Ghoema

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Ghoema , also ghomma, goema, is a single-headed tubular drum in South Africa , which was probably introduced by enslaved Cape Malay people and is best known today for its use at the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival (also known as Coon Carnival ), a minstrel show that takes place every year on the 2nd of May January is held in Cape Town to commemorate the official abolition of slavery on December 1, 1834. Groups of costumed musicians and dancers ( Kaapse Klopse ) paraded through the streets, mainly with brass instruments and marching drums since the 1970s . They play the same ghoema rhythm as the older ensembles that use stringed instruments and hand-struck ghoemas . The typical ghoema rhythm also accompanies the genre of satirical songs called moppies , which is also part of the celebrations. The musical repertoire comes from the ghoemaliedjies , as the Cape Malay folk songs accompanied by drums are called in Afrikaans .

The ghoemas , which are open at the bottom, belong to the music of the slaves fetched from the Malay Islands during the Dutch colonial era in the 18th and 19th centuries . Indigenous drums with closed bottoms ( vascular drums ) have been known for much longer in southern Africa . Simple ghoemas can be made from basically any tubular material. The Cape Town-based instrument maker Achmat Sabera has been making high-quality, barrel-shaped wooden drums for the Minstrel Carnival since 1974 , which he strung with goat skin.

All meanings of ghoema - a drum, a certain rhythm, a song genre and a music style - are related to the history of slavery, colonial oppression and the apartheid era in Cape Town. The Ghoema style is the amalgamation of the traditions handed down by the various enslaved ethnic groups and cannot be precisely determined musically.

origin

Cape Malay imitate European dance and music in their Sunday gatherings. The music group plays a ghoema , exceptionally in the style of European marching drums with two mallets, a curved " horn " made from the stalk of a seaweed species ( Ecklonia buccinalis ) and the plucked ramkie . Watercolor by Charles Davidson Bell, around 1840.

The earliest evidence of the use of musical instruments in southern Africa, which did not include drums, comes from the San (formerly known as "Bushmen") who wandered about as hunters and gatherers . At the turn of the century, the Khoikhoi (formerly “ Hottentots ”), semi-sedentary cattle breeders from the north, pushed the San into drier areas. Over time, the Khoikhoi took over the musical bow from the San and probably brought them the drum. An archaic type of drum of the San, which the British naturalist William John Burchell describes in 1824, was a section of bamboo cane filled with a little water and covered on one side with animal skin. As soon as the eardrum began to dry out, the tube was turned over so that the skin was wet and elastic again. This drum refers to its origin from the Khoikhoi, who kept milk in such bamboo tubes, while the San, who did not raise cattle, did not need milk containers. A drum made from a clay pot, observed by the San in 1878, is just as little of its own. Its membrane was pulled over while it was wet and tied with the tendon of a springbok . According to this typical portrayal, one woman beat the drum while another woman clapped her hands and the San men danced.

The earliest mention of a Khoikhoi musical instrument comes from Vasco da Gama , who heard a group of four or five reed flute players on his landing near the Cape of Good Hope ; The oldest description of a Khoikhoi drum by a European traveler who is not known by name is handed down by the Dutch doctor and writer Olfert Dapper in 1668. He describes the drum that has been beaten with his hands as "rommel-potten" and compares its design with the Dutch rommelpot , in which a large pot is covered with an animal skin, but it is a grating drum and is played completely differently. One such friction drum is the Zulu ingungu . Johannes Schreyer , a doctor who stayed in the Cape Colony from 1669 to 1677 , describes the pot drums that women beat with their hands: “... they take a pot, tie it tightly with a fur, and the women knock on this pot with hands and fingers, these are their drumming and kettledrums. ”The women sat with crossed legs on the floor and sang the same songs almost unchanged while they accompanied each other with the drums, says Johannes Gulielmus de Grevenbroek, who from 1684 was Secretary of Political Affairs Council under the Dutch governor Simon van der Stel was. The clay pot drum is mentioned in several reports from the 18th century. The Africa explorer Peter Kolben (1719) gives a detailed description :

