This is a spectacular, all-colour photography book, with an assortment of wide-angled and tilted camera effects that capture the rapture, tension, energies, and determination which Cape Carnival troupes experience both in rehearsals in their klopskamers and in performances. You feel you are there, just as the author was. Photographer, historian, and musician Professor John Mason had taken up his horn in 2007 with the Pennsylvanians and their crooning minstrels, one of the more successful klopse bands, but found the unique Ghoema beat more complex than he was ready to pursue. Hence, the camera!Mason skillfully portrays the thousands of klopse – Carnival musicians from working class Coloured neighbourhoods of the Cape Flats – who represent a polyglot of slave-age cultures. Every New Year’s Day, after a busy year grooming youth bands, troupes don their costumes to compete in various stadiums, and ultimately at the old Green Point Stadium for the final showdown.
Mason presents photos with splashes of bright red, contrasted with whites and yellows and blues, portraying stark-real scenes of young and old happily feting on Cape Town streets in their colourful costumes with matching umbrellas. Painted faces with complementary hats and hilarious sunglasses add excitement to this annual festival. Even the moffies those comically outrageous cross-dressers find a place to show their lifestyle on the crowded streets.
Delightful photos of food dishes, musical instruments in action, handmade drums, brown-tan faces boasting red-white polka-dotted paint styles, historic Cape Town buildings, dilapidated dusty residences of the Cape Flats, whacky hair styles, political references on signs, sun-blued skies, children’s joyous faces this is pictorial Carnival at its best, showing vast contrasts of scenery, but a unifying joy amongst these thousands of minstrels. One sees that moment of recurring cultural history which echoes the past: “For a brief moment in time, the city is restored, the community is made whole, and the wounds of the past are healed.” (p. 20). This ritualized disorder is summed up by minstrels: “Dis `n nuwe jaar, ons is deurmekaar”.
Mason’s photos excite: showing Cape Town’s Vygieskraal Stadium packed in the early morning hours as troupe competitions take place. The reader is left breathless, to enjoy the highly creative photography. Yet, this is his secret, only realized in spectacularly real visuals. OneLove,GhoemaBeat:Insidethe CapeTownCarnival, John Edwin Mason (photographs and text), Cape Town: Random House Struik. 2010. 128 pages.
(Available in Clarke’s Bookshop, Long St., Cape Town; and soon in other leading bookstores)
