Cape Town’s Creole Songs, Nederlandsliedjies and moppies

Following up on the publication of Sounding the Cape, Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa ( African Minds, Somerset West, 2013) researched and published with support by STIAS, this project will focus on two song repertoires emblematic of Cape Town’s music: the Moppies (or comic songs) and the Nederlandslierdjies. My 2015 STIAS fellowship will enable me to gather missing information and to start fusing in English various texts written in French by my young colleague Armelle Gaulier and myself. The aim of the project — the outcome of which will be a book that African Minds (Somerset West) has agreed to publish — is to propose a musicological and sociological analysis of two musical repertoires which are unfortunately understudied, an analysis which engages the question of the relationships between music and identity in Cape Town.