“In addition to the gomgom you have another musical instrument, which is an earthen pot, of the shape you make yourself, and has been described elsewhere; big or small, depending on how you like to use one. They cover this pot with a sheepskin, the hair of which is dazed and which is consequently prepared. They tie the same very tightly and stiffly over them with their thongs or herdsmen; Afterwards the women, but never the men, play with their fingers and slap it, just in Braband, the same thing is played on the Rommel pots in Thuringia and Saxony; ... If they use this Rommel pot and play on it, they use the vocal music, and all shout Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho, ... "

With "Gomgom" the blown mouth arch gora is meant and "she" refers to the Khoikhoi living on the Cape. The description is correct down to the last detail, only the comparison with the Rommelpot, which was obviously wrongly adopted by Olfert Dapper, was also taken up by later authors and even made its way into the Afrikaans vocabulary with the changed meaning "beating drum" . The Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg (1796) calls the drum the Khoikhoi seckoa and also explains that the drum body was covered with a damp sheepskin. According to Thunberg, the player hit her on the outside of the skin with four fingers of her left hand, with her left thumb in the middle and with two fingers of her right hand on the outside.

Percival Kirby found a corresponding drum in 1932 from a Koranna woman in Bloemhof . The drum called / khais consisted of a softwood vessel (of the willow species Salix mucronata ), which the Koranna used to store milk. A wet goat skin was stretched over the opening and tied with a strap. After the skin had dried, the drum hit with the flat of the right hand was used to rhythmically accompany songs. It is unclear whether the Koranna women tuned the drum to a certain pitch. In any case, the / khais of the Koranna corresponds to the type of drum that the Dutch call rommelpot . In several reports from the 19th century, this drum, played by women to accompany chants and dances, is mentioned, for example under the name / arub, a wooden Damara kettle drum . The ghoema differs from the often mentioned boiler drums that have been known for a long time in southern Africa in that the membrane is fastened , which is not tied on but nailed on.

The Dutch colonial era began on the Cape in the second half of the 17th century. Settlements were built on behalf of the Dutch East India Company . For the Cape Colony, the company brought predominantly Malay, Muslim slaves from their possessions in the Dutch East Indies on the Malay Islands, whose descendants are now known as Cape Malay. Their religion distinguishes them from the other, predominantly Christian groups of the Coloreds , to which they are assigned as an independent ethnic community. In addition to the Malay Islands, slaves were imported from India and Madagascar, and mainly from Mozambique towards the end of the 18th century . The Dutch colony in South Africa was annexed to Great Britain in 1806.

As far as is known, the ghoema is the first to mention an anonymous author who published his everyday observations made in 1820 in the following year. In a section on the music of the "uneducated people", the author describes the simple musical instruments of the slaves who met on their free Sundays in a place outside of the cities to make music together, to dance and to play satirical songs ( moppies ) in isolation. to sing. Men and women of all ages danced together. In the opinion of the author, the songs of the slaves in the “Sunday dance”, whose range was only three to four notes, which were repeated over and over again in a plaintive voice, were far below those of the Khoikhoi in quality. Between the singing, the slaves uttered loud screams, he comments derogatory. Without naming the instruments, he describes a two-string plucked ramkie and a cylinder drum made from a log that was covered on one side with sheepskin.

The softwood drums known as / khais or the single- skin bamboo drums were tubular like the ghoema , but - because they served as vessels - closed at the bottom. Percival Kirby offers for comparison with the shape of the ghoema cylinder drums from the Asian regions of origin of the slaves, which, however, have nothing in common. Nevertheless, he says in summary that the ghoema must have come from India via the Malay Islands to South Africa. An origin related to the Asian slaves is considered likely. Kirby's derivation of the name ghomma from the widespread Bantu- language word ngoma for "drum" with the argument that ngoma is used to name drums and dances by Muslim groups on the east coast of Africa appears questionable.

Originally a small wooden barrel served as the body of the ghoema , which was brightly painted and covered on one side with a nailed animal skin. Any suitable vessel can be used today. Since 1974 Achmat Sabera, called Boeta Achmat, the most famous drum manufacturer in Cape Town, has been producing high-quality ghoemas in various sizes with a sanded and lacquered wooden body for the Minstrel Carnival . Sabera also produces frame drums covered with the skins of springboks by hand.

