"Mother City": Mothering Work, Coloured Respectability, and the Making of Contemporary Kaapse Klopse

Abstract

The apartheid regime’s Population Registration Act (1950) constructed four racial categories: (Black) African, Indian, white, and coloured (mixed). I maintain the South African spelling of coloured to distinguish it from the racially offensive term once used in the US to refer to African Americans. Although some scholars put “coloured” in quotation marks, I have chosen not to because it can imply that coloured racial identity is constructed, unlike purportedly authentic, stable, and primordial Black and white identities. In klopse practice, the term “coon” is often used to refer to individuals who participate in klopse. While the term stems from the 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. Despite the racial violence connoted by the term, it is, in this particular context, perceived as a nonderogatory term, often even a source of pride for participants. When I, for example, joined the Fabulous Woodstock Starlites (FWS), I was affectionally referred to by my fellow troupe members as a coon. I intentionally italicize the term to distinguish it from its meanings in an American racial context.