“Dis Nie Myne Nie, Dis Nie Joune Nie” or Kramer and Petersen’s Ghoema: Inscribing the Past, Claiming the Present?

In 2005, musical theatre co-writers Taliep Petersen and David Kramer brought Ghoema to the stage. This musical engages with the early history of the Cape to demonstrate the unacknowledged contribution of slaves to the cultural life of Cape Town. In this, it relies heavily on a body of Afrikaans folk songs shared by both coloured and white Afrikaans-speakers. Like Afrikaans, these songs are the result of processes of creolization, created in the painful and violent encounter between slave and slave master in colonial Cape Town. This essay is concerned with examining whether what is regarded as a staging of creolization can contribute to exploring the contemporary identities of slave descendants, the vast majority of whom were classified as “coloured” or “Cape Malay” during apartheid and marginalized by the ruling government.