History of the Minstrel Carnival

Procession on the Anniversary of the Liberation of Slaves in 1834. Painting by George Duff, 1860s.

After slavery in the British Empire, which was officially declared ended on December 1, 1834, the more than 36,000 slaves in South Africa were followed by a four-year so-called training or preparatory phase until they actually achieved freedom in 1838. Most of the ex-slaves celebrated their release peacefully and calmly. There were triumphal marches in some places and in Cape Town they walked the streets day and night, often accompanied by amateur music groups, as the daily newspaper said at the time. Throughout the 19th century, the freed slaves and their descendants met for special (Christian and Muslim) religious gatherings, street parades, and dance festivals where they sang "drum songs " ( ghoemaliedjies ) in which they made fun of their former masters. In the 1880s, the celebrations were moved from December 1 to the first two days of New Year.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the commemorative events had ceased because the time of slavery had moved into the distant past and the desire to belong to the whites was the top priority for the Coloreds, who suffered from social and political segregation. In 1909, the editor of the newspaper of the African People's Organization (APO), the leading political organization of the Colored until the early 1940s , complained in 1909 that too many Coloreds would play whitening as soon as they made money. The influx of organized commemorative events marking the centenary of the liberation of slaves in 1934 lagged behind the spontaneous activities on December 1st during the 19th century. With the legal establishment of apartheid (“racial segregation”) around 1950, the time of slavery had completely moved into the past.

Poster of a minstrel band in the United States, 1899

From the 1940s the government supported the Muslims in Cape Town in their “Malay identity” and in the Population Registration Act of 1950 on racial classification, the Cape Malays were declared a separate category. In the 1970s, the anti-apartheid movement strived for a sense of community for all non-whites, which in turn displaced the memory of the slavery of individual groups. The era of slavery only came back into public awareness after the end of apartheid and the ANC's 1994 election victory .

It is roughly understandable from when in the course of the 19th century the minstrel performances from the United States were taken over into the festive events at the Cape. American minstrel shows included a character named Zip Coon who had a white performer dying his face black to joke in an exaggerated African American dialect . The first white dancers and singers in the United States to embody black slaves appeared in a play by Charles Dibdin that premiered in 1768. The first such performances with white actors took place in South Africa from the middle of the 19th century. The current form of the Coon Carnival with street parades and several performing groups competing with one another has been handed down since 1907. At the beginning of the 20th century the stringed instrument ramkie was replaced by the banjo and guitar . The ghoema is still used. A major change in the music groups participating in the Minstrel Carnival was the replacement of stringed instruments with brass instruments and the introduction of electric amplifiers in the 1970s. While the musicians of the traditional ensembles were amateurs who played for a few drinks, the brass ensembles have to be rented and paid for. The commercialization of the event increased competition and sometimes hostility among the participating groups.

Style of play

The musician holds the ghoema under his left arm and hits it alternately with the right and left palm. Percival Kirby (1939) distinguishes three types of impact: with the right palm on the membrane, with the right palm on the edge of the membrane and with the left hand on the edge of the membrane. In this way, an endlessly repeating beat sequence is produced, tonally structured by two high beats (with both hands on the edge) and a low beat in between (with the right hand in the middle). In the music example given by Kirby, several drummers play the dance songs called ghommaliedjies (literally "drum song") in unison in this way .

Usually at festive events the dancers hold hands and move in circles while singing one of the traditional songs. The ghoema player sitting in the middle on the floor begins a ghoemaliedjie , after which the participants arrange themselves in groups of three and dance. The ghoema rhythm, which has remained the same to this day, occurs in several musical styles. It consists of a continuous sequence of strokes of the left hand, which is supplemented by syncopated secondary strokes of the right hand.

The kransdans was a circle dance that was performed rhythmically at Christmas and Easter with a ghoema . At the beginning of the 20th century, European dance styles took the place of street dances. One of the simple dance forms, which were more of a social event than a certain style, was the long-arm dance among the Coloreds from the beginning of the 20th century , in which the dancers moved relatively freely with elongated arms. The ghoema rhythm of the Minstrel Carnival and the vastrap rhythm of the long-arm bands were the most popular dance rhythms in the streets of cities in the 19th century. Both styles of the Cape Malays are summarized as Cape-beat , they influenced later popular music styles in South Africa, such as the Marabi that emerged in the 1920s . Cape jazz, which is related to marabi, is also known as Ghoema jazz .

