The Woodstock Starlites and Cape Minstrels (also known as the Kaapse Klopse) take over Cape streets during previous Tweede Nuwe celebrations. Image:File picture: Henk Kruger/Independent Newspapers As a girl, Fatima Dulvie would spend New Year’s Day perched on the wall of her home in Cape Town’s historic District Six area in feverish anticipation of the minstrels’ parade that would pass the following day. Now aged 77, Dulvie has herself become a dedicated participant in the roughly 140-year-old parade of Tweede Nuwe Jaar (Second New Year) as one of an army of seamstresses who spend months making costumes for the thousands of minstrels.
“We didn’t sleep at that time,” she told AFP, recalling her childhood excitement that started the day before the parade – one of the biggest cultural events in South Africa – and lasted well into the following evening. Dulvie missed no detail of the exuberant spectacle of traditional goema beats and banjos, marching brass bands, dancing, and dazzling costumes, which started in the 19th century, when enslaved people were given a day off on January 2 to hold their own New Year celebrations. But she does admit to hiding at the approach of the renowned Atcha troupes with their frightening masks and fierce drummers, who are still a highlight today.
“If you hear the drums, you scatter because at that time the Atchas were evil,” joked Dulvie, a sun-yellow headscarf tucked neatly around her cheerful face. She was among more than 60,000 people forcibly removed from District Six after it was declared a whites-only area in 1966, in one of the apartheid government’s most notorious enactments of its racial segregation policy. She maintained the link to the neighbourhood and the parade as a seamstress for the Original District Six Hanover Minstrels troupe, sewing more than 900 costumes over the past three decades and winning the “Best Dressed” category several times in the parade’s competition.
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Dulvie’s five children have joined in the sewing marathon that starts around May and can last from 8:00 am to midnight in the countdown to the parade, also known as the Kaapse Klopse (Cape Minstrels). “Every year I say I’m going to retire, but the next year I start again… We grew up in District Six, we grew up with this, so it’s still in me,” Dulvie said.
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