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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Continuity and change in Cape Town's Coon Carnival: the 1960s and 1970s |
Author: | Baxter, Lisa |
Year: | 2001 |
Periodical: | African Studies |
Volume: | 60 |
Issue: | 1 |
Period: | July |
Pages: | 87-105 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | apartheid property rights traditional festivals oral history Urbanization and Migration Ethnic and Race Relations Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/00020180120063638 |
Abstract: | The Coon Carnival in Cape Town, South Africa, takes place on 1 and 2 January and consists of a street procession through the city centre to a variety of out-of-town competition venues. The stage competition is the culmination of months of practice in halls and back-yards across the Cape Flats and in the city centre. The 1950 Group Areas Act began to be implemented in earnest in inner-city Cape Town from 1966, instigating the removal of coloureds from the city centre to disparate new neighbourhoods in the Cape Flats. Group Areas removals are repeatedly cited as initiating the change and demise of the Carnival from a carefree, but respectable and disciplined expression of community harmony, to an anarchic display of gangsterism and commercial greed. Interrogating the testimonies of those who make this claim, however, reveals that much of what they cite as new phenomena within the event, a close relation of troupe and gang for example, existed well before the implementation of the Act in Cape Town. Interviews were held by the author between May and October 1995 with a random selection of people who participated in the Carnival in the 1960s and 1970s. Bibliogr., notes. |