In addition to the Minstrel Carnival on January 2nd, there are two other street parades with musicians playing in the ghoema style: (1) In Christmas bands that perform on Christmas days , there are usually no drums; instead, the same ghoema rhythm is produced with banjos, guitars and small bassies . Klein-bassie is a kind of cello held sideways, the strings of which are plucked. (2) On December 31st, singing groups called nagtroepe ("night troops", also sangkoor , "singing choir") say goodbye to the old year by singing ghoemaliedjies .

The songs and rhythms of the townships are part of the musical roots of the jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (* 1934). Played in Maputo in 1980 (and released on the album South African Sunshine. Piano Solo Live in 1982 ), Hit and Run draws its energy from the ghoema rhythm that Ibrahim plays at a fast pace with his left hand on the piano. The central line of text “freedom comes from the barrel of a gun; move like a ghost, we gonna hit them where it hurts them most ”refers to acts of sabotage by the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s. The song was very popular in the townships.

The accompaniment of the moppies songs sung at the Minstrel Carnival , produced by ghoemas , banjos, guitars, frame drums, walking sticks and rattles , is rhythmically more complex and faster than the vastrap rhythm of the long-arm dance in the dance halls. The syncopated ghoema rhythm could originally have been formed as a uniform basic pattern from a simple two- bar when different rhythmically inclined population groups met to make music. The ghoema rhythm makes it possible to combine heterogeneous musical forms.

Actor at the Minstrel Carnival in Cape Town, 2001

At the Minstrel Carnival ( Coon Carnival ), which is also called Tweede Nuwe Jaar ("the second of the new year") according to its date , music and dance groups ( Kaapse Klopse , Afrikaans for "clubs from the Cape") ) colorfully costumed through the streets of Cape Town with the loud music of brass instruments and marching drums. These processions mark the climax and conclusion of the New Year celebrations that began a week earlier on Christmas Eve. The brass bands consist of up to 60 or more musicians who play trumpets , trombones , saxophones and drums with sticks. There are also traditional music groups with banjos, guitars, shakers , small frame drums ( tamboor ) and hand-struck ghoemas . The ghoema rhythm is also struck on the modern marching drums and frame drums. A ghoema rhythm played at high speed by the Kaapse Klopse to accompany the moppies' singing is sometimes called the “ klopse rhythm” because of its specific use . The Kaapse Klopse describe their marching music, songs and dance parades as jolling , derived from the colloquial Afrikaans word jol , "party". The constantly driving ghoema rhythm becomes noticeable as a communal experience in which the participants hold hands. The rhythm becomes a movement element that connects music and body.

Some participants describe a trance-like state as they dance for hours in the same movements in the parade and refer to this state with the word tariek , which may be derived from tarīqa ("way, path [to God]") an Arabic term from Sufism . According to attendees, this sensation is reinforced by tariek as they move up the hill along Wale Street at the end of the parade in the center of town in the traditional Cape Malay residential area, Bo Kaap. In a figurative sense, for some, the perpetual rhythmic beat of the ghoemas becomes the pulse of the city itself, expressing the multi- ethnic history of slavery. The story of Nelson Mandela has come down to us in 1996, while he was still in prison on Robben Island , of the ghoemas , whose blows on the Tweede Nuwe Jaar reached him, reminded him of the history of slavery and moved him to tears. Whether the story is so authenticated or not, it stands for the symbolic meaning of the ghoema , which arises from the connection between physical sensation, personal memory and city history.

