective memory and cultural memory in society. By studying the process of creation and transmission of the songs in times of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, we can get a better understanding of the development of the collective memory of the largely repressed Coloured community relating to their slave past. It was particularly the informal character of this folk song tradition that made it well suited to communicate a collective memory of a slave past in times of racial segregation and discrimination when this slave past was actively suppressed by state authorities. This characteristic made them equally well adapted to be easily and frequently altered to fit changing socio-political situations. Therefore, this oral memory culture has proven to be resilient as well as able to link the slave past to the on-going struggle for civil rights during colonialism and apartheid and recently to the re-imagination of a Coloured identity in post-apartheid South Africa in which a sense of pride of their heritage is clearly advocated.
It is through these commemorative cultures that the past was and still is activated and as such provides meaning for a large part of society. Moreover, by analysing such memory cultures, in particular in the context of a traumatic past such as the slave past, historians become more sensitive to the link between the history of slavery and present-day discrimination and exclusion which descendants of the enslaved sometimes experience. As such, this study is also directly related to the postcolonial concern with the on-going effects of the memory of slavery on the cultural identity of the descendants of the enslaved as well as the postcolonial source critique, rejecting the so-called ‘master narrative’ as presented by the colonial archives and advocating the use of oral traditions and other (literary) re-imaginations of the past. In relation to the slave past, the distinct oral memory cultures which emerged in the wake of slavery provide historians with precisely such an alternative ‘slave narrative’. By looking at intangible heritage such as folkloric traditions, researchers can get a better sense of how this living memory or cultural trauma develops and functions in society.
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Utrecht University
Supervisors/Advisors
  • van Eijnatten, Joris, Primary supervisor
  • Grijp, L.P., Supervisor
Award date28 Jun 2016
Publisher
Publication statusPublished - 28 Jun 2016

Keywords

  • Slavery
  • South Africa
  • Cultural Memory
  • Commemoration
  • Intangible Cultural Heritage

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