Every year the ghoema embodies the origin and history of the immigrant ethnic groups. In some song lyrics of the ghoemaliedjies , a feeling of togetherness among the Coloreds is expressed, for example when they deal with District Six (also Kanaladorp), a formerly multicultural district in the eastern part of Cape Town that is now largely wasteland. In 1966, the apartheid government at the time had the residential area cleared and the residents moved to townships .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, p. 12; Daniël G. Geldenhuys: South Africa (Republic). II. Traditional music. 2. Khoi-Khoi. In: MGG Online. November 2016 ( Music in the past and present , 1998)
  2. ^ William John Burchell : Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa. Volume 2. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, London 1824, p. 65.
  3. ^ WHI Bleek, LC Lloyd: Specimens of Bushman Folklore . George Allen, London 1911, p. 351.
  4. ↑ Olfert Dapper: Naukeurige Beschrijvingen der Afrikaenschegewesten. Jacob van Meurs, Amsterdam 1668, p. 653b
  5. ^ Johann Schreyer : Journeys to the Cape and Description of the Hottentots 1669–1677 reissued after the second edition of the text first published in 1679 in Leipzig by Johann Christian Wohlfart (1681). Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1931, p. 38.
  6. ↑ M. Peter Kolben : Caput bonae spei hodiernum. That is: Complete description of the African prelude to the Good Hope ... Peter Conrad Monath, Nuremberg 1719, p. 528.
  7. ↑ Carl Peter Thunberg : Voyages De CP Thunberg, Au Japon, Par le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, Les îles de la Sonde & c. Traduits, rédigés ... Par L. Langles, ... Et revus, quant à la partie d'Histoire Naturelle, par JB Lamarck ... Paris 1796.
  8. ↑ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, pp. 15f.
  9. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1965, p. 18.
  10. ↑ Laurie Levine: The Drum Cafe's Traditional Music of South Africa. Jacana Media, Johannesburg 2005, p. 229.
  11. ↑ John Iliffe : History of Africa. 2nd Edition. CH Beck, Munich 1997, p. 168.
  12. ↑ Anonymous: Notes on the Cape of Good Hope made during an Excursion in that Colony in the Year 1820. John Murray, London 1821, pp. 106f.
  13. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1939, p. 480.
  14. ↑ James May: Ghomma. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.), 2014, p. 425.
  15. ↑ Lisa Baxter, 1996, p. 1.
  16. ^ Richard Lyness Watson: Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012, p. 11.
  17. ↑ Lisa Baxter, 1996, p. 3.
  18. ^ Nigel Worden: The Changing Politics of Slave Heritage in the Western Cape, South Africa. In: The Journal of African History. Volume 50, No. 1, 2009, pp. 23-40, here pp. 24f, 30.
  19. ↑ Lisa Baxter, 1996, pp. 4f, 118.
  20. ^ Percival R. Kirby, 1939, p. 478.
  21. ↑ Michael Hamlyn Dunseith, 2017, pp. 3, 34.
  22. ↑ Christopher Ballantine: Fact, Ideology and Paradox: African Elements in Early Black South African Jazz and Vaudeville. In: African Music. Volume 7, No. 3, 1996, pp. 44-51, here p. 49.
  23. ↑ Sylvia R. Bruin DERS: Sounding Community: Musical Practice and Social Engagement. In: Mary L. Cohen (ed.): CMA XIV: Listening to the World: Experiencing ans Connecting the Knowledge from Community Music. Proceedings from the International Society for Music Education (ISME) 2014 Seminar of the Commission for Community Music Activity. International Society for Music Education, 2014, pp. 145–150, here p. 148.
  24. ↑ Shaun Johannes, 2010, p. 33.
  25. ↑ Christine Lucia: Abdullah Ibrahim and 'African Pianism' in South Africa. In: Cynthia Tse Kimberlin, Akin Euba (Ed.): Towards an African Pianism: Keyboard Music of Africa and the Diaspora. Volume 1, MRI Press, Point Richmond (CA) 2005, pp. 53-66, here p. 57.
  26. ↑ Michael Hamlyn Dunseith, 2017, pp. 82, 84.
  27. ↑ Francesca Inglese, 2014, p. 134.
  28. ↑ Francesca Inglese, 2014, pp. 126f, 133f, 136.
  29. ↑ Francesca Inglese, 2014, pp. 137f.
  30. ↑ Chanell Oliphant: The changing faces of the meatballs: performing the rainbow nation during the Cape Town carnival. (Master thesis) University of the Western Cape, May 2013, pp. 3, 25.